The house he bought in Jersey was for her. After so many years of slums and fire escapes, he was moving his mother to a place in the sun, a place that had trees, a patch of green, a place where the air didn't smell of other people's cooking, and sour baby clothes.

Seventeen years in the Bronx, it had been, and plenty of kids he grew up with served time in jail because the neighborhood wasn't conducive to helping a boy turn out gentle. Bobby escaped the trap, and he credits his mother. "As poor as we were, that's how rich we were in love.
And ours was an educated family."

Mrs. Cassotto had been a singer in vaudeville, and a teacher, after that. Mr. Cassotto had died five months before Bobby was born, and the birth had been a difficult one. The mother had never been really well again.

Despite frail health, she'd been strong in so many things that mattered. "She had understanding," Bobby said once. "I never remember being hit at home. I was scolded twice. Once I was six years old, and I smashed six dozen eggs. I let them roll off the kitchen table one at a time and burst on the floor. It's a funny picture to remember, but we were so poor, and eggs were our chief nourishment. The other scolding came when Mom saw me hanging by the knees from a fire-escape eight floors above the ground."

Mrs. Cassotto had to go to work to support Bobby; the family's life was hard, "but we always had love."

When Bobby got out of Bronx High School, it was as though he had an enormous debt to pay back. He had the world on his shoulders. There was so much he wanted for himself, for his mother. He went to Hunter College for a year, he did a couple of plays there, he came out, changed his name to Bobby Darin, called himself an actor because he'd played drums at a Catskills resort the summer before.

He got a job doing a routine with a girl dancer. He fell in love, and he got hurt. She was older; she lied; she chased around with other guys. He came home to see his mother, and she noticed his nervousness. "I don't like what this girl is doing to you..."

The affair ended miserably, on a winter's afternoon, and he went wandering through the city, cold, disheartened, dazed. Hours later, like a homing pigeon, he found himself knocking at his mother's door in the Bronx. He'd walked ninety-two blocks through the snow. She looked at him, and she knew.

"Merry Christmas, darling," she said. "Welcome home."

He grabbed her. "You won't be disappointed in me again. I've been a boy, now I'm a man..."

He was eighteen; he was going somewhere.

The rest of the success story's been told. He's a driver, Bobby is. "I always had to be ahead of the game. I'd make any personal sacrifice to make good. I will. I'll be a singer, actor, musical comedy writer and a serious composer."

Part of this was ambition talking, part of it was the need to make up to a gallant woman for almost 20 years of selflessness.

"I'm not a mother's boy," he said once. "She's not that kind of mother. Mom would let me go ahead with anything I wanted to try, and she's been there when I was knocked down. But that's all. I always picked myself up."

When Mrs. Cassotto was knocked down, Bobby wasn't there to pick her up.

He was a star recording artist, and he was off doing a personal appearance when the news came.



She was dead. It was spring outside, and the grass was pushing through the gray earth around the little house in Jersey, and the birds had begun to come back after the winter, but the lady who was supposed to live there never would.

He sat in his dressing room, the boy who'd made records which were selling over a million copies a piece, the boy who had everything.

Too late, too late, he thought numbly, while his broken heart whispered, "Goodbye, Mom..."

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