It's an office party, or so it seems, and the mail clerk has had just enough vodka and cranberry juice to get up and pulsate with song. But the office is really Manhattan's subterranean Copacabana, one of the best-known bomb shelters in the world, and the mail clerk is little Bobby Darin, a $350,000-a-year corporation with ducktail by Lilly Dache.

In the middle of a three-week run at the Copa, Bobby Darin exemplifies the shallowing reservoir of young U.S. pop singing talent-an immodest boy with modest ability, whose fan club has just a little more to crow about than the followers of Frankie Avalon or the Fabian societies. Yet Darin has made six LP albums that have sold more than 1,500,000 copies. His trademark single recordea driving version of Kurt Weill's Mack the Knife-has sold more than 2,000,000 copies. He has all the bookings he can handle in America's major nightclub principalities from Las Vegas to Miami Beach. He has signed nearly $2,000,000 worth of Hollywood film contracts. Moreover, he has been all over television, from Ed Sullivan to This Is Your Life to his own hour-long spectacular.

Dungeness Crab. A renegade rock 'n' roller, Darin can make some substantial claims to recognition: he has a pleasant if ordinary voice, a remarkable sense of rhythm and a penchant for carrying tunes, although his knees seem to suffer now and then under the load. He sings rapidly, in a style that could be called 2Oth century Benzedrine, slurring the lyrics of Up a Lazy River or Clementine through lips that move no more than a carny ventriloquist's, while the song seems to be coming out of his left ear. He is versatile. At one moment he could be the kid brother of Eddie Fisher, a little later the son of Perry Como, later still the natural child of Frank Sinatra.

His versatility takes other forms too. He dances, has written hit songs (Splish Splash), plays the vibraphone, drums and guitar, and offers between-numbers commentary that is sometimes blue and often corny. His promoters at the Hollywood pressagent firm of Rogers & Cowan lavishly plug his innate sex appeal and his intuition for showmanship, which collide onstage when Darin, fervently singing, wobbles a disengaged microphone in his hand and slides sideways in a characteristic motion that could only suggest a young Dungeness crab in trouble.

Two-Tone Rolls. Someone else might well have been Bobby Darin. The incumbent, born Walden Robert Cassotto in The Bronx in 1936, contracted a near-fatal case of rheumatic fever at the age of eight. His father, described by Darin as a small-scale gangster, died before Bobby was born. Supported by his mother's relief money, he grew up in one of Manhattan's toughest and poorest neighborhoods, steadily refused membership in district gangs, studied hard and learned to play the drums, won admission to the excellent Bronx High School of Science. During vacations, he picked up show business experience entertaining at Catskill summer camps.

With a scholarship, he moved on to Hunter College,* but the sound of the drums remained in his ears, and he quit after one semester to become a musician and actor. He also fell hard at 18 for a 31-year-old dancer who squeezed him, crushed him, and finally threw him out into the street. Darin suggests that this was the start of his defensive brashness and hard-shelled egotism, for which he is now famous (he throws old friends out of his dressing room, barks at audiences, and wades roughly and silently through masses of clutching fans). His singing career started in 1956, when he wrote and sang radio commercials for local stores and his voice caught the attention of the record companies. Always bitterly remembering his coldhearted dancer, he now concedes that the experience probably helped his career: "I know what I'm singing about."

In recent times, he has acquired both a wife and a surrogate father. Playing Las Vegas' Sahara Hotel with Comedian George Burns two years ago, he began a close and uncharacteristically warm relationship, soaking up Burns's pithy advice and practical philosophy. Then last summer, on the location of a film they made together in Italy, he first saw the fluorescent tresses of 18-year-old Actress Sandra Dee. They were married in December, and now live in Hollywood. Before he left New York, Darin vowed that he would not return professionally to his home city until he could play among Manhattan's top brass-at the Copacabana. Now back for the second time (the first was in June), he showed up for work one evening last week in a two-tone Rolls-Royce, slipped a sidewalk bum an easy fin, and led his wife inside.

Another self-promise hung in the air around his shoulders: "I'd like to be the biggest thing in show business by the time I'm 2.1? years old," he has said many times. Anything is possible. He has 2 1/2 months to go.

*Best known as a women's college in Manhattan, Hunter also has a coeducational campus in The Bronx.

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