The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 1

The File on Bobby Darin

This is a fictionalized story about the life of Bobby Darin, the Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, and Oscar-nominated actor.  Bobby Darin, born May 14, 1936, was afflicted as a child with rheumatic fever that damaged his heart valves.  He knew from an early age that he would not have a normal lifespan.  He died on December 20, 1973, after undergoing two open-heart surgeries.  As his legacy, he left behind a well-loved son and a stunning body of musical recordings that included rock ‘n roll, rhythm and blues, standards, show tunes, country, folk, gospel, and songs protesting the war in Vietnam.  He was a crusader for civil rights who campaigned for Bobby Kennedy in his run for President in 1968.  This story is a fictionalized account of Bobby Darin’s unlikely friendship with the gossip columnist Walter Winchell.  The two did meet and became friends, but everything else that follows is a combination of fact and fiction.

Chapter 1

Dorothy Kilgallen, pert, petite, right next door to being pretty, made her way to the back of the ramshackle offices of the New York Daily Mirror.  The Mirror was primarily a male stronghold, but Kilgallen, who had grown up in newspapers, did not feel out of place here.  She did take a moment to pull her skirt down to hide a bit of leg as she made her way through the busy corridors; she was not about to give a show to these old news hounds!  The fashion sense of the Eisenhower years was in its final, rather tired months.  In four weeks, the Democrats would have their convention to recognize John F. Kennedy as their candidate for President.  Dorothy wondered if she and the rest of the nation’s women would end up wearing the sensible, Republican cloth coat of Pat Nixon for the next four years or enjoying the youth and glamour of Jackie Kennedy.  What effect would this election have on hemlines, she asked herself?  Mother of three and a busy gossip columnist, Kilgallen was a minor celebrity in her own right, and her own wardrobe would represent the current fashion trends.  Whichever way the political winds ended up blowing, it would mean an alteration of skirts. 

Dorothy had been in the building to meet a girlfriend for lunch (said friend being a reliable news source of late-breaking gossip).  As she said goodbye to the friend, a balding, slightly paunchy editor sidled up beside her.  “Hey Dottie, you going to the Copa tonight?”
She turned to the man.  “Why yes, Emile, I am.  You looking for a date?”

Emile Gauvreau had twenty years on Dorothy, and these being newspaper editing years, they looked more like forty.  He scowled.  “Of course not!  If you’re going, would you mind dropping these tickets back at Winchell’s office?”  Before she had a chance to answer, Emile had dropped two tickets into her hand, turned on his heel and marched down the hallway toward the front of the building.  Dorothy smiled to herself.  Walter Winchell had been a fixture at the paper long before the current managing editor had been installed.  The younger copywriters claimed that Winchell at the Mirror predated the discovery of penicillin.  Every other columnist duly jumped at the crack of Emile’s editorial whip.  Winchell was a law unto himself, however, and Emile had decided long ago that the only way to deal with his star gossip hound was to simply ignore him.  He could have sent a secretary with the tickets and the request to cover the new act about to start at the Copa, but Emile knew that his ulcer simply could not stand up to Walter’s moaning, even at second hand, about having to attend any event so flimsy, so manifestly beneath his journalistic powers as the debut of Bobby Darin, the Splish Splash boy, on the hallowed, if tiny, stage of the Copa.  If Walter moaned to Dorothy, it would not be on Emile’s dime.

Dorothy Kilgallen had the equanimity of youth and of gastric juices that did not rise up to torment her in the way they might the interior of a harried managing editor, and so she did not mind the errand that had been given her.  Dorothy worked for the New York Journal-American, which, like the Mirror, was owned by the sons of William Randolph Hearst.  Weren’t they all just one big happy Hearst family?  Dorothy laughed as she made her way back to Walter Winchell’s lair.  She turned to the right, down half a flight of stairs, to a part of the building that was less visited than the front corridors.  She passed a janitor’s closet to reach Winchell’s office.  Dorothy was surprised to see the secretary’s desk momentarily empty.  The intrepid Rose Bigman was usually on duty to guard her boss against the onslaught of press agents and other publicity hounds.  At this point in his career, not many people knew that Winchell’s office was housed in so modest a corner of the building, so there was little chance of him being disturbed as he labored to produce the gossip column that had launched and torpedoed so many reputations.  The time was now past when celebrities looked with fear and trembling to see if their careers or private lives were examined under Winchell’s magnifying glass. 

Rose’s perch was unoccupied, and Dorothy crossed the tiny anteroom to Walter Winchell’s office.  Through the halfway open door, she could see the great man, who once cut quite a dashing figure (or so she had been told), leaning precariously back on a rickety office chair behind a battered metal desk.  Behind him sat two metal file cabinets that had at least as many miles on them as the desk.  A couple of the file drawers were bursting at the seams, barely able to hold their contents.  These were the entire furnishings of the dusty room; man and chair, desk and file cabinets.  The spare room was inadequately illuminated by a single bare bulb hanging from a cord in the ceiling.  It looked like a prison cell where the lone inmate had been set to performing clerical tasks.

At first Dorothy thought that Winchell must be asleep.  As she knocked softly upon the door, though, Walter rolled his piercing blue eyes in her direction.  His Hollywood-handsome profile had softened in recent years, but the eyes were every bit as sharp in their appraisal as ever.  He was without his trademark headgear, the fedora, and Dorothy noticed that his hair was thinning.  She imagined that Winchell wore that hat for every conceivable activity.  She could picture him tucked up in bed wearing the hat.  Getting a shave while wearing the hat.  Deep-sea fishing wearing the hat.  Dorothy smiled as her imagination placed Walter and his fedora in ever-more unlikely situations.  It was like Fred Astaire’s tails or Jack Benny’s violin.  Just now, however, hatless, he seemed to be gargling with some concoction.  A heavy medicinal scent wafted across the office to reach Dorothy’s twitching nose.

“Walter, whatever is that smell?”

Walter Winchell raised a gentlemanly hand to pardon himself as he turned away from her to expectorate into a coffee cup.  He heaved a mighty sigh and turned back to face her.  “Oil of cloves,” he explained, “I have God’s own toothache today!” 

Dorothy whipped a folded newspaper from under her arm and perused a column.  She wanted to get him into a good mood before delivering the real reason for her visit. “Is it true, as you report here, Mr. Winchell, that Bette Davis has cancer of the jaw?”

“Well, it’s in my column, so if she doesn't have it, she'd better get it!”  Winchell cocked his head back to laugh, but the laughter was cut a bit short by a spasm of dental pain.  He had been to many dentists, had endured countless ghastly procedures on his teeth and gums, but nothing could take away this pain that seemed to be larger than his whole head.

Before Winchell’s glee over Bette Davis could entirely subside, she casually threw the Copa tickets on his desk before him.  “Emile asked me to deliver these to you.”

Winchell massaged his tender jaw with one hand and picked up the tickets with the other to inspect them.  He glanced at the name of the headliner and contemptuously tossed the tickets onto the floor.  Bobby Darin and the toothache, both on the same day, no!  Walter Winchell was not about to waste his time with every punk kid who thought he was going to be the next Frank Sinatra.  Winchell had seen Al Jolson knock an audience dead singing At a Quarter to Nine, and he did not even think that Sinatra was oh so very extraordinary.  He would have explained this at length to Dorothy, if only his head were not about to explode with pain.

Dorothy Kilgallen saved the great man this effort by reciting both sides of the dialogue herself.  “Thanks so much, Dorothy, for dropping off those tickets for me.”  “You’re welcome, Walter, any time!”  She turned to make her escape from the room before he could start rummaging in his pockets to display the press clippings that proved his own fame and stature on the international stage.  She left him to marinate in celebrity secrets and oil of cloves. 

After her departure, Rose the secretary, a sprightly, plump little sparrow of a woman, returned with a glass of warm salt water for her boss.  She set the tumbler on the table and bent down to retrieve the spurned tickets from the floor.  She studied them for a moment and said with satisfaction, “The Copa!  I hear this Bobby Darin does a pretty good show!”  She returned the tickets to Winchell’s desk and left the room. 

Darin at the Copa

The basement at 10 East 60th Street that housed the famed Copacabana nightclub was the center of meticulous preparation for Bobby Darin’s opening night.  The seventeen men of the Paul Shelley Orchestra spilled off the modest stage of the Copa’s main room as cues for the songs were reviewed.  The musicians, including Darin’s own drummer, Ronnie Zito, and bandleader Dick Behrke, were taking a break from working through the musical arrangements.  Brass instruments, drumsticks and strings were laid aside for the anticipated arrival of lunch.
Bobby Darin, the Splish Splash boy, the Dream Lover, resting briefly on a stool at center stage, was much too excited to eat.  Bobby stretched out to set his elbows on the piano top next to him.  He was a slim young man dressed in polished loafers, dark slacks and a white shirt open at the collar.  He exhaled slowly, stretching, and yawning in his seat.  He gave a little shake of his head to concentrate his thoughts.  In his manner, in the way that he carried himself, he was both very young and very seasoned at the same time, an old soul residing in the body of a sometimes immature, high-spirited young colt.  As to his physical features, Darin’s face was an intriguing combination of masculine and feminine.  The forehead and cheeks were broad, eyebrows dark and full above the dark brown eyes and a generous helping of Roman nose.  The cheeks tapered down to a delicate chin and lips that were as full and soft as a girl’s.  The bottom lip could quickly turn up in a gesture of bravado and defiance.  Just now the mouth and the entire face were in rare repose as Darin gathered strength to make his assault upon the Copa audience that evening.  An ad campaign had been building for weeks to announce his return to New York.  A copy of the current Variety sat beside him on the piano.  “Today is D-Day,” the ad announced.  “Bobby Darin Swings.”  Bobby Darin was already exhausted by this rehearsal, but he was far too keyed up to notice that just now.

The kitchen at the Copa was busy with preparation of the meal to accompany that evening’s show, so orders had been sent to a nearby deli to bring sandwiches over for the D-Day musicians.  The deliveryman brought the orders down to the basement room and laid them on the small tables near the stage.  Before the hungry musicians could claim their meal, Bobby jumped down from the stage to commandeer the food.  He walked back and forth in front of the tables and spoke to the sandwiches in the voice of Jules Podell, owner of the Copa, and a known terror in the kitchen of the nightclub. 

Bobby’s imitation of Podell’s gravelly Bronx-inflected voice was dead on.  “I’m sure you know that an orchestra travels on its stomach, so it’s of the utmost importance that we get these orders right.”  He even walked like Podell, throwing his shoulders out in imitation of the much larger man.  Dick Behrke, seated at the piano, smiled at the impression.  The rehearsal was getting tedious by this time, and Bobby would blow off some steam with his clowning.  Bobby critically eyed a Reuben that looked rather squashed and pathetic on a paper plate.  “You call yourself a sandwich?  Your pickle is limp!  You are a disgrace to the Copa!”

A ripple of suppressed laughter went up from the musicians.  They had worked at the Copa before, and the muscled, mob-connected Podell was well known to them.  None of them would have dared to imitate him.  Most of them had seen Bobby onstage before this, however, and they knew him to be fearless, sometimes heedless. 

The laughter subsided as Jules Podell himself appeared from the back of the room to stride down the narrow space between tables.  He loomed up, head and shoulders above Bobby Darin who was now really warming up to his Podell impression.  “We must set a new standard for sandwiches in the Copa.  Lettuce will be crisp!  Corned beef will be shaved!”  Darin thought he had his audience mesmerized with his powers of mimicry, but this new silence was hitting him in the pit of the stomach.  He turned to find Podell on his heels, towering over him like a colossus.  Everyone in the room turned to stone.  How was Bobby going to get out of this one?  Whatever could he say?

He said nothing.  Instead, he turned ecstatically to the giant man standing over him, as though happy to see a long-lost friend, reached up to pull Podell’s face to his, and kissed him full on the lips.  Dick and the musicians collectively sucked in a breath and exhaled a hearty laugh.  Podell’s ruddy features turned a darker shade of purple-red as he glared down at Bobby Darin.  He wiped a bear-like paw across his mouth and turned to the back of the room, growling, “stupid kid,” as he retreated in confusion.

The doors to the kitchen closed upon Podell.  Dick smiled and shook his head at Bobby.  “I can’t believe you did that.”  How many times had he said this to Bobby since they were at the Bronx High School of Science together? 

Bobby Darin shrugged.  “The best defense is a good offense!  Gentlemen, luncheon is served.”  The Paul Shelley Orchestra descended upon the sandwiches, vocalizing their gratitude.  This would be their last chance to eat before the show that evening.

That evening would shortly become a staple of show biz legend, breaking the attendance record of Frank Sinatra, Chairman of the Board.  It would be standing room only for the entire three weeks of the engagement.  If all of the people who eventually claimed to be in attendance for the opening night had actually been there, the Copa would have had to be three times its size to accommodate them all.  As it was, Jules Podell was trying to jam still more people into the tiny nightclub for Bobby’s opening.  He would sell seats on the ceiling if only he could persuade customers to hang, bat-like, upside down from the rafters.  Two interior columns had been removed a few years earlier to jam in a few more seats, and the basement had been built out on both sides, as far as it could go.  Even at this point, the room could hold not much more than seven hundred nightclubbers.  That lucky seven hundred would be treated to a generous helping of Darin, two shows a night.

Just now, Darin was lodged backstage at the Copa, looking over the audience to prepare for the show.  His slim form was hidden next to the orchestra behind an artificial palm tree studded by a coconut made of silk.  The disarray of the rehearsal session had been cleared away, the tables placed and beautifully set for the dinner show.  The audience was filing in to find their places.  These were the people he wanted to make a connection with for the next hour.  He would make them put down their knives and forks all right!  They would forget their own names as they listened to him sing.  His head was bent in concentration as he studied them intently.  He looked like a fledging hawk eyeing its next meal.  The high school prom set was in evidence at the tables, achingly young females, their hair piled high and shoulders bare above slim black evening dresses.  Hovering next to the shoulders he could see their equally young male escorts who resembled leggy colts, unsure of where to place their long limbs.  Elegant waiters in white cutaway coats with crimson red collars moved expertly through the crowd seating itself for the show.  They were all diligently acting the part of a nightclub audience, sophisticated, wonderfully well groomed, and eager to be entertained. 

The date of the engagement had actually been selected with Bobby’s teen audience in mind.  His record producer, Atco, had in fact wanted to delay this Copa opening.  Bobby thought now of a recent conversation with Ahmet Ertegun, son of a Turkish diplomat, lover of fine art, beautiful women, and most improbable booster of American pop music. 

“Bobby,” he had said to him from behind his desk at the Atlantic headquarters, “you are selling so well among the sock hop set, why risk losing them to try to cut into Sinatra territory?”  Sinatra himself was years beyond his appeal to a teen audience, and it was teens who bought the most records.  Why tinker with success?  Why not ride the wave of pop music for as long as it might last?  Bobby Darin’s definition of success did not rest on just the number of records sold; he wanted to try as many musical genres as he possibly could.  If he stayed with teen music for too long, he might be stuck there forever.  He was twenty-four years old, already a bit improbable as a teen idol, his uncertain hairline covered by a toupee, and he knew that he did not have all the time in the world to do what he wanted to do.  There could never be enough time for everything. 

“The time is now, Ahmet.  This teen business will be over for me pretty soon,” he had firmly told the record producer.  Darin’s own Bronx accent had faded a bit as he began to travel around the country’s nightclubs, but he still dropped his R’s in an engaging manner.  Over, as in “Don’t look now but the album is over,” sounded like “ova.” 

Ahmet Ertegun had smiled at the hurried young man before him.  It was obvious he had to let his artists take the lead, and leave Ahmet to look after the business side of things to the best of his ability.  He did not try to argue with Bobby, but immediately set about arranging to have live recording done at the Copa to capture Darin’s debut there.  The sound quality would not be optimal, but it would have, he hoped, the immediacy and energy of a live performance that could not be manufactured in the recording studio. 
Dick Behrke had been standing a few feet away backstage, observing Darin as he watched the audience.  Dick himself was feeling the pressure of opening night, so he could only imagine what Darin himself was feeling.  Actually, he could not imagine at all.  He pictured Bobby as inhabiting the calm eye of a hurricane while his life, friends, movie deals, television shows and recording sessions whirled furiously about him.  The hurricane had been steadily picking up steam in the last nine months or so.  Darin seemed to carry it all effortlessly, but Dick knew that nothing could be as easy as Darin made it look.  He had roomed with Bobby, and he knew him as few other people outside of his family did. 

How far they had come from the little flat Dick’s parents had rented for the two of them on West 71st after high school graduation from Bronx Science.  Bobby had been writing jingles for radio stations on spec, knocking on music publishers’ doors, mostly being ignored.  A cup of coffee was fifteen cents, and he was seven cents short of the price.  Nothing happened for the longest time.  It took him about four years to become an overnight sensation.  Four years, and the clock was ticking for Darin.  Dick was so excited for his friend that night, about to gain a coveted place in the spotlight.  But he was also suddenly wistful for the days they had spent together as two penniless nobodies in the Bronx.  When the kitchen sink in their apartment had somehow become full of dirty dishes, it was Darin’s brilliant idea to simply put them into a pillow case and throw them out the back window into the alley below.  Problem solved!  God, they had laughed about that until their sides had ached!  Dick knew that this Copa engagement would kick Bobby up into a new orbit, and he was not certain he would be able to follow.  Dick had started out his musical life as a trumpet player; he had only taken up the piano because Darin needed an accompanist!  It would never be the case that Darin would learn a new skill in order to keep Dick by his side.  This was simply the way that things were. 

Just a few weeks ago in May, Dick had been in Vegas with Darin along with family, friends and colleagues to celebrate Darin’s birthday.  George Burns had been there, Jack Benny, Louis Prima and Keely Smith.  Didn’t George Burns come to everyone’s birthday party, he wondered?  Now they lived in a world where such things did happen routinely.  Darin took it all as nothing less than his due.  Here at the Copa, Dick experienced a touch of vertigo as he was witnessing the moment of Darin’s assured triumph, but also seeing them both clearly as they had been not so very long ago, and as they would be in their future relationship.  The Copa would change everything, and Dick could see the present moment already receding into the past.  He would have hugged Bobby to him at that moment if the show of emotion would not have embarrassed them both. 

Instead, Dick tapped his friend lightly on the shoulder and asked, “Are you nervous, Bobby?” 

Darin, seemingly blissfully unaware of the realignment of the stars that was already taking shape, pulled his gaze away from the tables to smile at his friend.  “Nervous, are you kidding?  Nervous doesn’t begin to describe it, there should be a whole new section in the dictionary for it.  It’s like being beaten on an anvil.  My insides feel like they’ve gone through a cement mixer, until I get out on the stage, and then everything is fine, it’s like I’m in my own living room.  Just make sure to keep where I can see you, in case I want to change anything up.”

Dick grinned broadly, rocking back on his heels to work off some nervous energy before the show.  “With the size of that stage, I can’t imagine where you could go that I could NOT see you.”

Bobby looked doubtful.  “Well, you know me, I like to move around a lot.”

“Don’t go too far, or you will be sitting in the audience’s lap.”

“If I see something I like, might not be a bad idea.”  He inclined his head out toward the audience, inviting Dick to peer over his shoulder.

“Holy moly, Dick, look at that girl on the end!  No, not her, that one, that’s the one, oh you beautiful doll!”

Dick laughed and pulled his friend in the direction of the dressing rooms.  “Come on, killer, let’s go get ‘em!” 

And in the very next moment, it seemed, it was happening, they were onstage at the Copa!  Dick was leading the orchestra, Bobby ready to take the stage.  The fabulous Copa Girls had moved in to warm up the audience.  The dancers of Radio City Music Hall were tall jobs with long legs.  The Copa Girls were a type of dancer known as ponies, short and pleasingly compact, to fit the more intimate supper club space.  The costumes, hair and makeup were perfection, the dance steps measured to the small space between the orchestra and the floor.  The air was charged with lightning about to strike.  The trumpets heralded the arrival of the evening’s headliner.  “Ladies and gentlemen, Bobby Darin!”  The house lights dimmed during the drum roll, and then the spotlight opened up to reveal Darin, small and slim in a single-button suit of pearl gray, white dress shirt and a small bowtie.  Bobby’s heart was beating like a hammer in his chest as he stepped into the light and began to sing a lightly swinging arrangement of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, a song his mother Polly had taught him as a child.  He felt as though he were hurling himself over a cliff.  Once he began his act, the sensation of falling was not a frightening one.  He spread his wings and soared into song at the Copa. 

In a venue as intimate as the Copa, the space between the audience and the performer was short enough to support an arc of electricity connecting one to the other.  In his Copa debut, Darin was pouty, pleasing, teasing, funny, and moving.  He was raucous, bluesy, swinging, bumping, grinding.  He engaged the audience in conversation easily, never missing a beat in the song at hand.  He broke their hearts on a ballad, then cajoled them back to a good-time feel with I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.  He aimed his notes at the audience with the accuracy of a baritone sniper, and they laid down before the hail of musical bullets, killed by the twenty-four-year-old marksman.  He sang, he danced, did impressions and played piano, vibraphone, and drums for them.  He was a one-man Broadway show, cooking under pressure in the basement-level nightclub. 

It was not until almost halfway through the evening that Walter Winchell, the Bard of Broadway, managed to get himself seated at the Copa.  He knew that Podell would hold a table for him (they were both friends of Frank Costello, Prime Minister of the Underworld), and Winchell was in no particular hurry to get this evening underway.  As a very young man, Winchell had actually hoofed it for several years on a Vaudeville stage, dancing frantically away from his impoverished family and his parents’ loveless marriage.  Even though his figure had filled out a bit with the advancing years, he had lost none of his lightness of step, and he had no trouble making his way through the narrow paths between tables to a good seat near the stage.  Bobby Darin was not annoyed to see this movement in front of him as he prowled the boards singing You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.  He was glad to see that empty space filled up.  He waved Winchell into place with a hand gesture indicating the landing of a plane.  “That’s right, sneak in,” he said, announcing Winchell’s presence.  If Darin thought he could embarrass Winchell by punctuating his late arrival, however, he did not know his man, who was certainly not shy of a spotlight.  Winchell turned slightly to give a half-bow to the rest of the audience.  Winchell, once the most feared gossip columnist in the nation, would be known to the younger people in this audience chiefly for his rat-a-tat-tat voiceover narration to the popular television show The Untouchables.  Walter Winchell, who enjoyed the confidence of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover through several presidential administrations, was only too happy to lend his voice to the fictionalized triumphs of Elliot Ness on television, the growing popular entertainment medium of 1960.

Winchell jammed himself a bit uncomfortably into a chair, pulling his table to him, the top of which was not much larger than a dinner plate.  On cue, a waiter swept by noiselessly to deposit a double scotch, light on the soda, before the gossip columnist.  Not three feet away, Bobby Darin was moving about his tiny stage as he belted out the Cole Porter tune, easily dropping in his own changes to the lyric:

You'd be so nice to come home to.
You'd be ever so nice to park shoes by the fire.
While that breeze on high chants a lullaby
You'd be—all—that I could desire.
Under stars chilled by the winter time
Under an August moon shining above.
You'd be so nice, you'd be a lot more than paradise
To come home to and love, and love,
Let’s make love!

The room exploded with appreciative applause, shouts and whistles.  Winchell applauded and nodded politely, not yet bowled over by this young man.  Before the applause subsided, the orchestra bounced into the next selection, Dream Lover.  A small bobby soxer shriek went up from the tables.  This is what the younger set had been waiting to hear.  It was precisely what Winchell had been hoping to avoid.  His troublesome tooth began to throb to the beat of the song.  Fortunately, Darin tore off just a small portion of the odious hit tune (stopping briefly to banter with an 8-year-old girl seated with her parents) and launched almost immediately into a spirited delivery of Bill Bailey.  Now, this was more like it!  A song from Winchell’s youth.  He was glad to know that this Bobby Darin had such good taste.  Though there was almost no room between Darin his audience, he still found the space to demonstrate Bill Bailey walking on home.  Ah, a singer who could actually move!  None of them these days really knew how to do it.  None of them could sell a song the way that Jolson had done.  Jolson, now there was a singer!

Not sixty seconds into his reverie, Winchell almost managed to bring the show to a complete halt by leaning an elbow onto his table, slipping and knocking his knee into his neighbor, who was seated in most uncomfortable proximity to him.  The whole row of spectators might have gone down like dominoes, if not for a portly gentleman on the end of their section who opposed his heft against the small landslide of people now pushing in his direction.  The nightclubbers in between Winchell and the portly gentleman righted themselves like stubborn bowling pins, refusing to be knocked down.  A waiter hurried down front to assist Walter Winchell in righting his table.  Winchell let loose with a volley of epithets that, by some miracle, was not picked up by Darin’s microphone.  This nightclub floor was dangerously crowded, and you could bet he would complain about it in his column!  He had known it would be a mistake to come here tonight, and this was the result. 

Once again, Bobby Darin was not thrown by this intrusion into his performance.  He had been hardened by his service in the rowdier nightclubs across the country and had learned to expect the unexpected.  A patron knocking over a table, that was nothing compared to what he had seen elsewhere.  Once a mobster who did not care for Bobby’s ribbing of him from the stage (he absolutely could not stand those guys!) had leaned back in his chair and let his dinner jacket fall open to reveal a gun holstered at his side.  He made sure that Darin could see the gun.  That was in South Bend, Indiana, where the mobsters were cut from a gaudier cloth than those back in New York.  Here at the Copa, there were guns without a doubt, but Darin would not expect to see them displayed in so brazen a manner.  A table going over during a show, even with an accompanying crash of plates and silverware, that did not distract Bobby Darin for an instant.  His brown eyes focused in amusement on Winchell.  He quoted the tag line from Winchell’s own radio broadcasts.  “Good evening Mr. Winchell, and all the ships at sea!”  The audience laughed as the orchestra vamped Bill Bailey behind Darin, and Winchell and the waiter wrestled together to set the table upright once more.  The double scotch and soda, alas, had gone down with the ship.  Winchell sat down and made a vain attempt to recover his dignity as the waiter scurried away to replace the drink order.  Winchell, in almost too much pain from his tooth to speak, mimed an apology to the singer before him.  He tried to make himself as small as the jammed space around him required. 

Darin looked down, a benevolent deity on his dais. “Don’t you worry about it, Mr. Winchell,” he said.  “If I could sing as fast you talk on the radio, I could do my whole act in less than 20 minutes.”  Laughter emanated from the floor.  “Plus the second show.”  More laughter.  And from that point on, Bobby Darin aimed his entire performance directly at Walter Winchell. 

This Copa audience was particularly receptive to Darin, the local boy who made good, but playing in several dozen nightclubs across the country in the past few years had given him plenty of experience in dealing with audiences of every mood.  There were times when they never did warm up to him, though he would always go down fighting.  He had developed a satchel full of gestures to capture the wandering attention of restless nightclubbers.  As he wrung out the final note of a song, he would hold out his arms to draw the audience in, his well-shaped hands drooping in a relaxed pose.  He would hunch his shoulders to push out a note and give it special emphasis.  The orchestra sounded almost Dixieland-ish most of the evening with its emphasis on percussion, until the violins peeked out from behind a corner to break the hearts of the listeners.  Who would have guessed that there were violins within five miles of the Copa that night until they joined in with Darin on I Have Dreamed? 

I have dreamed that your arms are lovely. (a flute joined hands with the violins)
I have dreamed what a joy you'll be.
I have dreamed ev'ry word you'll whisper
When you're close, so close to me.

As Darin sang these lyrics in a light, soft voice, the audience came to a halt.  He had learned this from the singer Peggy Lee; when you want to get their attention, sing softer!  The high school prom set momentarily forgot to breathe.  The older members of the audience felt a romantic longing, tinged with just a hint of regret.

How you look in the glow of evening.
I have dreamed and enjoyed the view.
In these dreams I've loved you so (the lyrics began to roll out slowly)
That by now I think I know
What it's like to be loved BY … YOU!

Big finish on this final line, and Darin’s voice enlarged to reach every corner of the Copa.  Then it swooped down again, sweet and low, like a whisper into the audience’s cupped ear.  Bobby’s voice and the violins danced a caressing pas de deux:
I will love (violins) being loved (more violins) by…. you.

New York City stood still.  The room was silent.  To signal the end of the song, Darin murmured, “Thank you” into his microphone, and a wave of applause and ripple of emotion passed through the room.  At that moment, the audience took Bobby Darin into their hearts.  Even Dorothy Kilgallen, veteran of a thousand and one nightclub openings, stopped scribbling furiously and put down her pen to experience the moment.  This kid really had something, there was no doubt! 
Walter Winchell forgot about his toothache. 

Continued in the next chapter

The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 2  (E) Walter Winchell learns part of Darin's life story. #1441652 by Gisele