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By LEE DUMONT
obby Darin's escape
poverty
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HAT DID I WANT most while I was growing up in poverty?" Bobby Darin, sunning beside the pool of his Hollywood hotel, half closed his eyes and took a long, thoughtful look back into his not so distant past.
Suddenly an icy fire darted like blue lightning from those restless, searching eyes of his — and just as quickly disappeared.
'What I wanted most of all while I was growing up in poverty," the rage of the rhythm singing set murmured with well-controlled intensity, "was-r— to get out of it!"
For a moment you got the impression that no single desire had eclipsed that great driving surge of yearning to escape the overall desert of poverty as Bobby knew it.
And then this came pouring out: "I wanted to have some identity. I wanted a house with a yard and a vegetable patch." Now his voice grew quietly defiant. "And a fence!"
His next words, too, came softly. "I'm glad to say I could get that house and have my mom in it before she passed away.
"Maybe it's an awful house," he was veering toward the defensive again, "but it's a first, and I like firsts."
Half of what Bobby had said seemed to carry a charge of special significance.
Specifically, it was a house, not a home, he had lacked and wanted. Obviously, no matter how poor and cramped the family quarters were, his wonderful mother had made them a home.
And then the fence. What about that? Bobby grinned as he elaborated on the fence he used to dream about.
"I didn't want a big fence," he protested. "Only a little one." He measured with his hand scarcely a foot off the ground — about the height of a psychological fence! "Just to let people know they've got to step over it," he explained. "That I was over there on the other side of it."
Over there on the other side of that fence he's well able to afford today is a 22-year-old boy, Manhattan-born, brought up in the Bronx. A boy whose father died five months before Bobby was born ... A boy of Italian and English ancestry ... A boy who had rheumatic fever when he was seven years old .... Again when he was eight . . . nine . . . ten.
But Bobby is a boy who defies statistics, either cut and dried or dramatic. He insists on being his own highly individual self —
continued on page 4S
"1 want to be somebody. I want to get out of here," Bobby wished as a child of the slums. Today his dreams have been fulfilled
KIDS clap hands as Bobby strums his hit record, "Mack The Knife." Poverty and illness were his lot when a kid.
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