 |
| | |
|
| A Teen-age Idol Passes 30 |
Jimmy Darren of ‘The Time Tunnel’ is trying to forget his ‘Gidget’ days.
|  |
Perched at the top of the Santa Monica mountains, past the show places of the foothills, and up in those craggy regions where movie stars build hideaways, there’s the fanciest candy-store-come-pool-hall this side of South Philadelphia. It has an ice-cream fountain, pool table, pin-ball machine, stacks of all the records Sinatra ever made, and a few things they never thought of on 9th Street in South Philly—like an outdoor barbecue, a swimming pool and a view of Nancy Sinatra’s rooftop 350 feet below. | | | | |
When The Time Tunnel’s James Darren is not working he is likely to be alone in this game house out in his back yard. (“I like solitude. I have very few friends. I really prefer being alone.”) At the studio, before Time Tunnel stopped filming, he was a social isolate. (“I hate the commissary. It’s worse than a Hollywood party, everybody staring at you, saying ‘Hiya, baby,’ ‘Hiya, sweetheart.’”) He locked himself up in his trailer-dressing-room every day right through the lunch break. (“I’d rather think.”)
Among the things this brooding loner has to think about is a Hollywood career that sounds like something from a corner-drugstore magazine rack. Eleven years ago Jimmy Ercolani was a reticent kid from South Philadelphia. Then (zap!) as “Jimmy Darren,” he was an Instant Star; he went on to make 14 movies; his fan club grew to be one of the biggest any movie star ever had; as a singer he became a teen-age idol.
When he was 17, way back in 1954, Jimmy had made a fruitless trip to Hollywood to be “discovered.” He hung around Schwab’s drugstore for six months and finally left town. Later he was riding an elevator in mid-Manhattan one day when he was spotted by a talent executive from Columbia Pictures. In a matter of days Darren was in Hollywood, In a matter of weeks he was on a soundstage in his first starring picture, “Rumble on the Docks.” Says Joyce Selznick, his discoverer, “He was not one of those untouchable stars. He got right down there with the fans. And he was so beautiful.”
What is it that electrifies talent executives, galvanizes studio heads, generates fan mail, breeds fan clubs and jangles female susceptibilities across the land? You have only to ask the Other Sex.
They say it’s his striking good looks—basic, classic, Greco-Roman: “I’ve known any number of young actors who were pretty, but Jimmy has a structure underneath that’s never going to change.” They say it’s something no man will ever know: “Jimmy makes me feel like a woman and a little girl at the same time.”
Today the “former” teen-age idol is 31. It bothers him that his earlier celebrity in the three beach-party flicks—“Gidget,” “Gidget Goes Hawaiian” and “Gidget Goes To Rome”—still hangs on. It was the title song for the first “Gidget” that resulted in his recording contract and a whole separate career that is still happily tootling along.
Being a teen-age idol is not all fun and games, he recalls. “At times it was Chinese torture. In San Francisco a crowd of girls age 13 to 16 tore down the TV studio doors, pulled me out and pinned me to the ground, tearing my jacket, ripped my clothes off and pulling souvenir hairs from my head.”
In a New England town the police chief saved him from rapacious fans by pushing him into a waiting squad car in the manner of The Beatles. Once in Hollywood he found his car fenders, doors and trunk painted with the names and phone numbers of four girl fans. Another time a fan inked her phone number on the bottom of his new trench coat. “It’s a nice thing to look back on,” says Jim, “but it wasn’t much fun at the time.” Most of those girls have evidently stuck with him. Darren has received an avalanche of fan mail at 20th Century-Fox this year.
|
|
Darren’s story begins in South Philadelphia, which also spawned Bobby Rydell, Joey Bishop, Eddie Fisher, Joey Forman, Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Mario Lanza, Buddy Greco, Al Martino and Chubby Checker. “James William Ercolani” was his billing at birth, and he lived all his boyhood in a boisterous Italian household with his father, William, his mother, Virginia Di Josie, his kid brother, Johnny, three uncles, an aunt and his maternal grandparents, in their two-storey, five-bedroom, brick-front house at 10th and Ritner. His parents worked in a menswear factory and his grandmother prepared the pasta and sauce and ran the household for all 10 people. A lot more relatives showed up on Sundays.
Grandmother Clara Di Josie gave young Jimmy his start. “When I was 8, she used to give me a dime to sing her favorite song, ‘Besame Mucho,’ and she would call in some of the neighbors to listen.”
Jimmy was the shy one in the roisterous menage. Egged on by his extroverted family, he took to the trumpet, but not very enthusiastically. “Once when I was playing hooky from trumpet lessons my uncle and dad caught me in the candy store on 9th Street, hiding under the pinball machine, sitting on my trumpet case. They took me home and we all sat in the kitchen and talked. My dad had been laying out $3 a week for my lessons and he had just bought me a new trumpet. It was a tremendous disappointment for him.
“The only talent I had that I really dug was singing. So my dad started going with me to the clubs. I was 15 then and Frank Palumbo let me sing (at no pay) at his classy ‘C.R. Club’ in Philadelphia three nights a week. I had a lot of inhibitions. I sweated all the time.”
People often told him, “You ought to be in movies,” and the notion started to germinate. Finally, nearing 18, with his savings from an apprentice job at his uncles’ jewelry store, plus a loan from his father, Jimmy financed a six-month trip to Hollywood, with the sole aim of being Discovered. “How did I know that where I really should have been was in a Manhattan elevator?” he says now.
If his career was sensational, his private life was more so—if we are to believe the fan magazines which relentlessly chronicled his every emotion (Darren himself says that the fan magazine accounts are substantially accurate). Their first intimate “exposé” was his “secret marriage.” Seems that prior to the New York elevator, on Jan. 13, 1955, he and his “childhood sweetheart,” Gloria Terlitzky, both 18, drove secretly to Elkton, Md., and were married by a justice of the peace. “That same afternoon,” the way those magazines put it, ”they returned to their separate homes to have supper with their parents as usual and sleep in their own narrow beds.” Jimmy said (they said), “We were crazy in love. We didn’t want to wait any longer.”
In Hollywood the ladies of the gushy prose followed every nuance of the Darrens’ marital relationship, the birth of Jimmy Jr. on Dec. 3, 1956, their tiffs and spats, their separation in 1958, their divorce. Jimmy said (they said), “We were children playing house.”
Next they revealed that Jimmy was secretly dating Evy Norlund Larsen, formerly Miss Denmark in the Miss Universe contest of 1958. Fans denounced her for “stealing” Jimmy from Gloria. But in time they made an emotional adjustment to the new romance and started organising Jimmy and Evy fan clubs. Their 1960 wedding was covered from every angle. There were cops on hand to hold back the fans. A girl said, “I touched his sleeve!” Another said, “I touched his hand!” A photographer said, “Come on, bridey and groom, smile!”
Darren“s second marriage has generated a big fat zero in the way of sensationalism. Fans were only mildly titillated when their first son, Christian, now 6, was born. Second son Anthony is now 3 and Jimmy Jr. is 10. For the rest, it’s despair time for gossip mongers.
“We have no social life,” Jimmy says. “No Chasen’s, no premières. We belong to the Daisy but it’s a very boring club. I wouldn’t dream of going out without my wife and kids. I don’t get a better feeling from anything than being with my wife. We are great friends aside from being lovers.”
The first thing Jim did when he made it big was buy a house for his mother and father. It was the first they had owned in 25 years of marriage. “I’d like to support my family on both sides—Ercolanis, Di Josies, uncles, grandparents, everybody.”
Darren has adopted the Sinatras as his West Coast family. Of Frank he says, “I can identify with him. I know pretty much what he went through. To see Frank a success makes me feel good. I can look at him and say that’s what my goal is. A down-to-earth, great, warm man.” Of Nancy Sr.: “She’s family. There’s a lot of warmth over at her house.” Of Nancy Jr.: “She knows more about what I’m really like than anyone.”
And what is Jimmy really like? Says Nancy, “Show-business people aren’t real people any more. Something happens to the ego. But with Jimmy there are never any pretences, façades, ever.” Says a studio executive who was there when it all started to happen: “Jimmy weathered the clamor better than almost anybody. He was the Golden Boy who never let it go to his head. Yet somehow he never grabbed that brass ring.”
Is it that Darren lacks that one ingredient commonly considered vital to success in this industry of images? His discoverer, Miss Selznick, who also unearthed Tony Curtis, put it this way: “Tony grabbed the world by the tail, but Jimmy was never the tiger.” A Columbia publicist in the days of his rapid rise said, “Jimmy never played the Hollywood game. He didn’t play up to people who could do him some good.” Yet if nice guys finish last, how do you figure Perry Como? Dean Martin?
Darren is a great brooder about such questions. He’s moody; he admits it. “It’s nothing I try to hide. It’s from not being able to do the things I want to do.” He’s had the surfing bit. “Forget ‘Gidget,’ I want a chance to do other things.”
He knows what he likes: “Time to prepare, respect, and the opportunity to voice my opinion. I like a quiet set. I like the director to ask me if I’m ready, not only the cameraman.” What he doesn’t like: “Treating me like I’m a prop, which I’m not.”
Jimmy a prop? Not likely. Not as long as he has the wife, the kids, the family, the soda fountain, the pool hall, the pinball machine and the mountain top which is really a little bit of South Philadelphia, a little bit of himself. |
|
| |
| | |
|
TV Guide
Vol.15, No.25
June 24,1967
Issue 743 |  |  | | | Cover | |
 | | | Page 14 | |
 | | | Page 15 | |
 | | | Page 17 | |
 | | | Page 18 | | | |
|
