The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Back at his office in the Daily Mirror building, Walter Winchell was going through some dusty files dating back to the 1930s.  The filing system was unorthodox, to say the least; only he and Rose Bigman would ever have a prayer of finding what they were looking for amongst all these papers.  Each day in his column, Winchell had been sending little bouquets of compliments to Darin about his Copa run.  Just a line or two, but every day, to remind his still large readership about this new super-charged talent.  Charged with IT, and then some!  In his conversations with Bobby, he had found the singer eager to talk about his own talent, his plans and ambitions, and yet, on the private side of his life story, he stuck very much to the script of the interviews that Winchell had read the night of his opening.  On purely personal matters, Darin had a degree of reserve that Winchell found to be unusual in so young a man who seemed eager to communicate on any given subject.  One evening Darin and Winchell had outstayed everyone in the Copa lounge, the smaller, private space set aside upstairs for the performers and their friends, the two of them pontificating about everything under the sun.  The talk had dried up for the moment.  The three-piece band was taking a short break, and the room was draped in a heavy silence.


Bobby Darin with Sammy Davis Jr. in the Copa Lounge

Seated deep in a booth across from Winchell, Bobby Darin yawned widely, mashing his fists into his eyes in an effort to shake off his drowsiness.  “Walter, don’t you ever need to sleep?”

Winchell, the fedora perched up on the back of his head, looked across the room to where Charlie Maffia sat almost dozing on a barstool and shook his head.  “Sleep, what’s that?  What with writing my column, I’m up around the clock, just can’t relax long enough to sleep.”

Charlie Maffia was a simple soul who could fall asleep anywhere.  Now he roused himself from his catnap.  The bandstand was deserted, and the room was almost empty.  Seeing that the coast was clear, Charlie quietly got down off of his perch, went over to the piano, seated himself, and began to hesitantly pick out chopsticks on the keyboard.

Bobby raised his head and looked over to the bandstand.  He considered saying something to Charlie, considered again, and simply turned back to Winchell and said, “Thomas Edison functioned very well on four hours of sleep a night.”  He remembered learning this from a child’s biography of Edison that he read in bed while convalescing from an attack of rheumatic fever. 

Winchell’s face elongated in a doleful expression.  “Yeah, but he didn’t have a column to write!  I do five, sometimes six a week!  My God, what a racket.”  The two sat in silence for a time before Winchell finally asked, “How old are you, Bobby?  Twenty-two, twenty-three?”

Darin exhaled in a yawn, made a wry face and confessed, “Twenty-four, as it happens.  Atlantic keeps shaving a couple of years off my real age, to give the young female fans something to live for.  You can’t be on the cover of Boyfriend magazine when you’re an old man of 24.  I was born May 14, 1936.  That is, until my publicist decides to change the year again.”

Before Winchell could pose a further question to Darin, an amazing thing happened.  There was a small bar in the lounge, situated at the opposite end of the room from Darin and Winchell.  A man seated at the bar pushed his drink away and headed straight toward their booth.  Winchell could see Charlie Maffia come to attention on the piano bench.  He made no movement toward them, but he was watching the stranger as he approached Darin’s table.  It was obvious to Winchell that Darin was not without protection of his own.  Charlie was a bulldog who could let himself off of his own leash if the situation required it.  For now, the bulldog was content to watch over his master.

The stranger was a short man of rugged build, thick neck, nattily attired in evening dress.  He stood in front of their booth, ignoring Winchell, and fastening his gaze on Darin.  After doing two shows that evening, Darin was in no mood for autograph hounds or well-wishers, and he did not acknowledge the stranger standing before him.  Instead, he leaned toward Winchell and began to relate to him a rather over-long story about how his family had once survived for an entire week on nothing but hard-boiled eggs.  He gave the stranger no chance to speak.  Winchell, feeling pulled in two separate directions between Bobby’s pointless anecdote and the expectant patience of the stranger, finally interrupted Darin to say to the interloper, “What can we do for you, son?”

The nattily dressed man broke into a smile which revealed a large gap between his front two teeth.  He was clearly grateful to Winchell for giving him an in.  “Thanks, Mr. Winchell, thanks! (the thanks sounded more like “tanks”).  He spread his appreciative look between Winchell and Darin as he said, “I just wanted to say, Bobby, many congratulations on doing such a great show at the Copa.  The management in particle, excuse me, par-tic-u-lar-ly sent me to give their good wishes to you.”  Winchell thought that Darin might burst out in laughter watching this gangster type wrestle the multisyllabic word to the ground, but some instinct, or perhaps stubbornness, kept him silent on this occasion. 

The management.  That was a good one, Winchell thought to himself.  While Jules Podell was the putative owner of the Copa, and no effort had been spared to demonstrate that crime boss Frank Costello had no legal connection to the club, any child on the streets of New York could tell you who actually ran the place. 

The gangster, who appeared quite young now that Winchell saw him up close, obviously relieved to have delivered his message, waited in silence for Darin’s reply.  Onstage at the Copa, and in their subsequent conversations together, Winchell had seen Bobby at his most winning and ingratiating.  At those times, he was the very definition of charm and good manners.  Now he saw another side of Darin, one that sent a chill over him.  Bobby did not look at their uninvited guest.  He stared down at the table before him and said in an indescribable voice, “Tell ‘the management’ that Big Curly’s son says hello.”  Darin’s lower lip was drawn up in a childish pout.  Winchell recognized that look, one that he had seen on his son’s face when he refused to play with a new toy he had been given.  Darin continued to look down at the table.  He nodded his head up and down and seemed to be having a silent debate with himself about something.

The stranger was clearly not expecting this defiant tone from the Copa’s headliner in response to what he thought was happy news.  Lightning-fast mental processing was obviously not in the boy’s makeup.  “Tell who, what?” he asked, frankly confused.

“Big Curly’s son, that’s me,” Darin said quietly.  By this time, Charlie Maffia had moved off of his seat on the bandstand and came up behind the young stranger and to his left, where he was sure the young man could see him.  He and Charlie eyed each other as two dogs will when they are deciding whether to fight.  Winchell thought a brawl in the Copa lounge would be unseemly, attracting unwanted attention, so he patted the natty young man on the arm of his expensive suit and said, “Okay, son, thanks for the message, thanks very much.”  Between Charlie’s movement and Winchell’s, the tension of the moment was broken up.  Bobby never did look up to see who was addressing him.

The young gangster looked in frank appeal at Winchell for an explanation of this bewildering scene.  Winchell just gave him a nod and a wink, indicating that his message was delivered, and he could now depart.  “Yeah, thanks, Mr. Winchell,” said the young tough-in-training, “see you around.”  And then he somehow managed to get himself out of the Copa lounge.  He fervently hoped that Mr. Costello would never send him on such an errand again.  The last few remaining in the lounge packed it in at that point.  Charlie Maffia took Bobby back to his hotel before heading home to Nina and the three kids.

Now, in his office, after an early-morning haircut and shave, Winchell was searching through very old files, looking for any mention of the name Saverio Cassotto, who died five months before Darin’s birth.  That would be December of 1935.  He had sent Rose Bigman down to the newspaper library in the sub-basement to see if she could find an obituary on the father of Bobby Darin.

Rose finally emerged, hot and dusty from the catacombs, to confess that she could not locate the obituary.  “You don’t have the exact date of death?” she asked.

“No,” Winchell said, “but I figure it can’t be much later than December 1935.”  Walden Robert was born in the following spring.  Bobby Darin had no memory of his father, and he did not seem to share Winchell’s curiosity about him.  Winchell could have approached Bobby’s family about Sam, of course, but now, with what had taken place in the Copa lounge, Winchell had an idea that would probably result in a dead end.  Bobby Darin might be the first really famous person in his family, but his relations must have left their traces somewhere that Winchell could find them.  He turned the matter over in his mind as he attended the Copa performances, twenty-one nights in a row.  It was clear to Winchell that his next stop would be to visit a retired gentleman of means living at the Majestic on Central Park West.  As it happened, he would be visiting that palatial address sooner than he expected. 

Winchell put aside the matter of Sam Cassotto for the moment to open a plain white envelope in the morning’s mail.  As a Special Correspondent to the FBI, these plain envelopes passed between Winchell’s office and Washington, DC, with fair frequency.  Either Winchell was sending some underworld tip to the Bureau about suspected illegal activities, or the Bureau was giving Winchell something that would be beneficial for J. Edgar Hoover to have broadcast to the world in Winchell’s column.  Whichever direction the mail headed, it was a beneficial arrangement for both sides.  Writing about Bobby Darin for the Mirror was Winchell’s duty to his employer.  Whatever he did for the FBI he considered to be a duty to his country. 

Continued in the next chapter

ID: 1451094   (Rated: 13+) Title: The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 6  Description: Close encounter with fans in front of the Copa. By: Gisele