This article appeared in the March 1966 issue
of Motion Picture Magazine
Bobby called her from New York
that Saturday morning, and his
voice sounded strange. "I'm flying in" he said. "Meet me at the
airport, honey, and...."
"Flying! You must be kidding!" Sandra
exclaimed. Because Bobby
doesn't fly and he won't let her fly.
They do the train routine back
and forth to New York, and the
boat routine back and forth to
Europe, and that's that. He'd been
scheduled to leave New York that
morning by train as usual, and
now here he was calling to say he
was flying instead.
Her heart gave a funny little lurch.
Dodd had been sick with a cold before Bobby had left two
weeks before. She'd picked it up from Dodd, and now here
was Bobby....
"I feel sort of sick," he was saying. "I
don't know what it is, but I don't feel up to the train trip.
I just want to get home."
Home to her, she knew that.
They're a family—and,they hate being separated. "Bring
a blanket," he counseled her, "for the back of the car."
"Oh, no!" thought Sandy, "he's going to be a bigger ham
about this than Dodd." What he didn't tell her was that
he hadn't felt well for several days.. that he had done the
Steve Lawrence Show the night before burning with fever
. ..that he was shaking now and couldn't wait to get home
to his own bed.
Sandy drove to the airport, armed with
the blanket. By this time she, too, was shaking. "All I have
to do is see a plane in the air and I get nervous, and now
Bobby is on the plane
and I'm waiting for it to
land and I'm a basket
case," she told me the
day we met at U-l for
lunch. "And then the
plane lands and I spot
him. He gets off the
plane and he looks just awful. I've never seen a face so
swollen in my life, gray-white, this wide, puffy and hardly
recognizable. He'd lost 20lbs. in two weeks. I didn't know
that, I only knew he looked ghastly. I'd driven out to meet
him in this big Rolls. He kissed me hello and hurried to
the car and got right in back with the blanket. It was not
at all the Bobby I knew.
"The minute we got home, he
says, 'Get me some tea, baby, put some honey in it and call
the doctor. For me this is like 11 at night!'
She went
downstairs to make some tea, and a few minutes later Dodd
came running down, bursting with laughter. "Mommy,
Mommy, Daddy's doing a dance upstairs in his clothes."
She rushed upstairs. Bobby was lying under the blankets
with all his clothes and his overcoat on, shivering so the
whole bed was shaking. The whole thing was bizarre. Not
at all like Bobby. She went to get the thermometer.
"Let
me take your temperature, Bobby, that's the first thing
the doctor'll ask me," she said, and slipped the glass/tube
into his mouth. She'd been doing nothing but taking Dodd's
temperature and giving him medicine for two weeks, and
now here she was with Bobby. It was sort of like a bad
dream. She kept staring at the clock
but the minutes wouldn't move. She looked
at her husband and couldn't believe he was
that sick. Time. She pulled out the ther
mometer. It read 104.
The doctor came and prescribed some
drugs, and the next morning the fever was
down to 101 and Bobby was walking around
the house, so you knew he was going to
be okay. "It was nothing . . . it was almost
over. Bobby's a strong man .... God
wouldn't dare let anything happen to
Bobby." Only that night the fever hopped
back up. No cause for alarm the doctor said
when Sandy called, he'd drop by in the
morning. In the morning Bobby felt pretty
good. It was Sandy who didn't feel so great,
and she was due at U-l for some looping
on
"A Man Could Get Killed".
It was a wretched day. Torrential rains
were falling on the San Fernando Valley
and the studio was screening a scene shot
a few months back. Between loops she was
summoned hastily to the phone. It was
Bobby. "Honey, I don't want to alarm you,"
he said, "but I have to go to the hospital
because the doctor can't understand why
my fever's going up."
"What is your fever?" she asked, trying
to keep her voice under control.
His temperature was 105. And he had
viral pneumonia.
As soon as she could wind up the looping,
she rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital. She
went straight to the desk, told the young
intern on duty, Bobby Darin, and he gave
her the room number.
She went to Bobby's room, sat down and
tried to wait. She was trembling from head
to foot. Her heart was hammering. Seeing
Bobby didn't help. He looked terrible when
the nurse wheeled him in. He was ashen-faced and dripping with sweat. During the
course of the afternoon he went through
six pairs of pajamas. He lay without talking,
without reading, just holding Sandy's hand,
and finally drifting into a fitful sleep.
"What I didn't know then was there are five lobes to each lung and four of his
five lobes were affected. That's why his
fever kept recurring. As the infection spread
to each new lobe, the fever went up. And
viral pneumonia doesn't respond too well to
antibiotics.
"That day in the hospital, I began to
realize just how sick he was. Bobby is the
most dynamic boy I've ever known. For him
to sit still is quite an accomplishment, and
for him to just lie there . . . say nothing
. . . not even read! It was terrifying. I sat
wordless with fear. I stayed that night and
the next until midnight. I was worried and
I was scared, but somehow I knew nothing
could happen to Bobby. I pray like crazy
when Dodd is sick, but with Bobby—somehow he's so much stronger than any prayer
of mine could possibly be. How could any
thing happen to Bobby?
"But the strange, awful thing is, Bobby
came so close. He really did. I almost lost
him. The doctor didn't tell me until later.
He was deeply concerned, I knew that, but
I didn't know that for a day and a half
they didn't know whether Bobby would live.
My Bobby."
. . . without whom she cannot imagine
a life. She tried it once and discovered
then that there was no life without Bobby.
He's vigorous, he's demanding, he's stimulating—he's everything a talented and ex
citing girl wants and needs. It didn't occur
to Sandra that he might not ever come home,
until the doctor told her later that he just
might not have. "Oh my God," she thinks
now, and her heart gives that funny lurch
it did when Bobby called from New York
to say he was flying home.
During the crisis there was nothing to
do but sit and wait. Time dragged and
memories surged, unbidden. She remembered how lonely she had been in Portugal
and in Rome without him. She remembered
how she'd begun to stutter with anticipation when the New York skyline
finally appeared through the porthole and
she knew that he would be there waiting.
"I'm going to meet Bobby!" She'd run like
crazy with Dodd right beside her, and they
were holding each other . . . 'and now here
he was, lying there inert and pale and
vacant. No flash or sparkle to him.
Finally, on the third day, he snapped out
of it. The doctor was there, and for the
first time he was joking. Weak as a cat,
Bobby grinned at Sandy and suggested she
bring him some dinner from La Scala.
"I came laden with an order the likes of
which you wouldn't believe," laughs Sandra.
"I brought everything Bob loves. You
never saw a man eat as much as this husband of mine once he started living again.
He'd eat three eggs and bacon, and then
send down for a peanut butter sandwich.
He spent nine days in the hospital, and he
was so weak they didn't think he could
walk from the car to the house. But he did,
on his own two feet and up the stairs, and
you've never seen anyone come back to life
with such zest. He wants to devour every
moment, cram it all in, not miss a thing.
"He has always been a liver, a doer, but
he was always somewhat conservative. Like
the plane bit. Earlier, he had flown all over
the world, but after we were reunited and
so happy, he felt, Don't risk it. Now that's
all changed. The minute he was really feeling well, we flew to Las Vegas,
He phoned me at 3 in the afternoon and said, I've got
reservations for Las Vegas, honey, we're flying up.' 'Flying?' I asked, and started praying.
'Don't be silly,' Bobby urged, 'it's much
safer than driving.' He gave me the whole
spiel." A few hours later they were at the
the airport.
"But it's only a two-engine plane," Sandra had
protested weakly, "And it's sort of old,
Bobby, the tail is lower than the cockpit."
"They make a dozen flights a day," Bobby
had said.
"I'm not going," Sandy said. But very
half-heartedly. "My Lincoln is bigger than
that plane."
Three minutes later they took off—and
had the time of their lives. Bobby confessed
once they reached Las Vegas that the plane
had seemed pretty battered to him too, and
that if Sandra had shed just one tear, he'd
have phoned the butler and had him pick
them up. But she didn't cry, and he has
emerged from his tussle with death afraid
of nothing.
A week later, he decided on the spur of
the moment that they should go to Palm
Springs and soak up some sun. It was Sunday. They threw a few clothes together and
took off, just the three of them. Sandy,
Bobby and Dodd. "We never left the motel,"
Sandy says. "We lay in the sun, we ate, we
talked." This little guy of theirs is so sharp;
they were lying around the pool and he
showed them a note he'd been carrying
around in his pocket: Dear Kindergarten
Parents, it read.
"Honey, this isn't for you, you're not in
kindergarten," Sandy said.
"But my teacher gave it to me and said
give it to you."
So she and Bobby found out that Dodd
has been promoted. He's in kindergarten
now and he's only 4. He can write his name,
he can speak French and he gets all A's.
Bobby almost eats him alive, he loves him
so. He takes great pride in the boy and
dotes on the child's spunkiness. So does
Sandy. Like when they returned from Portugal after the
"A Man Could Get Killed"
location. Dodd told her firmly, "You can
drive me to school the first day, after that
I'm taking the bus." And he takes the bus.
On his birthday, when Sandra had to bring
cupcakes for all the children in his class,
he rode on the bus and she followed in her
car with the cupcakes. He's like his dad, he
has a mind of his own, and if he doesn't
want to do something, forget it.
Right now, Bobby wants to do everything. Sandra says she has never given so
many dinner parties, never dined out so
frequently, never been on such a whirl of
activity as since Bobby got well.
Bobby is scheduled to start shooting the
pilot of the series "It's A Sweet Life"
(on NBC's "Run For Your Life"
), but the
series itself won't start until May or June.
"I never thought I'd live to see him do a
series," Sandra says. "But then, I never
I thought I'd live to see him flying to Las
Vegas. And me!"
But the fact is, whatever Bobby wants
to do, they do. Not because Sandra Dee
needs a strong arm to guide her. She doesn't.
She's quite an amazing girl, and she's been
quite able to handle her own life since she
was a child of 12 working as a model in
New York. She may look round-eyed and
helpless but she isn't. Not a bit of it. She
has had, from the beginning, a faith in
life, something her father and mother had,
something she simply grew up with. She's a
good, strong girl. But as she told me simply
when she returned from Portugal, "My
marriage is my whole life. I don't want to
quit working. I enjoy working, but I just
wasn't alive emotionally during the four
months I was away from Bobby, and I don't
ever want to go through an ordeal like
that again."
LIFE, is for living. They both know that,
they've known it from the first, but now
there is a new dimension to their thinking.
They have each other and they've achieved
a new intensity together, a wonderful thirst
for life.
Bobby's not about to forget he almost
died. And Sandy's not about to forget she
almost lost him forever.
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