The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The next day, Winchell and Darin were returning early to the Copa.  Walter had introduced Darin to the steam bath next door to his hotel.  Nothing better for unwinding after a long night, Winchell explained to him.  After a shower and shave, it was a brand new Winchell who greeted the day.  The steam had a similar stimulating effect on Darin, though perhaps he did look a little bit parboiled, like a pink young shrimp.  They had not actually been thrown out of the steam room for loudly discussing politics, but it was clear that a couple of old walruses (rich ones, by the look of the cigars they wielded in the locker room) preferred to be steam cleaned in silence.  So Prince Hal and his Falstaff took their leave of them.  It was such a beautiful summer afternoon that they had dispatched their cab a couple of blocks away for a short walk.  The two of them were locked in animated conversation as they came up East 60th.  They did not notice the crowd that was forming in front of the Copa entrance.

“The FBI, don’t get me started!” Darin said as they rushed up the street.  “Our government has NO business spying on its own citizens.  Hoover should be sticking to gangsters and kidnapped dog cases.”

“You’re wrong about that, Bobby,” Winchell told him.  “It was President Roosevelt himself who gave Hoover the authority to get information about subversive types going into World War II.”

“And this authority now extends, what, fifteen years past Roosevelt’s death?  I guess it goes until the end of time?  Must be very handy, having a dead President as your boss.”

Walter Winchell had honestly never considered whether the extraordinary reach of J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men should ever be curtailed.  This would be some strange alternative universe where people went around wearing their shoes on their hands, so little sense did it make to him.  He said, “After the war was over, the Communists needed to be investigated, and who knows how many other groups who hate America and want to destroy it.”  Darin began walking faster, as though trying to leave this conversation behind him.  “And besides,” Winchell persisted, “it wasn’t just Roosevelt, Bobby.  I happen to know that President Truman allowed the FBI to investigate his political enemies for him.  This is the way world works.”

Darin threw his hands up into the air and exclaimed, “Stop, stop already!  If I listen to you talk about politics for five more minutes, I’m going to be the most disillusioned human on the planet!  Once you start spying and collecting information on people, where does it end?”

Winchell did not reply.  He knew how it ended.  In the political world, as well as the gossip column world, he knew the tremendous power and lure of a secret.  Governments rose and fell based on the secrets they kept.  Newspapers boosted their circulation through gossip columns that promised to reveal secrets.  Winchell had been a guest of J. Edgar Hoover’s many times in Washington, DC, and he had seen corridors in FBI headquarters that most citizens did not dream they were supporting with their tax dollars.  But the conversation was cut off as they approached the block containing the Copa. 

“What’s all this now?” asked Darin as they drifted into the gathering crowd.  Darin was wearing a hat (he had purchased a fedora, a bit incongruous for him, in honor of Winchell) and his glasses, and this was good as any disguise.  A fright wig and false teeth could not have hidden him any better. 

A redheaded woman in a rather impatient line at the door said to Darin in a Boston accent, “You better get back to the end of the line, mister, we’re waiting for standing-room only for tonight’s show.  They’re telling us the place is full!”  The tone of the woman’s voice expressed extreme doubt on this point, as well as her determination to get a spot at the Copa that very night.  She was wearing a white and aquamarine print summer dress against the rising heat of the New York summer day.  The crowd was pushing Bobby and Winchell a little closer to her.  Darin could see fine beads of perspiration on her upper lip and just at her hairline where it met her white skin.  He had a sudden urge to pull the woman to him and kiss away those beads.  He imagined himself doing this for just an instant, but he let the instant pass, because he did not want to see the moment reproduced in Winchell’s column.  Bobby Darin rarely resisted a temptation, but he was also calculating about the where and the when.  His eyes met the woman’s for just a second before he stepped backward toward the curb. 

“Oh really, now, you don’t say?”  Darin could not hide the pleasure in his voice.  People were coming in from Boston to see him, only to be turned away at the door?  No one had yet recognized him.  Usually this would have been a grave disappointment to someone who craved attention as much as Bobby Darin did, but in the current context, it was amusing to him.  Darin backed up to see his name on the marquee.  He squinted in disapproval.  He wondered aloud, “Can this kid really be half as good as they say?  I hear he just has a terrific press agent.  I don’t think he can actually sing all that well.” 

The woman at the front of the line lowered her head to look at Bobby through narrowed eyes.  “You are obviously too young to know good singing when you hear it!” she said.

“No way, lady,” Darin said, dismissing the marquee sign with a contemptuous flip of his hand.  “Kid thinks he’s Sinatra, and there simply—ain’t—no—way.”  He punctuated the end of his pronouncement with a curt nod of his head, throwing in a long wink and a smile to keep the tone friendly.

The redheaded woman stepped out of the line, planted her feet firmly in front of Bobby and gave him a searing look.  He felt his steam-bath-sensitive skin jump a little.  “Young man,” she began to say, “Bobby Darin has more rhythm in his left pinky toe than Sinatra has in his entire body!”  She was about to say more when she saw a motion behind her indicating that someone had stepped up to take her place in line.  She looked squarely at the claim jumper and said, “Now don’t YOU give me any trouble.”  The line jostled and began to buckle.  Bobby, along with Winchell, stepped out into the street as the line bunched itself up against the door, despite the protests of the redheaded out-of-towner.  Winchell knew from long experience that this crowd was not too small to turn into a mob, and he instinctively placed himself between Darin and the rest of them. 

Then someone from the back of the crowed shouted out, “Hey, look everybody, it’s Bobby!”  Bobby, Bobby, Bobby, suddenly they were all chattering.  ‘Don’t like the look of this,’ Winchell thought.  Where the heck were Podell’s men, he wondered.  The Bobby fans all began to move toward them. 

“Oh great,” Winchell said, “two against thirty, we should be just fine.”  He grabbed Darin’s arm and began to move him away from the jammed entrance of the Copa.  They proceeded to walk away, and the walk turned into a run as the fans moved to keep up with them.  Necks were craning in the back of the crowd to get a look at Darin, and they all started to jostle forward as a group.  All except for the redheaded woman.  She was not so far into her Sinatra diatribe that she failed to notice the momentum building up in this group of people.  She knew she could not stop the entire crowd, but she did manage to collar a young couple, a boy and girl of the high school prom set, and kept them from joining the herd.  She insisted quite firmly that they both sit on the curb with her, and this did slow a few people down to the point where they were not actually chasing Bobby Darin through the streets of New York.

The redheaded woman was now in a full glow of perspiration from the hot summer day and her exertions.  She attempted to blow away a strand of hair that was pasted to her white forehead.  “What has gotten into this town?” she asked her two captives.  “What on earth makes you behave this way?”

The male captive seated beside her, a ridiculously young-looking boy with white-blond hair and a considerable overbite, indicated the poster for Darin next to the door of the Copa.  “It’s D-Day, ma’am,” he explained solemnly.  “Bobby Darin swings!”  His date, a solemn girl with a pale complexion, black hair and enormous eyes, nodded in silent agreement. 

Meanwhile, Winchell had hustled Bobby Darin almost three blocks away and around a corner before Darin pulled away from him to rest against a store front, panting against the glass like an aging draft horse pulling an ice wagon.  “Good God,” Winchell exclaimed, having breath of his own to catch, though he still had good wind for a man his age, “your fans want to love you to death!”  Looking at Bobby, now crumpled up against the wall of the building, he wanted immediately to call those words back.  Bobby did not look good.  He was breathing rapidly and shallowly.  His skin was pale and glistening.  His fedora had been lost as they fled the crowd, and now he looked so terribly young and vulnerable.  He seemed to be trembling from the exertion of the run.  They had lost the crowd.  Winchell decided they must have given up and gone back to the line for standing-room only. 

“Bobby,” Winchell said, as he moved closer to him, afraid he might fall over into the street.

“I’m fine,“ Bobby insisted, pulling away.  “I just forgot to eat today, too much going on, that’s all.”

“Well, you don’t look fine just now, but let’s not argue about it, let’s get you away from here.”  Winchell spotted a yellow cab at the next corner.  He recognized the bull-necked silhouette of the cabbie as he bent over his newspaper behind the wheel.  He whistled and called out, “Petey!  Hey, Petey, back up here, will you?”
The newspaper over the steering wheel was tossed aside, and the head of the driver jerked up and swiveled around to see who was calling.  Petey shifted the toothpick in his mouth from the right to the left side, nodded to Winchell and neatly backed his cab up to the curb to meet them.

“Come on, Bobby,” Winchell said, “you can’t get into the Copa just now.  I have a place where you can rest.”

Bobby had his head down, gulping in air as though it were water.  He did not look at Winchell, but simply nodded and took his proffered arm to get into the cab.  Petey greeted them with delight.  “Say, Mr. Winchell, I was just reading your column, what do you think of that?”  He smiled so broadly, he almost swallowed his toothpick. 

“Yeah, yeah, that’s great, Petey, thanks a million.  Say, can you step on it to my place?  My friend here is a little under the weather, and we need to get him a bromo-seltzer.”

Petey sized up this new passenger, nodded and said, “Sure thing, Mr. Winchell, you’ve got it!”  And in less than five minutes, they were pulled up in the back of Winchell’s base of operations in the city, the St. Moritz.  Winchell, with the assistance of Petey, walked Darin to the service elevator and up to Winchell’s room.

Darin looked like a rag doll, with Petey holding him up in the hotel corridor as Winchell opened the door to his room.  Together they guided Darin to a sofa and sat him down.  His breathing was still labored, but it seemed a little more regular at this point.  Winchell paid Petey for his assistance.  The cabby vanished when he understood he was no longer needed.  He did wonder, as he returned to his cab, if this incident would end up in the column.  He would make sure to watch for it in the coming days. 

Darin tugged at his collar to loosen his tie and took a deep breath.  He looked pale and clammy.  His heaving chest gradually began to settle down.  He willed himself to stop struggling for air and relax into his seat.  “You can’t tell anyone about this,” he said hoarsely.  “No one can know this.”  He bowed his head and seemed barely aware of the older man at his side.  Winchell had been watching him carefully, only now just deciding not to try to get Bobby to a doctor.  He would make Bobby comfortable here, maybe get in touch with his family to come and see to him.

Winchell crossed the sitting area to get a glass of water from the bathroom.  He came back to the sofa, sat down and gave the glass to Bobby.  Winchell laid a paternal hand on Bobby’s knee and explained to him, “This is how it goes with me, Bobby.  If I find out something about someone through my own sources, then that information is fair game for the column.  Things that people want to confide in me, I don’t split on them in the paper.  This is my rule.”  Winchell did not tell Bobby that, at times, he had devised reasons to break this rule, but it would hold true for Darin, so he did not need to worry about it. 

Winchell looked at him with concern.  “You are following doctor’s orders about your condition, aren’t you?”

Bobby laughed quietly and said, “Well, my doctor’s orders included dying by the time I was fifteen, so I know you’ll understand it when I say I cancelled those orders.”

Winchell left Bobby in the room to go downstairs to the bar to make a phone call.  If he had not known before this that Bobby Darin was an extraordinary human being, he had every reason to believe it now.  Walter Winchell was sixty-three years old.  After twenty-eight years of radio broadcasting which had put him into millions of American homes every Sunday night, his contract had recently been cancelled, and he felt that life was too long.  He never thought he would outlive his radio show!  How sorry he had felt for himself.  Television was taking over as the new popular medium, and it was one with which Winchell could not feel comfortable.  He was so certain he had been ill-used.  And now here was this young man before him, bursting with ambition and talent, for whom life could never be long enough.  For about twenty minutes, Walter Winchell was able to think of someone other than himself.

Doctor’s orders had indeed been replaced with a plan of Bobby’s own making.  Alone in the hotel room, Bobby rolled up his jacket to make a pillow for himself and stretched out on the sofa.  He closed his eyes and, in his mind, went to a special place he had devised for himself as a child during bouts of rheumatic fever.  He had decided at an early age that it was going to be living that would kill him, not an infected heart valve.  It would be a thousand and one shows in the clubs, making records, writing songs, arguing and laughing with friends long into the night, acting in movies and television, connecting with as many women as he could talk into the act, all of these things would do him in, not a disease.  And somewhere amidst all of these activities, he was going to find and marry a sweet, virginal young woman who would raise up a noisy Italian family for him.  He was willing to work hard to achieve all of this, and given the truncated life span he had been handed, he did not think that any less was his just reward.  His end would not be today, so he bowed his head and gathered his strength for tonight's show. 

Using the phone in the St. Moritz bar, Winchell put in a call to Jules Podell at the Copa.  Twenty minutes later, Darin’s young bandleader presented himself in the bar.  ‘My God,’ thought Winchell, ‘when did all the young men start looking so young?’  He was sure that he himself had never had such downy cheeks and wavy hair in such large amounts.  Winchell’s circle of acquaintance was aging, of that there could be no doubt, but it really had not dawned on him until he had spent a few days in Darin’s company.  The young man before him appeared just a bit flustered at the moment.  Winchell stood at the bar to greet Behrke, who looked rather cautiously down the length of the room before moving towards him.  “Thanks for coming over, Dick,” he said, clasping Behrke by the hand.
Dick Behrke, slightly disheveled, looked about him as though he had just been dropped onto an alien planet.  “Well, it’s not exactly like I had a choice, Mr. Winchell.  Two guys picked me up, stuffed me in a car, and they let me out here.” 

Winchell grimaced in apology, then smiled sadly.  “Sorry about that, Dick, but I thought we might have a medical emergency on our hands, and Bobby was adamant that I not contact anyone.  He doesn’t know you’re here now.”  Winchell then sat Behrke down in a booth and related the scene outside the Copa, their escape, and its effect upon Bobby.

“Nina,” said Dick, cutting short Winchell’s description of Darin’s condition.  “Call his sister Nina, she knows what to do.  I can give you her number.”

Continued in the next chapter

The File on Bobby Darin, Chapter 7  (13+) Nina is called to the St. Moritz Hotel. #1453487 by Gisele