A New Picture!

Found on some obscure site, here is a new picture of our guy with the director of "Day is Done." Drinking coffee, looking alert!

Anyone else really love Bobby's hands?

Bobby in Eric Morris's Book

I found this today, and it made me smile... and nearly cry.

"... I auditioned at the Ring and got a small but nice part in Girls of Summer.  It was my first job since I had left the army, and I was thrilled to be onstage, instead of backstage stage-managing.  The leading roles were being played by Mike ("Touch") Connors -- whose nickname came from his having been a football star at UCLA -- Carole Matthews, and Bobby Driscoll.  Mike was at the beginning of his acting career.  Later on he became fairly successful on television as the lead actor in two diferent series, "Tightrope" and "Mannix."  Carole Matthews was a busy working actress in B films, while Bobby Driscoll, as a child actor, had done such films as Song of the South and several other big ones.  A great guy, always smiling and seemingly happy, he was then in his early twenties and was attempting to carve out a career as an adult.  I really liked him, and we established a close relationship during the run of the play.  Almost every night during the intermission, Robert Blake and Dean Stockwell would visit Bobby, and the four of us hung out in the dressing room backstage.  I listened to them talk about the old days -- the people, the other actors, the directors, and some of the gossip that wasn't written about in the newspapers.  I was fascinated by their conversations.  They had grown up in the studio classes, taught by teachers the studio brought in." -- Eric Morris, The Diary of a Professional Experiencer:  An Autobiographical Journey Into the Evolution of an Acting System.

It seems to be almost unanimous among people who knew Bobby that he was friendly and open, and usually willing to engage and to make new friends.  I feel this is the part of his spirit that was able to shine through most of the time, even past the muck and mire of the drugs that wore at the frayed edges of his brain.

Of course, no doubt he also probably knew how to "shuck and jive" even when he wasn't feeling like it to satisfy social purposes.  But I think the bright light part of his personality was, for the most part, authentically his.

Suzanne's Son

Okay, so I debated whether or not to elaborate on this, because as much as I enjoy discussing Bobby's life, I don't ever want to turn this blog into a place of gossip or baseless conjecture.  So before I present this topic, just allow me the disclaimer that I am simply "musing" about some facts surrounding Bob and wondering aloud about the unsaid.

Most of us know that Bobby carried on a romance with Suzanne Stansbury, a French woman ten years older than him just after divorcing Marilyn.  We can usually find, early on in our Bobby research, the articles everywhere about him having pistol-whipped a guy in her presence and the two of them having burgled an animal clinic.

So I went digging to find more stuff about her!  Here are some things I found:

Flash of Eden - Paul Ferrara, p. 67.

This one obviously has some things wrong, such as the fact that -- as far as anyone knows -- Suzanne and Bobby weren't ever actually married, and he was presumably in prison at this point in Chino, not because of being "the great cat burglar of Malibu."  I'll stop right here because I think it's pretty clear, from this article, that Suzanne was obviously not the sterling character she presents herself to be in the 1961 interview with Bobby we read over at Bobbydriscoll.net.  But it's not my goal on this blog to slander anyone, alive or dead.  Suzanne simply had her issues like Bob had his.

When we read the 1961 interview, by the way, we see that Suzanne mentions having been left with an infant son "fourteen years earlier," which lent me to wonder if said son lived with her or not.  The answer comes to us when we read this:

Oral History with George Herms - 1993

By the way, you might want to actually search on the page for Bobby's name (CTRL+F) to get where you want to go, but here we see that George and his family moved in with Bobby and Suzanne at one point, AND "Nicky", who would have been fourteen.

Which draws me to the subject of this blog post!  What on earth might it have been like in that house for Bobby to have been a 14-year-old's almost-stepdad?  He was only twenty-four himself at the time, really only old enough to have been this kid's older brother, yet he did live with them.

It makes me want to know, did they get along?  Did Nicky resent Bobby's presence?  Was he used to men coming and going in his mom's life, and therefore was pretty apathetic to the whole thing?  Was he a troublemaker, off doing his own thing most of the time?  One wonders about that part, only because it's obvious his home life with a mother who had an issue with drugs was likely very unstable.

I'd give anything to know more about this situation.  There are two things apparent to me, however, after learning these things:

1) When he loved a woman, Bobby was all in, despite the baggage she might bring with her.  Not only was Suzanne considerably older than him, she had a child from a previous relationship.  Not JUST a child, either, but a teenage boy.  How out of his element might Bobby have felt going into this?  We are able to draw from the things we read about Bobby's character that we was relatively optimistic.  Maybe he had the expectation that things would go well between him and Nicky, so he dived right in.

Now that being said, let me also be realistic and point out that often people make risky decisions when drugs are involved (and Suzanne was a fellow addict) and also lust.  Suzanne was apparently a beautiful French woman who might have made Bobby feel a little addled when he was in her presence.  So as much as I want to say his willingness to take on a relationship in spite of the challenges is a credit to Bobby's character, I have to admit that these other things could have been factors as well.

2) The other thing I thought of though was how quickly Bob offered hospitality to George Herms, who would have come with a wife and a small daughter.  If things weren't already stressful enough in the Driscoll/Stansbury household, imagine throwing these people into the loop?  It reinforces what many of us have already heard, that Bobby probably did have a big heart and was willing to help anyone, even if it meant piling people on top of each other in his (well, Suzanne's) house in Topanga Canyon.  Plus, we know he bonded with the family, as he indicates as much in his later letter to Herms from Chino.

So it's just a few more nuggets of behind-the-scene information for us to make of what we will.  There's not much of a way now to know the answer to the questions I've presented here, at least not unless Herms goes into this story during his interview for the documentary The Lost Boy.  But it gives us lots of scenarios to wonder about, doesn't it?

I love these open doors -- no matter how small, or how vague -- into Bobby's life, particularly those elusive adult years.

No Blame Game

One of the things I deeply admire about Bobby was his unwillingness to blame anyone else for what happened in his life.

Yes, there's the whole "satin cushion" remark he made that time... I think he was realistic about having been disappointed by the industry he'd unwittingly been thrown into as a child.  But not once, in the articles, letters, etc. I've read, have I seen him cast blame on or badmouth another person.

He certainly never said anything directly about Walt Disney, despite his contract having been terminated early, and even made a public appearance at Disneyland to plug the pirate ship after it had just been built.  I wonder what it took for him to do that?

He also never blamed his parents for any sort of pushing they may have done regarding his career.  He seems to have loved them with all his heart, and want nothing more than to please them.  It could be said that this was the standard relationship between Eisenhower-era parents and children, and socially conditioned respect and fear probably did have something to do with it.  But Bobby was intelligent, and he was a deep-thinker.  He could certainly have figured out where his parents may have made some mistakes (as any parent will), and caused everyone to feel sorry for him over it.  But he never did.

After his marriage broke up, he also doesn't seem to have bad-mouthed Marilyn in any way.  In the magazine article here, he cites incompatibility as the reason for the split and doesn't indulge in blaming and mud-flinging.  He treats his soon-to-be-ex-wife with respect at all times, which we all know is rare after a divorce.

Bobby also had the opportunity to blame some of his high school "friends" (one in particular) for introducing him to narcotics in the first place.  Yet again, he accepted his own responsibility for trying them.

This is definitely not to insinuate that Bobby was perfect and didn't have times of selfish behavior and recklessness.  Plenty of his legal troubles indicate that he did have his moments.  But I feel we can look over a good portion of Bobby's life and see that, on the whole, he was a loyal person to those he loved and didn't seek to put down anyone for his own misfortune.

I love how he asked Truman Capote to write his biography, if possible, "with care and skill and without attempting to shock, ridicule, accuse or enlighten, but simply, delicately, to reveal."  This was only a month or so before his death, and reminds us that despite the darkness he descended into the last few years of his life, that "light" was still flickering.