The Whole Story of My Life


This article appeared in the August 1960 issue of Movieland and TV Time Magazine -- BY Sandra Dee



According to my mother, I was born at 5:35 A.M. on April 23, 1942, in Bayonne, New Jersey. I weighed seven pounds, five and one-half ounces. Frankly, I don't remember much about it, probably because that is a dreadful time of day to have to concentrate on anything at all, to say nothing of making your debut in this world.

My mother insists that when I was placed in her arms she couldn't believe that I was her child, because I looked so grown up.

She says that I never seemed to sleep. She used to tiptoe into the bedroom where I was supposed to be getting four hundred winks, and there I would be, studying my surroundings. She says, "I would lean over, and there--staring at me from that little face--was a pair of chocolate-drop eyes." I guess that would be enough to shake up anybody!

My first clear-cut memory marks me, I think, as a child of my time: I recall our wartime blackouts in New Jersey. I remember being terribly impressed with the dark draperies closed at night before our lights could be turned on, and I remember sitting on my mother's lap in a darkened room before an open window on a summer night and watching the parking lights of automobiles flickering along the streets like fireflies.

Of course I didn't know, at that age, what fireflies were. But when--eventually--I saw my first cloud of fireflies and heard them identified, I remembered the summer streets of Bayonne during World War II. My mother wonders, when she hears me tell that story, if I don't remember it from her description of the war days. But if I recalled it from having heard about it, the details of blinking lights and heavy draperies would not exist as clearly as they do in my mental picture gallery.

Naturally, there are some facts about my infancy that I "remember" because I have heard my relatives discuss them. For one thing, I thrived as a baby, but my poor mother worried herself thin. (She was only 18 when I was born, and she was still considered a baby in her own family. When I came along, my grandmother told her friends, "My baby has had a baby!")

Mama was sure something was going to happen to me if I came in contact with germs or ordinary household dust or cold, so I was never allowed to learn to crawl among total strangers around our home. I was kept in my crib until I was about nine months old. One day my grandmother lifted me out of my "safe" prison, and set me experimentally on my feet on the floor. I balanced myself for a minute, then strolled over to a chair. Of course I had been bouncing around my crib for several months, watching grown people walk around, so I must have picked up the idea that it was a fairly easy thing to do. I think I must have liked the firm feeling of the floor after the uncertain footing of the soft crib.

To make up for not being able to walk as quickly as I wanted to, I learned to talk. According to my grandmother, when I was six months old I spoke my first word: "Bobby," which was my version of the Russian word for Grandmother, "Bobke." My next word was "Deedee," for Grandfather, then "Daddy," and finally - to my mother's relief - "Mama."

Another part of my sub-sub-sub-teen days that I consider funny was the incident when, after listening to the choir in our Orthodox Russian Catholic Church sing the hundred petitions to the Lord ("God Help Us"), I tried to sing the service alone while sitting on my grandmother's lap. Our mass is very long; it requires almost two hours, so you can imagine how the priest felt about my unsolicited musical program.

I was four when I started kindergarten, an experience that opened a wide, wide world for me. Mother expected me to cry a river. She thought, "Sandy has never been among total strangers before in her life; she has always spent her time with people who love her. She'll be so homesick, she won't stay more than an hour."

I fooled her. I was thrilled to pieces to see all the new children, and I sailed away from Mama without a backward glance. She was the one who cried. She was the one suffering from loneliness so much that she volunteered to help the teacher. For several months, she spent three hours each school day helping to monitor the kindergarten.

I must have given her some trouble, because I never wanted to go home when school was out in the afternoon. It wasn't that I had anything against home; it was that I loved the children and I LOVED school!

I was about four-and-a-half when my mother and father separated. I know that some children are unhappy when a family problem of that sort develops, but I would be misrepresenting my true feelings if I said I suffered any sort of trauma at all.

All it meant to me was that I changed schools. I liked the new school even better than the old. Most of the children in the new school had never attended school anywhere else, so I was something special. I thought, "I'm really living; I'm traveling around." I was thrilled to be making a new set of friends to add to the list of my original kindergarten pals.

Age Five was very big in my life. This is the way I remember one of the crucial events of that period: My mother was asked to serve on the committee for a benefit dinner and card party being given by the Ladies Auxiliary of our church.

I was asked to sing and do a tap number. I'll never forget my costume. I wore a ruffled poke bonnet and a gold polka-dotted green organdy dress with an enormous ruffled skirt, sox and slippers to match. I sang "Sioux City Sue" as it hadn't been sung (somebody said) since the days of Wild Bill Hickok. Big deal.

After the program, a raffle was held. I was asked to draw numbers out of a fish bowl; the holder of the lucky number won a cake or a pie or something like that, and promptly offered it for sale to the highest bidder.

In the midst of the bidding--people were having fun buying pies for five dollars and jars of preserves for six and so forth--I notice a big man standing at one side of the recreation hall. (I found out afterward that he was six feet two inches tall, and weighed around two hundred pounds.) Suddenly he called out, "I bid one million dollars for the little girl."

Everybody laughed and clapped, and the raffle went on. I was flattered, of course, but not impressed. You know how kids are, always saying, "My dad has a new car that cost about a million dollars.' To me, a million dollars, was just a gag; there wasn't any such thing.

I'll tell you who was impressed, though. My mother. After the raffle she said to the big man, "You must be quite taken by the little girl."

"I meant my million dollar bid," he said, "'I think she's the sweetest thing I have ever seen." My mother said, "Thank you; she's my daughter."

After the church party, Eugene Douvan drove Mama and me home. I'll never forget that ride. His car was a canary-yellow Buick convertible, and I was disgusted to see how dark it was, and to realize that it was late: The kids in our neighborhood were going to miss my coming home in style.

I had no way of knowing that Eugene Douvan was going to be parking that car in front of my grandmother's house in the evenings for several years before he became "Daddy Gene" to me.

I adored him from the first. At Christmas that year he gave me my first bicycle, a two-wheeler. Of course, the back wheel was supported by a cradle having two small auxiliary wheels, providing a sort of tricycle landing gear. Daddy Gene had to have blocks added to the pedals so I could reach them, and he only laughed and promptly took me to the bicycle shop when I insisted that I had to have a handlebar basket. My mother was exasperated with me and gave me a lecture afterward about being grateful for a gift, and not asking for more!

I think Daddy Gene (whom I called "Uncle Gene" in those days) knew how grateful I was. I felt that I glowed as if I had swallowed an electric light bulb when I rode around the neighborhood. I tried to be generous and let the other kids take turns riding, but I was nervous until they brought back my bicycle undamaged.

Mama and Daddy Gene were married on March 12, 1951. It was a positively stupendous day in my life. I wore a bouffant white silk organza dress and a matching poke bonnet, and was out of my mind with excitement. I remember standing on the sidewalk in front of Grandmother's house, dying of eagerness to get into the long, black, shiny limousine that Daddy Gene had rented to take us to the church.

I couldn't understand why it was taking my mother so long to get dressed. I kept calling, "Come on, Mama. You'd better hurry or you're going to be late for your own wedding? It's a wonder she didn't commit murder just before becoming a bride.

I didn't help matters much in church, either. I sat beside Grandmother during the long Nuptial Mass. She cried softly, while I giggled. I had no dreaming idea why she was crying, but I knew why I was giggling: I was going to Atlantic City with Mama and my new daddy. Looking back on it, I am impressed by the forebearance of my relatives who did NOT clobber me at some time during that wedding day.

I can understand my own exuberance. I think any nine-year-old would be beside herself with delight to be invited to go on her mother's honeymoon. I'm sure there were moments when my mother questioned the wisdom of the threesome trip. I remember walking down Atlantic City's famous Boardwalk, and Daddy Gene's asking me what I would like to do that afternoon. Ride the roller coaster? Ride a basket chair? Go to a movie?

I remember Mama saying plaintively, "Whose honeymoon is this, anyhow?" We went to a movie, but she decided which one.

I could scarcely wait to get back home,to tell about my adventures. I was the hit of my school. After all, I was the only girl who had attended her mother's wedding and gone on her mother's honeymoon.

During the fall of my ninth year I entered Roosevelt Junior High School on Long Island, and a great change was made in my life. Until that time I had been wearing fluffy, frilly dresses over dozens of petticoats. Also, baby doll slippers with bows to match my dresses. Suddenly, I became a tomboy. I bought my first pair of saddle oxfords, a leather jacket with slash pockets bound with Pink leather, and my first sweaters and skirts. One skirt in particular was my favorite: a gray flannel, skin-tight, that I considered extremely chic. Nowadays I realize that it was really too tight, but after all those petticoats and furbelows, I loved to look at my pencil-line contour in the mirror.

This was a trial time for my mother. In the morning she would ask, "What are you going to wear to school today, Sandy?" And I would answer languidly, "My gray flannel skirt, of course." I wore it until it had been rubbed almost transparent from sliding in and out of school chairs, and my mother was ready to disown me.

I was about 11 when I attended my first girl-boy party. It was a backyard barbecue, so the girls wore skirts and capris, and the boys wore pullovers and slacks. I learned to play "Spin the bottle," which was fairly silly. Of course, we felt terribly sophisticated to be playing kissing games, even though the kisses consisted of moist salutes placed on the girls' cheeks by boys who would have been enjoying themselves twice as much if they had been playing sandlot football or baseball.

There must have been something fascinating about it, though, because I didn't want to go home when curfew rang--at NINE O'CLOCK. Imagine: kissing games, followed by being called for by parents before the evening was well started! Of course, I fell in love during this first-awareness-of-boys phase. Tragically, as it turned out. His name was Bill. Bill what? I can't remember, which is real kookie considering that I used to write "Bill Whatsis and Sandra Douvan" over and over again on page of school tablet paper. Afterward, I tore it into confetti so that no one would discover my secret.

As for Bill's attitude, he wouldn't have noticed me if I had dropped dead in the street. I tried, in a hundred "subtle" ways --like laughing gaily in the hallways---to attract his attention, but he never gave me a second glance. Naturally, I didn't realize that his attraction for me was his total indifference. He represented a challenge, because I'd never been ignored before. As Mama said one day, "I seem to have errand boys around this house by the million."

I was 13 when something new was added. All the girls at school seemed to be talking about modeling at fashion shows, about what fun it was, how beautiful the clothes were, and so forth and so forth. I've always been clothes-happy, so I began to tease my mother to let me try out for the current fashion show in which the girls were interested.

Believe me, I knew nothing about anything. Except that I had to give the secretary, who was employing models, a list of references. I had listened well to the other girls who tossed off names of previous jobs, so I passed through that gate without getting stuck.

I told my mother, "I'll watch the girls who precede me. I'll learn the routine from them. It can't be too complicated." Well, I was accepted, fitted into a series of costumes to model, then given the Number Two position in the model lineup. Mama stood beside me as I prepared to show my first garment. I could feel her shaking in time to my shivers. The first model walked out, came to the end of the runway, and turned left. I gasped to my mother, "She's walking on AIR. She left the runway entirely. How can she DO it?"

I was so shook I didn't know whether I'd be able to fall forward, to say nothing of displaying a costume! Somehow I managed to imitate the first model's walk and to follow her itinerary--the runway, it seems, turned a corner and continued to an exit.

I was wearing white gloves and modeling a sheath with a bolero jacket. I was supposed to unbutton and remove the jacket, carrying it negligently in my fingertips while I turned to display the dress. Unbuttoning a jacket while wearing gloves is like playing a zither with mittens. The music was playing, the commentator was saying, "And there's a reversible jacket . . . and there's a reversible jacket · . . and there's a reversible jacket," and I was trying to escape from the reversible jacket! To make up for the delay, I grinned in every direction. I thought, "Oh, well-what the heck. I've been a model, even if my first time was my last time."

I had nightmares about it that night, but the next day I was offered a professional modeling contract by the Conover Agency. The day after I signed with Conover, the art director for The American Girl Magazine asked me to become their cover girl for a year. I was thrilled to the teeth.

For my first cover girl job I wore a green-and-white gingham dress, and was photographed in some corny pose that I didn't like from the beginning. Even so, I waited two months---counting the days--until the magazine was on the stands.


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