Okay, first of all: today, I happened to be knocked flat with an email giving me about ten comments needing approval that some of you submitted as long ago as TWO YEARS. I just want to say I am so very sorry I didn't receive any notification about these! I'm not sure why I didn't, but from now on, rest assured I am going to start manually checking my Comments Moderation page instead of waiting for notifications to come to me, because evidently they only do half the time. I am always looking to dialogue with people on here, so you can imagine my distress at realizing I'd missed out on some great opportunities. If ever you send me a comment and it doesn't appear on this blog within a couple of days, please email me: jessah82@gmail.com. Chances are, I just didn't see it. I obviously don't approve spam or anyone being hateful, rude, or argumentative, so if your comment falls under either of those categories, count this as your reason why it was ignored. Again, so sorry, Guys...
So, back to it! I decided to do another ancestry.com free trial, because I am quite the amateur sleuth. Or so I like to think. I've continued to be a total zero in regards to finding good stuff about Bobby from people who actually knew him. In the last few months I've tried to reach out to John Wilder and Robert Paget, two friends of Bobby's from way back (Paget starred with Bobby in The Party Crashers) who have an online presence. Nil. I know Dean Stockwell is said to make it a precedent not to talk about Bobby to anyone, but I keep hoping the right time will come and he will want to speak about the things he remembers. If he does, though, it probably won't be to me, a backwater southern belle with no tangible connection to Bobby and family, who isn't writing a book or making a documentary. I also have tried to reach out to someone I thought could quite possibly be THE Patricia Nolan (Bobby's teen girlfriend), but haven't scored anything there, either.
It takes money to seriously pursue information about people, mind you. And connections. And thick skin. I have none of that. I certainly lack the persistence to do hassle people in the name of research, and that's usually what it takes to get the job done. If someone tells me to leave them alone, I will go out of my way to do so. Maybe I need to partner my blog with someone who can do my investigations for me.
Anyway, back to Ancestry.
You'd be surprised at just how very little there is about Bobby on there. The record of his marriage to Marilyn, and the manifest for the ship he and his parents were passengers on, bound to England for the filming of Treasure Island... under which he was listed as "Robbie Driscoll" by the way. Not sure if that was a mistake or an attempt to keep a low profile. I did, however, find this!
I'm thinking this about has to be OUR Bobby, because by the end of 1960 I believe he was living in Topanga Canyon around George Herms and the rest of the art scene, and 1960 would have been the first election he could have registered to vote for, as twenty-one was the voting age back then. This would have been the JFK vs. Richard Nixon election, and I'm just betting Bobby was a JFK man. Young, full of new ideas, this would have been the candidate I think would have appealed most to him. Pure conjecture, but pretty good chances at being correct I think.
I love how his party is Declines to State. Why was this? Bobby's father was a registered Democrat I discovered, which at the time was the party preference of the working-class man. The political climate nowadays lends itself to Democrat = liberal and Republican = conservative, but those terms, as such, weren't relevant back then, if those classifications even existed loosely at all. I'm guessing Bobby didn't want to be labeled. He wanted to feel free to vote for the candidate, not the cause, perhaps. All very in keeping with the way he seems to have been feeling about life back then as a young man trying to find himself.
The biggest batch of information I found on Ancestry, though, was about Suzanne Stansbury. This is a woman we know very little about, either personally or in regards to Bobby, other than that they were arrested together in 1961, and he mentioned her in one of his Chino letters to George Herms and in his 1961 interview. Bobby had stated there that Suzanne had come over to the U.S. from France with an airman she'd met during the war -- presumably World War II -- and had been abandoned by him. Given those few details, I managed to find this:
Basically, if you can't read these (tried to make them big enough) we see that Suzanne came over as a war bride just after World War II ended in 1946 -- and just in time for Christmas. She was a fresh-faced 20-year-old with brown hair (she was blonde out of a bottle by the time she caught Bobby's eye fourteen years later), green eyes, standing just 5'4 and able to read only in French. It says here the man she married lived in Louisiana, which was where she was bound. It begs asking, how did she manage to get all the way to California in later years?
(By the way, it's weird to think that Suzanne came to the U.S. as a war bride just a month after the premier for Song of the South. Bobby was only nine-years-old.)
Her husband was one Martin Stansbury, she had five dollars in her pocket (which would be about $66 in 2020), and she had never been incarcerated.
Scant details, but it tells me this: Suzanne was young, probably very in love and optimistic about her future in America. She had effectively placed her life in her husband's hands -- a husband she might not have known very well. Thus is the story of so many of the war brides. It all ended up happily for some of them, but for others, life had to have turned very difficult if true colors were revealed and they were left alone, knowing no one in their new country. There is no way to know what actually caused the separation between Martin and Suzanne -- whether he did abandon her and their son Nicholas out of sheer neglect... whether he struggled with PTSD and found personal relationships too difficult to sustain after having survived a war... or how much Suzanne herself did or did not contribute to the factors causing the split-up. But that she eventually found herself across the country, addicted to drugs, raising a son by herself and working as a cocktail waitress testifies to the fact that life must have been tough. She may have had to resort to making tough and questionable choices just to sustain herself and "Nicky" as he's called later by George Herms in an interview. This while also having very little command of the English language, probably. People weren't as kind and judgment-free toward single mothers then as they are now, particularly if she started out in the South.
So it's not the full story about Suzanne Stansbury, certainly, and I fill in the blanks only with ponderings, conjecture and my own conclusions. One thing this search yielded for me, though, was way more compassion for Suzanne and women like her, as I reflected a few paragraphs up. I can be frustrated for how her influence was doubtlessly horrible for Bobby when he was most vulnerable... but she was probably vulnerable, too. I hope she found a sense of peace before she died, and hate that life dealt her such a raw hand. She surely made her own bad decisions, maybe even in marrying the wrong person who ended up abandoning her after bringing her home to his family... but how many people make the same kinds of decisions now, and have a chance to redeem part of their lives? It doesn't look like Suzanne ever had the chance to.
Now that I've thoroughly depressed us, let me just say I'm glad we have far more compassion for people in these situations nowadays, and more understanding for how they find themselves stuck in the mire of bad decisions and hopelessness.
So with that, I say Rest in Peace Suzanne Stansbury. I bet you had your own blustery, beautiful, devastating story to tell.
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