wdevoe, Fri, July 24th, 2009
So, that was two years ago — why post this now?
Because my wife asked me to, and the key to a successful marriage is doing exactly what your wife asks you to do.
Most marriage counselors call that compromise.
that being said, Here we go:
Bobby Darin.
For some reason that was the first thing that went through my mind when the nurse told me and my wife that our unborn child had a considerably pronounced arrhythmia.
Bobby Darin was born Walden Robert Cassotto on May 14, 1936. He also was born a frail boy who suffered bouts of rheumatic fever as a child that led to heart disease.
My son’s name is Nathan Alexander DeVoe. It is a very “Caucasian-American-mutt” name as my grandfather would say. While I listened to the prenatal heart monitor in the maternity ward at Samaritan Hospital, I was thinking that if my son should ever move to Hollywood to star in films or make it big working the resort circuit in the Catskills, I would hope that he wouldn’t feel that he has to change his name. He could abbreviate his first name to “Nate” if he wanted, and maybe strike the middle name altogether for screen and stage. I wouldn’t have a problem with that; his mother picked it out.
“It’s a very regular irregularity,” said the nurse who had come up to listen to Nathan’s heartbeat with us. She pointed out that his heart paused every six beats, like clockwork. Or rather, like the workings of a clock that doesn’t keep time very well.
When Walden Cassotto was 8 years old, the doctors told his mother that he was not likely to see his 16th birthday. Walden, sitting in the next room when the doctors imparted this to his mother, overheard, and had as a child the constant playmate of the knowledge that his life would be tragically short.
Despite this knowledge, or—more likely—because of it, Walden learned how to play piano, xylophone, harmonica and guitar by the time he entered his teens.
I don’t care if my son learns harmonica, xylophone or kazoo. I want him to find out what he enjoys in life and do it with passion, provided it doesn’t harm anyone else. Whether he wants to be a poet, priest or politician, or a lowly newspaper reporter like his father, I will support him.
Sometime in his young adulthood, Walden Cassotto learned that his sister, Nina, was actually his mother. The woman whom Walden had known as his mother was, in fact, his grandmother. Walden’s two mothers had arranged this ruse when Nina became pregnant at 17 years of age—socially unheard of in 1936.
His father died a few months before Walden was born.
I want my son to know that his parents love him. I want him to know that he has a mother, father, and older brother that love him dearly and want him to be happy.
I didn’t appreciate my parents until far too late in life, until I had left home several times and came to recognize how much they meant to me by virtue of how much I missed them. I do not want that for Nathan.
“We’re going to have to induce labor,” said the nurse. “There is a very low amount of fluid surrounding your child. The stress may be causing the arrhythmia.” She surveyed the worried looks on mine and my wife’s faces. “For all we know, it’ll go away as soon as he’s born.”
In 1956, Walden Cassotto, now a nightclub entertainer going by the more “Americanized” name of Bobby Darin, had exceeded his doctor’s estimates by four years and was signed to Decca Records. Over the next 17 years, he recorded more than two dozen albums and appeared in a dozen movies.
In 1960, Bobby Darin made headlines by marrying Sandra Dee, the actress every teenage girl idolized and every teenage boy swooned over. In 1967 they divorced.
I want my son to have the opportunity to have his heart broken. Thinking that you’ll never love again and finding out you will is one of the greatest things we do in life. I had my heart broken about 100 times before I met Nathan’s mother, and would do it all again if I thought that’s what it takes to find a woman so wonderful.
“We’re just going to add something to your I.V.,” said the nurse to my wonderful wife. “This will move things along.”
In 1963, Darin was nominated for an Oscar for his role in “Captain Newman, MD.” He lost to Melvyn Douglas in “Hud.”
I want my son to fail, and to fail gloriously. I cannot imagine a life where success is guaranteed, and would not like to imagine the types of people that a life like that would produce. I believe, as does the person from whom I’m paraphrasing this, that it isn’t how you handle success in life that defines your character, but rather how you deal with defeat. I want Nathan to strive in the face of adversity, to get up and try again, and to keep challenging himself until the day his heart does fail, but not before.
In 1971, Bobby Darin was fitted with two prosthetic heart valves to bolster a muscle that friends and family said was overworked by the sheer drive to fit more living into a life than time would allow. In 1973, one of Darin’s prosthetic valves failed and he spent 11 days in the hospital undergoing numerous surgeries. He did not emerge alive.
The medical profession is full of things that doctors and nurses tell you are usually benign, but react to apocalyptically, “just in case.” X-rays are harmless, they tell you, but when the button is pushed the technician is behind a brick wall and under three lead blankets “just in case.”
The nurse told us that the arrhythmia was still present, still could mean absolutely nothing, but when my wife went into labor, a pediatrician would be on hand to check the baby’s heartbeat “just in case.”
When Nathan was born, the pediatrician whisked him away to the warming table and placed the cold ring of a stethoscope on his chest. “I don’t hear anything,” she said softly.
“What do you mean?” I yelled.
“I’m sorry,” said the pediatrician, and she smiled. “I don’t hear the arrhythmia. Everything’s perfectly normal.”
In 1990, Bobby Darin was inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. In 1999, he was inducted into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame. In 2004, Kevin Spacey directed and starred in a feature film about Darin’s life. Earlier his year, Darin received his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
On Sept. 26, 2008, we will celebrate my son’s first birthday. That will be just fine.
