The Odd Odyssey of Sandra Dee
This article appeared in the June 1963 issue of Saturday Evening Post Magazine and was written by C. Robert Jennings

The mobile villa, sleek and baby blue, rumbled up the scraggy mountain from its home site, Universal Pictures. Snaking around the curves of the Hollywood Hills, it finally came to rest on the 20th Century-Fox lot in Beverly Hills. On Stage 8, where movies are made, it was unhitched.
Inside the mansion on wheels all was gold and glass, blue and beige, antique French and moviestar modern. There were white rugs, paneled walls, custom-built furniture, a lavender French phone, some stereophonic gadgets, an air conditioning unit and a refrigerator. In short order a quaint parade filed inside: makeup men, hairdressers, assistant directors, reporters, photographers, publicity folk, assorted Pomeranians and poodles. And atwirl in the middle of it was the villa's tenant and sole reason for the extraordinary pother, a tinker toy named Sandra Dee.
The odd odyssey of Sandra Dee from Universal, her home lot, to Fox took place this spring. The occasion was a $200,000 "loan-out" of Sandra by Universal for Fox's version of the frothy Broadway comedy Take Her, She's Mine, in which the blond, brown-eyed actress will play a love-struck college girl.
By the dimly flickering lights of the struggling movie industry, the pampered treatment that Sandra receives might be termed revelatory, perhaps even epic. At 21, Sandra Dee ranks as a noblewoman of Hollywood, the only female to share every top-10 box-office poll with Liz Taylor and Doris Day. She is the chatelaine of a Sunset Boulevard pad with wall-to-wall furs, a Sargasso Sea of gowns, a soda fountain, projection room, three servants, four dogs and electronic burglar controls. When she is too tired to pilot her red Thunderbird or black Lincoln Continental convertible, the studio provides her with a chauffeured limousine. She is, in short, A Big Star.
Since Sandra's acting skills might be equated roughly with those of Troy Donahue, the reason for her exalted station is not immediately apparent. But as Sandra explains, "It's glamour. I wear pretty clothes, have my hair done well, look clean. Older people see me as the daughter they would like to have--there's no scandal about me. With young people, maybe it's identifying with what they think they are or want to be, or--with boys--what they hope to have."
One fact is certain: Exhibitors estimate that more than 65 percent of their current audiences are screaming teenies. And though the teen-agers adore Doris Day (healthy sex) and dig Liz Taylor (illicit sex), they dote on Dee because she offers both without half trying. They write her 1,000 gooey letters a week. They camp outside her electric-eye gates. They demand her face on every issue of the fan mags they devour. Sandra is their Queen of Empathy; and, especially since her separation from her singer-husband Bobby Darin, she is their bitter and their sweet, their hurt and their hope. "She was thrown into a lot of pictures that did nothing for her acting ability but helped her image," says producer Ross Hunter, Sandra's Pygmalion. "Her fans couldn't care less if she's headed for Sarah Bernhardt's pedestal."
Clearly Sandra isn't. She has a tiny acting range that runs from joy to pout. Possessed of a curious charisma, she is at once crisp and cuddly, helpless and hoydenish, Mary Pickford with a hint of Tuesday Weld. Her saucer eyes can register warmth, yet often seem as cold as marbles. Her mouth can be set in a radiant smile or fixed in a mean moue. When she parts her sensual lips, it seems that applesauce will appear. But out tumbles vinegar. The charm of Sandra Dee is that her paradoxes seem right. She is that rare Hollywood commodity--a natural.
"I'm really normal just like anybody else," says Sandra, "but I do want to be a movie star very badly. Critics don't bother me. I just want to be a household name."
"There must be a reason she is in such demand today," adds Ross Hunter, whose real name is Martin Fuss, of Sandra, whose real name is Alexandra Zuck. "I'll tell you one reason--she looks like a star. I took her to the opening of Who's Afraid of Virginia WooIf ? She was wearing a sable coat, and they grabbed at her."
It was only six years ago, however, that a less impressed Hunter spotted the relatively unknown Sandra standing in front of Universal's Park Avenue offices with too much makeup on her face. "She looked as if her face had been dipped in white flour, and you couldn't see the eyes for the black shadow," Hunter recounts. He invited her, he says, to his office to read for a part. Sandra was one of 500 girls producer Hunter tested for an unpretentious film called The Restless Years and she was the only one who asked for time to read the script. "Which proved," says Hunter, "she had some brains anyway."
"When I came to Universal," recalls Sandra of her unreal cotton-candy, coddled life at the age of 15, "I was one student among thirty-two empty desks, yet I had to raise my hand to go to the little girl's room, and when they had recreation time, they even rang the bell for me. I made a screen test with Johnny Saxon and my grandmother was horrified--'Kissing a boy, and for all the world to see,' she kept saying."
Whatever her grandmother's reactions, they have proved no more pained than those of Sandra herself "I hate watching myself on the screen," she says. "I get sick at rushes, sicker at previews. And after I saw myself in The Reluctant Debutante I went home and cried. Everytime I see myself now, I feel awful."
She is devoid of personal vanity. She rarely sees her films--she went to sleep watching herself in Gidget--rarely looks at studio photos of herself, has someone else scan all fan-magazine material. She spends most of her off-duty hours with a group that Hollywoodians condescendingly call "the little people"--hairdressers, press agents and other toilers behind the scenes.
She is also, despite her advanced years, still addicted to childish benders. "Right now I'm playing Andy Williams records over and over until I get sick of him. I think I could sing Bobby's records backward," she says of her estranged husband. "I've gone through Ray Charles and always cried over Born to Lose. It's like my shrimp kick which I was on for a year and then my wild-egg kick..."
Miss Dee's egg kick came during her European period. She was refused service at Paris' elegant Tour D'Argent, the citadel of pressed duck, because she ordered two hard-boiled eggs. In Italy, where she met Bobby Darin while making Come September and also played half the title role in Peter Ustinov's comedy, Romanoff and Juliet, she "mistrusted the food," Ustinov recalls. "She was quite eager to preserve her hour-glass figure, and was terribly homesick the whole time. The fact that she was always ordering hard-boiled eggs caused some trouble. We had a delay on the film because she got--I don't know how you can say this delicately--a stomach disorder."
Ustinov was also a bit upset to find "her mother was younger than I was." It is true that Sandra's mother is one of the legendary stage mothers in moviedom, almost as good-looking as Sandra, and protective as a mother bear. John Saxon, Sandra's first screen lover and her costar in three Dee pictures, remembers that "Mama was there all the time. When we were doing our intimate scenes on the back lot there was Mama checking up on us. It sort of unnerved me."
Mama, who with Ross Hunter has played the crucial role in Sandra Dee's life, has, unjustly or not, been accused of living her own life vicariously through her daughter. As Sandra, an only child, says, "My mother loves me and it shows a mile." Indeed, the most fleeting survey of Sandra Dee's life explains her total lack of preparation for marriage, motherhood--she has a son by Darin--or anything approximating real life.
"My mother couldn't bear to be separated from me," says Sandra of her childhood. "She used to get jobs around school just to be near me. They had to put a curtain over the window in the kindergarten door so she couldn't watch me. She used to stand there and just cry."
Divorced from her Bayonne, New Jersey, bus-driving husband when Sandra was four, Mama married a wealthy real-estate operator named Eugene Douvan, who introduced her and Sandra, at age eight, to the headier things in life--theater, fur coats and dinners at "21." In Manhattan Sandra went to Professional Children's School and was playing Vaughn Monroe's TV daughter in her preteens, By the time she was 13 she was making $80,000 a year as one of the town's top teen models. At 15 she was swathed in mink and movie stardom and has known nothing else since. "When I was sixteen I had my own mansion with a pool, a sports car, a $12,000 fur coat, a poodle and toy Pomeranian and a thouand dresses," she says with wide-eyed insouciance.
Yet paradoxically she has no illusions about the business: "It's a great farce. You know you're only as good as the last picture, as long as you bring money in. Until then I will be taken care of by the studio."
Together, Sandra's mother and Hunter had chaperoned their "Sandy" through 16 films, happily and scrappily, until in 1960 their carefully nurtured hothouse plant showed fateful signs of new, independent shoots. Until Sandra became engaged to Bobby Darin, whose real name is Walden Cassotto, Hunter controlled all her associations. Hunter, noting her precipitous step into adulthood, admonished his protegee: "You've got to learn how to neck in cars first." And in a Homeric hotel-room fray over the engagement, Mama walked out. "I'd never been alone in my life," recalls Sandra. "I was frightened to death. For the first time, I had nobody--no dogs even, nothing." She phoned Bobby, and four days later they eloped--to Elizabeth, New Jersey, in the middle of the night in a red Rolls-Royce.
Today Sandra and her mother are close friends again. But Sandra now stands a little plaintively in the ruins of her lone romance and only marriage. Sandra Dee, the child-woman is patently confused. She has tried dabbling in psychotherapy ("I think I ran him onto the couch"). Her lingo is newly and too liberally larded with "damn" and "oh, hell," as if in some vague defiance. Trying out her first movie bikini recently she remarked, perhaps too determinedly: "It bugs me that now at age twenty-one I can't seem to get it across that I can't exactly be the Girl Scout forever. From now on, people are going to see me with cigarette in hand and maybe even hoisting a Martini glass. I've worked nine years, been married three, have a sixteen-month-old son, and now at last I'm old enough to vote, to order a glass of wine in a restaurant and to show my navel."
Perhaps Sandra Dee of Hollywood, California, has found herself at last--or at least is rediscovering a girl named Alexandra Zuck of Bayonne, New Jersey.

THE END

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