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Sing Out & Sonar. By his own description, he was always the class cutup and showoff. Raised in suburban Boston, where his father ran a chain of movie theaters, he was forever going to school with phony bandages on his head, explaining that his mother had hit him with a rolling pin or, after the 1938 hurricane, that a falling oak had beaned him. Something had to be done, or so it seemed, and eventually Morse was sent off to the lower school of the Christian Scientist Principia College in Illinois. Peccadilloes there were punished as sins. When Bobby stole a dollar or so from his house mother's coin collection, he was placed in solitary confinement, and when he confessed later to a minor sexual experience with a girl classmate ( Nothing bad—we just looked at each other"), he was expelled.
Back home at Newton High School, an understanding teacher decided that if Bobby Morse wanted to show off so much he should produce, direct and star in a school production of Walter Kerr's Sing Out Sweet Land. The show was good, his grades improved noticeably, and he decided to become an actor. The decision was also a kind of revelation for young Bobby: "It explained why I was always behaving like a brat."
After four years as a sonar man in the Navy, Bobby approached Broadway. Under the wing of his brother, Actor Richard Morse, his career developed quickly, with the usual tune-ups: American Theater Wing, classes with Lee Strasberg, etc. And he has calmed down considerably now that he is a $1,750-a-week star. Last April he married Carole D'Andrea, an actress-dancer who had a supporting role in West Side Story, and their first child is due in December. With the success of How to Succeed, Morse has finally developed confidence in himself, and the brat in him may be departing forever. He stops the show with a song, delivered into a mirror, that is such a moving paean to self-love it probably makes Narcissus roll over in his grave and take another look into the pool. It is called I Believe in You. At last, Bobby Morse really seems to.