Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee

Frontiers, 2001 by Scheiner, Georganne

Many feminist theorists have posited that the values of a culture are inscribed on the female body.8 I argue that Dee, through her physical body and the body of her films, underscores both a cultural hypocrisy and a real ambivalence about sex in the fifties. There were several female cultural bodies competing for dominance in the 1950s. For example, the "mammary madness" of the decade as embodied by stars like Marilyn Monroe and her imitators, such as Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren, is as much a part of the iconography of the fifties as are Dee and her adult version, Doris Day. Reconciling these seemingly contradictory representations is not as difficult as it would seem, however, for in many ways these types are simply flip sides of the same coin.9

Monroe was a modern vamp without the sting. She projected a softness, a sweetness, and a vulnerability sometimes at odds with other aspects of her sexual persona. Throughout her career, Monroe exploited her physical body yet tried to deny it in order to be taken seriously as an actress. She was simultaneously a prude and an exhibitionist, inhibited and uninhibited. Ironically, in many ways Dee was allowed to be more sexual in her films than was Monroe. As Molly Haskell has pointed out "[Monroe] was the fifties fiction, the lie that women had no sexual needs." Thus this "sex goddess" was often paired with nonvirile, asexual men such as Tom Ewell in Seven Year Itch, George Sanders in All About Eve, Donald O'Connor in There's No Business Like Show Business, David Wayne in How to Marry a Millionaire, and Charles Coburn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." Like Dee, Monroe's persona has also been appropriated to illustrate the sexism of Hollywood and the consequences of sexual objectification. As with Dee, such appropriations are often simplistic. Monroe's tragedy is grounded more in her own private demons and her tortured life than in the sexual iconography of the 1950s."

Jayne Mansfield, another icon of the 1950s, was a self-promoter and gained fame by satirizing Monroe. She was able to expose the sexual ambivalence of the period as she did in the 1957 film, The Girl Can't Help It. Grabbing a milk bottle and holding it up against her prodigious chest, she cries, "I just want to be a wife, have kids. But everyone figures me for a sexpot. No one thinks I'm equipped for motherhood."22 But her very physicality undermines her conservative rhetoric. Mansfield, through her comedic caricatures, was almost alone in exposing the hypocrisy of a period that was both obsessed and repelled by sexual matters.

Comparisons with Doris Day were common throughout Dee's career. In an interview with Variety, when Dee was only twenty-two and her career was in decline, Dee complained about being typecast as a "perennial teenager" or a "junior Doris Day."13 The characterization of Day as the quintessential virgin conflicts with the reality of many of her screen roles. Although Day might have been puritanical, she was not without a libido. Unlike Monroe and Mansfield, Day was paired with more sexy, romantic leads like Clark Gable, Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, and James Garner. Nevertheless, our collective memory of Day is one of a forty-year-old virgin. John Ellis, pondering Day's star phenomenon, questions the ways in which her image has obscured the reality of her films. He argues that her film roles are "to one side of her circulated images." 14 The same can be said of Dee, who continues to wear her virginity like a mantle in popular memory, even though her life and most of her roles prove otherwise.