The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Charlie had pulled the Cadillac up to the back of the hotel and waited for Bobby to come down the stairs and get into the back seat behind him.  Seeing Bobby in this excited state was nothing new to Charlie.  Every minute, it seemed, was an urgent one for Bobby, and Charlie did not expend any effort by getting worked up about it himself.  That would not be helpful to Bobby, and it would only keep Charlie in a needless, constant state of panic.  Darin wanted to go to the Daily Mirror offices, and Charlie could draw an inference that it was Walter Winchell he would be going to see.  More than this, he did not need to know.

Bobby was barely aware of the city blocks going by him as they went in search of Winchell.  At that moment, he wanted two totally contradictory things to happen.  He was picturing his life unfolding in two completely different ways, and just now he could not let one of them go in favor of the other.  He and Jo Ann Campbell had been engaged for the past four months.  He had met her and won her over quickly.  He wanted her so badly!  And now, he was hoping that she would break up with him.  He simply could not be the one to call it quits, he was so crazy in love with her.

He had met Jo Ann not long after his breakup with Connie Francis, when he finally had to admit she would not go against her father’s wishes to elope with him.  Elope to where?  The closest thing he had to his own home at that time was a secondhand 1953 Dodge Coronet.  Bobby had tarried with plenty of women, but Connie was the real thing for him.  At that time, however, long before Splish Splash, he was nowhere near being able to support a wife, and Connie was equally far away from defying her father, so, reluctantly, he had to move on.  He did not have the luxury of time, of hoping that she would eventually change her mind.  Bobby Darin was of necessity living his life up-tempo, and he could not sit around waiting for anything, not even a girl he truly loved, to catch up to him.  Just now he was willing himself to not tell Charlie to drive faster to reach Winchell’s office, because he knew from experience that it would only make him drive more slowly. 

George Franconero had big plans for his daughter’s career.  Plans that did not include a nobody who called himself Bobby Darin.  After that, Bobby had decided not to pursue another girl in show business; it just created too many conflicts, not to say competition, which Bobby’s ego could not withstand.  He could not have a wife with a career of her own, that much was plain.  Bobby’s resolve on this issue stood firm until the moment when he saw Jo Ann backstage at the Paramount Theater, a petite blond with the delicate coloring of a Dresden doll.  He watched her as she prepared to slay the audience with a lightly lustful, pouty rendering of “Mama, Can I Go Out Tonight?”  Bobby Darin knew that sex could help mightily to sell a song, and he did not question its importance in the pop music market.  What struck him more was her backstage demeanor, her delicate femininity, conferring rather shyly with the bandleader about her number, the very opposite of what she was emanating on the stage.  She had an innocence about her that absolutely could not be faked, and it was with this that he had fallen in love.  He had hoped he could make her love him enough to want to give up touring, but it was not to be.  Things were beginning to happen for Jo Ann just as Darin was preparing to occupy the Copa.  Right now, Jo Ann was, professionally, about where Darin had been the year before.  He knew that sickening feeling of possibly losing a chance to make it big, and he understood her not wanting to give that up.  Jo Ann had said that there would be time enough for both Bobby and her own singing career, but he knew that it had to be one or the other, and she had already made her choice by going back out on the road.  She had parted from him in a public place, Hanson’s Drug Store, where all of their crowd hung out, those who had recently made it, and those waiting for a break.  She had lead him around the corner of the prescription counter and given him a kiss to appease him, but it was really a kiss goodbye, not a promise of things to come.  Bobby almost laughed at himself now to realize this; he was such an operator with women, so very skillful in making an exit, and yet he had not seen himself being brushed off.  This realization was like a punch in the gut to him.  Right now, though, he had to get his breath back and deal with Winchell.  This mention of his engagement in a national column could not have come at a more awkward moment.  He looked up into Charlie’s rear view mirror from his place on the back seat.  He did not like his own image.  Get over yourself, Cassotto, he said to silently to the mirror.

Meanwhile, Walter Winchell was working side by side with Rose Bigman in his little office at the back of the building, down the half flight of steps, preparing the next day’s column.  A new column was constantly in the process of being assembled.  At times, Walter felt like a baker, stocking the pantry every day with rising dough, pulling one batch of baked loaves out of the hot oven and replacing them with the next batch.  He certainly sweated as much as any baker over his product!  His nightly visits to the Copa had not spared him from keeping up with other news of Broadway, the political scene, and Walter’s own ongoing feuds with other journalists, the ones who looked down upon mere gossip columnists.  In earlier days, Winchell’s columns had been peppered with the cloyingly sweet conversations of his daughters.  As time passed, however, more space was given over to teasing his enemies at Time Magazine and the New York Post.  If Winchell’s choices tended to run too much to vinegar, Rose would tactfully restore the balance of acid to base in the text.  The column was still open to editing by the various newspapers that carried it around the country, and how Winchell would moan when he found that something had been cut!  At that point, Rose Bigman would apply a soothing balm to his ego, they would both roll up their sleeves and get to work on the next batch of bread.

As Walter’s pen was aimed, about to pan a new Broadway play he had no intention of seeing, the telephone rang in the outer office.  Rose silently left Winchell’s side to step out to her desk to answer the call.  Less than a moment later, she signaled Walter through the open door to pick up his own phone.  Still looking over the press clippings covering his desk, he picked up the receiver and said automatically into the phone, “This is Winchell of the Mirror, what have you got for me?”  What Walter heard next caused him to sit up straight in his chair at attention.

A male voice on the line said to him, “I understand you’re looking for the father of Bobby Darin?”

Walter gulped in a breath of air and said smoothly, “Why yes, I have been looking for him.  Can you help me?”

There was a pause on the line, and then the voice said, “You’ve got him right now, brother.”  For what seemed to be an eternity, Walter Winchell and the caller stared at each other over the phone line, each waiting for the other to speak.

At that moment, Bobby Darin blew past Rose Bigman and burst into the room.  With the unknown man on the phone line to Winchell, Bobby was now in closer proximity to his father than he had ever been in his life. 

“Walter,” Bobby said, looking grim, “we have to talk, now.”

Winchell heard a clunk on the phone line as the caller hung up.

Continued in the next chapter

ID: 1465278   (Rated: ASR) The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 14  Bobby visits Winchell's office, Rose Bigman makes an observation. by Gisele