Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin:
"Peter Pan Is Out!"
This article, written by Edwin Miller, appeared in Seventeen Magazine March, 1966
"They can't keep me in Peter Pan collars for the rest of my life," Sandra Dee declares with a laugh, clad in skintight green slacks with jersey and shoes to match. "I've got to move on, I've got to grow up. I want to do drama, sex, pictures with real substance. And I'm not going to carry a picture by myself anymore; I want a star to play opposite me.
"It's the hardest thing in the world. Once you're known as Little Nell, they never see you as anything else.
"A Man Could Get Killed is the last picture for Universal on my original contract--it's been seven years--and then I start a new one. I'll make two a year for them and the rest on my own. I'm twenty-three and I look at Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood and I figure if they've been able to do it, I can too. I've got my own company now. It's a great feeling to own yourself, to know that no one can tell you what to do and when to do it anymore. In the beginning it's great to belong to the studio completely. Where would you be without them? For a long time, you say, 'Thank you, thank you,' but the time comes when you've got to get out on your own. It's a lot harder to pick your own properties and read hundreds of scripts; you realize how much is involved with each decision you make. But this way at least, the responsibility is all mine. If the picture's a bomb, I can't say, 'You see, I told you I didn't like the script.'
"I didn't want to make A Man Could Get Killed at first. The script didn't seem right, and I didn't want to leave Bobby [Darin] and go to Portugal, a place I had hardly ever heard of. It's a funny story. There was a slip-up, and nobody even told me I was in the picture until three weeks before it began. Bobby happened to read the script and called the studio and said he was interested in doing a part, and they said, 'What? You think it would be a good idea to play opposite your wife again?' We had just finished making That Funny Feeling. That's the way he heard I was doing the movie! 'It's news to me,' he said, 'and I've got news for you: nobody has told Sandy she's in it.' Somebody goofed! The producer thought the studio had informed me, the studio thought the producer did, and that's the way it went.
"I was originally supposed to do That Funny Feeling with Warren Beatty. I was interested in the story two years ago and asked for either George Peppard or Warren Beatty to play opposite me. I think they're the two most exciting young actors to come along in the last few years. Then it was a hassle with Warren's agents. He wanted top billing. I've worked hard for seven years making one picture after another and I didn't think it was fair to take second billing under Warren, who's been around such a short time. My pride hurt. I offered to split the billing, take top position on the movie credits and second position in the advertising--or the other way around. But they refused, so that was it. We had never even met! I waved to him once at a restaurant.
"A Man Could Get Killed is a chase, a kind of spoof of the James Bond movies. James Garner, Melina Mercouri, Tony Franciosa and I are all after some diamonds. Tony plays an American who has disguised himself as a Portuguese, and I'm an American girl who recognizes him while on a cruise and moves in on him. I'm supposed to have shot him in the stomach with a beebee gun when we were kids. When he denies knowing me, I say it's impossible that there could be another man with two navels. So far, practically all my scenes have been with Tony. I had only seen Melina in "Never on Sunday" and when I walked through the hotel lobby right after we arrived in Portugal, I noticed a woman with a dog looking at me rather curiously. I didn't pay any attention to her--somebody's always looking at you when you're outside your own home--but then my mother said, 'Sandy, that really wasn't very polite. You cut Melina Mercouri without saying a word. Go back and apologize!' I did, but I couldn't say, 'I'm sorry, I didn't recognize you.' That's about the worst thing you can say to a star. It's much better to keep your mouth shut altogether and say nothing. She was blonde when I saw her originally, and now her hair is brown and cut short, but once you come close, of course, her face is unmistakable.
"When Mother and my son Dodd, who's three, and I sailed from New York, I couldn't look at Bobby the whole last day because I was afraid I was going to start crying again. I had been crying the whole month before but I still could have filled a body of water the size of the Atlantic. I thought to myself how ridiculous I would look if I arrived at the ship thatway--with all the press and everything. Movie Star in Tears! Just let me get aboard without cracking up, I said to myself. Dodd couldn't understand why Bobby wasn't with us. He hasn't been away from Bobby for two years since our own separation, and that's all over now. He just couldn't understand why Daddy was leaving us. I kept trying to tell him that we were leaving Daddy and to wave to him from the rail, but he didn't understand and kept crying silently. No sound, just tears running down his face. We were the only two people crying on the boat. Everybody else was having one great big party. The couple next to us were stoned. She kept saying to me, 'I know you from some place, I've met you before.' Finally, I told her who I was and then she kept calling Dodd Bobby. Dodd does look like Bobby, and everyone keeps saying, 'My, he looks just like Bobby,' and then I wait to hear, 'but he has your eyes or something' but it never comes. I'm beginning to feel that I've had nothing to do with it at all--as if I'm in the way.
"The boat was wonderful, but it was full of young fellows who kept coming over to me and trying to be friendly, and there was a ship's newspaper, and I could just see somebody writing it all up and making the papers back home and Bobby reading about his wife having a shipboard romance. So I could only go to have a drink with Dodd and seat him at the bar or stay in my cabin. The captain was quite put out because I didn't go to any of his parties until finally, the last day of the voyage, I sent him a note and had a drink with him and explained. After we got off at Gibraltar, my mother and Dodd and the maid and I drove to Lisbon. Once we checked in, my chauffeur suggested a nightclub for me to go to, and I went and everybody recognized me, calling me Sandra Day. It was a big surprise. Strangers sat down at my table and ordered drinks. The singer would say, 'Excuse me, I must leave for a moment' and run up on the bandstand and sing and then come back. I had about eighty-five people at the table; they had all seen my pictures and were wonderful. Then the fellow from the movie company came in and asked, 'What are you doing here? Very bad!' It was a not-quite-respectable place for girls!
"Portugal is lovely but there's nothing to do really; you just hang around the hotel when you're not working. There's no night life and I'm so low and homesick missing Bobby you wouldn't believe it.
"When we left, Bobby told Dodd that he was going to have to be the daddy while we were away and take care of me; it's been incredible ever since. Every night at nine o'clock Dodd says, 'Come now, Mommy, you have to go to bed.' And I have to go to bed. He says he's Daddy and Mommy goes to bed and that's it. Dodd sleeps in the same room with me; I'm bringing him up the way I think is right and if I make any mistakes, at least they're mine. If I want to keep the light on, he comes over and wants to read too, so I can't even do that.
"We shot one scene over at Sesimbra, a little fishing village. That was really wild. The company bought nine hundred pounds of fish to use as props--there's a sequence in which Tony's searching for the diamonds after a fish swallows them. I have to pick up dead fish and hand them to Tony and he looks down their throats and tosses them aside. The fish were lying around for two days. Oh, that smell! I'll never forget it as long as I live. I like to fish and I can take out the hook if I'm wearing gloves, but I can't bear picking up dead fish. There's one kind you have to pick up by the eyes--that's the only way--and I thought I'd faint. Dodd kept saying, 'Lift it higher, Mommy, I can't see what you're doing!'
"Bobby didn't want to come to Portugal. He didn't want to be in the position of accompanying his wife to a location and then sitting around waiting for her to finish work and come back to the hotel again. It's as simple as that. He records for Capitol and has a huge music publishing business--about the second largest in the country--and he's trying to build his career, doing movies and TV. He's awfully hard on himself, whatever he does. When he made Captain Newman, M.D., he looked at it and thought he was terrible--and there he was, nominated for an Academy Award.
"Bobby idolizes George Burns, who kind of took the place of the father he never knew. Some time after Gracie Allen died, we had a dinner for Mr. Burns, and I hired an Australian butler to serve. George loves burning hot soup; if the soup isn't hot, his dinner is ruined. When I explained to the butler that Mr. Burns was the guest of honor and about the soup, he was so excited he could hardly stand up. It turned out that George and Gracie had been his favorite comedians all his life and he had always listened to their radio program. When dinner was ready and we all sat down, the butler rushed out with the boiling soup and passed right by me in his enthusiasm to serve Mr. Burns first. Afterward, he was so relieved not to have spilled anything that he took ten minutes to serve the others at the table. By the time George could begin eating the soup, it was cold!
"I've grown up at Universal," Sandra remarks, "but it's changing so much--especially now that the studio runs trams carrying visitors right through the lot. I don't know why they're doing it, the make-believe is all the fun in the movies.
"I don't enjoy movies anymore the way I did when I was a kid. Take the love scenes: I know the actors don't love each other, they're just acting at it, but I never used to think about it that way. You lose so much giving away all the secrets and exposing the tricks. I think it's tearing the business down. The actors are part of the tour too, and it's awful--you can't go from makeup to your dressing room without running through the street. They point you out and people are looking at you all the time. One day I was having lunch in my bungalow and didn't pull down the blinds and a trainload of people drew up and stopped and the guide began describing my lunch! There's no privacy left."
THE END
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