Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin:

"Wind Her Up and She Fights"

This article, written by William Tusher, appeared in Motion Picture Magazine May, 1963

Once upon a time a dashing young New York troubador and a beautiful young Hollywood princess met in Rome and fell madly in love. And just as in the storybooks of yore, Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee became husband and wife, living happily -- and scrappily--thereafter....
One night while the loving couple was visiting New York, they had one of their usual loving fracases (today they cannot remember even over what), and Sandra, boiling, stormed out of the hotel suite determined to teach her man a lesson!
"This time," she vowed, "I'm going to fix him." Disguised in dark glasses, a kerchief swathed around her pretty head, and accompanied by her sleepily protesting hairdresser Kay Reed, Sandra went on a real binge--a moviegoing binge, that is! While her rage fermented, she stomped from one open-all-night 42nd Street cinema to another.
It was not until 9:30 the following morning that she trudged, half-blinded but triumphant, back to the hotel. She was convinced that by then Bobby must have been out of his mind with worry. She was equally convinced, in womanly fashion, that it served him right.
She even felt she could predict the first words out of Bobby's mouth when he saw her enter their suite. She smiled in gleeful anticipation. She could almost hear his outraged inflection as he would say:
"Where the------have you been?"
No such thing happened.
Sandra and Kay sat down to breakfast. Bobby pleasantly said, "Good morning," as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place, leaned over and kissed Sandy!
"That killed me," Sandra howls. "That killed me. I think that killed me worse than anything. Ohh! I wanted to hit him."
As they go through the hilariously bellicose early years of their marriage, Sandra and Bobby doubtless are a puzzle to many. From the very beginning, even in the gestating period of their romance, they were spirited rather than moony young lovers.
In Hollywood, where eggshell marriages aren't fables and readily collapse at the first shock of fighting, these two imperishable gladiators on the field of wedlock have created an unsettling effect. They have dealt a blow to the sacred tradition that news that a couple is fighting is an unfailing forecast of the beginning of the end.
Sandra and Bobby, ignoring the fragile mores of their times, have been busily carving out a new frontier in domestic relations. Their motto seems to be, A marriage worth fighting for is a marriage worth fighting at. With them fireworks are not a sign of a marriage's deterioration--but of its vitality.
"Knowing me," Sandra grins good humoredly, "it would be idiotic if we never clashed. I hope the day never comes when Bobby and I cannot find anything to fight about. Oh, I hope I don't ever get to know him that well, really."
The very thought of reaching such a plateau gives fair Sandy the shakes.
"We went out with a couple one day," she recalls with a shudder, "and it was dull! He knew when she wanted a cigarette, and she knew when he wanted coffee. They were like one person-not two different people. You know--to know someone that well, it's like living alone, living with yourself.
"I've always been like that, from the beginning, before I even married him," Sandra admits unabashedly. "Oh yeah, I started off, bango, with an argument. He tried to stop me from smoking one night, and I didn't even know him. I thought, who is this idiot? How's he got the right to try to get me to stop smoking?
"That smoking bit was a thing to say hello because I wasn't very friendly," Sandra concedes. "The reason I wasn't very friendly in the beginning was that I didn't like him. He just said hello and I didn't like him, to be honest. I just figured I'd better stay away rather than get into an argument.
"Later, of course, it was a big joke. I still remember. I could NOT stand the sight of him. We used to go out on publicity layouts. I think we got one done--out of 20 we went on. Everyone was saying to me, 'You've got to work with the boy. You've got to behave yourself.'
"So I behaved myself--and married him. I kind of like him now. I accept him."
One thing has to be said for Sandy. She's the same lovable, cantankerous and unpredictable doll Bobby married: The type of doll that sometimes doesn't even have to be wound up to fight. Not only would Sandy be false to her nature if she ran from a fracas. She goes one better. She's willing to look for a fight.
"I'll play Bobby's records all day," she smiles devotedly, "but the minute he calls me on the car phone and says, 'I'm on the freeway and I'll be right home,' I'll stick a Sammy Davis Jr. record on, or a Ray Charles. I'll have them blasting. Bobby will come in, and I'll say, 'Gee, Bobby, the baby (Dodd, who's one year old and walks up a storm) loves these records. He's so quiet when I play them. I can't figure it out.' Bobby knows I'm kidding, but it bugs him."
Sandra, it must be granted, doesn't always bug Bobby on purpose. Sometimes, like that unforgettable night in the Camelot Room of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, she manages to accomplish the same results without trying.
"He kept picking at me about my hair," Sandra recalls. "I'd lacquered it, which he hates, and it was done up on top of my head. He kept picking at me and fiddling with the back of my head. He'd say, 'Oh gawd--that's hair? That's straw!'
"He kept it up and kept it up. Meantime they put cherry cheesecake in front of him. I didn't say one word. I just took the cake and scrunched it. On his hands. I wouldn't do it on his face, or he would kill me. I don't have enough courage for that."
Looking back, Sandy acknowledges admiringly that Bobby was a pretty good sport about the whole thing.
"He was very calm about it," she says. "He took the cheesecake and scrunched it right back. In my hair!"
Sandy is the first to concede--and almost with pride--that, of the two, she is by far the more difficult.
"I'm a harder person to live with," Sandra agrees unhesitatingly. "I get moody easily. Usually there's a reason for it, and Bobby understands. But when he gets moody, I don't understand it and it drives me crazy. Invariably I'll storm out, the great exit, and I come storming back in, and he always says cheerfully, 'Where you been, slats?' Oh, I could kill him.
"He never gets mad for long. I stay mad longer--and he never does anything to get me unmad. And slowly and surely I'm getting unmad faster. I think if he did something to try to get me unmad I'd play it to the hilt. This way I sort of calm down. He'll never come to get me when I storm out. He's smart because if he ever did come, I'd take advantage of it. I just love to play Camille-I just love to have someone begging me to come back. Then I'd still say no. I know it."
This is not to say, by any means, that as heroically forbearing as Bobby can be, he has mastered patience and understanding to such a degree that he never blows his own cork.
"Now he storms out," Sandra chuckles. "He does. He'll storm out, but he'll storm back the same night, half an hour later. He's left only twice and I've left about 120 times.
"But it's better, if something's bothering us, that we get it out. Especially if it's a serious argument. Then naturally we feel better afterward. I'm not much for hiding things, for keeping anything in. I'll never get an ulcer, I think.
"I couldn't have it any other way," she says. "It wouldn't be me. I get mad, I let it out. Bobby's a little different; he keeps it in more. The minute you try to change you may make the other person happy, but you're not going to make yourself happy, and eventually the other person isn't going to be happy."
Sandra became especially aware of her attachment to individuality--and the need to preserve it as a cornerstone of marriage-when she and Bobby did their first and only post-marital co-starring picture, If A Man Answers. She says, with deep feeling, that there'Il be no more of those.
"I guess 24 hours a day was just too much," she comments. "At that point I knew what he was doing, thinking, eating and talking about. We'd come home, there really was silence, just nothing to say. I couldn't ask him who he saw during the day because I saw them. What did you have for breakfast? I was there. How did things go? I was in them. Who won in chess? Me. I played."
For Sandra, however, the most difficult pill to swallow since she married Bobby has been the incessant traveling. Bobby's night club engagements keep him on the go, and he has no choice.
"I hate it," Sandy admits, of the traveling, "but if I stayed home while he was gone I'd be more unhappy. So we have a running thing going. I did complain about it in the beginning.
"Finally Bob said, 'You don't like it?' I said, 'No.' So he said, 'Stay home.' I don't feel like staying home without him. That made me aware. I like the house and I like all my clothes and I like the baby nurse and it's much easier for me--but now I can understand."
Their baby, Dodd, is one reason why Sandra, despite her frank misgivings, wouldn't think of remaining behind while Bobby goes his itinerant way filling night club engagements. "It's not a healthy way to bring the baby up--with one-parent," she says earnestly. "And it doesn't bother him to travel. All the baby needs is a bottle."
While Sandy and Bobby are equally wild about the baby, it would be unwarranted to leave the impression that little Dodd represents neutral territory where Sandra and Bobby at last find enough common cause to bring on a cease fire.
"I took the baby to a record session the other night," Sandy exclaims, "and Bob had a heart attack. I had him out in the night air! I give Dodd a bath at ten o'clock at night. Another heart attack. His pores are going to be open when he goes to sleep. The sun is shining--he has to have a hat! The baby is perspiring. He sleeps in a room where it's 68 and there's no heat ever in the baby's room. Bob walks in and he needs a coat!
"Bob doesn't believe in hitting a child at all. I do--when he needs it, when he's turning on the gas jets in the oven and getting in, when he's opening the medicine cabinet or going in the street. I hit him on the hands. He wouldn't feel it on the bottom with all those diapers. Nothing. He laughs. So I spank him when Bobby's not home. I've never done it in front of Bobby.
"When I was pregnant we talked about how we'd discipline the baby. He gave me his ideas and I gave him mine. I use my ideas and he uses his."
There is a growing school of thought among psychologists that more marriages expire of boredom than for far more spectacular causes. On that basis, Sandra and Bobby are rich in deterrents. They appear to have enough unfinished business in contention to keep them married until they are wrinkled octogenarians.
As might be suspected, there's enough sentiment beneath Sandy's peppery carryings-on to reduce an iron man to tears.
"It's funny," Sandra says softly, sounding positively soulful, "when you marry somebody you feel you love him madly. Compared with the way I love Bob now I didn't love him at all. Not in the sense I love him now. I loved him as a girl who would have a crush on someone.
"I guess a lot of marriages end early because love doesn't last--or grow. I was very lucky because I didn't know love from a hole in the wall. Really--I didn't know. I'd never had a crush on anybody else so I didn't know what love was. At the time, to me, I loved Bob more than I could love anything in the world. Ten years from now I will probably look back and say I didn't actually love him then. If you live together every day you get closer and closer.
"Bobby would rather eat three pounds of spaghetti than anything else in the world," she sighs. "I don't like spaghetti. I've never liked spaghetti. So it's always a conflict. Like he'll come home and see what's for dinner, and he'll cook his own--spaghetti.
"But--if it happens to be something I personally prepared he'll eat anything. If I cook it, he'll eat it--even if it's cigarette butt!" The poets may have their lyric definitions of true love. Sandra Dee has hers. And to all intents and purposes, the sentiment's the same.

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