Bobby Darin seems to be having a late-posthumous career renaissance, with his songs popping up in various movies and Kevin Spacey’s 2004 biopic Under the Sea. As Evanier points out, his image today is less strong than Dino or Sinatra because Darin kept changing his image – he was a rock and roll star, then a Vegas swinger, then a movie star, a music publisher, a folk singer, a film director (!), a TV variety show host.
He was a man full of contradictions – a contemporary of Fabian’s who was more at home doing standards; a genuine Civil Rights supporter (he took part in the March on Washington) who treated his own family horribly; a supposed great business brain who lost most of his money in bad investments and divorce; someone who liked to go their own way and made a big deal of being independent but ended up crawling back to his Vegas fans; who married a woman who adored him (the one after Sandra Dee) – but then divorced her a couple of months later.
To be frank, Darin comes across in this book as a bit of a wanker – up himself, showered with devotion from a family who he treated like dirt (okay, later on he discovered his sister was his mother but that just gave him an excuse for more bad behaviour). There are too many quotes from people that go on about how tough Darin was, or they were, or which compare him to other singers from the time (eg Sinatra, Johnny Mercer).
Evanier is however very good on Darin’s music – not just the famous stuff, but he’s also slogged his way through the protest music phase. There’s also lots of interesting tidbits – Darin was so involved during his act that he would ejaculate (his assistant had to lay out condoms for him before a night); Darin took part in orgies and wife-swapping; he directed, wrote, starred in and financed a film towards the end of this life which was never distributed. I would have liked a bit more about the films (there’s hardly anything on The Happy Ending, for instance) but I admit my interest lies more in that direction.
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