Modern Screen (Jan-Dec 1960)

whole scene again, how it had all happened earlier tonight. He hadn't been feeling too well all day — sort of tired and a little groggy. He'd tried to catnap during the afternoon, but something was always interfering with his rest: phone calls, interviews, a hasty conference with his conductor and accompanist when someone had misplaced some music and mild hysteria had set in. . . . And then he had gone on stage and in the middle of his fourth number, he'd suddenly felt very dizzy. After that song he'd taken a drink of water, and walked around the stage, making jokes and light talk off the top of his head, hoping that the nausea would pass. But it didn't. The audience started to blur before his eyes; his arms and legs felt like lead weights, his head began to throb and pound and he could feel the sweat pouring down his face, streaking the make-up and trickling into his collar. But he'd finished the show and taken a quick bow.# Then he'd staggered back stage, breathing heavily and clutching at his collar. His manager had taken one look at him, felt his forehead, and gasped, "My God, Bobby, you're burning up!" He'd ignored Bobby's half-hearted quip, "Well, vou can't say I didn't go out in a blaze of glory," shooed him right up to the suite, and called the doctor. Two doctors had come immediately and examined him as he lay limply on the bed, alternately sweating and shivering. They'd diagnosed it as glandular fever, a virus that was going around town at the time, given him a double dosage of sulfa and ordered him to rest. Period. He smiled a little bitterly. The Copa — that shining beacon to which every aspiring young entertainer fixes his sights. The Copa — symbol of "having arrived" in show business. Yes, he had finally made the big time, the Copa — and what was he doing? Lying flat on his back with a virus, and the stern warning that it could lead to complications . . . It was only a little over a year since he'd been one of the aspirants, another face in the crowd of eager hopefuls, of talented, but not yet arrived performers, just another name people said "might amount to something one day." A lot had happened to him in that year and a half. He got his break, he made it in a big way. And they began to hail him as the entertainment sensation of his generation. Even the staid, conservative New York Times had swallowed its usual disdain for young pop music talent long enough to glowingly report in February of 1960: . . . On records, the most striking insistence of the renaissance oj showmanship can be found in the work of Bobby Darin, not only because he is a young singer with all the assurance, projection and casual craftsmanship of an old pro, but what is more remarkable, because he first gained his popularity in the rock 'n' roll scramble. They said it couldn't be done — and Bobby Darin had done it. He had done it beyond the shadow of a doubt. Yet most people talked about his sudden appearance in the big time line-up in the hushed tone of awe that one reserves for the recounting of a miracle, or shrugged off his success as an unprecedented "streak of luck. The kid musta been born under a lucky star. How else could he have made it so fast?" But the kid Bobby hadn't been born under a lucky star. The kid Bobby had made it on two things: an abundance of talent and the unwavering will to make the biggest splash ever in the show biz pool. And he had made it fast because he'd lie in bed at night and think he could actually hear, in the stillness of the room, that 82 chilling heart murmur and with it the harsh reality that very possibly he didn't have as much time as most hopefuls do, that if he was going to make good, he'd have to do it quickly. So, he plunged in and flailed away, grimly determined to reach his goal. And when he was well on the way, they censured him for being brash, pushy, conceited. ONCE, A FEW MONTHS ago, when a reporter had reminded him of these criticisms, he had shrugged and replied with a characteristic candor: "I've got this feeling that I'm gonna die young and there's so little time, so what I've gotta do, I've gotta do fast." But he hadn't mentioned anything about his weak heart, and the reporter, not knowing the truth, had insinuated that any 24-year-old who talked this way must be off his rocker and that the criticisms leveled at Bobby Darin were probably well-founded. Bobby winced when he read these and other comments, but still, he refused to talk about the real impetus behind his seemingly demoniacal drive. He shied away from it mainly because he didn't want pity, he didn't want people to like him because they felt sorry for him. He remembered too many years of that. Of lying in bed with pain and pity as his constant companions. And later, the years of poverty and more pity, when his fatherless family was on relief, when they practically had to beg to stay alive. He remembered all that and he didn't want any more of it; he wanted acceptance and respect, sure — but only if he had earned it by his talent as a performer and by what he had to offer as a normal, intelligent human being. So, whenever an interviewer would sniff along the trail of the truth, he'd squelch the line of inquiry with a sharp defense, "Whaddya mean weak heart? Everybody dies of heart failure, y' know. Look, I don't ask for sympathy from anybody. Nobody, see? I'm in a position now to give sympathy. Not take it. I don't need sympathy. Not from anybody ... I don't worry about dying. Who knows what death is? Do you know what death is? Well, all right . . . When He comes to take me away . . . When He calls . . then I'll go . . . Bye-bye . . . You gonna do it any different? Huh? "You're still not satisfied? Okay. Look, when I was ten years old, they told my mother that I'd never live to be 14. They never told me. I'd have laughed in their faces. Now they say I may never live to be 30 and I laugh in their faces. So you see, there's no story. There's nothing to tell. . . ." He could fool most outsiders with that flippant, I-don't-give-a-damn attitude, but he couldn't fool the few people who really knew and loved him. And most of all he couldn't fool himself. Not when he got out of breath after singing two numbers. Not when he often had to rest after climbing a steep flight of stairs. Still, he'd try. When a worried friend would admonish him, "Bobby, you've got to take it easy. You're doing too much, too fast. At this pace you'll kill yourself," he'd shrug and carelessly retort, "When I go, Baby, it'll be with a bang." But a split second after the quip, an almost imperceptible shadow of fear would cloud his face, and he'd murmur soberly, before the friend could say a word, "I know, honey, I know. I've got to be more careful. I've got to be as careful as I know how." WHAT HE WANTED most of all was a guarantee that there would be time, time for all the things he wanted to do. But he didn't think he'd ever get that guarantee, so he became the personification of a Young Man in A Hurry. He didn't know if there would be time later, so he had to prove he was top material now. Right away. He had to prove it not only in his career, but also as a man. In the career, he had to buck the handicap of having started out late — at the age of 21 in a field where most newcomers are often in their early teens. He had to make the transition from the idol-hungry, rarely ta'ient-conscious, rock 'n' roll teen-age audience to the more sophisticated, somewhat selective, young adult nightclub crowd — and make it fast. It's a big gap between these two worlds, and his bridge was one of sheer guts. He simply turned his back on the teen-agers, the only real security he knew, and took the risk that he'd be accepted by the older crowd. He gambled on his talents — not so much as a singer, but as a performer who could magnetize post-teen women by weaving a spell of sex on the nightclub floor, by arousing them unabashedly and calculatingly with sensuous, subtle motions. It worked. As a man, he had to face up to the fact that he wasn't the best-looking guy in the world. He leaped that hurdle by gaining an outstanding reputation as one of Hollywood's hottest new sexpots, a "big ten swinger," hit 'n' run lover, the slickest of the love 'em and leave 'em brigade, a guy who wanted fun without deep involvement, courtship without marriage, girls, but not wives. Women complained bitterly about him: he was forgetful, he was never on time, he didn't write, he flirted with other girls in their presence. And yet, they flocked to him as mice to the Pied Piper, they said he was, "a doll . . . amusing . . entertaining . . unpredictable . . ." They adored him. Then he found what he wanted. Love, real love. Jo-Ann Campbell. No, it wasn't so much that he had found love — love had found him. Jo-Ann had loved him long and silently before she could break down his resistance to real happiness, before he could accept the wonder oi the love they shared. And for a while life was so wonderful that even ambition driven Bobby was satisfied at last. Hij career was nearing the top: he had the love of an understanding woman; he would J soon have a wife, a home. But then it began again, that needling fear that there wasn't too much time left that if he stopped running for even a moment, someone with more time would ge ahead of him, would block his way tc the top. So he did what he had to do. "What I've gotta do, I've gotta do fast," he told himself, and there wasn't time for love, foi marriage, for a home. There wasn't mucl time at all, only enough to get to the to} before it was too late. So he "postponed' his engagement to Jo-Ann Campbell. H< would go off on tour, alone, it would giv< ; them time to "think." But he knew in hi heart what the answer would be. . . . Now he lay in bed in the shadowy roon and listened to the steady swish, swisl of traffic beneath his window, occasionally interrupted by the bleat of a car horn o the shrill voices of revelers who were mak | ing a late night of it. And he saw th( form of the sulfa pill bottle on the nigh table: the crutch. He resisted the impuls to reach out, grab it and hurl it across th room to shatter on the opposite wall. H gripped the sides of the mattress hard wit! both hands and firmly vowed not to le himself get rundown like this again, to ge off the treadmill and take it easy. But eve as he made the resolution, he wondered i he ever would really slow down, if h ever could. And if he couldn't, wh? would happen . . . ? EN Bobby's in United Artists' The Alamo, j