What did Bobby Darin's family finally reveal to him before it was too late?
What happened during Chester Bennington's childhood that he could never quite escape?
Everyone has their secrets, and some of them are especially heartbreaking.
Bobby Darin's early death at the age of 37 wasn't exactly surprising, as his heart had
been damaged by an illness when he was a boy. As his son Dodd told People magazine in 1994,
"My father knew he wouldn't live long. He was trying
to pack a lifetime of ambition into what little time he had."
Darin was a successful singer in the 1960s with a happy family. But five years before he died,
he learned that some of his family members weren't who he thought they were. It was speculation about
running for office that finally got his real mother Nina, whom he thought was his sister,
to finally come clean. Bobby's half-brother Gary, who was not his cousin as Bobby believed,
told Bobby's biographer that their sister told their mother,
"You've got to tell Bobby because what will happen is, if he goes into politics, they will uncover
the truth. And better that he knows it up front than trying to find it out in some other way."
"I'm not your sister. Bobby, I'm your mother."
Nina was only 17 and unmarried when she got pregnant with Bobby, which led to the cover
story that his grandmother was his mother. Nina also refused to tell Bobby who his father was.
Unsurprisingly, he didn't take this revelation very well. As his brother Gary explained,
"Bobby never questioned it. Once he heard the words said to him, 'I'm not your sister,
I'm your mother,' he knew it was the truth. [...] Unfortunately, he could never accept it."
Addiction is a painful and complicated disease, and Ray Charles had the extreme misfortune of
being a celebrity whose excessive drug use was visible to the world. As reported by The Weekly
View, while at a tour stop in Indianapolis in 1961, Charles received an unsolicited phone call
offering to sell him drugs. He purchased weed and heroin and then got high. The next morning,
however, cops showed up at his hotel room door after the dealer tipped them off. Charles was
then purposely humiliated, as he was charged with being a "common addict" and paraded in front of
the media. When a reporter asked the musician about how his drug use began, he revealed,
"I started using stuff when I was 16. When I first started in show business.
Then I had to have more and more. [...] A guy who lives in the dark
has to have something to keep him going. The grind is just too much."
But this public revelation didn't stop Charles' heroin use. As he told Rolling Stone in 1973,
"Let's face it, man, if a guy doesn't want to stop doin' somethin', the judge, the psychiatrist, the
jailer, ain't nobody gonna. [...] It's a made-up mind of what you want to do with yourself."
Charles eventually got clean after another drug bust in 1965.
"A person has to have his mind made up that this is not good for him."
Nikki Sixx was perhaps the hardest-partying of the hard-partying rock band Mötley Crüe.
In 2007, he released a book about his life during the group's heyday, framed around
diary entries he wrote throughout 1987. One entry is especially shocking, as he revealed,
"I've decided I should do something special for Valentine's Day
to mark the anniversary of the day that I died."
Considering that Sixx titled his book The Heroin Diaries,
it should come as no surprise what almost killed him. The year before, specifically on February 14,
1986 in London, Sixx went to a drug den, and the first hit was too much for him. As he recounted,
"I OD'd on the spot. My lips turned purple: I was gone. The story I heard was that the
dealer grabbed his baseball bat and tried to beat the f---ing life into me. He couldn't,
so he flung me over his shoulder to dump me in the trash, because nobody wants a dead rock star lying
around. Then I came to [...] and I guess I had yet another dark secret to never tell anybody."
But this wasn't even the first time that something like this had happened. Later in the book Sixx
admitted that by 1987, he'd experienced many overdoses and seizures that he'd kept secret. One
final OD at the end of that year would lead to him and the rest of the band finally getting clean.
"I said, you know, I'm gonna turn my life around and do something
good with this horrible information."
Women in the music industry have often been treated terribly.
Jackie Fuchs, aka Jackie Fox of the 70s all-girl rock band The Runaways,
is one such woman who learned the hard way exactly what powerful people could get away with.
"I was the bass player in the 70s all-female rock band The Runaways."
In 1975, the band finished a gig and went to an afterparty, where the barely-16-year-old
Fuchs was given Quaaludes. She lay down and drifted in and out of consciousness.
She and others who were present allege that her manager, Kim Fowley, who was then in his mid-30s,
sexually assaulted her while the party guests watched.
Some people left in disgust, but nobody did anything to stop it or report the crime.
According to Fuchs, when she went to band practice a few days later, it was obvious that
none of the other girls wanted to acknowledge what had happened. She didn't reveal publicly
what had happened until a 2015 interview with The Huffington Post. As she explained,
"I didn't know if anybody would have backed me. I knew I would be treated
horribly by the police—that I was going to be the one that ended up on trial more than Kim.
I carried this sense of shame and of thinking it was somehow my fault for decades."
Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns was just 15 when his band released their debut album. By the
time he was 18 and their second album was an even bigger hit, he was fighting depression. There was
another mental health problem he was dealing with as well, and from what the press wrote about him
at the time, it should've been obvious. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported in 1997,
"Johns is slim to the point of thin. His jeans and shirt hanging loosely from him."
Another reporter called him "dangerously emaciated".
And as Johns' biographer Jeff Apter put it,
"It was almost as if he was trying to physically disappear."
While looking back at his struggle, Johns explained,
"The only way I can describe it, is to say that it felt comforting to be in control of something,
like I hadn't totally lost it."
Johns restricted his food intake until he would only eat when forced to or when
he was about to pass out. Eventually, this led to the paranoid belief that
chefs were trying to poison him and that apples contained hidden razor blades.
After getting a cold that wouldn't go away and finally seeing a doctor, Johns was told in no
uncertain terms that he had to start eating again or he was going to die. He eventually recovered,
but he kept his struggle hidden from the public until his biography was released in 2018.
Alanis Morissette was absolutely inescapable in the 90s. But she'd actually been in showbiz
even earlier, as she appeared on Nickelodeon's You Can't Do That On Television when she was only 10,
and she went on to land her first record contract at the age of 14.
The music industry is rarely good to young girls, though, and in 2021,
Morissette told a documentary filmmaker that she'd been abused at a young age. As she explained,
"I never talk about this. It took me years in therapy to even admit there
had been any kind of victimization on my part. I would always say I was consenting,
and then I'd be reminded like 'Hey, you were 15, you're not consenting at 15.'
Now I'm like, 'Oh yeah, they're all pedophiles. It's all statutory rape."
Even though Morisette tried to tell people what was happening, nobody intervened.
Before this revelation, she'd spoken in more general terms about exploitation and abuse
in the industry, but this was the first time she made her own accusations on the record.
However, a controversy around the documentary complicated matters.
Morisette never named the people who assaulted her and never retracted her accusations,
but she backed out of supporting the film after she was unhappy with the final product.
Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington was open with his fans about his substance abuse issues.
But it wasn't until 2008 that he told a reporter that he'd been using drugs
to cope with horrible childhood trauma. As he revealed to Kerrang!,
around the time he was 7 years old, a friend who was a few years older began
sexually abusing him. This continued until Bennington was 13. As he explained,
"I was getting beaten up and being forced to do things I didn't want to do.
It destroyed my self-confidence."
It would be six years before Bennington felt he could tell
anyone in his life about the horrible things that were happening to him.
His parents were distant, and there was no one he trusted to tell. As he admitted,
"I didn't want people to think I was gay or that I was lying. It was a horrible experience."
Tragically, Bennington killed himself in 2017 when he was only 41.
It wasn't a secret that INXS frontman Michael Hutchence was punched by a taxi driver outside
a Danish pizzeria in 1995. But until decades after he died, only one person knew just how
bad that injury was. Overnight, Hutchence's personality changed drastically. He developed
mood swings and also lost his sense of taste and smell. Only his girlfriend at the time,
supermodel Helena Christensen, knew just how bad the situation was, and he made her swear
not to tell anyone. To others, the outbursts were just seen as regular rock star behavior.
Filmmaker Richard Lowenstein, who had directed some of INXS's music videos,
made a 2019 documentary about Hutchence. He learned about the singer's extensive brain
injuries from interviewing Christensen and reading the full autopsy report and discovered the punch
had seriously injured Hutchence's frontal lobes. As Lowenstein revealed to Sky News,
"If it had gotten out – even just between the band
members – that he had serious damage to the brain, they would have come in and
started writing the songs themselves. And that was his worst nightmare."
Hutchence didn't even tell Paula Yates,
his girlfriend at the time of his death and the mother of his child. As Lowenstein noted,
"I do think he was scared that even if Paula had known or any of his partners had known,
they would maybe not love him quite so much or treat him like an invalid."
Hutchence's life ended tragically when he killed himself in 1997.
In Elton John's 2019 autobiography, the legendary musician revealed to his fans that two years
previously he'd been diagnosed with prostate cancer and kept his treatment a secret. The
timing was especially inconvenient, as he was in the middle of preparing for his worldwide farewell
tour, but fortunately the cancer was found in its early stages. His doctors gave him the choice of
chemotherapy or having his prostate removed. He took the more aggressive approach, as he revealed,
"I went straight for the surgery. A lot of men won't have it, because it's a major operation,
you can't have sex for at least a year afterwards and you can't control your bladder for a while.
But effectively my kids made the decision for me. I didn't like the
idea of cancer hanging over me — us — for years to come: I just wanted rid of it."
The surgery was successful, and John was on stage again just ten days later. But he
wasn't out of the woods yet. He contracted an infection that was so serious that his
doctors told his husband David Furnish that he was a day away from dying.
But he managed to pull through, and his fans who saw him in concert in the years
between his diagnosis and his book coming out likely had no idea about his health problems.
If you or anyone you know is struggling with addiction issues,
help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or
contact SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).