The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Winchell decided, as he finally remembered to down his scotch and soda, that he had better come back for the second show of the evening and see it all again from the top.  He was sure that Darin’s dressing room would be a mob scene of well-wishers and hangers-on, no sense in trying to interview him there on opening night.  Before this evening, he had only glanced at press coverage of Bobby Darin in various magazines, hardly paying attention as he waited for his favorite sandwich to be served to him in his own special corner of the Stork Club.  All of this publicity, the interviews, the in-depth profiles of celebrities, it was merely ink on paper.  Winchell himself had over the years generated enough ink to fill the Atlantic Ocean, so he was not necessarily impressed by the amount being written about any particular media darling of the moment.  Now he wished he had been more observant, however, because he had hardly been prepared for this Copa opening.  Winchell, who congratulated himself on knowing everything about anyone of importance, felt a slight sting in his professional pride.  He should have done his homework instead of nursing a sore tooth!  His mind was racing as he watched the second part of the show which featured about half a dozen more tunes, including Darin playing the vibraphone (with lots of asides to the adoring audience as he prepared to play), drums, and finally, piano.  It seemed there was nothing this young man could not do!  At the end of the show, through a thunder of applause, Winchell stood up from his tiny table and made his way against the throng of people back to his office at the Daily Mirror on 45th Street, courtesy of a police squad car at his personal command. Winchell took taxis only when the police car was not available.

The back of the building where Winchell’s office was located was deserted at this time of night.  Rose Bigman had retired to her home and husband who, if truth be told, she spent less time with than she did in service to her boss.  Rose was invaluable when it came to collecting and categorizing information that Winchell would need to feed the ever-gaping maw of his newspaper column.  One column could contain several dozen news items, which might feature world leaders or leggy showgirls seen in the company of some prominent entertainment figure.  All of these tips must be collected and arranged for his readership.  Whatever Rose did not have in Winchell’s office could be supplied by either the newspaper library in the basement or a nearby press clipping service. 

Winchell also had his own sources of information in the police department and the FBI, for interesting items that a reader could not hope to find in Time Magazine or other such publications.  He thought he could stick to the more traditional sources, for now, to learn about this impressive young singer.  Who was he, and where did he come from?  His real name was a rather ungainly moniker, Walden Robert Cassotto.  “Born in Harlem, raised in the Bronx,” Winchell recalled.  He had read this somewhere in reference to Darin, or someone had told it to him, he could not remember which.  Winchell could not recall the last time he had been so excited at the prospect of a nightclub review.  He sang the lyrics to Bill Bailey quietly to himself as he sat at his battered metal desk, fedora clasped firmly to his head, and began to examine the press clippings that Rose had left for him before retiring for the day. 

A new file with Bobby Darin’s name had also been prepared by Rose and left on Winchell’s desk.  Anything pertinent to the singer would be placed in the file as time went by.  Many things that Winchell learned about an entertainer or political figure would not actually go into the file; the most sensitive information might never be written down, but carried in Winchell’s memory, which was capacious.  Winchell would write himself a brief note in a file to jog his memory, a sort of shorthand that would be meaningless to anyone else.  Using the cryptic notation, along with Winchell’s own peculiar filing system and Rose Bigman acting as Cerberus to guard the office and its contents, the secrets he gathered were as safe as Fort Knox until the time when Winchell decided they should come into play.

Meanwhile, in between shows back at the Copa, the entire audience would have liked nothing more than to stuff itself in to Bobby Darin’s dressing room.  They felt that they really knew him now, owned him in a way, after seeing the show, and they wanted to claim their prize.  The older women in the audience wanted to be a mother to him.  The younger women wanted to be something else, something they would not have named to their mothers.  The men wanted to pump his arm in a crushing handshake of congratulations for the performance.  Fortunately for Darin, who needed to conserve his strength between shows, the dressing room was located inconveniently behind the Copa’s kitchen, and few people who did not actually know the headliner would have dared to cross this special territory of Jules Podell and his muscle-bound friends with the broken noses.  Even if they breached that particular wall, however, they would still have Charlie Maffia, Bobby Darin’s brother-in-law, to contend with.  The disdain of this unlettered garbage collector, who was fiercely loyal to Darin and determined to shield him from the heat of his excited fans, came down upon gate crashers like an icy rain.  Charlie often traveled with Bobby to take care of his luggage on the road, and it was a most unwary fan who incurred Charlie’s displeasure.

Dick Behrke, however, carrying a thick swatch of congratulatory telegrams for Darin, had no trouble making his way into the castle keep.  He pushed the dressing room door open with his foot, flush with excitement from the opening show.  He set the bundle of papers down on Darin’s table.  “Say, Bobby, Western Union called and asked if you could get your friends to stop sending the opening-night telegrams, please.  Their operators are having to go into overtime for you.”

Bobby was seated at his table near the door, stripped down to his T-shirt.  He paused in the chore of removing his stage makeup to pull the telegrams to him.  He laughed deeply and said, “Come to Poppa!”

Dick Behrke closed the door and leaned against it.  “Check it out, there’s one in there from Sammy Davis.  He says to watch out for Walter Winchell trying to get up on the stage with you.”

Bobby donned a pair of thick black-framed glasses to read the telegrams.  Without looking up from the pile, he said, “Oh, Winchell wouldn’t try to do that, would he?”

“You better believe it!  He did it to Sammy, right in the middle of a Broadway show.  The man gets carried away at times.  Like Jimmy Durante says, ‘Everybody wants to get into the act!’” 

Bobby considered this information.  “Well, then, Dick, you’ll just have to block him if he starts to set a foot up there.”

“I’ll talk to Podell about maybe putting in a moat with alligators in front of the stage.”
Charlie Maffia paused from unwrapping Tuxedo shirts for the next show.  He leaned over to the two younger men to say, “I’ll block him!  I’ll block him but good if he tries that!”  Charlie struck a boxer’s pose to illustrate how he might deal with Winchell or anyone else who tried to interfere with Darin.

Bobby Darin laughed, punched Charlie lightly on the arm and said, “Okay, okay, champ, but go easy on those shirts!  They’re expensive, custom-made shirts, not used tires, so don’t heave them around like that.”

In the background was Bobby’s older sister Nina.  She was a good sixteen years or so Bobby’s senior, a sturdy woman with bleach-blond hair and strong Italianate facial features.  Dick Behrke could see her resemblance to Bobby most strongly when the two of them were annoyed.  This was not a rare occurrence when they were together, as they were both strong personalities.  Nina, in her eveningwear finery, was bent over the small couch jammed up against the closet door, shaking her head and pulling apart a sandwich that she had ordered for Bobby, to make sure it was arranged just the way he liked it.  Both she and Bobby knew that he would not actually eat the sandwich.  In the middle of her task, she said nothing, but jerked her head up slightly to signal to Darin that she heard his comment to Charlie about used tires.  Darin saw the jerk of her head but did not acknowledge it.  He returned to his stack of telegrams. 

When Dick saw there would not be a further discussion of used tires (discussions among the Cassottos and Maffias could quickly become loud and intense, in which case it was best to be out of the line of fire), he crossed the small room and slid onto the couch where Nina was reconstructing the sandwich.  He had known Nina and Charlie and their children for several years, they were just like family to him.  He had met Bobby’s mother Polly, who was rather frail and sickly, but he had not known her well.  One day, as Polly lay in a bed that filled the tiny pantry behind the kitchen in the Cassotto-Maffia apartment at Baruch Place, she had related to him the story of Bobby’s childhood bouts with a terrible illness.  He thought briefly now about Polly and her explanation of the effect of rheumatic fever upon the heart.  This topic was never mentioned in Darin’s presence.  It was certainly out of place on a night of triumph such as this.  Dick pretended to reach out to grab Bobby’s sandwich, a turkey club, and Nina pretended to slap his hand away from her project.  She did not look at him but said, “You did great tonight, Dickie, I’m sure your parents must be very proud.” 
“Yes,” Bobby said from his seat in front of the makeup mirror, glancing back at them, looking owlish in his glasses.  “Bronx Science will have to put our names up in the entry way with all the other famous alums, the doctors and the lawyers and nuclear scientists.”  Bobby began to drum on the table with his hands and sing the lyrics to Caravan.

Charlie joined in by whistling softly under Bobby’s singing as he moved about the room, placing a suit coat onto a dresser’s dummy to brush it.  Nina unobtrusively slid the rebuilt sandwich next to Bobby’s elbow, where it remained, unnoticed.  Bobby picked up on his table-top drum beat as he opened his voice in song about a thrilling romantic encounter on a desert caravan.

Dick Behrke waited for a beat before he observed, “That’s great, but it’s not even in the show, and you should be saving your voice for later.”

Bobby Darin swiveled neatly around on his chair to say, “It’s not in the show right now, but who says we can’t put it there?  Tomorrow, we’ll go over the lineup and see if we need to make some changes.”  He had about a dozen ideas of what those changes might be, but before he could launch into discussing them, the door to the dressing room swung open with a crash, and in walked a tall, slightly stout man in a gray suit.  He had a florid face, balding head, and the imposing manner of a beat cop.  He said, “Bobby!”  And he said nothing more.

Bobby Darin rose up and replied, “Boom-Boom!”  And he said nothing more.  This was Steve Blauner, his manager, who had guided his career to the point where Darin now called the Copa his own.  Darin had given him the nickname in honor of a commanding voice that could be easily heard three corridors away from any booking agent’s office.

The manager and client regarded one another intensely and in silence before Steve announced dramatically, “You did great tonight, kid!  You did great, and I’m quitting!”
Darin looked at Blauner with frank amazement, though Dick could see a little smile tugging the corner of Bobby’s mouth.  The smile would not break out in full form, though, because he could see that his manager was deadly serious.  “Tonight, you would do this to me?”

Blauner managed to look both angry and embarrassed at the same time.  “I’m sorry, young man,” he said, “But some things, I just can’t stand.  So I have to quit.  There it is.  I waited until you killed them with the first show to tell you.”

Dick Behrke absolutely could not help himself from laughing out loud.  Steve Blauner shot him a baleful look as he moved back to the door, ready to make his exit.  Referring to Bobby and speaking directly to Dick, he said, “He can do better than you, you know!”

Dick looked around at the other occupants of the tiny dressing room and said, “He can do better than all of us!”  But Steve was already stomping back toward the Copa kitchen and did not hear this retort. 

An uneasy silence hung over the little room.  Blauner was hardly a favorite with Nina and Charlie, and they were not going to pretend to be sorry that he was gone.  Dick finally said, “How can he do this to you now, tonight of all nights?”

Darin blinked rapidly several times in succession, staring at the spot his manager had occupied just a moment ago.  He shook his head and said, “Don’t worry, he does that at least every other month.  It’s always something.”

“What is it now?” Dick wanted to know.

Darin shrugged off the question as he sat down and went back to work removing his makeup.  “It’s nothing, just a movie deal that he doesn’t want me to take.  He thinks it would be bad for my career.  Don’t worry, he’ll get over it and come around, he always does.”  He was working hard to appear casual, but Dick could see he was a bit shaken up by this little performance of Steve’s.  But he also knew that Darin was right; he and Blauner were a team, and any split would be purely temporary.  The moths simply could not keep away from Bobby’s flame for long. 

Was Walter Winchell joining the moths?  Dick Behrke wondered as they began the second show of the evening, and there was Winchell, seated ringside at the Copa.  Dick was relieved that Winchell at least would not be making a repeat fussy late entrance as he had at the first show.  Behrke had many things on his mind as he led the Paul Shelley Orchestra, and he really did not want to add Winchell to his list.  Dick, Bobby and the band plunged into the second show.  The adrenaline rush was there when they needed it, but they felt a little more at home now that they had the first show under their belts.  Hell, Bobby had said it, the Copa was like their own living room!  And just as at home, you never knew when some drunken, noisy relative might decide to drop in.  Dick shook that particular image away as he bent into leading the band members, no sense in wishing for trouble. 

Continued in the next chapter

The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 3  (E) Winchell and Darin meet. #1444168 by Gisele