The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Walter Winchell was now prepared to give Bobby Darin his full attention for the Copa show.  He sat at ringside and watched Bobby carefully as he prowled his tiny stage, relating in song the story of Mack the Knife, the audacious hit man from The Threepenny Opera.  He had not heard this song at the earlier show, Darin’s biggest hit to date, as he had attended the second half of the evening’s first performance.  He noticed that Darin not only sang the song, but told the story in a series of gestures and poses.  He made the audience see Mack sneaking around the corner from his latest victim, now just a body, oozing life.  He showed them the cement bags used to weight down a corpse in water, and he staggered to imitate Mack, spending like a sailor on shore leave the hard-earned cash he had forced hapless Louie Miller to withdraw from the bank before Mackie dispatched him.  At the end of the song, Darin, strutting across the stage, named those likely to be his next victims, Jenny Diver, Sukey Tawdry, Lotte Lenya, and Miss Lucy Brown.  He spoke the final line, threw it out in a voice that sounded like the cracking of a whip, announcing that old Mackie was back!  With Ronnie Zito’s drum beating punctuation behind him, it sounded like the final sentence of a ghost story, meant to excite a shiver of frightened delight in the listener.  The Copa audience exploded into applause.  The line formed on the right for willing targets of Mack, as the line of autograph seekers would form for Darin the moment this show concluded for the evening.  Darin owned that audience, and he could now do what he pleased with them. 

Never taking his eyes off Darin as he performed, Winchell considered the short biography of the singer he had picked up in his trip back to the office.  He read the same story, repeated in almost exactly the same words, in interview after interview.  Walden Robert Cassotto, born in Harlem, raised in the South Bronx.  His mother, Polly Walden, was an ex-Vaudeville performer, of “good American stock.”  She had married Sam Cassotto, a man who seemed to have held a variety of jobs.  A sometimes inventor, he could never manage to get a break.  Sam had died of pneumonia five months before Bobby’s birth.  The widowed Polly, along with her first-born daughter Nina and young Bobby, had gone through some hard times then.  Things improved for the family when Nina married Charlie Maffia and started a family with him.  Still, it was a struggle, and Bobby Darin described in the interviews a childhood that was never a childhood.  He had been, by his own account, a popular child in school but was happy alone, in the company of books.

Then the boy, popular but a loner, a child and not a child, poor but of “good American stock,” discovered music.  He bought himself a secondhand set of drums.  The family somehow came by a piano for him to practice chords upon.  He organized a band from among his high school friends. He had no formal training as a musician, just what he had managed to pick up on his own.  Not known as a singer, but one day he found himself out in front of the band, and suddenly, he was singing.  His mother Polly had unfortunately died before she could hear the album of standards that would really launch him in the popular music world, called That’s All.  He had placed a copy of the album into her coffin before it was lowered into the ground.  And now the much-loved son was an orphan.  From this mass of contradictions, Bobby Darin was born.  It was the show business standard American success story in which the entertainer was the hero, classic rags to riches stuff.  In this country, to be the thing you wanted to become (successful, famous, powerful) you first had to pretend to be that thing, whatever it was.  Herein lay the greatness of the United States, Winchell thought as he read the story, and Bobby would not disagree with him, a nation where that initial act of pretence was not blocked.  You still had to deliver the goods, of course, but no one was going to say you could not because of your name, place of birth, or what your father did for a living. 

Having seen half of the earlier show, Winchell was already rooting for Bobby when he read over this material.  For some reason, however, it left him feeling unsatisfied, perhaps a little bit sad for this young man who suddenly had the world at his feet.  For Winchell, who himself worshipped at the altar of material success and wealth, this was a curious feeling, one he did not enjoy.  He liked things to be simple.  This Bobby Darin, though, was not simple.  Walden Robert Cassotto, son of Sam Cassotto.  Walter Winchell understood that a name ending in a vowel did not automatically bespeak a mob connection, but knowing Broadway and certain neighborhoods in the vicinity as he well as he did, he could not but wonder.  Fortunately, Winchell knew just the man with whom to make inquiries on the subject.  For the moment, however, he pushed these matters from his mind and enjoyed the performance as he had enjoyed nothing in a very long time.  Bobby Darin was a tonic to Walter Winchell. 

The second show ended in triumph.  The Copa was now conquered territory.  There were well-wishers and fans to be greeted in the lobby, hoping to have their pictures taken with the headliner, after which Bobby would hold court in his dressing room and perhaps find two consecutive minutes in which to relax.  It was a continuation of the show itself which would last until Bobby signaled to Charlie that it was time to clear the room.  Charlie would waste no time in carrying out his orders; he would turn out the lights, and the moths would scatter into darkness. 

Dick Behrke discovered that he was simply too wound up to go home and go to sleep after all the excitement, and he found himself back in the Copa main room in the early hours of the morning.  He was not terribly surprised to see Ronnie Zito on the bandstand, packing up his drums for the night.  He did not like to leave his setup to the not-so-tender mercies of the cleaning crew.  Ronnie grinned at Dick in deep satisfaction as he climbed onto the bandstand.  He held out a hand in congratulation.  “You did it, man!  You did it!”

Dick took the offered hand and gratefully shook it.  He exhaled in relief.  “You did it too!  You were great tonight, Ronnie, you killed on those skins!  Did you hear that gal yelling at Bobby to sing ‘Splish Splash’?  Man, I thought I was going to bust out laughing!”

“I know, man, I know, she was lucky he didn’t take her head off right there.  Man, what a night!”

Dick and Ronnie smiled to remember the heckler, who had obviously thought to please Bobby by the request for Splash.  The two young men laughed over this thought.  Fatigue was beginning to creep over both of them, however, and they lapsed into silence, moving idly about the stage, picking up sheet music and other scraps of paper, already thinking about tomorrow’s run-through of the show.  The silence was broken by two loud voices coming from the back of the room.  Dick looked up the aisle to see Bobby Darin and Walter Winchell seated at a table, their heads bent together in conversation, engaged in what seemed to be a rather intense debate.  Dick could not make out their words as they spoke over one another in the far back of the room.  What now, Dick wondered?  Without the audience and the band, the Copa looked like a subterranean cave, somewhat cold and forbidding.  It occurred to Dick that the Copa was a nightclub only when people were present.  Minus that human element, it was just a cellar.  Off in the corner, to the far right of the stage, sat a man half concealed in the shadows, attired evening dress, with the build of a bodyguard.  In his nightclub sojourns with Darin over the past nine months, Dick had learned not to display any curiosity about these highly developed physical specimens.  After a while, they just blended in with the décor. 
Ronnie Zito squinted in the semi-darkened room to see the two men arguing near the kitchen door.  “Sweet mother of Jesus,” he said, “is Bobby going to smack Walter Winchell?”

Although Dick knew that any smacking that might take place would be purely metaphorical, he still felt an almost parental concern in reference to Darin.  Instinctively, he began to move in the direction of Darin and Winchell but was stopped in his tracks by a volley of laughter that rose up to suddenly stifle the argument, whatever its subject.  Bobby Darin saw this motion out of the corner of his eye, patted Winchell on the arm, jumped up from the table and bounded toward the stage to meet Dick and Ronnie.

“Hey, guys, you picking up a few extra bucks cleaning?” Darin asked as he hopped onto the stage.  His makeup removed, wearing his glasses, he looked more like a college student than a now-famous crooner.

“No, Bobby, we’re just punch drunk, walking in our sleep up here,” Dick said.
“Is everything okay?” asked Ronnie, tipping his head in concern in the direction of Winchell, who remained seated by the kitchen door.  The sixty-three-year-old Winchell, sitting on the edge of his seat, wore the attitude and bearing of a schoolboy anticipating a field trip.

Darin looked briefly puzzled, then followed Ronnie’s gaze and said, “Oh, that?  That was nothing, just a disagreement about,” Darin paused, “about a certain political figure, that’s all!  No, everything is great, and Winchell is taking me to breakfast!  I’ll see you goons back here at 2 this afternoon.”  Darin hopped back off the stage, bounded back toward Winchell, and the two men exited through the kitchen door, leaving Dick and Ronnie starring after them.

“Well, I’ll be!” said Ronnie.  “Bobby and Winchell, there’s an odd couple for sure.  Whatever got Winchell out of the Stork Club, anyway?  Did the Russians drop a bomb on it, do you think?”

Dick shook his head in disbelief.  “I don’t know, I guess we’ll just have to wait to read all about it in Winchell’s column.  Let’s call it a night, I’m beat!” 

Continued in the next chapter

The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 4  (E) Breakfast at the Copa. #1447208 by Gisele