Bobby's Girls - Part 2 (Adulthood)

As promised, my second installation of "Bobby Girls" - a close look at the relationships we knew Bobby to have.

In my last post I chronicled a few of his teenage girlfriends, plus delved into his marriage to Marilyn Jean Rush in a limited way.  As I said there, anyone who wants to know more should read Bobby's own words from 1961, found in this article.

And, in that very same article, we are introduced to the great Suzanne Carrier Stansbury.  You know, Suzanne of the infamous animal clinic burglary.

Bobby mentions having been drawn in by Suzanne's looks.  I'm sure she was very beautiful (it's kind of hard to tell in the one picture we have of her), and drew him in with her sexy French accent and older woman experience (we read she was a decade older than Bobby).  And, as Loretta Lynn says in a line that would be considered super sexist by millennial standards, "after all, he's just a man." :):)

You'll notice there are next to no indicators painted in the article above that Suzanne was a particularly bad influence on Bob, and she even goes so far as to say he got himself in so much legal trouble by being around the wrong people.

... And that is positively cringeworthy when hindsight tells us she was one of those people herself.  In this passage from Flash of Eden by Paul Ferrara, which obviously gets a couple of details wrong about Bobby's crimes, we learn that Suzanne was out finding people to get high with while Bobby was in Chino.  Pair that with the burglary, and you've got a pretty good indicator that she was every bit as into drugs as he was at the time.  What makes this all the harder to stomach is the idea that Bobby was away in rehab, even though we do know that unfortunately alot of people go to rehab only because court mandates it, and it gets them out of a sentence.  Because we haven't yet gotten to hear from George Herms or any of his other friends who knew him from around that time, it's uncertain whether Bobby was truly serious about getting clean in Chino long-term or not.  But if he was, it had to be crazy discouraging to come back home to this.  And we've definitely reason to believe he did go back home to Suzanne, as he wrote one of his last letters in Chino before his release to Herms, still declaring his ardent love for his girlfriend. 

Oh my gosh, I have looked up as much as I possibly can to try to trace this woman both before and after her relationship with Bobby, and I can find nothing.  She seems to have ghosted.  She could have gone back to France, changed her name, gotten married, or all of the above, and we really don't have a trail to follow her down.  The only things we know about her we know from Bobby's interview -- and because he was neck-deep in his addiction and a fair amount of deception trying to hide it, it's hard to know if this is the FULL story -- but he said she was a war bride who married an airman in World War II, came back over to the U.S. with him and their son, and at some point he left her.  She then took jobs at department stores and as a cocktail waitress, trying to get by.

Now if this were truly the case, and it's very plausible, it does give us some sympathy for her.  Even in California, times were what they were back then, and I'm sure she was often judged for being a single mother and a divorcee.  She was also a foreigner.  Chances are, she took to drugs herself in order to numb some of her own pain and disillusionment after her husband took off.  She still had her son, Nicky, with her when she met Bobby and moved him in with her, and we can bet that was a serious adjustment for all of them.  Fourteen is a tough age for the kids who have everything going for them.  Nicky was being raised by a mom who was in a relationship with a man only ten years older than him (and who knows how often this kind of thing had happened before), plus they were both addicts.  See more about my thoughts on this from my post here.

I guess the thing I'd like most to know is what happened between Bobby and Suzanne.  I can't personally dig enough up to tell me.  All I know is, he was with her when he was released from Chino in early 1962, and by the end of the next year, he wasn't.  I'm not sure if he broke up with her... she broke up with him... they just drifted apart.... or if she moved away.  I'd really love it if someone would shed light on this who might know.  He married Didi in the fall of 1963 after a VERY brief courtship, so there's always a chance he could have left Suzanne for this other woman, but something tells me he and Suzanne didn't make it quite that long.

So... from what I can gather... after 1962, Suzanne just disappeared.  It's unlikely she's alive today, as she would be over ninety years old now.  Not impossible, but as many people as Bobby knew who died as young as their sixties and seventies, chance seems to be stacked against us.  I guess what I hope is, she got help of her own at some point during her life, and that her son ended up with a peaceful adulthood.  Everyone deserves peace and safety.  I pray they found it eventually.

Our next -- and last -- relationship to discuss is that that Bobby had with Sharon "Didi" Morrill.

If we ever thought we knew next to nothing about Suzanne, we know even less about Didi.  Or rather, there is more information about her individually (though still precious little), but this is one relationship we never heard Bob talk about himself.  This could be because, post-Chino, Bobby all but disappeared from the public eye.  I figure some of this was his desire, as he'd become more enveloped in the art scene, but it could also be because by 1963, Bobby was considered a hundred percent washed up.  His television appearances had ceased, and the sad thing is, even if Bobby hadn't meant for it to go down that way, his very public sentence to Chino probably took care of any of the remaining do-gooders who had wanted to help him get a new start back in the late 50's.  Even the most empathetic of people during this era still understood very little about drug addiction.

So, Didi!  First, let's talk about who she was.  According to her brother Terry in the book Semina Culture by Michael Duncan (which I'd love to own, by the way), Didi was a big-hearted, thrill-seeking, drug-addicted woman who grew up in a middle-class family and became an airline stewardess after she left school.  However, the regimented lifestyle didn't appeal to her for long, and she soon left the job.  From then on, it seems she lived a largely transient lifestyle, had alot of different relationships with different men, and contributed in small ways to Wallace Berman's art and poetry scene.  She can be seen for a couple of minutes dancing in Berman's Aleph.

I've not yet read anything chronicling Bobby and Didi's falling in love period, but I would imagine it went something like this:  Bobby was as mesmerized as the next guy was by this free-spirited young woman.  An article I once read on Kirby Doyle (but, of course, can't find now) states that in the summer of '63, she left Doyle, whom she had been with for years (even taking on his last name periodically as she'd done later with Bobby), with a gentleman who had been exclusively homosexual to that point, but fell into a fury of infatuation after having watched her dance one night.  This, in and of itself, tells us Didi was probably a charmer. 

There's also more than a good chance that Bobby had known her for awhile prior to their relationship.  They were both friends of Wallace Berman's, Didi actually appearing in a few of his avant-garde photographs, and we don't know but that maybe he had admired her from a distance before she finally became available for him.  I'm sure also that drugs brought them even closer together.  One has to wonder, was Bobby likewise close with Kirby Doyle?  What did Doyle think when, after returning from her excursion with another man, she immediately took up with Bobby?  Was Bobby concerned about that, or was he too smitten to care?  There are more questions than answers about this period of Bobby's life, so I don't know if we'll ever know their "meet story."

All we do know is that they were married in November of 1963 in a ceremony officiated by Bob Alexander.  The whole thing was unofficial, as we know, and my conjecture is that maybe the ceremony was Bobby's idea.  My only reason for thinking so is knowing that Didi had been with more than a handful of men by this point and had never bothered to "marry" them previously.  Bobby, however, had religious sentiments and seemed to favorably regard marriage, despite how it went the first time for him.  Even though it never ended up happening, he had wanted to marry Suzanne Stansbury as soon as they could manage to do so.  This tells me that marriage was still a very important thing to Bob.

Bobbydriscoll.net shows us a thank you note Bobby had written to Alexander, thanking him for the marriage and sending him a candid shot of Didi.  So, a new chapter of Bobby's love life was written!  And then....

And then what?

Inconsistent stories and, eventually, nothing at all.  It's pretty much agreed upon by everyone that Didi and Bobby went together to New York around 1964.  That's when we read in Semina Culture that Bobby, Didi, and her brother tried to sell drugs there and ended up on the police's radar, which caused them to flee to Canada.  Then, supposedly, Bobby went back down to NYC and Didi went home to California.

Only, that couldn't have been the end of the story.  In 1965, we know they appeared in Heliczer's Dirt together, her under the last name "Driscoll."  Things had to have been good enough for them then.  Then we know that in the winter of 1966 (which I always assume to mean January/February of that year, not the end), Bobby posted his "Sunday Bonnet Smile" poem in The Floating Bear, and Didi drew a picture to go with it -- though, once again, using the surname Doyle.

So what exactly happened?  When did Didi go back to California, and did she and Bobby continue to correspond as friends?  Were they on-again, off-again for awhile?  At Thanksgiving in 1966, Diane DiPrima speaks of Didi spending some time with her and her partner because "her old man had gone a little too berserk, even for her."  This was mentioned just after a reference to the drugs Didi did, so I assume whomever she was with was experiencing a really scary high.  I wondered if this was Bobby.

Though, yet again, DiPrima calls her by Doyle.  Had she gone back to Kirby Doyle by this point?

I really have no idea what happened to Didi, and to her and Bobby's relationship.  What I do know is that the next thing I was able to find was that she died of something related to heavy drug-use in the 80's or 90's, and Bobby....

Well, we know what happened to Bobby.  He died completely alone.

We can't judge Didi for leaving him to die, really, because we just don't know what happened.  He could have driven her away.  He could have wanted to be alone more than he wanted her with him.  And, I mean, sure, she could have ran off -- as seemed to be her habit -- to greener pastures.  But until someone knows for sure, I don't want to cast any blame on her.

Were there other girls for Bobby?  The one-after-the-other nature of all three of his significant adult relationships really leaves no time in between for anything else serious, though we'd have to know how/when he separated from Suzanne to know if there was a sizeable enough gap before Didi for him to have fallen for someone else.  As far as after Didi, we can either guess that Bobby was unable to find anyone else that intellectually and romantically stimulated him enough for a relationship, or that he wasn't able to attract girls as easily anymore.  We know he was missing teeth by then, his hair was graying, and heroin causes the skin to appear yellow and leathery.  It could be that any would-be partner that happened post-1966 considered him to look far too old for her tastes.  He may also have been so heartbroken that he never found true happiness in any of his relationships to date that he decided never to try again.

He could also have known he was dying, and didn't want to issue promises he couldn't keep, or saddle a woman with caring for him through a pretty rough physical demise.

So there they are -- the woman we know of that Bobby loved.  I hope you guys have enjoyed reading these posts as much as I've enjoyed writing them!  And, as I always say, we'd love to hear from you if your own knowledge can fill in any blanks.

NOTE:  The above image came from ebay.  It's a Party Crashers still of Bobby and Connie Stevens.  And even though the quality I was able to secure here kind of sucks, stay tuned, because I bought it! :)  When I get it, I'll scan it in at full size so you all can see it.  It's said to be pretty rare, and it must be because I'd never seen it before.

Bobby's Girls (Part 1 - The Early Years)

Bobby, from what we can deduce from letters, songs he loved, things he said in his handful of interviews, etc., was quite the romantic.  He never went long, from the time he was an adolescent onward, without being in a serious relationship.  I've never heard of or read any evidence claiming that he was a "lady's man," however, or a philanderer.  He was known to be flirty at times, but it doesn't seem he really used it as a means for an end, grabbing up all the girls who would have him.  Rather, it seems to me he was most interested in finding that one person who would be his forever.

This, as we know, didn't work out very well for him.  I don't want to call him a serial monogamist, as having gone through three relationships by the time he was thirty-one seems pretty standard for alot of guys.  But he did continue to try to find that person, despite the ending each of his relationships had.

So!  I'm going to talk a little about this in my post today.  Mind you, my blog is for me, as an admirer of Bobby's, to simply discuss parts of his life as I see them and feel them, not to shed any disrespectful light on either him or anyone involved with him.  Therefore, I don't intend in the least to tear any of these women down.  Bobby had his own faults and baggage he brought into each relationship that, I'm sure, helped to bring about the demise of each.  I adore the man, but he was not perfect.  I also want to say that the reason I feel comfortable doing this is because Bobby himself, while always being tasteful and discreet about his relationships, never seemed bothered by making them known to the public.  If he'd been ultra-private in this regard, I'd feel more trepidation touching on this topic myself.  But since I feel he'd be okay with the way I'm going about this, I'm going to dive right in here.

Okay, so we know that in his teens he was involved with (at least) Patricia Nolan, Susan Strasberg, and Louise Kane.  I won't go into the adolescent relationships so much, as we don't know much about them, and what kid with Bobby's looks and charm didn't do some playing the field?  I'm not really sure how serious any of these relationships were.  We've all run across his letters to Pat Nolan when he was in the first half of his teens (if you want a refresher, you can find them at bobbydriscoll.net as well as tons of other places).

We know about Louise Kane only because Bobby mentioned her in an interview he did just after he began his stage run of "The Boy with the Cart" (Tucson Daily Citizen, 2/5/54).  And that's all we know about her.  Maybe this one didn't last long.

According to a would-be biographer, he met and dated Susan Strasberg, daughter of Lee Strasberg, when he visited New York a couple times as an older teen.  The biographer states that Susan confirmed the relationship, as well as the fact that she had great difficulty talking about Bobby because the subject broke her heart.  I have wondered if this is the girl from "the movie colony" that Bobby's mom mentions in the interview she did after revealing his death back in 1972.

These are only a few of the relationships Bobby had before his marriage to Marilyn, and there were quite possibly a few more.  He mentioned in his 1961 interview that he'd dated Connie Stevens briefly, and we may know more about that here shortly when the documentary is released, as Stevens is one of the people interviewed.

So now we get to Marilyn.  We get the best glimpse we ever get into this relationship in Bobby's 1961 interview, which you can also find on bobbydriscoll.net.  It seems they were both young, lonely, and vulnerable in their own way.  I tread very lightly here, because Marilyn is the mother of Bobby's children, and I know the topic of their parents is a very personal one to them.  So all I really want to say about Marilyn is that my heart truly does break for her.  She was young, probably very much in love with Bobby and hopeful about a white picket-fence future with him, raising a family.  Who isn't at nineteen?  So when you take the "nervous disorder" talked about in his interview (and I'd rather not pursue the topic any farther than that in this post), and the mayhem he brought into the marriage with his drug and legal problems... plus three young children... you have the broken-dreams situation we read about later.  I'm sure this was a very hurtful thing for everyone involved, and I'd imagine Bobby probably had some regrets about the way alot of it was handled.  I simply pray that in the aftermath, Marilyn found some peace.

Almost immediately after he and Marilyn divorced -- actually, during their separation but before the divorce was finalized -- Bobby met Suzanne Stansbury.  And that's where I will pause for today.  More on Suzanne... and Sharon Morrill... next post!