The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 21

Chapter 21

The morning after the Copa closing, Darin and Company headed out to Washington, DC.  “No rest for the wicked, lads, let’s go,” Steve Blauner had told them as Dick Behrke, Ronnie Zito and the bass player had packed up their gear.  They left Lips the trumpet player behind; he no longer did the road gigs.  He could always find plenty of work right in New York and go home to his own bed every night (“As if that’s anyone’s idea of a good time,” Bobby had observed in very good imitation of Jack Benny).  Charlie Maffia accompanied them to act as Bobby’s valet.  Darin had slept most of the way in the back seat of one of the cars.  Dick always marveled at Bobby’s ability to fall asleep at any time, anywhere.  He could be talking a blue streak to the rest of the boys, lay his head down on a couch, and be asleep before he had finished a sentence.  Dick guessed that this was how Bobby always kept his batteries fully charged, ready to unleash all of his energy into performing.  Bobby dozed as they drove by the views of the Potomac River and the cherry blossoms past their peak of color.  Dick leaned over the seat to ask Blauner, “Say, do you think Eisenhower will come to see us?”

Blauner snorted in laughter.  “Not very likely.  He should be out campaigning for Nixon, but I think he won’t do anything that keeps him from an early round of golf.  Not much campaigning, and no nightclubbing for sure.”

Dick had never been to the nation’s capital.  He hoped he would have a chance to take in a few sights, but this was not a lengthy engagement, and he and Bobby would have a mostly new band to break in before they could take the stage at the Casino Royal.  Having Ronnie Zito with them was an immense advantage, however, as he knew all of Bobby’s charts already, and that would be a considerable time saver.  Dick hoped he would encounter no prima donnas among the house musicians.  If they gave him a hard time, he could always show them Winchell’s gun, he thought, if he had only held onto it.  Dick smiled to himself at this notion, laying down the law with lead to the brass section if it decided to be uncooperative. 

Nighttime was turning into dawn in New York City.  Journalists who had Broadway as their beat were used to working the graveyard shift.  Dorothy could have her copy turned in at the paper and be at home to greet her family at breakfast.  Not such bad hours for a working mother, really, who was used to catnapping whenever the opportunity presented itself.  Both she and Winchell had become attuned to these upside-down days after many years on the job.  They agreed to leave the St. Moritz to take a stroll as they discussed the Darin situation.  It was a hot New York City summer, and this was actually the best part of the day to be out and about.  The sun was coming up to cast a rosy light on the activity of milkmen and street cleaners as the two news hounds conferred. 

This was not the first time that Winchell and Dorothy had been in pursuit of the same story at once, but they had never been so close to stepping on one another’s toes before now.  It was not a story that other journalists were tracking down, as far as they knew.  Dorothy was not giving herself any kudos on this matter; she felt sure that the only reason the truth about Bobby’s parentage had never come to light until now was simply because no minimally competent gossip columnist or private eye had ever been moved to look into it.  Relocating to a new neighborhood after Bobby’s birth had been enough to hide the Cassotto’s from even a cursory examination of the family tree.  People in their new environs had not been tempted to study the matter too closely, perhaps because of some irregular bloodlines in their own ranks.  Polly had clearly understood that if they lived quietly and renounced their Frank Costello association, they would be given a pass on certain delicate matters that were nobody’s business.  That was all they had needed until Bobby had gone and made himself famous. 

Dorothy listened intently as Winchell walked with her on the city pavements and related briefly putting out feelers about Darin’s father which lead up to the exciting mystery phone call, topped off by Darin’s arrival at his office at the Mirror.

Dorothy dismissed this account with a shake of her head.  “But Walter,” she said, “that could have been a crank call, someone just pulling your leg.”

Winchell agreed, and he had thought the same thing after considering the matter for a time, once his excitement over the incident had abated.  Then he explained to her how he had found the discrepancy in the date of death of Sam Cassotto.  This had been repeated too often in Darin interviews for it to be an error; it had clearly been moved up by a year to make it seem possible that Sam was Bobby’s father, when in fact he had been dead for several months before Bobby had been conceived.  Winchell digging into the matter had clearly gotten to someone, and that someone had made the phone call.  Winchell had not heard from the man again, and at this time he was still casting about for a way to find him.

“That’s the problem with fathers,” Dorothy observed lightly as she watched the newspaper trucks dropping off their loads at the corner newsstands.  “After they’ve done their work, fathers can leave so little trace, if they’ve a mind.  That’s why it’s usually easier to track down the mother.  Mothers leave much more of a paper trail, in the usual way.”  Dorothy was enjoying giving Winchell an elementary lesson in sleuthing.

Winchell said to her, “Why, I didn’t need to look for the mother.  There was Polly, but she was already in her grave, you know.  I would love to talk to her, only I don’t believe in seances.”

Dorothy waited a moment to give Winchell a chance to unravel the part of the story that was really no mystery at all.  When he showed no signs of doing so, she finally said, “Oh, Walter!  Bobby’s mother is very much alive!  You were torturing her just last night at the Copa!”

Winchell walked a few more paces, then finally came to a dead stop.  He looked at Dorothy, shaking his head and cursing himself for a fool. “If I ever thought for a minute that I was a smart one, I was sorely mistaken.  Nina, of course!”  Here Winchell put his hands over his face in mortification.  “Hell’s bells, she must hate my guts right about now.”

“I don’t think she will be nominating you for a Pulitzer,” Dorothy said. 

In return for Winchell coming clean with her, Dorothy related her success in tracking down Nina as the true mother of Walden Robert, aka Bobby Darin.  Winchell shook his head in wonder, not at Dorothy’s sleuthing, which was appropriate to their occupation, but at his own thick headedness in the matter.  The two of them made their way to Walter’s office at the Mirror, where even now, Rose Bigman was making the first pot of coffee of the new day.

Bobby and the gang arrived by car at the Casino Royal at 804 14th Street NW.  It was a serviceable building with a more generous stage than the one they had just left.  Extra tables were being moved in to cover most of the dance floor area.  Bobby, Dick and Ronnie met with the house musicians and immediately launched into rehearsal in preparation to open that night.  Their graduation ceremony, so to speak, having been performed at the Copa, they all knew now what needed to be done to be ready to open in a new location with a mostly new band behind them.  Dick passed out the scores, and they quickly got down to work.  The hours flew by in what seemed like minutes, and when Dick finally took his head up out of the music score, it was time to grab a hasty dinner and leave the stage so that final preparations could be made for that evening’s show.  This was life on the road, he thought, where each day seemed to fly by faster than the one before it, and the one before that, until they were all melted together in the blurry image one sees while seated on a stationary train, watching another train pass by the station at full speed.  It took Dick’s breath away to consider how quickly a lifetime of touring could shoot by.  Bobby would be leaving the country soon, and he would miss him, but in the interim, he thought he would not mind it so much if the train chugged along a bit more sedately. 

Opening night in Washington came off without a flaw.  They experienced none of the first-night jitters of the Copa, which was the pinnacle for nightclub performers.  The Casino Royal, although very nice in its way, was something below the very top, a comfortable way station to visit en route to more exciting destinations.  Washington, DC, was not exactly known for its nightlife.  The audience here did not come in knowing their part as they did in New York City, which lived for the night.  It was up to Bobby to see if he could shake up the District of Columbia and keep it awake past its normal bedtime. 

The evening went smoothly.  The only real surprise of the night was when Bobby was able to look down at the audience (unlike at the Copa, he was actually raised on a bandstand a couple feet above the dance floor), and who did he see at ringside but Walter Winchell!

Bobby used his right hand to shield his eyes from the spotlight as he looked down into the audience and said, “Say, Mr. Winchell, I hope you aren’t shadowing me.”

“Why is that?” Winchell asked from his seat.

“Because,” Bobby replied, “you aren’t very good at it!”

This might have drawn a laugh back home, but Washington was not really Winchell’s town, had never been in the way that New York City was.  Most of the audience here would not immediately recognize Winchell, though they certainly knew his name.  They did not laugh or applaud but waited in polite silence for Bobby Darin to continue his act, which he lost no time in doing.  His reception at the Casino Royal could never meet the level of intensity of that at the Copa, where he was a local boy returning home in the guise of a conquering hero.  He gave them a good show, but the opportunities for banter, for a give and take between the performer and the audience, were just not as abundant here, and because of that, Darin’s act just nearly missed generating a lightning strike that evening.  He finished up with I’ve Got A Woman and had to work very hard indeed to elicit some faint “yeah yeah’s” from the audience. 

Walter and Dorothy made their way through the noisy corridors to the back of the building, down the half flight of steps to Walter’s modest hideaway.  There was a time when this office had been packed with press agents begging to give Walter tips that they had hoped would show up in print.  Even without attribution, landing an item in his column was a considered to be a coup.  Now, when Winchell wanted peace and quiet, this was where he headed.  He made no complaint about the parade passing him by, however.  He simply took Rose Bigman’s stool to sit on and offered his own chair to Dorothy Kilgallen.  He felt he owed her this much in beating him to the scoop.

Dorothy took her place at the desk, laying her purse and notebook before her.  Several years ago, she would have considered it something to be sitting where she now found herself.  But she had worked hard in newspapers, radio and television to make a name for herself, and she knew she had earned it all in her own right.  So, she took the seat with barely a thought for what it meant.  Now she was as direct with Walter as she had been with Nina the evening before.

“What do you know, Walter,” she said, “we’ve both been barking up the same tree!”

“Yes,” Walter agreed, “we came at it from different angles, but it looks as though we are both missing a piece of the puzzle.”

“How so?” Dorothy asked.

“Because,” Walter said to her, “now we know who the mother is, thanks to you, but we don’t know the name of the father.”

Dorothy leaned back in the chair and half closed her eyes as she said gently, “But Walter, I do have the name of the father.”

Winchell had been congratulating her on the scoop moments earlier, but now he was beginning to feel annoyed.  “What?” he asked sharply.  “What?”  Was he getting too old to keep up, he wondered?

Dorothy Kilgallen smiled gently.  “Oh, didn’t I mention it?  Yes, it’s true, Nina gave me the name.  I have it with me now.  It’s my scoop, Walter, and it’s staying with me.  She told it to me in confidence.”

Winchell could hear a pounding in his ears that matched the quickening beat of his heart.  Was this what a stroke feels like, he wondered?  He shook his head and took a deep breath to clear his thoughts.  Perhaps all of these late nights were catching up with him at last.  He had to admit, Dorothy’s instinct to follow the trail of the mother had paid off.  His usual method of sending out feelers from the comfort of the Stork Club had not gotten the job even half done.  But no matter.  He was the one who had talked to Bobby’s father.  If it had been his father!  Suddenly even that looked doubtful, though he could barely admit it to himself, and he certainly would not come clean with Kilgallen on this point.

Continued in the next chapter

ID: 1473302   (Rated: 13+) The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 22  Winchell sings for Bobby by Gisele