Occupation: Swing commander, American idol, doomed crooner

The tragic death of singer Bobby Darin cut short a career that looked set to eclipse Sinatra's. Later this year, Kevin Spacey brings him back to life in Beyond the Sea, the story of the wayward genius who excelled at everything he tried. This article appeared in the September 2004 issue of GQ Magazine, the UK edition and was written by Peter Doggett.

Whichever way you measured it, he was slick. He wore a tux, a bow tie as broad as Catwoman's mask, and shoes that shone like spotlights across the stage. In front of the cameras for Mack is Back, a 1973 US TV extravaganza, Bobby Darin was showbiz incarnate. He finger-snapped his way through Broadway standards, then shifted into soft rock or hard country, uptown soul or down-home blues - inhabiting each personality as if he'd been born in that disguise. As he sang, his hips swayed and his feet moondanced. He reeled off one-liners like Groucho Marx, then slipped into well-worn impressions of Jimmy Cagney and Jimmy Stewart. Through it all, he commanded the stage like no one before or since. Bobby Darin was king of the world. He was 37 years old, with 15 years of hit records and an Oscar nomination behind him, treated as an equal by the Rat Pack and movie stars alike. But now he was dying. Within nine months Darin's life would be over.
Between songs, he'd shake his hand ferociously as he stepped over to the piano or reached for his guitar. The crowd thought it was part of his shtick. But, as his manager Steve Blauner reveals, "He was trying to get the circulation back in his fingertips. That's how sick he was." Darin's friend, record producer Phil Ramone, noticed something else. "He'd run off stage for a few seconds - to get a shot of oxygen. He was determined not to stop."
Since his childhood bouts of rheumatic fever, Darin had known that his life would be brief. He'd recently survived heart surgery, but that only postponed the inevitable. "He could hardly get up the steps on the stage," Blauner recalls. "But when the lights were on, he came alive. When they went off, it was like he was mummified. He was practically dead."
His death that November (webmaster note: Bobby passed away December 20th) was a three-day wonder in the world's press. They remembered the hit singles, especially "Mack the Knife", and the arrogance that led him to declare, "I want to be a legend at 25." For Ramone, it wasn't just a star who had gone: "The grand old tradition of showbiz had reached the end of its trail. TV had killed off the variety shows. Even Sinatra had retired. But when Bobby was on stage, all that was still alive. He had the cocky walk, the tuxedo, the big band, the jokes: he was the real deal."
In Darin's absence, other legends filled space in the pantheon. Sinatra came back, Tony Bennett was reborn, and Darin was remembered only as one of the "Bobbys" - Vee, Vinton and Rydell - who, according to Jerry Lee Lewis, had killed rock'n'roll back at the start of the Sixties. But afterlife brought unexpected rewards. Neil Young claimed him as a hero, the man who'd convinced him it was possible to be more than one person in a lifetime. Darin was elected in the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame; George Clooney chose one of his songs, "Artificial Flowers", on Desert Island Discs; Robbie Williams revived his spirit for his swing album; and now the Darin biopic, "Beyond the Sea" is finally due for release this November after its star and director Kevin Spacey struggled for years to get it made.
Darin would have accepted all this as his due. He laid out his ambition from the start: "I want to tackle every single medium that exists in this game, and to be good at it." His main game was music, and there he had few peers. "He had a better sense of time than almost any singer I ever worked with, " says Atlantic Records found Ahmet Ertegun, the man who signed legends like Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin. "No matter what he did, he was always swinging. He had soul, which was something that Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin never had." Ramone agrees: "Plenty of white singers have the borrowed the black R&B sound, but Bobby Darin was one of the few who really understood it, and felt it. He was totally comfortable in that world. And he was a killer when it came to delivering a lyric. He was a true musician."
To the delight of the teen fanzines in the late Fifties, Darin's was an authentic rags-to-riches tale. But despite his unerring confidence on stage, his life was stalked by tragedy and angst. Born in 1936, he was raised in the Bronx, New York City, like a star in a soap opera. He was well into his thirties before he discovered that the woman he knew as his mother was actually his grandmother, and that he was the secret child of his big sister. He'd grown up believing that his dad was a mafioso betrayed and killed by the Mob - something that coloured his relationships with the men who ran the USA's most prestigious nightclubs. He never discovered the identity of his real father. Sick almost from birth with rheumatic fever, the landscape of his formative years was relentless pain - and constant attention. He claimed that his mother was taunted as she pushed her baby carriage round the city streets" "Whaddya wanna wheel that thing around for? It's gonna die." But at home he was the chosen one who ate before the others and accepted their sacrifices as his birthright. Young Walden Robert Cassotto, as he was named, carried a twin-edged destiny: the threat of premature death that could strike at any moment, and the certainty that he had something special.
Though his heart was in vaudeville, he broke through in the late Fifties as a teenybopper star. "He was a rock'n'roll singer," remembers his manager Blauner, "and I didn't even like rock'n'roll. He was the opening act on a show in Bridgeport. He came out on stage singing rock, and my mouth fell open. He was the greatest performer I'd ever seen, except maybe for Sammy Davis. He could sell any song. So I went back to the office and told everybody that this kid would become one of the biggest stars of all time. They all thought, "Who is this crazy nut?"
Blauner encouraged Darin to switch from rock to Broadway standards, and chivvied Atlantic's Ertegun into releasing "Mack the Knife" as a single. It was No. 1 for nine weeks, but beyond its commercial appeal, it was perhaps the greatest swing performance ever captured on record, by a man young enough to be Sinatra's son. "Darin has the talent and the personal magnetism to become the dominant entertainer of his generation," said the veteran comedian George Burns, who took Darin under his wing. "Nothing can stop him but himself."
His talent was never in question. By the time he reached 25, celebrating with a TV special alongside Bob Hope, Darin had piled up a stack of hits: "Splish Splash", "Dream Lover", "Beyond the Sea", "Artificial Flowers." But the same drive that propelled him from extreme poverty and sickness to the stage of New York's hottest niterie, the Copacabana, also sent him careering over the boundaries of showbiz etiquette.
"If I get a smart-aleck question, I've got to give you a smart-aleck answer," he once admitted. "I've got to bury you. That's my defense mechanism." It operated whether he was facing the press, or his showbiz superiors. "He should have been championed by someone like Sinatra," says Ertegun, "but he rubbed him the wrong way. He got on the wrong side of Perry Como on a TV show, because he walked in and before he was introduced, he said, 'Hi, Per!' That wasn't showing due respect. He did little things like that, half in jest, but they put people off. Bobby would not play second fiddle to anybody, but you can't be in the driver's seat when you're with people who are bigger names than you are."
Sinatra's hackles were raised when Darin was quoted as saying that he would soon become bigger than his hero. "I don't think he actually said it," explains Ramone, "but that's the way it was reported." Ol' Blue Eyes never forgot: Darin was scheduled to star in the movie Come Blow Your Horn until Sinatra was booked for the role of his elder brother and insisted that Darin's role should go to his son-in-law, Tommy Sands, instead. But, Ramone says, Sinatra never underestimated Darin: "When we cut 'Mack the Knife', Frank said to me, 'I don't know if I can bring anything to this song that Bobby Darin and Ella Fitzgerald haven't already done.' So he appreciated Bobby's talent."

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