Silhouette

This, y'all, makes me very happy.  It's a silhouette of Bobby based on his late 50's likeness.  I commissioned a girl on Etsy to do it because I couldn't resist it.  Didn't she do an amazing job?

(Btw, it's by Ines Madureira at NineDesignCreations.  Go see her for all your silhouette needs, I promise she's the bomb and she will make sure you're 100% happy with something before you pay)

His lips are slightly parted here, hence why they might not seem as full as they actually were.  But I feel it's a wonderful likeness of a beautiful, spirited man.

Hart Island

On "A Daughter's Musings," Kathy Driscoll's public Facebook blog (Bobby's daughter), she states she is going next month to visit her daddy for the first time on Hart Island, and plant California poppy seeds for him.

This is a beautiful thing to hear.  I'm so glad one of his children finally gets this chance to go to him.  California poppies are among my favorites flowers (and I'm not a big flower person, so that's really saying something), and it makes me wonder if it was Bobby's, and that's specifically why she's taking them!  Either way, I know it will absolutely warm his heart.

Meanwhile, I tried to go to Hart Island myself last October and didn't make the ferry in time.  You can imagine how upset I was, having driven all the way from North Carolina.  I then wanted to try again in March for his birthday, but there was a blizzard in New York plus my dad was very sick...

So I have been planning for October again this year, to go and pay my own respects.  My plan is to take sunflowers -- my favorite flower, which I want to leave there with Bobby -- and a tile I hand-painted a message on.  I might not be able to take one or both of those things, as they are picky about what they let go on the island (I know no glass!) but going there will be enough.

Let's wish Kathy well in our hearts for her trip to finally get to whisper goodnight to her father.  Addiction may have claimed the best years of his life, those he didn't get a chance to spend on fatherhood, but I am sure the man loved his children the very best he could at the time and is so very proud of them.

Roles for Bobby Part 2

I did a blog post like this at the very beginning of "Remembering Bobby," and it was great fun.  Since then, I've continued to keep  my eye open for film/TV roles that I feel Bobby could have easily aced, and I've come up with a few more!

Here we go:

Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate

Now I love Dustin Hoffman, but I have to be honest:  he felt a little too "MAN" to be young, impressionable Benjamin Braddock in film.  I feel this role could have been played very well by Bobby who would give some naivety and youth to the film, but also the passion needed.

Robert Philip in Enchanted

Of all the "Disney princes" I can see Bobby being a shoe-in for, I would have to pick this character.  He's the charming, but serious lawyer who takes in Princess Giselle after her arrival to "the real world" from "Disney Princess-land", assuming her at first to be mentally disturbed, then falls in love with her.  It's a precious movie and I feel Bobby could have pulled Robert off very well.  Of course, Patrick Dempsey was in his 40's when he played this role, but it would have been suitable for a 30-year-old.

Eddie Tate in The Night She Won Miss America

Alot of people wouldn't identify with this if they hadn't read the book, but Eddie Tate is a young, eagle-eyed reporter who comes to fall in love with Miss Delaware at the Miss America competition in 1950.  The love goes unrequited, as Betty Jane is in love with her escort, but Eddie's tenderness toward Betty Jane and his determination to keep her safe in the heat of danger makes him a worthy competitor to wealthy Griffin.  He is described as slightly built, but handsome in a quirky way, which I think describes Bobby perfectly.  The only part that wouldn't match up is the blonde hair, but hey -- easy to get around.

Any other ideas?

Some Good Screenshots from Some Good Acting

I took more screenshots of Bobby as Lew Conover a couple days ago.  What's my fascination with this role, you may ask?

.... Nothing, actually, other than that this is one of the few leading TV roles he had as an adult that I have a copy of.  So, gotta work with whatcha got!

Which, btw, leads to another reason I'm posting these.  Running a Bobby Driscoll blog can be daunting for the lack of new content that comes 'round.  Sometimes you just have to make your own.

Oops, forgot to crop some of these, but it doesn't matter.

These might seem unremarkable but for my love affair with the man's profile.  They're good angles I thought...

 This next one is another one that interested me for good reason!

Note the similarities of this with this:

It's a great kid/adult parallel, don't you think?  It's always fascinating to me to observe how the human face changes from year to year, yet also how it stays the same over decades.

I really love these because they show how good Bobby was at conveying emotion with his face.  Often, 1950's acting could feel stiff and "professional."  Bobby, however, seemed before his time in his ability to get lost in the mood behind the lines he read.  When you actually watch this show, you can see him subtly trembling with rage in this scene and the veins in his neck popping every so slightly.  What wonderful acting ability, such a talented guy....

If there's one thing I wish I had more access to, it's Bobby's TV work.  People downplay it because it was only TV and not movies, and during his big decline, but it's still wonderful acting and the chance to see how his talent followed him into adulthood.

What might he have gone on to do?

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.