The life of teen idol Bobby Darin

Bobby Darin was a great pop star … singer, dancer, musician and Oscar nominated. It was the artist who did everything, except Broadway. Until now!

The winner of the Tony Jonathan Groff award (“Mriry We Roll Aando”) plays the icon of the late fifty -60s in the musical “Just in time.” “He was in the apogee of his powers, when he was on the floor of a nightclub with the audience in the palm of his hand,” Groff said.

For Darin, a live audience was oxygen. Then, for Groff: “You can feel this vibration between the artist and the audience member. [It’s]For me, the most essential to turn on in the count of its history. “

They are tasks seven years and a lot of sweat to take the show to Broadway. Groff’s casting, loved by his roles on stage, and as Kristoff in “frozen” films, might not seem obvious. Groff grew up in a horse farm in the Mennonite country of Pennsylvania; Darin was a misalted Italian child from Bronx.

I asked Groff who he liked to listen when he was growing. “I am in the fourth or fifth grade, on the computer or Nintendo in the basement, flying to Ethel Merman,” Annie gets your weapon, “he laughed.

“So, this is the 1990s, probably? And are you playing something from the 1940s?”

“Exactly!”

Similarly, Bobby Darin was an old soul, says his son, Dodd Darin. “I admired, hey loved, respected the old timers. He loved that era of the show business. That is related.”

That could have had something to do with the woman who raised him: “Polly, her mother, was an old Vaudevillian,” Dodd said. “And she fed him and said:” You can’t play stickball on the street. And you can’t RoughHofousse with the children “(” because he was fril and sickly). “But you can learn to sing. You can learn to play the piano.” And opened an entire world. “

“Fragile and sickly” was not exaggeration. Born Walden Robert Cassotto, Darin suffered several episodes of rheumatic fever when he was a child, permanently damaging his heart. When he was a child, he listened to a family doctor to say that he would not live beyond his adolescence. “Put on that position,” Dodd said. “Then, he was ambitious. He was driven. He was always moving. He was trying to get everything,” because he knew he didn’t have time. “

Without time to waste, he was the shock songs, and at 22, Bobby Darin waves waves with a recording or “Splish Splash”.

Bobby Darin performs “Splish Splash” (1958):

It is not one to touch it safe, for his second album, in 1959, Darin Tok, a dark ballad of the “German Opera” Opera “German and did Swing. “When my dad took ‘Mack the knife’ before he was released and that Dick Clark heard it, he said:” Why are you doing this? This will bombard! “” Dodd said.

He won the Grammy for the record of the year and became the greatest success of Darin’s career.

The following year, he headed to Italy to make his debut in the film for the bride of the United States, Sandra Dee. “We hit immediately,” Darin said. “She hated me and loved her, and that was all.”

The teenage idol married the teenage film star in December or 1960, and welcomed his son, Dodd, a year later. Dodd would then write: “My father made his destiny. Destiny made my mother.”

What did he mean by that? “Well, my mother goes through a lot,” he said. “I never wanted to replace.

Dee was looking for a life at home, Dodd said, but Bobby Darin was not ready to reduce speed. The marriage ended after six years. Darin never stopped playing the clubs.

Sammy Davis Jr. once said that Bobby Darin was the only person who would like to have to follow. “Absolutely true,” Dodd said. “My dad idolized Sammy.”

The feeling was mutual, as seen in a 1959 transmission of “This is your life”:

It also made a duration of the episode was Nina, the Darin woman thought It was his sister. But almost a decade later, he would turn a secret from the family of long heroes: Nina was, in fact, Bobby’s mother, having given birth out of marriage when she was a teenager. Who made Polly, the woman who thought she was her mother, her grandmother. “It was never the same,” Dodd said. “He said that his whole life was a lie; it was, like, a fraud. It is simply devastating. There is no sugar that covers it.”

Looking that tape today, says Dodd, everything seems obvious. “That is the love of a mother,” he said. “That is not a sister, right? That is the adulation of” This is my son “, but you can’t Say He. “

Dodd, who was seven when his father learned, remembers a change in your father from that moment: “I will not say that it is attributed directly to that incident; I am sure it is part of that. Tuel.

“And those were some of the best moments I had with him. He was a usual guy. We were in Big Sur in a trailer, passing the time. And yes, he released his hair, so to speak. It was good times.”

Bobby Darin interpreted “Simple Song of Freedom” (1970):

In December or 1973, the heart of Bobby Darin finally yielded. He was 37 years old. Dodd had just turned 12. Now 63, Dodd Darin is grateful that, with the new Broadway show, a new generation can learn his father’s story.

“It’s so beautiful that all these years later, it’s been 50 years, we’re talking about him. We remember it,” Dodd said. “Hey, I did something well.”

Online exclusive: look an extended interview with Dodd Darin

You can transmit the album “The Ultimate Bobby Darin” by clicking on the insertion below (free spotify registration required to listen to the tracks in its entirety):

For more information:

History produced by Kay Lim. Editor: Lauren Barnello.

Look at Jonathan Groff play “Dream Lover” for the “Just in Time” cast album: