Bobby Rydell, teen idol who starred in ‘Bye Bye Birdie,’ dies
Bobby Rydell, a pompadoured, velvet-voiced teen idol of rock-and-roll’s early years who recorded more than two dozen hit singles, was featured in the 1963 movie musical “Bye Bye Birdie” and maintained a decades-long career as a crooner on the nightclub circuit, died April 5 at a hospital in Abington, Pa. He was 79.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, according to a statement shared by his spokeswoman Maria Novey.
For a few years in the late 1950s and early ′60s, when Elvis Presley was in the Army and Beatlemania had not yet begun, Rydell was one of the biggest young pop stars in America, a slender, boyishly handsome singer and drummer who caused teeny-boppers to swoon and played Ann-Margret’s sweetheart in “Bye Bye Birdie.” He came to symbolize an era of teen sock hops and towering hairdos, inspiring the name of Rydell High School, the setting for the 1970s musical “Grease.”
By most accounts, he re- leased 34 Top 100 hits – from “Kissin’ Time” in 1959, when he was just 17, to a waltzing version of Paul Anka’s “Diana” in 1965 – and sold more than 25 million records, performing on television shows including “American Bandstand” and receiving an average of 5,000 fan letters a week. Virtually all of them, he said, were from young women proposing marriage.
“I never thought of myself as a celebrity,” Rydell once told the Philadelphia Daily News. “I was just a guy who went out there and worked.”
Raised in South Philadelphia, he grew up within a few blocks of three other teen idols, all from Italian American families: Frankie Avalon, James Darren and Fabian, who were then known by the names Avallone, Ercolani and Forte. Long after he started touring, he was still called Bobby Ridarelli by friends and neighbors, and explained that he changed his name because it was too hard for Paul Whiteman, the host of a Philadelphia-based show called “TV Teen Club,” to pronounce on-air.
Rydell cultivated a boynext-door image, recording songs such as “Wildwood Days,” a celebration of Jersey Shore summers, and per- formed at major venues such as New York’s Copacabana nightclub, where he debuted when he was 19. (The Oscar-winning movie “Green Book” included a scene in which Rydell, played by Von Lewis, dazzles the club with a rendition of “That Old Black Magic.”)
His Top 10 hits included “Wild One” (“You got the lips that I’m mad about / I got the lips that’ll knock you out”), which peaked at No. 2 in 1960; “Volare,” a version of a chart-topping single by Domenico Modugno, which proved more popular than an earlier rendition by Dean Martin; and “We Got Love,” “The Cha-Cha-Cha,” “Forget Him” and “Swingin’ School,” which served as a model for the Beatles’ song “She Loves You,” according to a biography of the band by Bob Spitz.
Rydell appeared in a few movies and television shows, including episodes of “Combat!” and “The Red Skelton Hour,” but largely stuck to singing, even as shifting musical tastes knocked him off the pop charts for good during the British invasion of the mid-1960s.
Embracing the swing tunes and American standards that drew him to music as a boy, he became a club singer, performing classics by Irving Berlin and Cole Porter alongside his own early hits. He also partnered with Avalon and Fabian in 1985 to form the Golden Boys, a trio that continued to tour intermittently in recent years, filling the time between songs with good-natured jokes about their hair loss and long-ago fame.
Rydell kept busy even as he battled depression and alcoholism following the death of his first wife, and credited a kidney and liver transplant in 2012 with extending his life. He said he was also energized by performing for audiences that came to see him well into retirement age, long after he lost his signature pompadour.
“It’s almost like 1959, 1960 all over again,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “There are people with pictures of you when you had the hair and when you were skinny, and they’ve got the 45 record jackets, and they’re screaming and yelling and nuts . . . . I’m telling you, we have grandmothers coming onstage and doing the jitterbug. God bless them, they’re up there having a good time, telling us, ‘Oh, we love you! We remember when!’ “
Robert Louis Ridarelli was born in Philadelphia on April 26, 1942. As a young boy, he often joined his father, a factory foreman, at big band shows, and came home imitating the instruments.