Bobby Darin: A Life. This item is unavailable.Bobby Darin: A Life

Bobby Darin fit more into his 37 years alive than most people fit into longer lifetimes. By the age of 22, Darin was a pop idol with chart-toppers 'Splish Splash' and 'Dream Lovers.' A year later, he reinvented himself as a Sinatra-style crooner with 'Mack the Knife' and 'Beyond the Sea,' winning a Grammy Award, the adulation of millions, a Hollywood contract, and a starlet wife, Sandra Dee. His sense of urgency drove him throughout his life and if it seemed as though Darin was trying to do it all, he was: a rheumatic heart doomed him to an early death. Bobby Darin examines the entertainer's entire life, from his boyhood in the Bronx, where he was born Walden Robert Cassotto, to his rise as a musical sensation, his rocky marriage to Sandra Dee, and the evolution of his career from pop idol to swingin' crooner to folk singer. Also detailed is the shocking secret Darin learned later in life--that his 'sister' Nina was actually his mother, and that Polly, the woman he thought was his mother, was actually his grandmother--and how he spent the last five years of his life consumed by bitterness and anger over the betrayal. Interviews with such close friends and relatives as Steve Blauner, Darin's best friend and business manager, Gary Walden, Darin's half-brother, Dick Clark, Wayne Newton, Neil Sedaka, Tony Orlando, and many others will give the book a special intimacy and provide a deeply revealing portrait of the man.

Entertainment columnist for the New York Post, Michael Seth Starr is the author of Mouse in the Rat Pack, Art Carney: A Biography, and Peter Sellers: A Film History.