A "new" picture of Bobby! Actually, this has apparently been on Facebook since 2010. It was posted for public viewing by Bobby's high school friend Sherwood Hilliard, who has unfortunately not been active on Facebook since 2014, and therefore I couldn't figure out how to ask if I could re-post this here. So let me just say, I do not own it, and if it causes any problem for it to be here (I'm speaking specifically if Mr. Hilliard were ever to see this and take issue), please just let me know and it will come down.
Our boy is there in the middle, and he was about fifteen -- it was taken in 1952. The third boy pictured is one Dick Glass, and this was in Pacific Palisades, where I believe they all lived at the time.
That big, fun grin! From what we ever hear about Bobby from his friends, that expression completely captures his sweet, happy personality. I'm not sure whose car that was, but it looks like kind of a junker they were maybe hoping to fix up. We know how Bobby loved his cars.
Gosh, I'm so glad to have finally found something different. I mean, and this takes work, Guys. I did a Facebook image search for Bobby Driscoll that yielded this, but you have to be patient and meticulous and make it through ALLLLL the pictures that have anything to do with anybody or anything named "Bobby Driscoll." That means people who happen to share that name, old pictures of him we've seen recycled again and again, usually posted alongside a sob story about his life, but then occasionally it'll all pay off and you run into THIS -- a gem among the junk and the crystals.
So this got me excited to see what else is out there all over again -- and trust me, I needed the motivation. So I went back to archive.org and searched through the text files, and came across something else that came out when he was around that same age. It was an article from something called The Children's Newspaper from November 15th, 1952. I'll quote it here:
"Boy film actor Bobby Driscoll is studying engineering as a profession, just in case films no longer need him when he is grown up.
'I've seen a lot of child actors,' Bobby says, 'and I've heard more about them from my mother and dad. One day your name is up in lights and all the studios are screaming for you. The next day your voice has broken and parts get fewer and smaller until they come to a dead stop. If that should ever happen to me Lean always fall_ back (sic) on my engineering training I hope!'"
(The last sentence must have been mistranslated when digitalized, but I'm sure it meant something like, "I can fall back on my engineering training.")
Let's take a moment here.
I felt profoundly sad upon reading this because we all know that is exactly what happened. Bobby's firing from Disney was only a few months down the road from this very statement. But this tells me something -- a few things.
Firstly, Bobby knew this could happen. He knew he could become not so important an entertainment figure anymore, and he was trying to prepare for that. He'd said over the years anyway that he didn't necessarily know he wanted to be an actor forever, and had even mentioned civil engineering back when he was younger as a career he'd be interested in pursuing. So what happened?
Well... I'd imagine that even though he knew in theory he could be bounced from the movie star scene, he probably had no idea it was going to happen as quickly and cruelly as it did when Walt Disney let him go within the next six months. By all accounts, he was emotionally derailed by the action, and the engineer plans just didn't pan out. Why not? Well... being bullied at school, and definitely meeting up with drugs are both things that can take a young person's hopes and dreams and toss them in File Thirteen. This is evidently what happened to Bobby. In his later years, he would say to interviewer Fred D. Brown that he'd tried to go to college twice, but lacked focus and motivation to follow through. I'm sure this, at least, was due to addiction.
Secondly though, it debunks what everyone has said about Cletus and Isabelle. They evidently knew Bobby might not always hold onto his stardom, so they did at least try to encourage him to pursue another career. Now I'm not sure how hard they pushed the engineering, or what their follow-through was like, but anyone who says they didn't even try to equip Bobby for his future isn't entirely right. The Driscolls knew the hazards of child acting, and there were at least a couple of conversations in this vein had with Bobby -- enough to get him thinking about an alternate plan.
So in light of this, it seems pretty clear that Bobby and his family couldn't have been completely surprised that his star eventually burned out. I just wonder if it felt like something that might happen only in theory, but they still felt secure enough in his talent to carry him through.
Bobby was bright enough and resilient enough to have done something different with his life once the emotional trauma of being let go by Disney wore off. But, yet again, I think that's where the drugs stole that opportunity from him.
But despite how sad it is to think of the things that never were... it makes me smile to imagine them at the same time. Bobby Driscoll... one-time child star, brilliant engineer who went on to carry his genius into another art... raising children, mentoring young actors, making new connections, sharing his artistic vision with the world by maybe doing artwork on the side, continuing to sign autographs for delighted children and old fans with a crinkle of those impish eyes...
... So much could have been had. And even though it didn't work out that way in this lifetime, it will be truly exciting to see what has become of him in the next, if you believe in a heaven, a New Earth, and second chances. People can call me blithely ignorant and superstitious, but I do.
On a slightly sweeter note, Happy Mother's Day to Marilyn, who bore all three of Bobby's children. She was young, probably naive about romance and marriage, and as we came to found out later, mentally ill. Her husband was shackled by addiction. But I'm sure through all that, she did the best she could at the time.
And it was not in vain.
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