I Was Born 200 Years Ago



This article, written by Bobby Darin, appeared in TV Picture Life Magazine in April 1959.


I was born 200 years ago. Sometimes it feels like 500. My birth certificate shows that I was born twenty-one years ago. Double-talk? Not really. I look back and I can't remember a childhood as such. Someone says to me, "You must have had fun sometime," and I answer frankly, "No, I can't remember being happy. Not ever."

It seems as if I always had to prove myself and stay ahead of the game. Forever I've been trying to find out where I belong. So the guy who's asking still thinks I'm scrambling words and he says, "But you've had a lot of success for a kid barely out of his teens. You've been on network shows, you've got hit records, you get mobbed when you go on tours. Doesn't that mean something?"

Sure, it means something. There's satisfaction in knowing that your songwriting has paid off in a couple of hits and there's satisfaction in getting recognition as a singer and performer. But somewhere inside me there's another guy who won't let me find peace. So many times that guy inside has 'been in a state of confusion because he doesn't know where he belongs. Mom once said to he, "Bobby, some day you're going to look back on it and laugh and think it was all a joke." Maybe she's right. She's been right about a lot of things, but I haven't laughed yet.

Maybe you think I'm a creep. A guy whom everyone else avoids. Not true. Socially, I've always been the life of the party. Even when I was a kid. I came into a room and a half-dozen guys were on their feet to grab my hand. "Tell us a funny story, Bobby," they'd ask and in a minute I'd have them holding their sides. The teachers too were always crazy about me. I made good grades and I handed them a laugh. Not smart-alecky. Fun for everyone but myself.

I've got a good heritage. My mother was of early American stock. She had a fine education. A beautiful woman, in her youth she was a singer who played Vaudeville. Later she taught school. My father was an Italian immigrant, a man who found pleasure in music and the warmth of his home. My sister got to know a little of him. I didn't. I was born five months after he died.

Poorer than us you couldn't have been. I was raised in the slums of the Bronx where you learned the humiliation of being underprivileged because you had to be grateful for cast-off clothes. Your playground was the street and your toys were garbage cans.

I remember the afternoon when, with a gang of others, I helped knock over six garbage cans—the street was filled with ashes and slop. The superintendent came out of his basement with a heavy strap. I was slower than the others but I got around the corner and slid under a car. I thought I was safe and then I felt his hand dragging me out by the neck. In his other hand was this heavy cartridge belt and he said, "Okay, kid you gotta be learned a lesson."

That's the way it was on the street, nothing to do but the wrong things. Have you ever seen kids chinning themselves from a fire escape five floors above the street? My mother saw me and I don't think it did her any good. Actually, I was trying to fit in with the gangs and I didn't make it because I was different. My home was different. My mother respected books and so did I. In those early years I was happiest when I was home studying and reading. And wouldn't you know it, I was top man in my school. I skipped two grades and won a medal for scholarship. In the neighborhood, they called me "the genius" but this made me an odd-ball. I couldn't hang around with kids my own age. The older boys tolerated me because I'd learned to clown and the "genius" could help them with their school work. I'm not angry at any of these guys. A small percentage of them have wound up in penal institutions and I'm sorry for them. We were all victims of poverty.

I was twelve when I went into high school and I really believed I was a genius. My grades earned me entrance into the Bronx School of Science where the best young brains in New York took their secondary education. I figured I'd found myself at last. Brother, was I ever wrong. I suddenly found myself with kids who had real genius. My grades were in the eighties. Theirs were in the high nineties. I had a high I. Q. Theirs were astronomical. It couldn't have happened to me in any other city, for only one percent of the population has brains like theirs and only in a large city like New York are there enough to populate a school. Any ordinarily bright guy suddenly realizes his inferiority.

So I didn't belong with the gang back in the neighborhood and I couldn't keep up with those future nuclear scientists. What saved me then was my mother's philosophy. She always insisted that you had to look at both sides—and I was caught right in the middle where I could do it. I began to see the distasteful side of being too well schooled. You don't know people or learn to live through books. The geniuses were in a world of their own. They were good guys and some were my friends but they had little understanding of the human side. They couldn't see the world around them and to me observation is the greatest art form. Books are just a supplement.

I was fifteen when I followed an impulse to buy a set of drums. I worked after school until I had enough money to get a secondhand set. I had no false idea about becoming a fine musician but I wanted a taste of the entertainment world. From the time I was a youngster, mother had told me about her work in vaudeville and the fascination of show business. It sounded exciting to me, but I couldn't see where I would fit in. I learned enough drums to work week ends with small dance bands. A couple of summers I organized my own outfit and took them into the borscht circuit where we played in the evening and doubled during meal times as busboys.

But I was getting nowhere and when I graduated from high school I enrolled at Hunter College. I told myself that perhaps professors and college students could help me find myself. I was wrong again. After a year, I went to my mother and told her I was leaving school. She didn't like it. I told her that I was leaving home, too. I told her, "Mom, I've just got to. I don't want to be like the guy down the hall. I've got to get out and see what the rest of the world's like." She was deeply hurt but didn't stand in my way.

I was seventeen. I was neither a teenage genius nor a teenage werewolf. But right off, I was lucky. I was hired to play an Indian chief in a company that toured eastern cities and gave shows for children. The pay was lousy but my spirits soared. This was the greatest. I was going to be an actor. I'd found myself. I got back to Manhattan and learned there were 50,000 other guys who had the same idea. And there weren't any producers who were interested in a kid whose only billing had been as an Indian chief. So I took all kinds of jobs. I built garage doors. I swept up filings in a gun factory.

For a time, I wore a white collar. I look better in a white shirt than overalls and I held a job in an advertising office. I couldn't take that. I couldn't stand the men in their flukey flannels and nine-button suits. I went back to manual labor. The guys I worked with there were human.

In those two years I fell in love and it was the only time I'd ever been in love. It turned out to be love on the rocks, so sordid, so impossible that I became wholly miserable. I can't even talk about it. And what does a teenager do when his world collapses? This one began to write songs. I poured all of my misery into them.

One day a friend said to me, "Why don't you let me introduce you to Donnie Kirshner. He's had some songs published. Let him listen to yours." We were sitting at a soda fountain. Donnie had come in the door. My answer reflected my whole attitude. I said, "What good would it do? What's the use?" But I met Donnie and sang for him. He loved my songs and suggested we team up. I said okay.

Well, Donnie knew what he was talking about. We wrote identification music and commercial jingles for some radio stations in New Jersey. We made about $1200 in the first three months. We tried some songs. We got a couple of singers, including Connie Francis, to record them. That was when I got my first big break and it came out of left field. It so happened we made audition records of our songs and it was I who sang on them. Well, Connie's manager heard me and said, "Bobby, I can get you a recording contract with Decca." I asked, "As what?" He was serious. He said, "You're a singer." Out of politeness I didn't laugh in his face but I wanted to tell him he was crazy. So what happened? The following Monday I was in the Decca office signing a contract. Tuesday I was in a recording session. Saturday of that same week I was featured on Tommy Dorsey's network show and it wasn't small potatoes. The week before, Elvis Presley had played the same show. In one week's time, Bobby Darin had become a star.

You've heard of three-minute eggs. Did you ever hear of three-minute stars? I wonder if you know what it's like. All your life you've been hungry to make good. You've wanted to pull yourself out of poverty. You've wanted people to respect you for your talent. Suddenly, they're slapping your back. "You're a star. You're going places."

Then I went out on the road and learned a few facts of professional life. I had been on a big network television show but so had a lot of other guys. I had a record that was selling well, but, to be honest with myself, it was a cover record for Lonnie Donnegan's "Rock Island Line" and his was selling better. I began to see that the real stars are people like Sinatra and Dinah Shore and Como. I realized stars aren't made. A great performer becomes great through work and learning—not from teaching and books. It takes night after night on the road, playing clubs, theaters, school auditoriums and, if necessary, corn fields. Sure I've worked with Dorsey and with Crosby and many times on the Dick Clark Show, but that's a very small part of it.

I've been quoted as saying that one day I expect to win an Oscar and an Emmy and a Tony. I said it but I'm not just hoping. I'm working at it. I'm going to be an actor. I'm going to continue being a singer and song writer. I'm going to write a musical comedy. I'm going to write serious music. I've got to know where I'm going and I'll work and get along with three hours sleep a night to get there. I've never had luxuries, not even the small ones, and I can do without them a few years more. I don't drink. Not because I belong to any temperance league but I want my head clear and sharp at all times. I haven't had five dates in the last three years. I've no time to fall in love. I can't fall in love when it means that I can't give myself. It would be one-sided, for too much of me is involved in work. I've never leaned on anyone—not even my mother.

It sounds hard. It sounds tough. But there's one thing that saves me. We have a joke in my family. My family consists of my mother, my sister and her husband and two nieces and a nephew. I bought them a house in New Jersey. This was my first sample of material success and it meant a lot. It meant getting us out of dirty tenement streets and into the country. But we still have the same old furniture and we still have something that is most important. It has to do with the family joke. For years, my sister and then me and now my nieces and nephew would run to mother and say, "You don't love me." She would chide us and say, "You're neglected, dear. I'll bet tomorrow you go out in the garden and eat worms." It was a joke to us  because no matter how bad the furniture or dull the food, our home was always full of love. You could feel it the moment you walked in the door, and you still can. That, alone, has sustained me all my life.

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