Celebrity Collector Magazine 1995

Legendary Sandra Dee

By George Carpinone

This article appeared in the magazine Celebrity Collector, issue six, 1995 and was contributed by publisher, editor and interviewer Mr.George Carpinone.

Although widely known for her films of the 1950s and 60s in which her roles captured a sweet, pure, and very American innocence, actress Sandra Dee has actually been out of the public eye for nearly a decade. Her reemergence has provided Celebrity Collector with an opportunity to not only understand her years of invisibility, but to provide an in-depth look at her career through her own words.

The former Alexandria Zuck was born on April 23, 1944 in Bayonne, New Jersey, the only child of John and Mary Zuck. Her parents were divorced while she was still young, and her mother remarried a real estate entrepreneur, Eugene Douvan.

'Sandra Douvan' began her career as a young New York model at the age of eight. She was discovered by producer Ross Hunter at the age of twelve. Dee's life changed forever: she moved to California and went on to become the young movie star sensation for a new generation. She was the girl everyone wanted to be. Blonde, wide-eyed Sandra Dee hit stardom and became 'big box office', sharing honors in the top ten with Elizabeth Taylor and Doris Day. She eloped with the popular singer-actor Bobby Darin in 1960 and gave birth to a son, Dodd, a year later. Appearing in over twenty feature films, including Gidget, A Summer Place and Take Her, She's Mine, she worked with Peter Ustinov, Rex Harrison and James Stewart. Dee's marriage to Darin lasted seven years, and ended in divorce. But it's no secret that her love for Darin did not end even after his death at the young age of thirty-seven.

In the 1970s, Dee appeared in TV-movies and in guest star roles. One of her last appearances was on Fantasy Island in 1982. She then disappeared from public view until 1991, when she was featured as the cover story of People magazine.

I hadn't seen any photos or TV appearances of Sandra Dee since 1991 and did not know what to expect for this in-person interview. Awaiting me was a radiant, lovely woman at the home of her managers, Arthur and Barbara Friedman, in Los Angeles. As I opened my briefcase, Dee noticed my copy of Dream Lovers (Warner Books) by her son, Dodd. As a proud mother, she began to talk with delight about her son's job as host of a local radio talk show.
It was then that the movie star named Sandra Dee emerged and came to full bloom as I presented her with memorabilia from my own collection. Smiling, Sandra Dee began to reminisce about her past:
Celebrity Collector: Have you kept any memorabilia yourself through the years?
SD: Very little. My mother kept it, to be honest, and now my son has most of it. But I never thought it would matter. When I was a kid of eleven or twelve, it didn't effect me that much when I was told that I had been on ten magazine covers. I was too young to realize the significance. But it matters now.
CC: How was it that you began modeling?
SD: I was really alone growing up. That was the reason I went into modeling: my parents worked and I was alone. I had to do something to occupy myself. One day in school my classmates said to come with them on a modeling call. I was nervous about it because I thought my father would be angry, but they assured me that there was no reason for him to know. Then, when I got the job on the first call and without an agency, he had to know. There I was signing papers and I thought, "My father will kill me." Actually, he almost did, but after a while he was really proud.
CC: Tell us about your commercials and other early TV experiences.
SD: I don't remember them very well. I did Coca Cola live on The Eddie Fisher Show when he had a fifteen minute segment, and I remember breaking out in hives because of the coke, but no one could figure out what caused them! The Vaughn Monroe Show was another fifteen minute show, but I didn't have a speaking part. My part consisted of walking across a porch with a dog - the little girl who just walked her dog - in a scene called 'Racing with the Moon'. And to think I felt so important when they played it!
CC: How did your modeling lead to a screen test for producer Ross Hunter?
SD: Fate. At my modeling agency, Huntington Hartford, there was a man named Len, a friend of my father, who said, "Sandra, an important man, Ross Hunter, is coming to town." Len didn't have a client and asked my father as a favor if I would go to audition. Meanwhile, my father died and Len was insistent that the audition must take place. So we went. There were two hundred other girls there and I was not too happy about it. I was thinking about my mother being alone and my father's burial. I guess that Ross Hunter was not in a very good mood either because he had just seen auditions he didn't like. He threw the script down, and I asked if I could read it. He said despondently, "Yeah, you can read it," and so I read. I don't know how I read because my mind was somewhere else. And he looked at me and said, "You know, I think I'm going to bring you out for a test." And I thought he was joking! I forgot about it. I went home and never told my mother where I had been. I figured Natalie Wood was going to get it because she was under contract. The next thing I knew my agency called and asked when was I leaving. I said "Leaving for where?" Apparently, the news was in the headlines, in Louella Parsons' column - and that's how my acting career began.

CC: Being so young and a professional, what was your attitude? Did you feel like a young grown-up? Did you play with dolls?
SD: Oh, I played with dolls. I had modeled since I was eight. I felt like an adult. And when my father died, I was the adult. My mother fell apart. And that's why we came out here: we were moving to a new apartment that my parents had bought together. But my father died before that could happen. Then my mother just couldn't face moving. So when the screen test came up, I thought at least it would be a good excuse to get her away from New York. She was just bonkers and I couldn't stand it anymore.
CC: Do you think it was your casualness and the fact that you weren't desperate for it that gave you the edge?
SD: I think I was scared. I was naive. We did a scene from Our Town, which wasn't a bad scene to do, a scene with fear in it. Fear of a boy/man - girl/woman relationship. I was nervous reading the lines. I had never been on a date.
My grandmother came to see the test. Everyone in the projection room was excited because she had come. Her first words were "Where on earth did you learn to kiss like that?!" I was so humiliated! John Saxon was there. Ross Hunter was preening in front of the screen. And her only comment was to ask how I had learned to kiss like that! I just shrugged.
CC: Was your name Sandra Dee or Sandra Douvan in New York?
SD: While I was in New York, it was Douvan. It should have stayed that way. However, as a model, I had terrible handwriting and as I could never fit 'Douvan' when I signed the work slips, someone said that just writing 'D' would suffice. It was not spelled 'Dee' at that time, only the letter 'D'. When I came out here, Louella Parsons was the one who spelled it out. Ross Hunter said to her that he'd met 'Sandra D', and Louella replied that she couldn't write Sandra with just the letter 'D', so she added the double 'e'. She said it would be alright because no one in California had heard the name Douvan anyway, although I would have rather kept it. Actually, if I'd had my druthers, I would have had 'Alexandria Douvan'.

CC: You were so young during all this. What problems did it present?
SD: When I was on Sally Jesse Raphael, I didn't know that John Saxon and several other celebrities would be there. Sally asked how I was treated during my early acting years. I replied that they treated me as if I was poison, because I was underage. And meanwhile, the other actors told Sally that they had loved me! Loved me? The truth is that if anyone was near the set, John Saxon would keep me at a distance explaining that he didn't date underage children. I tried to contradict him on the show but he would have none of it. It was uncomfortable and a lot of it was cut. However, in retrospect I guess I can't blame him because of my age at the time.
CC: Tell us about that first film, Until They Sail.
SD: On the first picture, I worked with Jean Simmons, Paul Newman and Joan Fontaine. And wouldn't you know, none of them could ever agree on which day to start shooting. If one wanted one day, another wanted the next! I said to my mother "What, are they nuts?" I hoped that no one had anything against Thursday because we were already into Wednesday, et cetera. However, as I was in more films, I began to realize that I felt the same as they had: in other words, one performs best on one's 'luck day' and I had to have luck, too. It's strange.
But on that first film, I had a great director: Academy Award winner Robert Wise. And not a schlock cast either. At the rehearsals we were told to study, for example, scenes twenty to thirty. But I didn't know that the pages were different from the scenes, that scene twenty could be on page one, and so I thought I had to memorize the entire script! As a result, I learned all of Paul Newman's words as well as my own!
CC: Which actors impressed you?
SD: Jean Simmons, Rosalind Russell, Lana Turner, Kay Kendall. I'm sure I'm leaving out some. Those four. They helped me. All four. Some people had reputations for not liking people - I will not mention names - but they were just wonderful to me. Lana was like a mother. She would be fixing her make up and would look at me and say, "You need some powder on your nose. No one is going to put up a sign in the movie theatre that says your nose is too shiny." She told the make-up man to look after me.
CC: Who least impressed you?
SD: John Gavin. It was like talking to a stone wall. If he did his close up first, he was wonderful. On my close-up, he might just as well have had the script reading it.
CC: Do you have a favorite film?

SD: The one I had most fun making was Gidget. That was the first and only time in my career that I worked with fairly young people. Being with them wasn't like being with an aunt, mother, or grandmother. I had fun.
CC: Did you learn to surf?
SD: Yes. I went out in the ocean with Jimmy Darren and an Olympic surfer. It was March. We had on wet suits. I was paddling in the water and asked if I could catch a wave. The surfer said to wait. I thought that, finally, this was going to be fun! Well, at 5:30 am, we had a shooting call and had to use a boat to get out into the ocean. The director asked if we were ready. I was out of my wet suit and jumped in the ocean with my two piece bathing suit on - and froze! I was purple! They couldn't get me out fast enough. I said, "No more of this. We didn't work for the remainder of the day. The rest of the shooting was in a tank - a ninety-two degree tank at Warner Brothers. I loved it!
CC: What do you recall about working with the late Constance Ford? She played 'the mother from hell' to your character, Molly, in A Summer Place.
SD: Constance was a New York actress who came from theatre. There was a scene in A Summer Place in which she was supposed to hit me. She told my mother to leave the set while we did that particular scene. Constance warned my mother that she would not be on speaking terms with her if she stayed to watch. Then, turning to me, she said, "But you, Sandra, will speak to me again because you have to in the picture." Continuing, she said, 'Now, don't flinch', and with that she slapped me so hard that I landed on the floor. I'm not kidding! I'd taken slaps before, but she knocked me out! I saw stars! Constance was such a good actress with whom to work that when another scene required being slapped again, she told me - so that I would feel in character - that my dog, Pom-Pom, which I dearly loved, had died. It was a way to make me appear genuinely upset. In A Summer Place, everyone worked with and for each other.

CC: When you were pregnant with Dodd, did it present any problems during your contract?
SD: I didn't know that if you're pregnant, you cannot be insured on the set. When the filming of Tammy Tell Me True began, that is when I became pregnant. But I didn't know it. However, I felt something, feeling full, but I went in every day. My clothes seemed to fit alright. Everyone was pampering me in the make-up room and asking if I wanted to lie down, but nobody said anything about my being pregnant. The doctor who was treating me asked if I was pregnant, and I said that I didn't think so. Then one morning I said that I had to lie down. I was getting morning sickness, but I kept telling myself that it was crazy because all my clothes fit. What I didn't know was that my clothes were being let out at night, inch by inch. The wardrobe lady said that she was only letting out the top. It was difficult with morning sickness to work on those scenes in a swamp with a goat. But we made it through, and everyone looked the other way.
CC: Tell us what it was like to work with character actress Beulah Bondi on the Tammy films.
SD: Beulah Bondi was a joy to work with. However, there was a day shortly after my marriage to Bobby when I was trying to leave for the weekend for Las Vegas where Bobby was playing. I couldn't leave until we had finished shooting a certain scene. And wouldn't you know, Beulah Bondi, who had gotten my name correct all along up to that point, waited until then to mix up her lines by calling me 'Sammy' instead of 'Tammy'. She said, "I just don't know what's wrong with me!" She had correctly called me 'Tammy' on all the other days, but just when I was trying to leave, she came out with 'Sammy'. I kept looking at my watch and it was getting later and later. I will never forget this! I don't know what possessed her and she never did it after that.

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