Bobby Darin was one of the most ambitious and versatile performers of the last forty years. He straddled generations, appealing to bobbysoxers as a teen idol who wrote and recorded "Splish Splash" in 1958 and then winning over their parents as the swaggering, Sinatra-voiced adult who cut the ultimate version of "Mack the Knife" (a song from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's musical Threepenny Opera) only a year later. Both songs were enormous hits, with "Splish Splash" reaching Number Three and "Mack the Knife" topping the chart for an astounding nine weeks. Darin's range was as boundless as his brash self-confidence. In 1959, he told a Life magazine reporter that he wanted to be a pop legend by the age of twenty-five, while he allegedly informed another writer that he intended to surpass Frank Sinatra.