Even back in those mournful days when
Flagg Flyers and ducktail haircuts were the rage and no one thought Dick
Clark was particularly ridiculous, you knew there was something different
about Bobby Darin.
Sure, there were the typical three-chord rock 'n' roll
rumblings like "Splish-Splash" that blared from the hoagie shop jukeboxes
after school. But then there came "Mack the Knife" and everyone at the
hoagie shop stopped and said, "Hah?"
"Splish-splash I was takin' a
bath,”we would understand in those days of Eisenhower and Clearasil. “Oh,
the shark has pretty teeth, dear..." blew our preoccupied minds and sent us
scurrying back to the button you pushed for Connie Francis' latest.
Bobby Darin:
"I believed in being
what the moment was.."
Darin, 23
then, had left rock 'n' roll behind in 1959.
After that, it was a crazy, cocky
whirlwind for the headstrong kid with an I.Q. of 137 from the teeming Bronx
tenements. When he was a baby, Darin had slept in a cradle that was a
packing crate.
By the time he was 24, after "Mack the Knife" and the other
million-selling hits, he was off to nightclubs and acting, to starlets and
publishing and a show-business empire that quickly made Bobby
Darin—the man whom A&P heir Huntington Hartford said ran off with his
wife—a millionaire.
The critics who interviewed him had a favorite word by
now: "obnoxious." But they always had to append the word "talented" to it.
"I
thought of myself as a singer and actor in that order," Darin explained
recently. "I believed in being what the moment was. Frankly, I wanted to
establish myself as a legend by the time I was 25."
He succeeded, especially in the nightclubs, where the kid with the rock 'n'roll reputation proved to
be a suave,versatile, intelligent and crowd-pleasing rhythm singer and
impressionist.
In short, Bobby Darin was on top of the world, riding high on
Las Vegas' glittering strip, running with starlets, slowly becoming
disgusted.So, after a few years of it, he chucked the big house and the yacht,
hooked up a trailer to his car and drove off to the rocky cliffs of Big Sur
above Los Angeles. There, amidst the pounding Pacific and the
sun-drenched mountains, he shut himself off, writing a movie.
"I had to do it
to survive spiritually," Darin said recently from Burbank, where he had just
completed production for the Bobby Darin Amusement Co.,
a summer show which premiered last Thursday (July 27,1972) on NBC and will run
for seven segments. "I totally changed, got rid of all my material possessions.
I realized that there was more, really more. I stopped being something else
and came back to me."
With the change in Darin's lifestyle, friends and
colleagues noticed an amazing change in his attitude. Gone was the arrogance
and the cockiness. Visitors to the new variety show's set noticed an
atmosphere of fun and relaxation there. No, they said, this was not just some
pampered performer changing lifestyles to suit his role. This was something
different.
"Darin's Groucho Skit
Would Even Fool Chico"
"I'm so happy with this show, I can't believe it," Darin says. "It's
great when you can find talented people to work with and things feel so
right."Darin is a first-rate dancer, pianist, guitarist, drummer and
songwriter. He says the show will be accented with comedy, and will feature
a lot of sketches and his impressions."He does a Groucho Marx
impersonation that would fool Chico," swears an associate.
Getting back into
television hasn't posed too many problems for Darin's newfound freedom.
After he taped the first show, he recalls, "I just drove off and drove down
past Laguna to a deserted beach, took out my sleeping bag and hot plate and
unwound."
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