His talent for far-out humor in
song has already hit it big with
teenagers. Ambition and drive
will keep him zooming to stardom
This article , written by Gregory Merwin, appeared in the Jan. 1959
issue of TV Radio Mirror
Bobby Darin is like a bullet violently discharged and in mid-flight. His target is
stardom and he will not settle for less than
a bull's-eye. . . .You know Bobby's hit disc,
"Splish Splash," a humorous song he wrote and
recorded himself. You've seen him on last
summer's Bob Crosby Show and several times
with Dick Clark. Bobby's personable and bright.
Socially, he's the life of the party. His teachers
were crazy about him because he was not only
well-behaved but a lot of laughs, too.
Yet there's another side to Bobby. "I'm not
a happy individual," he says. "Never have been.
As contrived as it may sound, I don't ever remember having fun as such. My childhood
wasn't a childhood. I always had to be ahead
of the game. It seems that I've never had anything else to do in
this life but learn. I would make any personal sacrifice to make good. I don't say
I think I will or I've got to. I will. I want
the Academy Award and the Tony and
the Emmy. I will be a singer, actor, musical-comedy writer and a serious composer.
"It's my ambition to succeed at whatever I choose. If it means working until
five in the morning and then getting up at
six to get to the next town to appear on
a deejay show, I do it. But, outside of a
call from my family or my close friends,
I wouldn't get up at five except for my
career. I won't touch liquor, because I
want my head clear at all times so I can
think and do my best. By the time I'm
thirty, I want to be rich enough to retire—not that I would retire."
Bobby was twenty-one last May fourteenth. Average-looking, he stands five-
nine-and-a-half. His eyes and hair are
brown. He's a bug for sweaters and jewelry. "I've got about twenty sweaters and
I'm nuts for diamonds. Now I own a diamond ring. It's just a chip diamond, but
it's a luxury I'm very unaccustomed to."
He was born in New York and spent the
first seventeen years of his life in a Bronx
slum, where the kids wore cast-off clothes
and got their kicks bowling over ashcans
and spreading garbage over the streets.
"There was a rough element. Some of the
boys are doing time in local and federal
penal institutions, but a small percentage.
Most were basically good, but victims of
poverty. I was the lucky one. As poor
as we were, that's how rich we were in
love. And ours was an educated family.
Those two things gave me an advantage
over the other kids. But this advantage
also made me an outsider."
Bobby is the younger of two children.
His sister Nina is married and has three
children. Bobby's mother, of early American stock, had been a singer in vaudeville
and then a schoolteacher until she married. His father, of Italian extraction, died
five months before Bobby was born.
"Mom has been both father and mother
to me. She is gifted with one of the greatest virtues in the world, understanding.
"I never remember being hit at home,
because I never was. I remember being
scolded twice. I was about six years old
when I smashed six dozen eggs. I just
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.
And the other scolding came on the day
Mom saw me hanging by the knees, like
a monkey, from a fire-escape eight floors
above the ground."
As far back as he can remember, he was
always at odds with children his own age.
They didn't like his grades, for he was the
most brilliant student in school. He did
his last six years of elementary school in
four and won a medal. "They called me
a genius in the neighborhood, which
didn't make me liked. Most of the time.
I hung around with kids a couple of years
older. They at least tolerated me. They
used to think I was pretty funny and they
liked to have me around to make them
laugh.
"On the other hand, I didn't mind being
alone with books. I like books. Mom
understood my problem, but she didn't
baby me." He pauses, then says suddenly,
"I'm not a mother's boy. 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."
Bobby was knocked over for the first
time when he entered the Bronx High
School of Science. Its students are the
cream of the entire New York area. and
many go on to be doctors, nuclear physicists, engineers. "That's where I learned that I was nowhere near being a genius,"
says Bobby. "I met guys whose I.Q.s began at 180. They pulled grades in the high nineties and mine were in the eighties.
"So there I was again. I never felt that I belonged in my neighborhood, and I found that I didn't belong with intellectuals. But it turned out to be the most advantageous thing that ever happened to me, being caught in the middle. I could see both sides of the story, as Mom had always taught me to do, and judge both ends. And I learned the distasteful side of being too book-wise. Socially, you don't know people or life through books, You learn by living and doing. To me, the greatest art-form is observation."
It was in high school that Bobby took an unobtrusive step toward show business. He worked after school for three months to buy himself a secondhand set of drums. He organized a dance band and got weekend jobs. He spent three summers in the borscht circuit, doubling as busboy and drummer. Out of high school, he went to Hunter College for
one year. "I still kind of figured that maybe there was something I could get from professors or college students. I was
wrong. And I was tired of wearing dungarees and the same shirt.
"In the back of my mind, it seemed to
me that I was always trying to decide whether I was meant for show business. My earliest memories were of Mom telling me about her days in vaudeville. Anyway, after my first year at Hunter. I went to Mom and told her I wasn't going back to school and that I wanted to leave home. She didn't like it. I said, 'Mom, it's time I got out to see what makes it tick.' She was hurt, but she didn't stop me."
Bobby was lucky, at first. He was hired as an "Indian chief" for forty-five days in a troupe that performed for children in Eastern cities. "They gave me forty a week, and out of that I had to pay all of my expenses except transportation. But I felt good. I came out of that experience feeling: This is where I belong. I had the world by the chops—and then I got back to the city and discovered there were only forty thousand other actors in this vast metropolis. I don't know whether
you know how it is, when you're seventeen and you find you don't belong anywhere. But I was in a depression. I turned to songwriting, where I could lay all my gripes on the line."
Writing at night, he lived in Manhattan and held various jobs, such as building garage doors and cleaning machinery in a gun factory. This went on for a year and a half. Then, one afternoon, he was in a candy store, having a soda, when a friend nudged him and said, "That's Don
Kirshner who came in. He's had some
songs published. Why don't you show him
some of yours?" Bobby recalls that he
said, "What good will it do me?"—but he
was introduced, and they found a piano
and Bobby played his songs. Kirshner
liked them and, as a result, they teamed
up.
"I didn't have any expectations," Bobby
says. "Don said that we could write and
sell radio commercials. I thought he was
nuts. But, within four months, we made
about twelve hundred dollars. We
knocked out some songs. A couple got on
records, but I don't think we made twelve
dollars for the year out of those. Then
Connie Francis took one of our songs, and
it was her manager, George Scheck, who
heard the demonstration record on which
I sang. He said to me, 'Bobby, I think I can
get you a recording contract with Decca,'
I wanted to say, 'You're crazy,' but I'm a
polite guy and contained my utter disbelief. The next thing I know is that I'm
signing my first recording contract."
Bobby's entry as a performer came about
so suddenly that it threw him off balance.
On Monday, he signed the contract Tuesday, he cut his first recordings, including
a "cover" record of Lonny Donegan's
"Rock Island Line" Saturday night of the
same week, he sang on the Dorsey Brothers' network television show—which had
featured Elvis Presley the preceding
week.
"That was the greatest thing that ever
happened to me. I was hit with a hard
taste of success. Everyone was patting
me on the back and giving me the business, 'How does it feel to be a star?' And
I was buying it. Then I went on the road.
to play clubs, and found nobody knew me.
Sure, I had been on television. So what—
so had a lot of other guys. I had a record. Well, Donegan's recording was a
lot bigger than mine. I began to understand, for the first time, what a star really
is. A star is really Sinatra or Peggy Lee
or Cary Grant. It's not someone who
happens to have one or four hit records.
A star is someone who comes to understand his audience through years of doing.
I learned that you don't get it by watching or reading or being told. You learn
only by doing."
With success has come money, and
Bobby has bought his family a home in
New Jersey. "I'm not married," he says.
"When I say 'family,' I mean Mom and
my sister and her family. Buying them
the house represented something to me,
and it meant getting the family out of the
dirty city. The next thing I want to buy
them is a good car, for that means getting rid of a '36 sedan. I admit this: Being so poor is my chief impetus for
wanting to be rich."
Bobby's never had a vacation in his life
and he isn't yet ready to take the time off.
He keeps up a back-breaking schedule.
On the road, he averages five or six hours
sleep a night. Before and after his performance, he meets with deejays, his fans
and reporters. On the way home, he
looks forward to eight or nine hours
sleep, but usually finds his New York
schedule just as heavy with business conferences, meetings with songwriters, recording sessions and more interviews. It
gives him little time for girls.
"You're going to do a double-take when
I tell you this," he warns, "but I haven't
had more than twelve real dates in my
life— I mean the conventional kind where
you pick up a phone and ask a girl if
she'd like to go to a party with you this
coming Saturday. I go to parties, but I
prefer to go stag and just meet a girl and
get to talking. I love to talk to a girl, to
get to know her, if it's a real informal
thing where you just happen to get together over a cup of coffee or something."
He adds. "I like to level with a girl. I
have no time to get serious now. I tell
her. 'You have to understand that we are
going out because you like me and I like
you. But if I don't call you next week—
or ever—you mustn't feel bad about me.' "
He's given consideration to the kind of
girl he'd like to marry. "I'm not goin' to
be one of those guys who says, I don't
care what she looks like, so long as she's
intelligent.' To satisfy my own ego, she
must be beautiful. But if she's smarter
than I—and I wouldn't mind that—she
mustn't buck me mentally. She mustn't
ever try to out-think me. There's so much
of me in my work that at times she may
be giving more than she's receiving."
Bobby admits that the one thing about
women which scares him is the possibility
of being hurt. "Emotionally, I can be
slugged. Once I was in love, and only
once. I don't want to talk about it, but
that really murdered me. I can give you
another example, though. I had pets as
a kid. I had a Pekinese dog that I loved
and one day I saw him killed by a car.
It hurt me so badly I decided I'd never
have another pet."
While Bobby refuses to let dating interfere with his career, he has more than his
share of good friends. "I have six real
buddies for whom I'd walk to the ends of
the world. These are people I can really
talk to. They can criticize me or my ideas
and get angry with me, and I know it is
because they are concerned for me. They
understand my moods and my needs for
privacy. I can say to them, 'Don't bother
me,' and they aren't hurt. They understand."
When Bobby gets back to New York
now, he stays with his family in New Jersey. He has always got along well with
his brother-in-law, Charles, and, on a
free evening, they will go to a movie or sit
around and listen to records. His nieces,
Viva and Vana, and his nephew, two-
year-old Gary, idolize him.
You'll find Gary's picture in Bobby's
wallet. "Every time Gary sees a jukebox, he asks for my record and, if it's not
there, he tries to beat up the box. I want
him to be in show business. He's a beautiful kid, and already I can see he has a
bundle of rhythm. I want him to have
music lessons. I want him to have a
piano. I want to cry when I think of my
wasted years."
Bobby doesn't think recent success has
changed him. "I still don't know where
I belong. I only know that I'm going to
succeed at whatever I enter. I'm very
self-sufficient, in a personal sense, and
it's a little unfortunate at times. You
can get too independent for your own
good. But I guess that's what the right
woman will be to me. She'll be someone
I can lean on."
Bubble applet used in "Splish Splash" picture
courtesy of Javaboutique.com and picture
of Bobby and Gary courtesy of Harriet Wasser.
bobbydarin.net/bobbydarin.com, All Rights Reserved.
