"Please Don't Let Love Pass Me By!"

This article appeared in the 1960 issue of Hollywood Romances

She's 18 and she owns a Silver Imperial car (with a dress and coat to match); she lives in a house whose decor reminds you of spun sugar, and she herself looks like a doll come to life....
Everything that success and money can buy, Sandra has--or will shortly acquire. She is a full-fledged movie star (who receives ten thousand fan letters a week) and the pride of Bayonne, New Jersey (which, try as she may, does not seem like home).
"A movie star," Sandra once said, "must live in a world apart." Now, at 18, she may well wonder if love can ever come into that world.
So far, not even one close girl friend has been found in it. So far, it has been filled only with things, expensive things fit for a doll. And with work, very high-paying work whose rewards are doubtful.
"I can't stand seeing myself on the screen," she says, and is thus cheated out of a sight that has delighted millions. But even though she can't stand seeing herself she can't stop being an actress. "I'm always sick when I'm not working," she says. "When I'm working and don't feel well I pay no attention. but the minute I'm through with a picture, the slightest thing and I'm practically dying..."
At 18, work is becoming almost an addiction to her. There are people who think that work is a cure for everything, but sometimes it is only a distraction that hides the ailment. It would be foolish to say that Sandra is suffering. Perhaps she is just beginning to discover that success and happiness do not always come together. Perhaps, with the beginning of desperation, she is clinging to success.
Only last year she said she'd give up her career for marriage and a family. This year she's changed her mind. "I wouldn't give this up for anything," she says. "I love it." And in the next breath, like so many glamour girls before her, she adds, "I would like to get married more than anything and have lots of kids. I really would."
For a girl whose assortment of dates has always been casual, and often arranged; for a girl who is often too exhausted to budge from the house, marriage seems far removed.
"I'll probably get married when I'm 22," she says, with a combination of wistfulness and iron. She is a girl who usually gets what she wants. But, at 22, she may discover that you can't make love to order. Now, busy and excited by adulation, she's handed over her personal life to the producer who discovered her--Ross Hunter.
"Ross advises me about certain people to go out with," she says, "and he tells me yes or no. If I haven't got a date for some big smash party, he takes me. If I get lonely or down, he always knows exactly how to handle me. I don't know what I'd do without him."
She is growing up. She has already mastered the "Joan Crawford bit"--dressing to the teeth for any and all occasions. She is finishing the "European bit"--making a film, Romanoff and Juliet, in Italy where, off duty, she will probably be provided with many handsome young escorts whose names she'll soon forget. She'll come back with an imported wardrobe and even more gloss to the outward sophistication that works against tenderness and love.
Sandra is a warm and feeling person but it isn't obvious. "My mother loves me and it shows a mile," she says. "I'm not like that. I'm not affectionate at all..." Perhaps learning to be is even more important than learning a new script, but Sandra passes if off. Then she wonders, like a child, why people her own age, people who knew her in the past, feel uncomfortable in her presence.
"I'm really normal, just like everyone else," she says. "I always try to stay that way." A "normal" girl living in a "world apart" is bound to have rough going.
Sandra isn't normal and never will be. She is unique. Offscreen and on she is the embodiment of glowing youth, but it is a hothouse glow that says, "Don't touch." It is a glow that has been carefully nurtured and is in danger of freezing into place.
But it doesn't have to. Not if Sandra realizes that what she is is not normal but human, not a doll who has to be a perfect movie star but a girl who can be hurt, a girl who has a heart, a girl who must take the time to feel love and show it....and we think she does. She has said she wants friends. Surely, she wants love, like every human being, and prays that it won't pass her by. And it would be a tragedy if the success she has worked so hard to win will cheat her out of it.

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