Roman Candle

By David Evanier

Published by Rodale

November 2004; $24.95US/$35.95CAN; 978-1-59486-010-2

"My first intimation that there was a Bobby Darin occurred when I heard a piano in the practice room adjoining my office at Atlantic Records. Nobody had informed me that Ray Charles was back in town! After first establishing bona fides as a rock star, Bobby switched gears and began recording standards from the great American songbook: Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Johnny Mercer and company. Then Bobby without notice made an even more audacious move. Virtually overnight, he morphed full-blown into one of the premier nightclub performers of the era. The accolades came pouring in, from Sinatra, from Sammy Davis Jr., from Dean Martin. For the rest of his sadly shortened life, he was their peer.

"In Roman Candle, David Evanier relates the Bobby Darin story with empathy and insight. His chronicle of the triumphs and vicissitudes of Bobby's star-crossed life is packed with illuminating details and a page-turning seductiveness. Here is the ultimate tribute to the life and times of a true American original."

--Jerry Wexler, legendary producer, Atlantic Records, and member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

***
Hipster, Rocker, Lover, Idol . . .

With the release of a feature-length movie about his life and fresh compilations of his music on CD and DVD, Bobby Darin -- like "old Macky" himself -- is back. Darin's hard-swinging versions of "Mack the Knife" and "Beyond the Sea" set the standard for cool in the late 1950s, back when crooners were king. But behind the glitz and the girls and the quick smile, all of which were in plentiful supply, Darin was being eaten up inside by a ferocious drive: He vowed that he would make it to the very top of the heap die trying.

***
Bobby Darin, as a performer, rivaled Sinatra. Energizing the early rock-and-roll scene with his rollicking classic "Splish Splash," Bobby then became a top-draw nightclub act. Chronic illness dogged him from childhood, setting the tone of urgency that inspired a career full of dizzying twists and turns: from teen idol to Vegas song-and-dance man, and from hipster to folkie and back.

Based on extensive interviews with those who knew Bobby, Roman Candle tracks his meteoric rise from dire poverty as the grandson of a low-level mobster to his well-earned place in the showbiz pantheon. David Evanier probes the dark side of a celebrated marriage to America's sweetheart, Sandra Dee, as well as the incredible family secret that affected Bobby to the end.

Finally, more than three decades after his death, comes a multilayered portrait of this brash, gifted artist, whose restless voice and spirit seem as alive today as ever.

Author

David Evanier has written for New York magazine, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and The Village Voice, among others, and has been senior editor of The Paris Review. He coauthored Joe Pantoliano's book, Who's Sorry Now, and his Making the Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Roselli Story was a finalist for the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. He has won the Aga Khan Fiction Prize and received residence fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Wurlitzer Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

"In order to truly understand who Bobby Darin was, you have to understand where he came from. David Evanier's new book, Roman Candle , tells the story of the young Walden Robert Cossotto -- who grew up to become Bobby Darin -- in a compelling and revealing way. His examination of Darin's impulses and influences give the reader a chance to go behind the persona and learn what it must have been like to grow up knowing that time was not on your side. Darin's drive and ambition was fueled by childhood illness and a determination to live as many lives as he could. As Darin himself used to say, 'It's not true you only live once -- you can live a lot of times, if you know how.' Roman Candle gives us the many lives of one of the great entertainers of all time, whose flame was extinguished way too soon. It was a pleasure to read."

--Kevin Spacey, actor/director, Beyond the Sea

Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from the book Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin

by David Evanier

Published by Rodale; November 2004; $24.95US/$35.95CAN; 978-1-59486-010-2

Copyright © 2004 David Evanier

Chapter Six

The

Big

Time

It was probably the most surprising switch that any popular singer on the rise ever made -- a total departure from what was expected of him. Just as he was beginning to achieve great success in rock and roll, Bobby was ready to take his chances on eroding his image with his public to keep growing as an artist. At 22, he was already ready to move on. Watching his studio rehearsals, one could immediately catch the moment that Bobby was getting happy with the music, whether it was a new song he was writing or an arrangement he was trying out. The smile spread all over his face, his body bounced, and he could not keep still. Bobby was an artist who needed to be happy when he sang, to be inspired. Staying in one place stifled inspiration; changing genres, experimenting, jumping into the water, taking chances: this restless quest defined him as a singer.

"Bobby made a terrific transition from a kid rocker into a suave nightclub performer who could give Sammy Davis or Frank Sinatra a hard time," Jerry Wexler states. "He was just great on the floor, his composure, his moves. I thought his moving away from rock almost right away to the standards was very intelligent. The progression from rock and roll to either jazz or sophisticated nightclub ballads and crafted blues is to me a mark of maturation."

In reality, Bobby would become the last of an era of nightclub performers. He was entering a world in which nightclubs were the glittering center of show business with a circuit stretching across the country from the Copacabana and the Latin Quarter in New York to Bill Miller's Riviera in New Jersey, Skinny D'Amato's 500 Club in Atlantic City, Mister Kelly's and Chez Paree in Chicago, the Latin Casino in Philadelphia, the Town Casino in Buffalo, Blinstrub's and the Latin Quarter in Boston, the Three Rivers Inn in Syracuse, and Ben Maksik's Town and Country in Brooklyn. It was still the era of Walter Winchell, Damon Runyon, Leonard Lyons, Sidney Skolsky, Earl Wilson, Meyer Berger, Jack Lait, and Lee Mortimer. But the composers of many of the most popular standards were themselves beginning to pass away, and the New York they once celebrated was now heading into decline. Oscar Hammerstein II died in 1960, Cole Porter in 1964. The lights were going out on old Broadway.

The songs sung in the nightclubs were culled from the great American popular music catalog: Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Schwartz and Dietz, Sammy Cahn, and Jerome Kern. In truth, Bobby had always loved those songs, and in them he found his own voice. He would bring to them a richness, depth, and personal stamp that had eluded him in many of his rock records. Bobby always needed to move beyond and resist his chameleonlike ability to copy the sounds of other artists in his hurry to reach the top instantly. He sounds more like Presley than Presley on "Mighty Mighty Man"; and "Baby Face," despite its vigor, sounds like a reincarnation of Little Richard's arrangement. When he was emotionally moved, he forgot the treadmill and was swept up into the meaning and beauty of the music. "Bobby grew up listening to Charlie Maffia's record collection," Steve Blauner says, "Crosby, Jolson, Sinatra. So then he's doing 'Splish Splash.' Well, that's because it's the only way he can get his foot in the door. But the minute he had the strength to call his own shot, what did he do? The That's All album."

When Bobby did That's All, many assumed he would try a Sinatra album. There was no question that Bobby revered Sinatra; what singer did not? But for Bobby, Sinatra was the gold standard, and some observers thought Bobby was obsessed with him. Yet the album is largely devoid of a Sinatra feel or even of songs Sinatra had chosen to sing. (He would record "Mack the Knife" long after Bobby died, and in his record he would pay homage to Bobby's version.) "When Bobby made the switch-over from rock to standards," Hesh Wasser says, "it really set him apart. It separated him from all the Sinatra clones. Because they could do only one thing, and Bobby could do every genre. Even Sinatra himself could never have done what Bobby did."

That's All was totally against the grain. "Totally against everything, because he had never done anything like it," Steve Blauner says. "Here's a guy who was doing 'Splish Splash,' 'Dream Lover,' 'Queen of the Hop.' What do you mean he's doing these standards? Think about it. He picked all of the songs. And he had a way of doing songs differently than they'd ever been done. 'Mack the Knife' had been a dirge. 'That's All' was a ballad."

Bobby was rebelling against not only his own image but against the musical times. Rock and roll had taken over the music business. A musical amalgam that comprised many strains of American music -- rhythm and blues, country and western, gospel, jazz, folk and swing -- its strong sexual overtones (in the black community, "rock and roll" was a common term for both dancing and sexual intercourse) had made it greatly appealing to white teenagers. Frank Sinatra was one of those who expressed his distaste for it (and, indirectly, at his chief rival, Elvis Presley) in 1957:

It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd, intact, plain dirty, lyrics . . . It manages to be the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth.

But Sinatra was in the rearguard. In 1954, "Sh-Boom," a rock-and-roll song recorded by both a black group, The Chords, and a white one, The Crew Cuts, became the fifth best-selling song of the year and the first rock-and-roll hit. In 1955, 12 of the year's top 50 hits were rock-and-roll songs. Among them was Bill Haley and the Comets "Rock Around the Clock," which was featured in the film Blackboard Jungle. The record reached the top of the charts and sold 15 million copies by the late 1960s, becoming one of the best-selling single records of all time.

From 1956 to 1960, black artists such as Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Little Willie John, Fats Domino, and the Platters rose to fame and fortune. White singers, most notably Presley, borrowed black styles and utilized them to catapult themselves into the ranks of the new icons. And the white rock-and-roll singers, like Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, and Pat Boone, were popular with their cover versions of black hits, sometimes more popular than the original artists were. Presley's blend of rhythm and blues, rockabilly, and country music led to 14 consecutive gold records from 1956 to 1968.

Record sales soared. With the success of rock and roll, annual revenues climbed from $219 million in 1953 to $277 million in 1955, reaching a staggering $600 million in 1960. By 1955, the ballad singers were already beginning to lose their hold on the public. The record companies, Tony Bennett says, "started going for this obsolescence idea. They didn't want records that would last, they didn't want lasting artists, they wanted lots of [consecutive] artists. So they started discarding people like me and Duke Ellington and Leonard Bernstein."

Within a few years, the impact of rhythm and blues had totally transformed American popular music, and Tin Pan Alley was displaced as the music center of the universe.

This was the high tide that Bobby was swimming against.

Bobby played a key role in creating the new album. "Now that he had 'Splish Splash,'" Hesh Wasser says, "I was there with him when it was a matter of him searching, trying to figure out where he was going to go, not knowing what would happen. After he and Dick Behrke gave up the apartment on West 71st Street, Bobby was living with his family again on Baruch Place. He couldn't survive without them. He needed to have medical care; if he was sick, he had to be under constant care, he had to be watched. So he was depending on them. It was Charlie who mainly took care of him. Bobby couldn't take the subways because he couldn't walk up the stairs; Charlie would drive into Manhattan and pick him up."

But outside the house, it was Hesh Wasser who was Bobby's guardian angel. Once again, she played a crucial part in what transpired. Nelson Riddle had created the great arrangements that marked Sinatra's transformation as a singer in the Capitol years of "In the Wee Small Hours," "Songs for Swinging Lovers," "Nice and Easy" -- albums that changed Sinatra's image in the public's eyes from a gentle romantic balladeer into both a macho swinger and a heartbreaking ballad stylist of enormous depth and passion. Wasser set about finding Bobby his Nelson Riddle. She decided on Richard Wess.

"I was the one who found Wess for Bobby," she recalls. "I knew that Wess was a big-band arranger and had done some albums. Richard had absolutely no interest in rock and roll, while Bobby was basically a rock-and-roll artist at that time. He would never have really talked to Richard Wess about music. Bobby knew who he was, but Wess was just a person who passed through his life; I don't remember them ever sitting down and having a conversation. So I was the one who really inquired of Wess. I went to him and asked him to show me something he had recorded. I liked an album that he had done with a singer named Sally Blair. Wess seemed to be right for Bobby, and so I got Dick together with Bobby. He never even listened to the albums Wess had given me. He trusted my judgment. Dick said to me, 'How do I know Bobby is going to pay me?' I said, 'Just don't worry, it's going to happen, take my word for it.'"

Wasser never doubted that Bobby would return to the standards. "Even when he was doing rock, he never really gave up on everything he had listened to as a kid. He liked rock, and he wanted to be part of the current scene. He wanted the kids to like him, but he also wanted the adults to like him. He was going to do a little rock and roll, but then go out there and sing Jolson's 'Rainbow Round My Shoulder' and show as a 22-year-old, 'I'm going to knock their socks off.' And he knew this was how he would do it."

"Bobby had a great regard for the old performers, for what came before him," says singer Steve Lawrence. "You soak that in, and bring your own intelligence, your own abilities, your own creativity, to what has influenced you. And then you become, it's like the tenth man. You listen to nine other things out there, put yourself into it, and become the tenth man."

Many of Bobby's other peers, in addition to Frankie Avalon, Steve Lawrence, Dion, and Paul Anka, also regarded him as apart, someone with unique gifts, focus, and unusual seriousness. "Bobby was much more hip -- even though we all considered ourselves hip -- than any of us," says singer James Darren. "When you perform, many actors and singers are afraid to show their real selves, afraid they won't be liked if they reveal what's underneath. Bobby did not have that problem. The best thing you can ever do is to show yourself -- because you have what you are, and that's what's unique about each person. Bobby did all that onstage. And that's why Bobby was such a standout. And it all came from the fact that Bobby was confident with himself and not afraid to show it. If you listen to his records today or see him on film, he's sustained, he holds up. Do you know what his impact comes from? It comes from whatever his vibes were when he sang those songs or his vibes whenever you saw him. You come through him. That's you. So that's why Bobby lives, the magic the human being has.

"Bobby was older than what he was. Bobby was 25 going on 55. But he was inventive in the way a young kid is. His head was like he had been there before. Like he came back, reincarnated. The body's young, but his brain -- he was hatched. I was cracking the fucking shell of the egg. And this guy was shaking the shit off his wings."

Bobby initially recorded "Mack" with three other songs on an EP -- an extended play album of four sides, very much in currency in the'50s. Al Kasha, two-time Academy Award-winning composer, recalls that Bobby's determination was so great that he paid for the EP himself. "This is really the big story about how 'Mack the Knife' came about," Kasha says. "When Bobby signed with GAC, there was an agent there named Roz Ross who booked the rock-and-roll shows for Dick Clark. Bobby felt he was getting older and was already losing his hair. He knew he wanted to make the transition to being a nightclub singer and wanted to get into the Copa, and he told Roz. Ross said to Bobby, 'Jules Podell doesn't understand songs like 'Splish Splash' and 'Queen of the Hop'; he doesn't get rock. You have to do something for me to show Julie, some sort of demo, to get into the Copa.' Bobby went to Ahmet and Jerry with 'Mack the Knife' and said that he would never get into the Copa, never get anyplace, unless they released the EP. And he said he'd give up his royalties on 'Splish Splash' and 'Dream Lover' for it. He took a gamble. He was always a gambler, Bobby, on himself, because he was a visionary. The EP went through the roof. Then Atlantic finally put it out as a single."

"He would go and record a session, and it would be charged to him," Steve Blauner recalls. "He didn't pay at that moment, but before he saw any money, it was deducted from his royalties. In those days, you could make an album of 12 songs in three days, and it would cost about $25,000. So if he was getting a dollar an album -- and he wasn't, because in those days the albums sold for under five dollars -- and I think he had 5 percent of 90 percent. Plus, the 90 percent came from old deals when they were making shellac, and there would be breakage from shellac, so automatically you didn't get paid 10 percent. Of course now they were moving into 45 rpm's, and there was no more breakage, but they were still getting away with it. So he had 5 percent of 90 percent, whatever that came to. You had to sell a lot of those to make up the $25,000 before you started to get any money. So with 'Splish Splash' and his other hits, Atco owed him money. They knew this album would pay for itself, and so they went along with it."

From December 19 through 24,1958, Bobby recorded all the tracks for That's All, although the album would not be released until 1959, and no singles from it, including "Mack the Knife," the song that would immortalize him, were released until August 1959. Bobby did more than record the songs. "People say Sinatra was one of the only artists who ever produced and took a hand in his albums -- he didn't just get up and sing," says Hesh Wasser. "He really contributed, produced, collaborated, he did everything. Well, Bobby certainly did just as much in that ballpark, if not more. Bobby Scott would say, 'You write a chart for Bobby Darin, you're working with him. Because he's sitting there, he's telling you the notes.' He'd direct it all. And we're not talking about some 40-year-old. We're talking about someone who from day one, when he entered the studio, he always had control. That's why all these other artists -- Durante, Burns, Jack Benny -- were surprised and in awe of him from the beginning."

Dick Clark recalls that "Bobby and I were very close; we could say anything to one another. He called me once on the phone. He said, 'Listen to this record.' He plays 'Mack' over the phone. I listen and then he says, 'This is my next release.' I say, 'Are you out of your mind? What are you trying to be, a saloon singer? You're a rock-and-roll star, you're huge, you're on the roll. That's the sort of stuff you'd hear from a lounge lizard singer."

In February of that year, Steve Blauner and Bobby were at the Moulin Rouge in Los Angeles watching Jerry Lewis perform. "Somebody said there had been a phone call for Bobby," Blauner recalls. "And I didn't think anything of it, because I didn't know anybody knew where we were. And who would be calling Bobby? So I didn't pay any attention to it. After the show, we went to a Chinese restaurant on Sunset Boulevard and I said to him, 'You know, somebody said someone was trying to reach you. Isn't that strange?' So he said, 'Let me check at home.' He called New York and found out his mother [Polly] had died. So I put him on the plane next morning to go home for the funeral. And he buried her."

Polly, who had a heart condition that was a contributing factor in her being bedridden from her mid-40s on, died of a stroke. She was in her mid-60s.

Reprinted from: Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin by David Evanier © 2004 by David Evanier. Permission granted by Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098. Available wherever books are sold or directly from the publisher by calling (800) 848-4735 or visit their website at www.rodalestore.com.

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