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!

Bobby and Luana! Too much cuteness...

I did find a pic this month I hadn't seen before!  Actually I found it last month, or maybe longer ago even, but who cares about these details? :D  I was hanging on to it to post on here at some point.

Who else thinks this is beyond adorable?  They both have such serious little faces!

Notice how perfectly coiffed Bobby's hair was, always.  That was a product of his era, but also, can't you just imagine how, as a little boy, he probably stood stone-cold still in front of his momma for her to gunk his head up with product so she could sculpt it so well?  At least, I always assume he went for his publicity appearances with his hair fixed already.  I'm not sure they spent quite the money and time back then on trussing up child stars for their pictures as they do now.

I know this may feel a little like an extension of the post I did on Isabelle to bring this up, but who else thinks she was absolutely FIERCE when it came to teaching Bobby manners?  I just have a feeling -- especially based on how strict she was said to be with him.  I also know from my own grandparents and stories from people older than me that those mid-century mommas could be a force to be reckoned with.  I'm betting his rules went something like this:

Don't bite your nails.  And by the way, go clean under them. (His nails were always nicely trimmed too... and I recall Clet questioning their cleanliness before one of his teen interviews).
Don't ask the adults to stop filming for you to go to the bathroom.  Hold it! (Ugh...)
No sass-mouthing.  Ever.  (I wonder if he felt a certain amount of excitement when he was neck-deep in that altercation with the surfer guy he ended up hitting with a pistol?)
Treat ladies better than you treat yourself.  (He was quite the charmer, and he always had long-term relationships to show for them).

And probably a ton more.  It polished him up quite well, at least... until he grew tired of perfection, as we know, and turned to a helper.  Anyway... hope you enjoy this one! 

I really wanted to do a post at some point discussing Bobby's artwork and more of his poems, but I have trouble sorting through his symbolism.  Anyone else who thinks they have a corner on this, please speak up!  We'd probably all love to hear from you.

A Break in the Silence!

Happy summer Sunday afternoon, Readers!  Where the heck have I been?!

Well... working alot of hours.  And truthfully, being thoroughly unable to find new material to blog about.  I typically have to tunnel down into the depths of the internet to find "new" Bobby info, and often I luck up and do come across something.  Or sometimes I'll commentate on stuff that's already general knowledge.  But lately I've just had some serious writer's block.  I had wanted to do a Father's Day post talking about Clet as I had done for Isabelle, but let me tell y'all a secret you probably already know:  there is precious little I can find on Cletus Driscoll.  He seems to have been a quiet figure that went about his daily work as a salesman and business owner and let Isabelle do most of the Bobby-ing in terms of his career.  Therefore.... guh, I just don't know what to say about him.  Then I'd wanted to do a segment on Bobby as a father, but I would need to interview one or two of the kids for this, and that's not really a viable option right now, so I let that go too.

So I'm sorry to say I don't have too much for us this week.  I will continue to try harder for my next post, which I'd like to have up sometime later in the month, but for now?  I will share with you all a background I made on PicsArt a couple weeks ago!  It is an amalgamation of some of Bobby's grown-up pictures, along with two quotes that express my personal feelings about Bobby -- and that I imagine might express some of yours!  So feel free to take it and use it, if you like it.  I had to crunch it down to fit on this page, but hopefully if you click on it you can get the full size...?

Anyway... that's all I've got for now!  By the way I'm open to take any suggestions if anyone ever wants me to feature a specific Bobby topic. 

Oh!  Good news is, www.bobbydriscoll.net is back up and running!  This makes me happy.  Finally we can access those sound files again from Bobby's radio work. 

Hope everyone has a good month.  Please stay cool!

Beautiful New Tribute Art by Morgan

I was going to wait a little longer to post this, but I got excited and couldn't.

We all know how much I love works of art/writing/music based on Bobby, because I believe that, as he himself was an artist, he would be very touched by them.  And of course I enjoy art myself, so there's that.

Anyone remember Morgan of the super amazing screenshots on Pinterest?  I featured them several months ago, or at least posted a link so you all could check them out.  Anyway, she has presented us with two cartoon drawings of Bobby that are quite excellent!  Here they are:

The first is entitled Spa Day, and is a drawing of herself and Bobby as a young man, having fun.

She has also rendered a likeness of Bobby at nineteen, which she pointed out, is her current age:

I think she has done a beautiful job cartooning Bobby's features and capturing his quirky handsomeness.  The eyebrows are GREAT!  I also like how she rendered his slender build very accurately in the first one.

Loose Guidelines for me posting your stuff... or a link to your stuff:

If anyone else ever has some tribute art or writing you'd like me to share on my blog, please contact me!  I can't absolutely promise I will post everything anyone wants me to, as I do reserve the right to decline if I feel something doesn't match the tone of this blog or is disrespectful in any way.  I'm never going to post nude pictures, pictures that don't actually resemble Bobby whatsoever (not dissing anyone's work!  I'm sure Bobby would have appreciated the effort, just I have to draw the line somewhere), or are controversial in some way.

With writing, I'll probably just post a link to your story instead of paste it in here.  It can be a little dicey to get people to read fictional stories based around Bobby's life, as some people don't think that should be done.  I myself have written one, however, and personally feel that respectful fiction in which you give plenty of disclaimers reminding people it IS just a story is an acceptable and moving way to honor him.  But again, no pornographic literature, and I don't expect writing to be perfect but I do ask that it at least be moderately correct with grammar and spelling -- not typos all over the place -- and sentence structure.  LORD!  SENTENCE STRUCTURE!  That's truly my one big bug when it comes to amateur writing.  And it needs to feature Bobby prominently and be largely about him, not be about something else and Bobby makes a supporting appearance.

One other thing:  let's not do anything featuring Bobby's children.  They are still alive and just trying to live quiet lives I think, and they may feel objectified by their names being mentioned in any Bobby-related artwork or writing.  I actually need to go myself and take their names out of my story, speaking of, because I have since felt that that shouldn't be done.

So let's give Morgan a hand for what she did here, and encourage her to continue pursuing her amazing talent!

Isabelle (intended for Mother's Day, but, well...)

So today I am going to talk about Isabelle Louise Kratz Driscoll Parker -- otherwise known as Bobby's mother.  I would have done this earlier in the month, but my life has been a three ring circus since April, just recently coming to a head, and I couldn't seem to sit in peace long enough to form a single thought to blog about.

I've definitely noticed you don't have to be a Bobby fan for long to realize most people aren't very happy with Isabelle and how she mothered Bobby.  In most people's minds, she ranks alongside Walt Disney on the list of "Who did Bobby the dirtiest." There are alot of people who say they heard from this person who talked to that person, and therefore came to the conclusion she was a horrible stage mom, an emotionally abusive mother,  a money grabber who took advantage of Bobby's fame, a naive woman for having not identified Bobby's addiction earlier, and, oh!  How dare she not bring his body home from Hart Island in short order?  And to get remarried and not be buried next to Clet and her son's cenotaph?!

It's kind of endless.  And by the way, there might be something to alot of the accusations.  But I tend to be one of those people who says, if we don't know for sure (and we have few remaining primary sources that quote her or even knew her well), let's have grace and assume there was another side to her story.  Here's what's important:  Bobby loved her.  Even if, suppose, he spent alot of time frustrated with her and felt as an adult that there were ways in which she let him down, she was his mother -- and I've read enough about Bobby to know he was a loyal, loving friend.  I've every reason to believe he was the same way with his family.  That's about all I need to know in order to give Isabelle's memory a fair chance.

Here is a picture I found of her recently!  She was a young woman here.  I've always felt that Bobby favored her a good deal more than he favored his dad, except for the nose.  They certainly share the same bold eyes and full lips.  On either side are pictures of Bobby I feel resemble her the most here:

Isabelle died back in 1981, and aside from granting the interview in 1972 to Florence Epstein revealing what had happened to her son, we've never heard alot from her or about her.  I do hate that she was estranged from her grandchildren for whatever the reason.  I'm sure there was a story with a couple of sides behind this too, but out of respect for Bobby's children first and foremost, I think we should leave this topic alone.

Here are the pearls of first-hand knowledge we DO have.  Let's string them together and see what kind of necklace we end up with:

• We know she was a schoolteacher, and later worked for UCLA as a librarian part-time.
• By her own admission, she was a woman who liked to stay busy.
• Florence Epstein described her as jovial.
• She was born in 1904, and didn't have Bobby until 1937, so she was an older mom.  Not really by today's standards, but back then, thirty-three wasn't considered a spring chicken, especially in regards to having babies.  Knowing me and how I like to ask questions about everything, of course I've wondered, did she mean to wait so long?  Was it a struggle for her to get/stay pregnant, and that's why not only was Bobby born later, he was her only child?  This we are never told.
• According to her and assuming she was truthful in her interview, which we've no reason to doubt, Bobby gifted her during his adult years with a pair of gold earrings and a beautiful bedroom chair, "just because."
• She had lost a sister on the mission field to natives who killed her and the party she was with.  Another brother was a Baptist minister.
• Her father, Lemuel Kratz, had been a lawyer, and he died when she was only around eighteen.  Her mother, Susan Grace, remarried a man named Mahlon Hollingsworth -- all this courtesy of ancestry.com.  I know how to do my research when I need to!
• Speaking of her mother, the poor woman died in a car crash on her way to visit Bobby and Isabelle just before the release of Song of the South.  Can you imagine how hard it must have been for Bobby to continue to smile for the cameras during all that promotional work he and Luana did?
• She, herself, remarried a man named Nate Parker around three years after Cletus died.
• She is buried in her second husband's family plot, in the same cemetery as Cletus and Bobby's cenotaph (and not sure why she isn't close to them, but as you can guess, this is another reason she's given a good amount of heck).  Here is an image of that:

Something to keep in mind, though, is that some people are not big death planners, and if Isabelle hadn't taken care of her arrangements before she died, it might not have been her choice to be buried in the Parker lot, away from Bobby's cenotaph.  Her second husband, if still living, might have decided that for her.  Another obstacle may have been that by that time, there were no more plots available next to Clet.  I know my dad would have loved to have been buried close to his parents in the cemetery where our family rests, but the section they were buried in had been filled up by the time my dad passed.

Anyway, back to the facts listed above.  First of all, her claims about her sister are sadly true.  Mildred Kratz was killed on the mission field in the 20's, according to a local Cedar Rapids paper I found on newspapers.com. Isabelle had at least one more sister -- Gladys -- and a brother, Ronald, who was a Baptist pastor and died pretty young.  This, again, courtesy of ancestry.com and local papers.  

Time Out Moment:  I always try to give disclaimers about where I find things, but I can almost promise you that in every instance, I just do web searches using the right terms and pull stuff up.  Anyone can do it, so if you ever doubt information I give on here, please know that's how I found it and feel free to check behind me.  Some stuff is bound to be incorrect some of the time, but I try hard to be factual!  I unfortunately don't own much exclusive Bobby content from primary sources, so not able to verify that everything I find online is always 100% correct, but I do my best!  I try to verify things I learn in at least two places.

Anyway... in the interview Bobby did for Fred D. Brown, he said his mother worked to put herself through college to teach school, so she seems like she might have been a strong, resilient lady.  She was her own working woman for quite a few years before she met and married Clet.  But the fact that she remarried at an older age MIGHT tell us she was also a romantic who loved married life.

She was strict enough to set limits for Bobby, as we've read in many accounts.  She still gave him chores and had him save his money, and she gave him curfews on school nights and the weekends, according to Barbara Berch Jamison's article "The Dangerous Years."

Bobby was mentioned a couple times as having kept alot of pets, however; and in some of girlfriend Patricia Nolan's letters, she asks him if she can read any of the passages to his mom -- which indicates that maybe she was fond of the older woman and didn't mind sharing her affection for Bobby with her.  So a soft side of Isabelle must have existed.  

Now I'm going to mention what we have all probably thought about, and that is... if Isabelle found out Bobby had died just a year prior, wouldn't it have been simple enough for her to arrange for him to be brought up and reburied in the place where she memorialized him next to his father?  It should have been far easier to locate him then than it would have been later, and what mother wouldn't walk through hell barefoot to bring her baby home from a place like Hart Island?  Well... here's what I got to thinking about the other day when I asked myself the same question:

I want to tread lightly here, because I want us to think of Bobby as the person he was... not what became of him in death and after.  But we also can't ignore that there could have been logistical problems in transporting a body that had been underground a year.  I don't think I have to be specific here, I'm sure everyone understands.  And if we don't even want to imagine the complications that could have gone into that, then what must it have been like for Isabelle to have been faced with them?  What details might she have had to learn in order to discuss his identification?  How haunting might it have been for her to have to realize she would not, could not see him to tell him goodbye because of what death and the passing of time had rendered?  Maybe she felt she could hang onto her sanity much better -- be able to put one foot in front of the other without shattering to pieces -- if she let him lay where he was and be remembered who he used to be.  We can never begin to "armchair critic" our way into a situation like this.

So I hope you've enjoyed seeing these pictures, learning a little about Isabelle if you didn't already know this stuff, and maybe thinking of things in a different light.  Mrs. Driscoll was just as imperfect as the next mother -- and who knows, maybe the worst of the awful rumors about her were true.  But she was still Bobby's mother, and if nothing else, we can be grateful that she gave him to the world, even if just for a little while.

Peter Pan, and thoughts about a GREAT role...

Hello All!  I haven't posted in several weeks, which is odd for me, so I wanted to check in.  I could have definitely worked harder to find something to talk about this month, just I've been lazy... so I'm going to take an easy route and just post a picture!  This one is courtesy of eBay, and I might just bid on it because it's so awesome.

I think I've already said I have a special fondness for Bobby's Peter Pan stuff.  The way his hair is obviously "fixed", with the hat pinned on, makes me think this was for the Christmas Special of '51, plus the presence of a Christmas book.  Was this a script?  Just a random book he'd found lying around somewhere?  A promo picture featuring Peter Pan Learning About Christmas or some such...?

It's definitely visible in this picture that the infamous acne problem was already present.  Acne has been a puberty issue the world over for probably hundreds of years... but I can't help but think Bobby's problem was more than likely exacerbated by having worn makeup for years prior while making movies.  And you know kids -- especially boys.  He might not have been very diligent about washing it off at night. 

Anyway, he had such a sweet and mischievous little smile.  I'm always on the lookout for movie parts I could post in my Modern Roles for Bobby feature, and I hadn't come across any in a long time... until last week, it occurred to me that he might have been a fantastic Loki for the Marvel comics movies.  His "elf-like" eyes and eyebrows, quirky smile, and slight build would have translated wonderfully into a Norse god of mischief!  I read someone once liken him to a leprechaun -- a comparison I hated, by the way, because it felt so disrespectful to him (though can't put my finger on why) --  but there's just no denying he could have owned any roles that called for him to look a little otherworldly in the fantasy sense. 

So that's it for now!  As always, I'm still on the lookout for stuff.  It is my goal this month to finally sit down and watch him in So Goes My Love, and I'm sure when I do, I'll commentate on it here.