What lies ahead for Sandy and Bobby's baby? Is it dangerous to be born to famous parents or doesn't it matter?

* HERE ARE THE PROS AND CONS *

"I was just floored when I realized I was pregnant," Sandra Dee said. "It was the most incredible shock I ever endured."

Sandy's press agent and friend, Betty Mitchell, interrupted. "Oh, Sandra, I don't think that's a good thing to say." Mrs. Bobby Darin's huge brown eyes grew even larger. She was talking about her coming baby for the first time, and it was obvious she was going to talk about it in her own way. "But that's true!" she said. "I think most girls at eighteen, if they are honest, will say they are shocked when soon after marriage they find they're going to be mothers. There I was, married six months. I'd had chicken pox, so I was walking around like a mummy anyway, and then I found this out. It was just awful! To make it worse, it was Bobby who told me. How that happened is that I'd taken a test, but I just didn't believe anything could have happened. We were down in Palm Springs, and what I didn't know was that the doctor had told Bobby to phone back later.

"So we'd come up to Hollywood, and we were sitting in one of the strip places having dinner -- Bobby, my mother and I. Bobby excused himself to go to the phone. I paid no attention to this, except that two minutes later he comes back yelling. 'I'm going to be a father! You're pregnant! I'm going to be a father!' And that's how I found out -- along with everybody else in that room. I was simply speechless, but Bobby was on cloud 12 and going higher while I got lower and lower."

"I had to get used to the idea. Having a baby isn't like, buying a dress. If you get one you don't like, you can't give it back. I was stunned! I couldn't think of a thing but me. How I felt. What was going to happen to me? What I'd do?"

"I didn't even think of my career -- just me, me, me, for four whole days. I don't know if I didn't want to grow up enough to be a mother, or what. I do know that when we married, even if the certificate did say seventeen, I was really about eleven, emotionally. So there I was six months later, with people around me being overjoyed. And I was just out to lunch."

"It was like the first week we were married, that first week in a house without my mother. I had a housekeeper to run the house, but I had to run the housekeeper. I had to plan meals. I had a husband, so I couldn't run out at six o'clock in the evening to go see my friends. Once I actually started to do that. Bobby said, 'Where are you going?' I said, 'I'm going out to see my girl friend.' I couldn't understand why he minded. I'd done that all my life -- done as I pleased. But there I was married and there was someone else I had to think of first."

"Only that first week, I didn't. All I could think of that first week was did I do wrong? I missed my mother and I missed my friends. I missed not being taken care of and babied. Bobby babied me but he wouldn't pick up after me. I had to pick up my own things. Fortunately, at the end of that first week, Bobby had to go to Vegas about a nightclub date. And then I found out. Oh, I missed him so. At the end of three days, there I was in Vegas. I didn't want any of the things I thought I'd been missing. I just wanted Bobby."

"That's when I knew I'd really become a wife, or at least was starting to be one. And it was like that with being pregnant. It took me four days to come out of my shock. Then it hit me -- I was going to have Bobby's baby! Before I knew it, I was sailing up to join Bobby on his cloud up there. And out shopping for clothes for my baby."

"Sandra paused for a long breath. She's the easiest girl there ever was to interview, not only because she answers questions before you ask them, but also because of her complete honesty. She wants a boy and says so.

"If it's a girl it's going to be sent back," she said. "I've picked out boy's clothes and boy's toys. I wanted him to be called Robert but his father talked me out of that fast. He pointed out that our Robert would be 'little Bobby' in contrast to 'big Bobby.' So I gave that up.

"Now I think he will be Jeffrey. Where that comes in is that when you have a lot of friends, as we have, if you name your child Steve or Richard or John you delight one friend and hurt another. Then you start with family names and a relative gets insulted. So we don't know a single Jeffrey, but Jeffrey-something-Darin makes a nice name.

* AN ETON SUIT FOR BABY *

"I've already been shopping for him. I've bought him dozens of shoes. Of course, I came to a little later and realized Jeffrey couldn't wear such shoes till about two years from now. Then I bought him an Eton suit. That was really the end."

"The saleslady said to me, 'How old is the child?' I said, 'About four months.' Fortunately. she didn't recognize me. She said, 'The child is a boy, isn't he?' I said, 'I don't know.'

"That's when it struck her -- something was very wrong. It's my baby and I don't know whether it is a boy or girl or its age. She began to laugh and told me that what I wanted was a layette. Well, I didn't want a layette. Who wants to look at diapers? So besides the Eton suit I bought pajamas. About twelve dozen pairs of blue and green pajamas, with one lonely little pair of pink ones -- just in case."

When Bobby came home and saw that Eton suit, he flipped.

"Then he got firm with me. He said, 'My kid is going to wear dungarees and play in the mud.' I said, 'Well, maybe your son will do that, but my son is going to dress up occasionally.' I thought that was a good time to change the subject, I'm really beginning to get a little bit of tact with mv husband.

"So I brought up the subject of college." I don't know what you call it, but Bobby is so well balanced. He thinks everything through. I said I wanted Jeffrey to go to Black Foxe, the military school, for one year. Bobby said we'd have to discuss that with our son. He says we will discuss everything with or son. He will know why he is being disciplined, why he's being indulged."

"Well, I know that anything Bobby says he'll do, he'll do. Besides, because of the way I was brought up, I'll be pretty stern, too, I think. I love my mother more than anybody in this world, except Bobby. She and I will always be friends -- but I am not going to be friends with my baby. I want to be his mother. You can't be a pal really. You're nineteen or twenty years older. Oh, I'll spoil my baby a little -- that's part of love. But I won't have a brat. And I won't bring him around the studio and get him spoiled in a half hour, as I could easily with Ross Hunter and the make-up people around. God forbid that I let all that overindulgence happen to him."

"Bobby and I argue about one thing. He wants our children to use the family name, Cassotto, to go to school under that name. But I say that's impossible. I say to him, 'You're Bobby Darin. I'm Sandra Dee. I'm having our baby, but even the doctor calls me Miss Dee. So if we send Jeffrey Cassotto to school, all everybody will say is his father's Bobby Darin and his mother is Sandra Dee.' It's nothing for us to gloat over, but that's the reality of it. I don't think we'll ever have pictures taken of our baby for publicity. This I think would spoil him and make it rough on him with the other children in school. But he's got to know who he is, who Bobby is, and who I am. And if he becomes five times as important as we ever can, then that's fine."

"Besides, no matter what kind of a mother I turn out to be, my baby will have the greatest grandmother ever. John Cassavetes' wife goes to the same baby doctor I do, and we talk about how our mothers are carrying on. My mother is, positively, having a second childhood as well as a second child; she's so excited."

* THE PATIENCE OF A SAINT *

"Right now we are trying to find a house with a nursery. Bobby merely wants a great big house, in Bel-Air or Beverly Hills, with about two acres of land around it -- right in the middle of town, you understand. No real estate agent has heard of such a place within miles, but Bobby will find it just the same. He has the patience of a saint. He found our honeymoon house for us and he hired the housekeeper. Now -- we need a much bigger house and we ought to have it within the next two months, and I am completely sure we will."

"I don't know how Bobby puts up with me right now, but he does. If he turns the doorknob wrong, I cry. If he looks at me and says, 'I don't like that dress' I get hysterical. I can be sitting in a room being perfectly happy and then all of a sudden something hits me and the tears start coming. I never was like this before. My emotions are all topsy-turvy. But Bobby puts up with me and he has morning sickness."

"Don't laugh -- he does. And I don't. The doctor gave me pills against it and told Bobby how to rub my back when I got an attack of it. So I take the pills and wind up rubbing Bobby's back. Then there is my poor doctor. I called him up so much the first week we engaged him that it got to the point that, when he'd hear my voice, he'd say, 'Hang up.'"

I couldn't help laughing with her. She was delightful. Everything she said, every word and inflection, bespoke her innocence. "Sandra," I said, "have you and Bobby looked at the more serious side? I mean have you considered the dangers that can befall a celebrity's child? You read the papers. I don't have to spell out the case histories of Cheryl Crane and Fredric March's son, Tony. Or Edward G. Robinson Jr., or Bob Burns' daughter."

"Let's face it," I continued, "the child of a celebrity faces many dangers. For example, there's the pitfall of leading a double-life. One moment Mommy and Daddy are just that: Mommy and Daddy. The next moment the child is blinded when they turn into glittering stars, watched over by the whole world. Ordinary kids don't have to share their parents with the world; ordinary parents don't lead changing lives, one day playing a cowboy and the next day a doctor, one day a nun and the next day a girl of the streets.

"Look," I said, "at the problem of aloneness. A celebrity's child can be the loneliest kid in the world if his parents are so busy being famous that they haven't enough time for family living and loving. And what about the notoriety that goes with fame and the gossip?"

"Is there anything crueler than to hear or overhear one's parents talked about? Or anything more vicious than to be compared unfavorably with one's own mother or father?"

Sandy sat back for a moment, in deep thought. That is an outstanding characteristic of this teenager. She can think, and with great clarity. Her voice was serious. "I think every set of parents thinks that their child is different," she said. "I read about these delinquent children and I think their parents are just unfortunate. But I can't think that way about myself. I have to think that my baby is out of my home and my heart and that it has to become the kind of an adult I want it to be. It just can't turn out badly."

"I don't like it that people imply it's just Hollywood people who have maladjusted children. They are all over -- in Chicago, New York, Paris or wherever. But most of them here, like most children everywhere, turn out well. Think of the Hollywood families of five or six children, all wonderful, like the Burt Lancasters, or the Gregory Pecks, or the Pat O'Briens; or the Chuck Connors. And the Ladds, the Nelsons, the Hopes, Gale Storm and Lee Bonnell -- their children are great. Nobody points out Don deFore's daughter, who gave up luxury to dedicate her life to serving the sick in an Oriental slum."

"I saw a picture, 'The Young Savages' and I loved it -- and I don't usually like this kind. But it was so honest. I looked at those fifteen-year-old boys in it and my imagination began to run away. I thought, 'My baby boy must not grow up this way.' Then I realized that Bobby came from this kind of background and look at him! Tony Curtis came from this kind of a background and look what he's done with his life. So you just can't let yourself think in these defeatist terms."

Sandy paused again, still thinking deeply. "But you can't let yourself spoil your own baby," she said. "And you can't let other people do it either. Right now, wherever Bobby and I go, people are extra nice to us. That's very pleasant. We like it. We also know why they are so extra nice. But if you take a child into such a flattering atmosphere they don't understand it. They think they are very special."

* WHERE WE GO, BABY GOES *

"One thing Bobby and I won't do is leave our baby alone with servants. Wherever we go, he'll go. Whatever we do, he'll do. He'll be our son, not some lonely little thing wandering around a big house."

"I thought I was completely happy before I met Bobby, but now my happiness is another thing altogether. I am so conscious of everything now, like my good fortune in marrying this man, the most honest person I've ever met. And now to be pregnant is just a miracle."

"And the timing! I have three pictures ready to come out, that will take a year. The baby will be here in another six months, and that will give me a whole year to get to know my husband."

"I can't stand to be separated from him. I usually am with him on the set, not twenty-four hours, but before or after lunch: If Bobby weren't making movies it would be too difficult, and I'd give up my career, but now we can both make them, and I do love acting. He's got to go on location soon, for six weeks. Well, since I'm having a baby I can go with him. I don't know how we worked all this out, but I thank God. And I don't worry about my baby's future, no matter where we raise him. Bobby was raised with so much love. So was I. Jeffrey will be, too. We won't let any dangers touch him."

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