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

Both stars can be read as a metaphor for the cultural schizophrenia surrounding female sexuality in the fifties. Dee's star persona is made up of oppositional qualities much like Monroe: She is both sexy and innocent, demure yet vivacious, fearful yet sensual. Dee thus embodies the cultural dichotomy of the fifties, the contradictory qualities existing simultaneously in one person that personify the sexual tensions that ran through the ideological life of the decades. Grease requires two characters, Rizzo and Sandy, to portray the oppositional characterizations of good girl and bad girl, but Dee did both all by herself. Sexual ambivalence is reconciled through the body and persona of Dee.

FROM ALEXANDRA ZUCK TO SANDRA DEE

Dee was born Alexandra Zuck in Bayonne, New Jersey, on April 23, 1944. For years, her birthday was reported as 1942 to make her appear older. Her parents divorced when she was five. Her mother, Mary, worked as a secretary until 1950 when she married Eugene Douvan, a real estate investor and her boss. Part of the mythology of the Dee image was his oft-cited remark, "I'm not marrying your mother, I'm marrying both of you." Unfortunately, Douvan really believed that, and his sexual abuse of Dee began while he was still dating her mother. Dee accompanied them on their honeymoon and was forced to sleep between her parents for several years. Douvan began having intercourse with Dee when she was about eight years old, abuse that Mary Douvan never acknowledged. When Dee began menstruating and developing breasts at nine, her mother had her bind her breasts and tried to deny Dee's sexual maturation.(20)

Dee also became an anorexic the same year. While it is difficult to know the exact origins of the disease, it appears to have been caused by a number of things. In later years Dee attributed it to an offhand comment her stepfather made when she was ten years old. He placed his hand on her stomach and said, "Someone's had too many pancakes." It also might have stemmed from the force feedings Dee endured as a child. Her mother believed in putting all the food for a meal in one bowl. She would then feed Dee with a spoon, and not let the girl leave the table until all the food was eaten. This behavior went on until Dee was six years old. Certainly, the sexual abuse contributed to the anorexia, and, at age nine, it appeared to be a method Dee used to gain some control over her already unstable life.

Dee began modeling when she was ten and became a top Conover employee, earning as much as $75,000 a year. In 1956 her stepfather died during heart surgery. A few days later, producer Ross Hunter arranged a screen test for Dee after seeing her in a television commercial. She was signed to a seven-year contract with Universal-International and was immediately loaned to MGM to play the younger sister in Until They Sail. In her first year and a half she made four films: Until They Sail, The Reluctant Debutante, Stranger in My Arms, and The Restless Years. In 1959, she made another three films, Gidget, A Summer Place, and Imitation of Life.(21) In the same years, she was hospitalized three times for her anorexia, twice after overdoses of Epsom salts caused cardiac distress, and another time for severe edema caused by lack of protein. She met Bobby Darin in Rome in 1960 at age sixteen during the filming of Come September, and they were married after a whirlwind courtship.(22) The union produced one son, Dodd, born in 1961. She became an alcoholic during the turbulent marriage, which ended in 1967. By the late sixties, Dee virtually disappeared from the public eye to battle the demons of incest, alcoholism, and anorexia. Her career suffered from continued typecasting as an ingenue.