Since
1981, Gene Lees has published, edited, and written for the respected Jazzletter from which the
following article is extracted.
At the age of nineteen, I thought I might want to be a writer. So, I bought a portable typewriter and an instruction
book and learned to type. It took about a week to accomplish that, but I had no idea how to go about learning
to write. And so I did something I thought at the time was pathetic, silly and hopeless, and it certainly was lonely:
I started typing out pages of writers I admired, Steinbeck and Dos Passos chief among them. Pages and pages of it, all the
while thinking this was pretty dumb, merely hero-worshipful. Shameful, even.
Now when on occasion I do seminars with writers' classes in universities, I urge the young people to do
exactly that. Copy your models slavishly, as painters in earlier times were
taught to copy the works of their
teachers, thereby absorbing their
brush techniques, color usage, and
all the rest. If you type out the work
of your heroes, you absorb into your
very blood their rhythms, their sentence structures, their punctuation
styles, their sonorities, their diction.
It is the same with singing.
Indeed, I suspect all art begins with
imitation. Even speech itself begins
with imitation. Some of these
thoughts passed through my mind
recently when I was re-examining the
career and work of Bobby Darin.
In early 1960 I spent several days
with Darin in St. Louis, hanging with
him all day, having lunch and dinner
with him, attending his rehearsals.
He was cocky, a very brash young
man—he was then twenty-four.
Bobby was born Walden Robert
Cassotto in the Bronx, on May 14,
1936, and, as you can tell from the
name, he is in that extraordinary
group of American Italian singers
who have contributed more to
American music than anyone seems
to have noticed, a group that includes
Frank Sinatra, Russ Columbo and
Perry Como.
Bobby got his name off the neon
sign of a Chinese restaurant. The first
three letters of the word "mandarin"
were burned out. Whether or not it
was to escape an Italian identity, we
may never know. But there was something else he may have been trying to
escape.
Bobby had a painful childhood.
When he was a boy he had rheumatic
fever, which left him with damage to
the heart. He knew when he was eight
that his life expectancy was short: he
heard a doctor discussing it with a
member of his family. He had, according to Roger Kellaway, a ferocious
desire to live not one or two but all of
his dreams in a lifetime he expected to
be quite short, and he just about
pulled it off. He wanted to be a singer,
an actor, a guitarist, a songwriter, and
he became all of them with varying
degrees of success.
He attended Hunter College in
New York for a time, playing drums
in a school group and studying
drama, but soon signed with Decca
Records in 1956, when he was twenty, and then with Atco in 1957. The
following year, when he was twenty-two, he had his first big hit with a
song of his own, a humorous rock 'n'
roll novelty called "Splish Splash."
Thus his career was moving much
faster than that of Sinatra before him.
He had several more rock hits before
recording "Mack the Knife" in 1959.
The recording was a huge hit, followed by another that year: "Beyond
the Sea." Departing from his rock 'n'
roll image, Darin did both tunes at a
medium tempo in a thumb-snapping
Sinatra style.
This, remember, was not long
before the arrival of the Beatles, the
proliferation of rock groups, and the
ingenious and only-too-successful
campaign of the record industry publicists to define the most meretricious trash as an art form. What
raised the evebrows of older folk,
including me (I was a senescent thirty-two years old) was that a denizen
of rock should actually turn out to
have some talent. Darin wasn't the
first to attempt the transition. Tommy
Sands actually sang rather well. And
in later years performers from the
rock and pop and country worlds
would essay the "standards," among
them Carly Simon and Willie Nelson.
But Darin was good at the "good"
material, the quality songs. Very
good. No doubt the professionals
thought Darin was the man who
could lead the kids back to music.
That was always their hype: that the
rock 'n' roll fans would develop a
taste for the better things, which is
like arguing that the young exposed
only to Spiderman would through
these readings progress to
Shakespeare and Kipling. If we have
learned anything in the culture of the
last forth or so years it is that exposure to junk leads to a permanent
taste for junk, and young fans of the
young rock groups were still following them around at the end of the
century, when both tans and performers had grown grizzled.
Darin accepted this fact; "I contend that it takes the kids to put you
on top," he told me, "and the same
kids as grownups to keep you there."
Yet Bobby was different.
"I have friends in this business
from Frankie Avalon and Fabian to
Sammy Davis.Jr.," Bobby said to me
in St. Louis. "I can get something
from any of them. You can learn from
anybody, even if it's only what not to
do. Fabian and all of them knew from
the start that I wanted to progress
beyond the rock 'n' roll phase. I've
been preparing for this all my life."
This was shortly after a review in
The New York Times that said, "On
records, the most striking instance of
the renaissance of showmanship can
be found in the work of Bobby Darin,
not only because he is a young singer
with all the assurance, projection,
and casual craftiness of an old pro,
but—what is most remarkable—
because he gained his first popularity
in the rock 'n' roll scramble."
Bobby was in love with show business. He told me, "It's not the
singing. It's being a performer and
being accepted."
I did not know then about his vanished father and the sordid past of his
familial relationships. That comment
makes much sense in the light of
these facts.
Bobby told me that his father
died of pneumonia shortly
before his birth in 1936, and
his mother struggled to raise him. "We were poor, on-relief type
Bronx people," he said. "Besides my
mom, who's dead now, there was my
sister. She married a wonderful guy
who was good to me. Now that I can
help out, I do."
When he was in his early thirties,
the story unraveled. He had always
believed his mother was Polly
Cassotto, who had been a show-girl
known as Paula Walden, and that his
father was her husband, a man
named Saverio Cassotto, nicknamed
"Big Sam Curley," reputed to be a
low-level associate of Mafia leader
Frank Costello. Cassotto died in
prison, and the family went on relief.
Nina, the girl he thought was his sister, married a truck driver
and refrigerator repairman named Charlie Maffia, who held down two jobs to
help the family.
Bobby learned that Nina was his
mother and Polly Cassotto, whom he
thought was his mother, was actually
his grandmother. The revelation was
shattering to him, according to associates such as the late Bobby Scott,
who at one time was his music director. "My whole life has been a lie,"
Bobby said when he learned the
truth. It certainly didn't help establish a central sense of identity.
I caught up with him at the Chase
Hotel in St. Louis, where he had just
broken the house record set by
Martin and Lewis. Bobby's ambition
was blinding, and he made no gee-whiz ah-shucks attempt to hide it. "I
want to be in the Number One slot,"
he said, ''I guess the polls are of primary importance to me. Showing up
in the Down Beat poll last December
was the greatest thing that's happened to me." And he was winning a
lot of awards at the time. "I want the
respect of the trade. You must have
that. If you can create excitement in
both the trade and the public, you've
got something. These things are the
emotional compensation for the work
I'm doing. Don't let guts who poo-poo
the polls kid you. Anybody that's alive
cares whether he's accepted."
His style at that point entailed a
number of unreconciled elements: a
lot of Sinatra, a little Tony Bennett, a
little Bing Crosby, and the influence
of the rock 'n' roll world from which
he was emerging. He did not have
Sinatra's polish: Sinatra was then
forty-two, Darin twenty-four. Sinatra
had been a professional singer for
twenty-one years, Darin had been
singing for four. But what struck me
during those days was his willingness to learn, and the rapidity with
which he could do it. He asked me—
believe it or not—what I thought of
his show, and being the ever-tactful
that I am, I told him. I said that it
lacked control. I said that a performer should hold something of
himself in reserve, not throw it all at
the audience from the very moment
of coming on stage. I said he should
give himself room and time to build.
To my amazement, the next night
he did exactly that. He began in a
very subdued manner, and then kept
building to a strong peak at the end.
"You see?" he said, with a grin, afterwards. "I tried it. You know, I've
learned something."
Amazing. And he was wonderful
to watch. He had about him something of the best French chansonniers, like Yves Montand and Henri
Salvador. I told him that, too, and he
was very pleased. He said he wanted
to be known as the singer who
moved like a dancer, and he had
already achieved it: a loose throwaway kind of agility, with little shuffles and side-steps, all of it directly
out of vaudeville. He was very, very
graceful.
Bobby was very clear about his
stylistic influences. "There are only
three singers who move me emotionally: Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, and
Ray Charles. If I want to be lullabied,
I listen to Peggy Lee, I don't care
what the tempo is. That's the boss
lady. If I want to think about lost
love—or any kind of love, for that
matter—I listen to Frank. If I want to
be thrown into a primitive, wild kind
of emotional involvement, I listen to
Ray Charles. I can't think of anything
else I want satisfied. These three people are the Rock of Gibraltar. Make
that four singers I like. I'm a Crosby
fan. 'I'm an Old Cowhand'? I was listening to that at five. And Sammy
Davis has taught me a lot, in terms of
how to generate excitement.
"It is Sinatra as a person more
than Sinatra as a singer that has influenced me. His outlook on the business and his attitude to performance
are the important things. My
approach to singing is not the same.
Sinatra has a clipped speech. I'm a
slurrer. But let's face it, he's the boss.
Another thing I admire is the fact that
he's done all the great tunes. But I
have a theory that his phrasing is
accidental."
And I have a theory that Darin was
wrong.
"I've been accused of comparing
myself to Sinatra, in terms ot career
climbing. Certain people have said I
was out to beat him out. First, I never
said this, the press said it. Second, to
me, Frank Sinatra is the greatest living lyric interpreter, and that ends
the admiration. My idol is the step
beyond the great image of today. In
other words, it's an indefinite goal.
"He's supposedly mad at me. I've
never met the man, but he's supposedly mad at me. He came up with
what I think is one of the greatest single lines of all time. After all the
recent things in the press, somebody
asked him, 'What do you think of
Bobby Darin?' And Sinatra said,"I
sing in saloons. Bobby Darin does
my prom dates.' I was so gassed by
the line when I saw it. All I can say is
that I'm only too happy to play his
prom dates."
And there was a pause. "Until
graduation."
It was impossible not to like him.
"Movies is where I want to go,"
Bobby told me, "no question of that
But I want the right roles. We've
looked at twenty or twenty-five
scripts, and I've turned them all
down, I don't want to do an exploitation picture. I want to do drama, light
comedy, the whole range. And some
day I want an Academy Award. The
motion picture business is still the
most glamorous,
glorious, stimulating, exciting end of
the business .
Sammy Davis told
me that before he did Anna Lucasta,
he could walk down
the street and
maybe two people
would want his autograph. Now he is
constantly sought
after. That's why I
want the picture
business."
Bobby broke into film acting in 1961 with a comedy called
Come September, directed by
Robert Mulligan and starring
Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida.
Also in the cast was Sandra Dee,
whose real name is Alexandra Zuck
(and you'd change it too if it were
yours). Darin married her that same
year; and that was the same year that
I spent those several days with him in St. Louis.
Bobby said he wanted not only to
write songs, but to compose classical
music, "music of a serious nature,"
he said affecting a haughty English
accent to show he was kidding. But
he wasn't kidding.
If you listen to his recordings of
standards from the time of "Mack
the Knife" in 1958 through about
1961, you can hear the conscious
search for self. In "I Found a New
Baby," recorded in February, I960,
you hear what he meant when he
said he was a slurrer: it comes out
not "baby" but "bavy." And his oo's
are too round. This very conscious
kind of enunciation is similar to some
of the mannerisms of Sinatra.
The arrangements on some of his
hits, including "Mack the Knife" and
"Beyond the Sea" are by Richard
Wess, and they're pretty "limp," as I
heard one musician describe them.
And there are some peculiar choices
of material. Some songs are gender-specific: they work only for a man or
for a woman. He recorded "Black
Coffee," which is a very much a
woman's song. He does it remarkably
like Peggy Lee, from whose recording he unquestionably learned it. He
even attempts, in French, a Piaf tune,
"Milord," and to do it he affects her
tough whorehouse mannerisms.
Again, the performance is a conspicuous imitation. He was floundering in
that period. He really doesn't know
who he is. His imitations of his
sources are obvious.
But then, in August of 1960, he
recorded a duet with Johnny Mercer,
a song called 'Two of a Kind," which
they co-wrote. It is charming, and
some of Darin's affectations seem to
drop away.
A few months later, on March 22,
1961, his sense of identity seemed
stronger.
Darin had been recording for Atco,
and when he moved to Capitol, the
company assigned Billy May to him
for a time. The charts are (as one
might expect) marvelous, even on a
so-so tune Darin wrote, "As Long As
I'm Singing." But on "Oh Look At Me
Now," "A Nightingale Song" and "The
Party's Over," you hear what I have
come to perceive as the real Bobby
Darin. It's sort of Sinatra, to be sure
(and which among us can plead not-guilty to that?), but it's his own now.
It's internalized, it's unconscious. He
sings beautifully in tune, the affectations are gone, and I am forced to the
speculation that the encounter with
my friend John H. Mercer had a lasting beneficial effect.
Darin was at his best with good
arrangers and tunes, including "The
Shadow of Your Smile" (great tune,
dumb lyric, which Johnny Mercer
hated; he said it sounded like it was
about a girl with a mustache) and
"Don't Rain On My Parade," both with
charts by Shorty Rogers, recorded in
1966. Bobby's last album for Capitol
was Venice Blue. The title song was
mine, more precisely one of the adaptations of Charles Aznavour songs
that I wrote for Charles' one-man
Broadway show of that period. I don't
care for the song, I don't like my lyric
for it, and I didn't like Darin's performance, which I barely remember; I
don't even have the album.
After that, Darin lost his way again.
He embarked on a period of folk and
country songs, some of which are on
the fourth of the Rhino CDs. His marriage with Sandra Dee ended. He
grew a mustache. He recorded songs
by Hank Williams and Bob Dylan. If I
want to hear Hank Williams material,
I'll listen to Hank Williams doing it,
not some boy from the Bronx. His
admirers see this expansion into yet
another area as proof of his versatility; I see it as redolent of his need for
popularity and uncertainty about who
he was.
Bobby once told his manager,
"Steve, when I get up in the morning,
you know what I see? I see a short,
ugly, double-chinned, paunchy, balding guy. But when I got out that door
I'm Clark Gable. Nobody knows how
I feel."
It was all an act, then.
Bobby never got to write his "serious" music. For that matter, he never
got to be forty. He died on December
20,1973. He was thirty-seven.
For all his pretense of assurance, it
seems to me that Bobby Darin never
really knew how good he was.
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