Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee: Beyond a White, Teen Icon

Frontiers, 2001

The March 18, 1991 issue of People magazine featured a cover story on Sandra Dee. The full head-shot photo showed a beautiful, seemingly ageless woman, while the headline copy read, "Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee." The refrain is borrowed from a song in both the stage play and 1977 film Grease, which lampoons various high-school types of the 1950s, including "Rizzo," the hard-boiled, wisecracking, female sexual hood, and "Sandy" (no coincidence there), the naive, sweet cheerleader.(1) At a pajama party Rizzo and the other "Pink Ladies" try to teach Sandy to drink and to smoke, but she promptly gets sick. Rizzo dons a blond wig and begins her song satirizing the representations of sexuality in the fifties, "Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity, won't go to bed `till I'm legally wed, I can't, I'm Sandra Dee." The Dee persona is instantly recognizable to audiences of the present and becomes a form of shorthand to convey a specific cultural trope. These lyrics, which celebrate the "innocence" of the Dee image, were strangely juxtaposed on that People cover with the subhead, "Years of Incest, Anorexia and Alcoholism."(2)

The dichotomy between Dee's public and private personas, underscored by the People cover, also functions as a metaphor for the 1950s. Dee is remembered as the embodiment of the virginal, perky, uncomplicated, adolescent girl of the 1950s. She is a reminder of a time in the recesses of collective memory when there was no incest, violence against women, eating disorders, substance abuse, or sex outside of marriage. Of course, no such golden age existed. The collective image of the 1950s reflects what Stephanie Coontz has referred to as the "nostalgia trap": the tendency to simplify and idealize a past reality.(3) As Joanne Meyerowitz has demonstrated, "postwar popular ideology was more varied and complex" than the popular portrait painted by Betty Friedan. There has been a peculiar trend, based in part by the rhetoric of conservative politicians, to believe that life really was simpler and less complicated then.(4) Yet, Dee's story reveals precisely the opposite.

While both the private and even the public Dee personas contradict conservative idealizations of 1950s gender roles and family life, Dee's story also contradicts liberal caricatures of the period as well. In this article, I will examine the Dee trope as a site of contested meanings of the fifties. Appropriated by the right as an ideal of girlhood, and by the left as a symbol of enforced purity and repressive cultural values, Dee symbolized neither. I will show that behind Dee and a number of female representations that were mass produced in the 1950s lay some dark and complicated realities. A revisioning of the 1950s is currently underway among cultural historians.(5) Recent scholarly work has focused on reevaluating myths about family and gender roles during the period. Such approaches reveal that women's lives in the fifties were more varied and complicated than the monolithic images of virginity and domesticity that pervade evaluations of the period. Dee, as a white icon of 1950s female adolescence, is significant not only because she was used to construct dominant notions of femininity in the fifties, but because her iconic value continues to this day.

Dee can also be read as a kind of "cultural body" because of what she reveals about the particular historical period that produced her. She embodies the cultural contradictions of the 1950s. Her body was used to construct a specific star image.

According to film historian Richard Dyer, star image can best be defined as a "complex configuration of visual, verbal and aural signs manifest not only in films, but in all kinds of media texts."(6) Media texts include promotion and publicity material developed by the studio in the manufacture of the star image, material about the star not controlled by the studio, contemporary commentary and criticism, and, of course, the films themselves. I will explore the role that such media texts played, not only in the creation of Dee's iconic value as a symbol of sexual purity, but also in the obscuring of her dysfunctional life. In 1959, for example, the Motion Picture Herald called Dee the "Number One Star of Tomorrow" and underscored her appeal for teenage girls:

Her wide appeal is to her own generation as well as to adults stems from the fact that she seems to epitomize that nice "girl next door"...The image she projects on screen is that of today's teenager beset by problems her own generation can sympathize with and understand...Nearly always these problems involve parental relationships and dating and Miss Dee solves them by relying on decent instincts and common sense.(7)

In portraying the problems and tensions of teenage girls, Dee helped to expose the contradictions inherent in the double standard, which might have made subversive readings by female adolescent spectators possible. Audiences were not privy to all aspects of Dee's private life, however.