Posted on Sun, Nov. 09, 2003

Inqlings | Rydell working through the sorrow

By Michael Klein

Inquirer Columnist

Singer Bobby Rydell is back on stage, not two months after the death of his best friend, high school sweetheart, and wife of nearly 36 years, Camille.

"Getting out of bed and working" is therapeutic, he said the other day from Las Vegas, where he is appearing at the Orleans Hotel & Casino with Frankie Avalon. On Saturday, he'll headline an 8 p.m. show at the Lenape Regional Performing Arts Center in Marlton to benefit Cherokee High School's musical-theater program. (Tickets are $35, or $75 with a meet-and greet; 856-983-3366 or www.sjtheater.com.)

Rydell said he was in Vegas when his son Robert called Sept. 12, a Friday, from the family home in Penn Valley to tell him that Camille, who had fought breast cancer for more than a decade, had taken a turn for the worse. "I couldn't get out of here till Saturday," he said. "I wanted to see her, to kiss her." She died on that Monday, a month after the couple's fourth grandchild, a boy named Caden, was born to their daughter, Jennifer Dulin.

His first show afterward was Oct. 22. It was "really tough," Rydell said. "I used to talk about her [in my shows]. I said she had died, and there were moans and groans. The audience doesn't want to hear that."

Friends and family help him. "Every night," he said, "I put her ashes in bed with me."

But one gig he declined to book was a Christmas show at the Hilton in Atlantic City. "That was too close," he said. "I don't want to sing those kinds of songs now."