"What It's Like To Have A Baby!"
This article, by Sandra Dee, as told to Jane Ardmore, appeared in the January 1962 issue of Movie Mirror Magazine
"I'm so excited, so delighted about this baby now, I can hardly wait for December!" exclaimed Sandra Dee. "Oh, not at first. At first I was just plain scared. A baby? Who, me? Bobby was scared, too, I know he was. We'd only been married a few months and I'm the kind who likes to eat hotdogs on a roller coaster, go horse-back riding at 3:00 a.m., hates hips and a waist has to be this big and no bigger. But not any more.
"Some people are just born to be married and a parent. Others acquire it. That's me. I've acquired it. Bobby was born this way. It's not only that he has a great love for kids---you should see him with his little nephew Gary in New York--it's more than that. He has firm ideas about child-rearing, how a child should be spoken to, how an older child should be free to find its own talent, its own religion, its own school. Bobby wants to bring up our child the way his mother brought him up--with kindness, with gentleness and understanding and without physical punishment. He'll probably flip if he ever sees me spanking little Darin."
Sandra grins and dives into her lunch---salad with oil and garlic dressing, grilled hamburger, cottage cheese and coffee. "I'm starved," she laughs, and her mother and I laugh, too, because in all the years we've been having lunch, it's always been her mother, Mary Douvan, and I who did the eating. Sandy never cared about food. "I think she's tasted my cooking for the first time," Mary laughs. Recently, Bobby and Sandy were invited to her house for dinner. Bobby had a recording session. He dropped Sandy off on the way and while Mary prepared stuffed cabbage, Sandy was official taster. She literally ate all day, despite which she's gained comparatively little weight and looks very charming in tailored slacks and paisley overshirt.
"But to be serious," Sandra says, relishing the first swallow, and coming back to the subject nearest her heart, "Bobby is not the only one planning. I'm planning, too. The first week after the baby is born we're going down to our house in Palm Springs just Bobby and the nurse and the baby and I where we can be totally together and totally alone. If we stayed in our own house, it would be like Grand Central Station with all our friends and we just have to be quiet and get acquainted. The baby's due December 20. My guess is, he'll be a week earlier than that. I know, he keeps kicking away sending me messages! Well, anyhow, January 6 Bobby goes to Vegas for three weeks and this will be just great for me. The new little baby and the nurse and I will go right with him. I love nightclubs! I love the whole bit when it's my husband singing. Then we'll come back. I'll go to work in making a film too.
After that, if he plays Boston for two weeks, that will just coincide with my month off between pictures. One thing is for sure: when he plays the Copa in New York in May, I'm going to have the time of my life! This will be the first time my grandparents will see the baby. My grandfather and grandmother, Alexander and Anne Simboliak, raised me when I was little and they watched over my mother like crazy when she was carrying me. So you can imagine their excitement now that their 'baby' is having a baby! We have a huge family and all my aunts, uncles, cousins and my great grandfather will be on hand to welcome us. I don't think any baby ever had so many people waiting to welcome him and love him. And for that month, I'll just take care of my baby and be a mother.
"Bobby asks if I am really going to take the baby everywhere and he knows the answer. Of course I will! He knows I can't bear to leave our four dogs alone! You can't leave someone you love. I didn't always know that. When we were working on Come September in Italy and Bobby and I were first in love and dreaming of marriage I figured well, my husband will have to go away from time to time. But marriage isn't like that at all. I'd never be away from Bobby for more than a week. We married to be together."
Sandra is under no illusion that all these moments together will be glamorous. She spent three weeks with Bobby recently on location at Redding, California, where the temperature was 122 degrees in the shade. Several hundred men in army uniform tramped around filming Hell Is for Heroes. None of them shaved, all of them wore baggy pants. Bobby's were the baggiest of all as the young Phil Silvers character who is a con man at heart. The theme song of the production unit, extras, actors et al, was gripe, gripe, gripe, The heat was unbearable; there was no relief from it. They shot out in the country forty minutes from town and even in town there was nothing to do for all but one man--Bobby. He was as happy as a clam. He and Sandra arrived at Redding at midnight. The next morning he'd found a little place that served sukiyaki and they ate it--for breakfast! Then he bought a hibachi--a Japanese cooking stove--and went into the business of making sukiyaki himself. They had it every night except the two times Sandra cooked. Then it was roast beef and steak. Bobby called his mother-in-law long-distance to tell her how good the roast beef had been.
"All the men were going balmy," says Sandy, "except Bobby. He had the sun, his wife, his music, his game of
chess, his fishing. He had a ball!" Sandra went fishing with him, too. The first day, he baited her hook, she threw in the line, waited three minutes and nothing happened.
"Hey, what is this. said she. "I can wait two hours for something to bite? That's one heck of a sport! She kept right on going fishing with him but she didn't fish. If those wiggle warts didn't want to cooperate, they weren't for her. She sat in the boat with him, read and got suntanned. She also went
out on location with him every day. While he worked, she played chess, with whoever of the cast or crew wasn't working. She beat everyone. She also beats Bobby, who taught her to play, Sandra's strategy, is simple--she has none. An expert chess player has a plan. There is no such thing as playing to trade pieces. But Sandy has no plan and she doesn't mind at all if
you take her king so long as she can take yours.
"Why make that stupid move?" Bobby screams. But she just shakes
her blonde pouf and laughs.
"Who's winning the game?" she laughs, winning it.
Bobby, she knows perfectly well, is a better player than she, but once she ruins his plan, and she ruins it with a move like trading kings which seems senseless, then the game goes into
confusion. She used the same strategy on every chess player on location at Redding. One game she and Bobby started up there on a little magnetic board continued off and on for weeks and finished three days after they returned to Los Angeles. Guess who won!
One night in their little room at the lodge, near the location site, Sandra woke with a start at 3:30 in the morning. A child was crying. Hers? For a moment she thought it was! First thing in the morning, she was phoning her obstetrician long distance. Would she know when the baby was coming? He howled. She phoned her mother long distance. "Tell me the truth now, Mother. Don't lie to me..."
"Have I ever lied to you in my life, Sandy?"
"Mother, I want to tell you just how I feel . . . "She described each symptom minutely. "Did you ever feel
that way? Does everyone feel that way? Mother, don't spare my feelings."
She is probably the kookiest little character that ever carried a baby, this Sandra, and that's the character she's playing. She can't be glamorous for nine months? Well, she can at least be funny. And funny she is. She keeps Bobby in stitches. And he keeps her in stitches. She keeps her mother and the obstetrician and her friends at the studio all in a state of hilarity over her constant symptoms, her hypochondria, her false alarms relative to the baby's arrival. She fools no one. Sandra's been taking good care of herself for the first time since I've known her. She's getting good food, rest, and her mental attitude is exactly what the doctor ordered but she wakes up every day with a list of funny aches and pains and Bobby does a ten minute take-off on her that should go on TV. She can't sit down, she has a pain here, she can't stand up, she has a pain there.
But the fact is, Sandy had a very active pregnancy. When she was with Bobby in San Francisco, he had her up at 9:30 in the morning rummaging with him through antique shops for old coins. "This man is interested in everything, but everything," she moans. "It's awful." She means it's exciting and
fascinating and different from anything she's known in her life... chess and old coins, a new twelve inch telescope that weighs five-hundred pounds. "Last night we saw Saturn, the rings around it and everything!"... a Zoomar lens for his movie camera, he's making a short, just for fun.
And just for ruin, Sandra calls the doctor. "You know, I've never been pregnant before," she says, and asks her questions.
The doctor is used to this. She walks into the office and he greets her: "Well, Sandy, you've only called me four times today, you must be feeling great."
"I'm afraid I'm going quite mad," she says seriously. "I laugh for no reason and cry for no reason."
"I can't answer for you," laughs the doctor, "but with patients having babies, I can tell you about me." And he regularly threatens not to handle her case when it comes to subsequent children. She had him really in stitches when he asked her what kind of a room she wanted at the hospital.
"Huge," she said.
"Look, Sandy, I know you're a movie star but why do you need a large room?"
"Because I'm not going to be there alone," she answered gravely. I want my husband in one corner and my mother in one corner. I don't suppose I can bring the dogs--they're going to be terribly lonesome."
Most difficult chore during the time of waiting has been hunting for a house. They had to have a house in time for the baby. The house they were living in was all wrong, it didn't have the right number of rooms, there was no nursery, no nurse's room; it was merely the rented house they'd found when they came home from their honeymoon. Bobby and Sandy had seen dozens of houses. Bobby wanted something with thirty rooms and four acres of land, a house they could live in for a lifetime, see
their children married from, the house the kids would come back to with their kids.
"Bobby, what would we have then to look forward to?" Sandra asked, finally. "We need a house now. But in another couple of years, when we have more children, there will be plenty of time to buy another larger house. We don't have to buy the lifetime house right this minute."
Bobby capitulated. He almost bought a great Spanish mansion (that went up in price $50,000 in two hours when the owners found out who was interested). It had the acres Bobby wants and it had the charm Sandy wants but it only had two bedrooms and they'd have had to build on three more. Bobby talked Sandy out of it. "I'm an idiot with money," she says, "but Bobby is wise with money and he knew we were being taken."
Then--the day before Sandy and I met for this interview--Bobby came rushing into the house at five o'clock with the news that he'd bought a house, a beautiful white house, a modern house, next door to Sandy's producer, Ross Hunter! On a street down which Sandy used to drive every day of her life going to the studio, when she and her mother lived up the mountain! It had a pool, too!
"Where is the nursery?" Sandy asked. And that is the first room she saw, a lovely blue and white nursery she'll probably do over in another color, but all ready, with baby furniture and a bassinet and a crib, as if it were waiting for her baby. Then she saw the rest of the house. Sandra found one room she can convert into a den for Bobby's music.
By the time you read this, they will have moved in. They'll have gone over to Vegas for a few weeks, returned, moved in, refinished the nursery, put their own pretty silver and china and glassware away and gone off to Texas on location for Bobby's stint in State Fair. When they come back from Texas, there'll only be a month and a half to wait for that baby. As Sandra tells everyone she meets: "DECEMBER 20th, It'll be a boy... I can hardly wait!"
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