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

Frontiers, 2001

It was not until thirty years after Douvan's death that Dee finally confronted her mother:

She was ranting into the night about what a saint Gene was, and I finally couldn't stand it. I said, "He wasn't a saint. He had sex with me." She said, "You're crazy and you're drunk. Go to bed." I went to bed and the next day, I said to her, "Now I'm sober. And it happened." She didn't say anything. She had nothing to come back with.(34)

They never spoke of it again. Instead, Mary continued to deny not only Dee's incest, but also her daughter's anorexia and alcoholism, and even her own final bout with cancer.

What is particularly striking to the modern reader when perusing the fan literature on Dee is the emphasis on her eating and dieting habits. There is such a clear indication of Dee's obsession with regulating her food intake that it is difficult to imagine that someone close to her would not have noticed. Perhaps this negligence on the part of those around her illustrates that restricting food intake was, in fact, a normal preoccupation of girls in the fifties. The severity of her eating disorder fairly jumps off the pages of almost every article in the fan magazines. As one article predicted, "Her salad days may never be over."(35) An article in the Los Angeles Mirror News reported, "Her lunch is a hard-boiled egg and half a head of lettuce -- with a teaspoon of vinegar when she feels reckless."(36) Susan Kohner, Dee's co-star in Imitation of Life, admitted, "She's never had any lunch since I've known her. She eats practically nothing for breakfast and not much more for dinner." Despite this, Kohner alludes to Dee's high level of energy.(37) As Joan Jacobs Brumberg reported, physicians in the 1950s began to notice that the obsession with thinness was linked to a preoccupation with food that was often expressed in cooking for others.(38) Dee was often photographed in the kitchen, and her cooking skills were frequently mentioned in the media.

Like incest, anorexia has also been constructed as a contemporary disease. Yet as Brumberg points out, there was an increase in reported cases of anorexia in the post World War II period. As she says, "Increasing numbers of adolescents...used appetite and eating as emotional instruments much as they had in early childhood."(39) Her mother's role in the creation of Dee's eating disorder was underscored in an interview Douvan gave in 1958:

Sandy always had a mind of her own. I remember when she was about four and wouldn't eat her cereal. Nothing would change her mind. I could stuff all the cereal I wanted into her mouth and she'd just keep it there till she turned blue.(40)

It would seem that by adolescence, Dee was still using food in a battle with her mother.

Not all the symptoms of anorexia went totally unrecognized. One fan magazine reported, "Sandy is underweight. Her back is so thin it has to be padded when it shows."(41) In 1960, one Modern Screen reported "How She Almost Killed Herself" from her dieting during her modeling days, but Dee swore that she would never diet again, and "today I can eat anything!"(42) What was missing was any critical reaction by these magazines, again illustrating that dieting was a normal part of the female adolescent's life. Ironically, the only contemporary commentator to react was Louella Parsons, after one of Dee's hospitalizations due to the overdose of Epsom salts. Parsons wrote a didactic piece, admonishing Dee for her fad diets and warning other young girls not to follow Dee's example.(43) During Dee's pregnancy, her eating habits came under scrutiny again: