Darin's genius as a performer was never in doubt, but humility was more difficult for Darin
to achieve. "We had a rehearsal for a BBC radio show," Ertegun recalls, "and they were trying to be nice,
so they offered to go over his spot first so he could get away. And he took it as an insult, because he was
a star, and should go on last. He was offhand with the musicians; he tended to speak down to them. Then
the band took a break and he started to fool around with the drum kit. The drummer came over and said, 'Get
the f*** off my drum stool.' Bobby got very angry, and wanted to leave. I said, 'Look, this is the biggest show in
the country. You can't go.' He said, 'F*** it, we'll go to the other network.' I said, 'Bobby, this is Britain. There is
no other network!'"
Ill health restrained him from some of the temptations of stardom - but not all. "He wasn't a drinker," says Blauner, "he
wasn't into any kind of dope. I guess that his biggest drug was sex." As a teen idol and movie star, sex came easily
to Darin. On the road, he employed Charlie, the man he thought was his brother-in-law but who was actually his
stepfather, as a gofer. One of Charlie's perks was first shot at the fans and showgirls who came backstage in search
of the star. Once Charlie had taken his pleasure, Darin would walk into the room naked and say, "Now how about some
of this, baby?" One of Darin's touring band took his new wife on a train tour across the USA. After a quick lunch in the
restaurant car, he came back to find his boss and his bride naked in his compartment. The marriage ended there.
Such shenanigans were ignored by the showbiz press of the Fifties and Sixties. It preferred to chronicle
the tempestuous marriage between Darin and one of the USA's biggest film idols: 16-year-old Sandra Dee.
The pair shared the billing in a handful of movies - 'frothy comedies," says Blauner, " they short-changed
his career" - produced a son, Dodd Darin, but divorced in 1967.
At the beginning of their marriage, though, Darin seemed unassailable. He'd captured the teen market with
rock'n'roll, and the cabaret audience with his standards. TV networks were clamouring for his time. And still
Darin wasn't satisfied: he wanted to be a genius songwriter. In time, he became a brilliant pasticheur,
who could turn out perfect replicas of swing tunes or Bacharach medodies. But the process wasn't flawless,
as Ertegun discovered: "Phil Spector had become a buddy of mine. I thought he was a charming fellow, very
bright, so I hired him as my assistant. We went out to Bobby's house, and by this time he had a big place in
Beverly Hills and a movie-star wife. He wrote a lot of songs, and it was my habit to listen to what he had, which
sometimes was not that interesting, while I waited for something we could use. So Bobby sat by the pool with an old
guitar and started playing these songs. After the first one, I said, 'That's nice, what else have you got?' The second,
the same. The third, I said, 'That's terrific, Bobby. Got anything else?' Spector couldn't stand it any longer. He
stood up and said, 'That sounds terrific? Are you out of your mind? These songs sound like s***!' And Darin
threw us out.
"A year later, Bobby said to me, 'Some of these young kids are making great records. There's this guy, Phil Spector,
who's really hot. Do you think we can get him?' I said, 'Bobby, that's the guy you threw out last year!' So that never
happened."
Darin's urge to succeed soon enticed him away from Ertegun's label: "We were making hits. We won the Grammy for
Best Record of the Year. But then Darin moved to Hollywood, and when we'd have a meeting, there'd be these
Hollywood agents who thought they were God's gift to the world of showbiz - but they were just schmucks. They
would sit around and openly discuss how everything was so great in his career, except for the fact that he was
on an independent label. They kept talking about how Capitol Records had built this amazing building, the
Capitol Tower - the ugliest thing, it was atrocious - and how Sinatra had been on Capitol, and Dean Martin, and he lapped it
up. As soon as our contract was over, boom! He signed to Capitol."
Not content with rock'n'roll and swing, Darin used Capitol's studios as an adventure playground, cutting folk, country,
soul and sophisticated pop, all with the same devilish self-confidence. "I used to fight with him," Blauner remembers,
"and say, 'You can't be all things in music. People won't accept it. If they buy a Sinatra album, they what they're
getting. With you, they never know.' I'm pleased I lost that battle, because his legacy is spectacular."
Hollywood's hometown business proved more difficult to master. "He wanted to do this movie called Too
Late Blues," Blauner says. "I hated it, and so did the public. Then there was Hell is for Heroes, which
had trouble written all over it." His co-star in Hell.....was Steve McQueen, who fought with the director,
had him fired, and then started a feud with Darin that soured the production. Another Hollywood icon sabotaged
what could have been Darin's defining screen moment, as Blauner recalls: "Bobby was on the Mike Wallace show
in New York, a hard-hitting talk show. Robert Rosen (director of The Hustler) saw it and said, 'That's it, I've
found the Hustler.' It was a great part, and it would have made him a movie star forever. Then we were at the track
in LA, where Bobby was in a celebrity chariot race. This agent came up and said, 'Gee, it's too bad about The Hustler.'
I panicked, made a call, and discovered that Paul Newman had suddenly become free and they'd given the
part to him."
Searching for a hit, Blauner discovered a movie called Captain Newman MD: "I sent Bobby the script, and
I'd marked up the pages he was on. It was only a cameo. He called me up and said, 'Why am I doing this
movie?' I said, 'Because this is the kind of part that Academy Award nominations are made of.' Two years
later, he got the nomination. But it never led to the kind of offers he deserved."
Darin's music career was also stalling. He was only four years older than John Lennon, but in his tuxedo he
looked like the Beatles' uncle. He'd turned down hit songs like the Lovin' Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic?"
Intrigued by the self-expression of rock music, he cut a poignant Tim Hardin tune, "If I Were a Carpenter", and
reinvented himself as a folk-rocker. By 1968, he was writing his own Dylan-esque songs, and billing himself
as "Bob Darin." He returned to the Copa in New York, scene of his early triumphs, clad in denim, and
performed a set of protest tunes. The crowd was baffled, and the management appalled. "You dress right
when you come here," a well-connected Italian gentleman told him. "It's a matter of respect."
For the first time in his life, Darin found a cause more vital than his own career: Robert Kennedy's presidential
campaign. The crusade ended with RFK's assassination in June 1968. "With him in the ground," Darin
lamented, "part of me went too." By Kennedy's graveside, he experienced what he called "metaphysical illumination."
Long after the mourners had left, Darin remained rooted to the spot, unable to move. In the small hours, he
was granted a vision: "I saw things with a peace and a calm I had never seen before. All my hostilities,
anxieties and conflicts began to fly away into outer space."
He emerged a prophet for a new world order: "There's no longer any place for phoniness in my career or my
personal life. I've reshaped me, and now I'd like to take a part in reshaping the universe." Abandoning Beverly
Hills, Darin moved into a trailer overlooking Hollywood, shunning the material world. "It turned into a
Kafkaesque prison," he ruefully recalled later.
Gradually, the real world intruded on his fantasy. There was alimony and child maintenance to pay, so
Darin returned to Vegas and dusted down his tuxedo. Meanwhile, the health crisis that had shadowed him
since childhood closed in. He survived one brush with the heart surgeon's knife, but the sense of impending
doom rarely left him. "I was with him up in Lake Tahoe, maybe six or eight months before he died," Ramone recalls.
"He was so fragile, sitting there with a cylinder of oxygen that he'd draw on every few minutes. He knew he was going
soon." Blauner agrees: "It affected his whole life, the knowledge that he had so little time."
"I think that's been overdramatised by people," says Ertegun. "Even if people tell you you're going to die, you still
think you'll survive. It's human nature. So I didn't feel as if he was speeding toward death. But there was
something else that always hung over him. He fantasised himself as being much bigger than he ever became. And
when he hit any failure, it rested very heavily on his mind, because he was really a winner, and didn't want to accept defeat
of any kind. Somehow he didn't become the great movie star, or honoured as the greatest
singer of all time, and he wanted to be all that, and more. And he could do all that. When he was on stage, he
had the audience in his hand, and he was swinging, and they were roaring with laughter, and he was dancing -
then he was a total showman. He was in complete control. The only person who could match him was
Sammy Davis Jr, and Sammy didn't get hit records the way Bobby did. Anything that any of those people
could do, Bobby could do it just as well."
When Blauner resumed control of Darin's career in January 1973 after a nine-year break, Darin
had a network TV series, nightclub and concert bookings, and a new record deal with Motown. He was also
seriously ill. "It was as if he had Alzheimer's," Blauner recalls. "He would call me up first thing and say 'Meet
me on Friday at ten.' Then an hour later he'd call again, and have no recollection of the previous conversation. And
he'd keep doing it. Or else he'd be on the street, and he'd walk into a wall, like he was drunk. Eventually they
discovered it was a complication of the rheumatic fever: he wasn't getting enough oxygen to the brain."
After the final TV special in March 1973, Darin struggled to fulfil his engagements. "It was the most difficult year of my life,"
Blauner admits. "Oh God, I still live with the guilt of not stopping him from working, because I was the only one who
could have, but he knew he was going to die. He was trying to put away money for his family." He had now married again,
to a woman called Andrea Yeager, but as his condition worsened, he stepped out of her life: "He didn't say a word.
He just left me and walked off. He never came home," she said. Two days later, she read in the papers that
they were getting divorced. "No matter how hard I pleaded for him to slow down," she explained, "he wouldn't
let up."
In November 1973, Darin was hospitalised again. He promised: "I'm not dying. I'm going to make a comeback.
I'll be up and running and making records before you know it." He talked of directing movies, producing other
singers, writing musicals. Two weeks later he had an operation to replace a faulty heart valve, and never came
round from the anaesthetic.
Steve Blauner maintains that, "Bobby lived life to the fullest. He wasn't cheated out of anything." But
everyone who knew him is still nagged by the loss of what might have been. "If he was alive today," says Ertegun,
"he would be sustaining the legacy of singers like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin - but with soul." Blauner has
no doubts: "He would be the king. He was the chosen one from his generation, and still would be."
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