The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Back at his office in the Daily Mirror building, Walter Winchell was burrowing through some dusty files dating back to the 1930s.  The filing system was unorthodox, to say the least; only he and Rose Bigman would ever have a prayer of finding what they were looking for amongst all these papers.  Each day in his column, Winchell had been sending little bouquets of compliments to Darin about his Copa run.  Just a line or two, but every day, to remind his still large readership about this new super-charged talent.  Charged with IT, and then some!  In his conversations with Bobby, he had found the singer eager to talk about his own talent, his plans and ambitions, and yet, on the private side of his life story, he stuck very much to the script of the interviews that Winchell had read the night of his opening.  On purely personal matters, however, Darin had a degree of reserve that Winchell found to be unusual in a young man who seemed so eager to communicate on any given subject.  One evening Darin and Winchell had outstayed almost everyone in the Copa lounge, the smaller, private space set aside upstairs for the performers and their friends, the two of them pontificating about everything under the sun.  The talk had dried up momentarily.  The three-piece band was taking a short break, and the room was draped in a heavy silence.

Seated deep in a booth across from Winchell, Bobby Darin yawned widely, mashing his fists into his eyelids in an effort to shake off his drowsiness.  “Walter, don’t you ever need to sleep?”

Winchell, the fedora perched up high on the back of his head, looked across the room to where Charlie Maffia sat almost dozing on a barstool and shook his head.  “Sleep, what’s that?  What with writing my column, I’m up around the clock, just can’t relax long enough to sleep.”

Charlie Maffia was a simple soul who could fall asleep anywhere at any time.  Now he roused himself from his catnap.  The bandstand was deserted, and the room was almost empty.  Seeing that the coast was clear, Charlie quietly got down off his perch, went over to the piano, seated himself, and began to hesitantly pick out chopsticks on the keyboard.

Bobby raised his head and looked over to the bandstand.  He considered saying something to Charlie, considered again, and simply turned back to Winchell and said, “Thomas Edison functioned very well on four hours of sleep a night.”  He remembered learning this from a child’s biography of Edison that he read while convalescing in bed from an attack of rheumatic fever. 

Winchell’s face elongated into a doleful expression.  “Yeah, but he didn’t have a column to write!  I do five, sometimes six a week!  My God, what a racket.”  The two sat in silence for a time before Winchell finally asked, “How old are you, Bobby?  Twenty-two, twenty-three?”

Darin exhaled in a yawn, made a wry face and confessed, “Twenty-four, as it happens.  Atlantic keeps shaving a couple of years off my real age, to give the young female fans something to live for.  You can’t be on the cover of Boyfriend magazine when you’re an old man of 24.  I was born May 14, 1936.  That is, until my publicist decides to change the year again.”

Winchell made a mental note of this birth date, then immediately turned the conversation in another direction.  “What do you do for fun, when you’re not working?”

Bobby stretched in his seat, rolling his brown eyes in wonder.  “Not working?  We are never not working.  Look, Walter,” he said, leaning over the table to speak in a lowered voice.  “I graduated from Bronx Science in 1953.  I took a semester at Hunter College and did a part in every play that would let me take a crack at.  Okay, end of formal education, and ever since then, I’ve been trying to make things happen, in theater, songwriting, radio, you name it. Everything’s start to cook for me in the past year or so, but it was a long time coming.”

Winchell could remember being young and thinking that the world simply did not spin fast enough to please him.  At his time in life now, he wanted to slow down that turning globe, to enjoy what was happening, not merely get through it.  Nineteen fifty-three might seem a lifetime away to Bobby, but to Winchell, it was more like the day before yesterday. 

“What about girls?” Winchell asked.

Bobby pretended to think about this question for a moment, nodded and said with a grin, “I am definitely a fan.”

Winchell laughed, “Sure, you like them, but anyone in particular?”

Bobby bent his head and slumped down in his seat a bit.  The evening was catching up to him.  “Really, there hasn’t been much time for that, but,” now he looked uncharacteristically shy, “there is a girl,” he paused to pull his wallet from his back pocket, “just something I’ve been working on...”  From inside the wallet he pulled a black and white snapshot that he laid down on the table between them.  It was a picture of a girl, a head and shoulders shot of a blond with delicate features, looking rather shyly into the camera. 

Just as Walter was about to reach out and pick up the photo for closer inspection, an amazing thing happened.  There was a small bar in the lounge, situated at the opposite end of the room from Darin and Winchell.  A man seated at the bar pushed his drink away and headed straight toward their booth.  Bobby shifted his weight as he quickly lifted the photo off the table and placed it carefully back into his wallet for safekeeping.  Winchell could see Charlie Maffia come to attention on the piano bench.  He made no movement toward them, but he was watching the stranger as he approached Darin’s table.  It was obvious to Winchell that in the sometimes-rough landscape of the nightclub scene, Darin was not without protection of his own.  Charlie was a bulldog who could let himself off his own leash if the situation required it.  For now, the bulldog was content to watch over his master from a measured distance.

The stranger was a short man of rugged build, thick neck, nattily attired in evening dress.  He stood in front of their booth, ignoring Winchell, and fastening his gaze on Darin.  After doing two shows that evening, Darin was in no mood for autograph hounds or well-wishers, and he did not acknowledge the stranger standing before him.  Instead, he leaned toward Winchell and began to relate to him a rather over-long story about how his family had once survived for an entire week on nothing but hard-boiled eggs.  He gave the stranger no chance to speak.  Winchell, feeling pulled in two separate directions between Bobby’s pointless anecdote and the expectant patience of the stranger, finally interrupted Darin to say to the interloper, “What can we do for you, son?”

The nattily dressed man broke into a smile that revealed a large gap between his front two teeth.  He was clearly grateful to Winchell for giving him an in.  “Thanks, Mr. Winchell, thanks! (the thanks sounded more like “tanks”).  He spread his appreciative look between Winchell and Darin as he said, “I just wanted to say, Bobby, many congratulations on doing such a great show at the Copa.  The management in particle, excuse me, par-tic-u-lar-ly sent me to give their good wishes to you.”  Winchell thought that Darin might burst out in laughter watching this gangster type wrestle the multisyllabic word to the ground, but some instinct, or perhaps stubbornness, kept him silent on this occasion. 

The management.  That was a good one, Winchell thought to himself.  While Jules Podell was the putative owner of the Copa, and no effort had been spared to demonstrate that crime boss Frank Costello had no legal connection to the club, any child on the streets of New York could tell you who actually ran the place.

The gangster, who appeared quite young now that Winchell saw him up close, obviously relieved to have delivered his message, waited in silence for Darin’s reply.  Onstage at the Copa, and in their subsequent conversations together, Winchell had seen Bobby at his most winning and ingratiating.  At those times, he was the very definition of charm and good manners.  Now he saw another side of Darin, one that sent a chill over him.  Bobby did not look at their uninvited guest.  He stared down at the table before him and said in an indescribable voice, “Tell ‘the management’ that Big Curly’s son says hello.”  Darin’s lower lip was drawn up in a childish pout.  Winchell recognized that look, one that he had seen on his son’s face when he refused to play with a new toy he had been given.  Darin continued to look down at the table.  He nodded his head up and down and seemed to be having a silent debate with himself about something.
The stranger was clearly not expecting this defiant tone from the Copa’s headliner in response to what he considered to be happy news.  Lightning-fast mental processing was obviously not in the boy’s makeup.  “Tell who, what?” he asked, frankly confused.

“Big Curly’s son, that’s me,” Darin said quietly.  By this time, Charlie Maffia had moved off his seat on the bandstand and come up behind the young stranger and to his left, where he was sure the young man could see him.  He and Charlie eyed each other as two dogs will when they are deciding whether to fight.  Winchell thought a brawl in the Copa lounge would be unseemly, attracting unwanted attention, so he patted the natty young man on the arm of his expensive suit and said, “Okay, son, thanks for the message, thanks very much.”  Between Charlie’s movement and Winchell’s, the tension of the moment was broken up.  Bobby never did look up to see who was addressing him.

The young gangster looked in frank appeal at Winchell for an explanation of this bewildering scene.  Winchell just gave him a nod and a wink, indicating that his message was delivered, and he could now depart.  “Yeah, thanks, Mr. Winchell,” said the young tough-in-training, “see you around.”  And then he somehow managed to get himself out of the Copa lounge.  He fervently hoped that Mr. Costello would never send him on such an errand again.  The last few remaining customers in the lounge packed it in at that point.  Charlie Maffia saw Bobby back to his hotel room before heading home to Nina and the three kids.  Winchell took his own departure, wondering how he might unearth the name of Bobby’s blond dish.  His mind ran to some of the young secretaries at the Mirror who would be familiar with the dating scene of Bobby’s age group.  That seemed a promising place to start.  His moment to question Bobby about this directly had passed, and he knew from long experience that he could not count on finding his subject in so confiding a mood anytime soon. 

Now, in his office, after an early-morning haircut and shave, Winchell was on a separate trail, searching through very old files, looking for any mention of the name Saverio Cassotto, who died five months before Darin’s birth.  That would be December of 1935.  He had sent Rose Bigman down to the newspaper library in the sub-basement to see if she could find an obituary on the father of Bobby Darin.
Rose finally emerged, hot and dusty from the catacombs, to confess that she could not locate the obituary.  “You don’t have the exact date of death?” she asked.

“No,” Winchell said, “but I figure it can’t be much later than December 1935.”  Walden Robert was born in the following spring.  Bobby Darin had no memory of his father, and he did not seem to share Winchell’s curiosity about him.  Winchell could have approached Bobby’s family about Sam, of course, but now, with what had taken place in the Copa lounge, Winchell had an idea that would probably result in a dead end.  Bobby Darin might be the first really famous person in his family, but his relations must have left their traces somewhere that Winchell could find them.  He turned the matter over in his mind as he attended the Copa performances, twenty-one nights in a row.  It was clear to Winchell that his next stop would be to visit a retired gentleman of means living at the Majestic on Central Park West.  As it happened, he would be visiting that palatial address sooner than he expected. 

Winchell put aside the matter of Sam Cassotto for the moment to open a plain white envelope in the morning’s mail.  As a Special Correspondent to the FBI, these plain envelopes passed between Winchell’s office and Washington, DC, with fair frequency.  Either Winchell was sending some underworld tip to the Bureau about suspected illegal activities, or the Bureau was giving Winchell something that would be beneficial for J. Edgar Hoover to have broadcast to the world in Winchell’s column.  Whichever direction the mail headed, it was a fruitful arrangement for both sides.  Writing about Bobby Darin for the Mirror was Winchell’s duty to his employer.  Whatever he did for the FBI he considered to be a duty to his country. 

Continued in the next chapter

The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 6  (13+) Close encounter with fans in front of the Copa. #1451094 by Gisele