Sandra Dee

The Boston Herald 

I met her once. I watched her step out of a limousine and make her way into a room full of reporters nearly four decades after she had been a star. Sandra Dee was in her 50s then and Troy Donahue, her escort and former leading man, was 61. But there they were, in the flesh, and it was a thrill seeing them.

Maybe you had to have been there - not in New York in 1997 for the showing of the American Movie Classic ``A Summer Place.'' But back in 1959 when the movie was released. I was 12 then and apparently impressionable because for a long time afterward Sandra Dee was my favorite movie star. 

I saw all her films: ``The Restless Years,'' ``Gidget,'' her two ``Tammy'' movies and everything she made with her husband, Bobby Darrin.

Movies aren't supposed to influence you more than real life. But they must, because why is it that 45 years later, I can't piece together a single day of eighth grade. What time did we have English? Where did I sit? What was the name of the monsignor who used to stride through the door and give us days off sometimes? And yet I remember all the lyrics to ``Gidget'' - ``She acts sort of teenage, just in between age'' - and entire scenes from ``A Summer Place.’'

I wanted to be Sandra Dee back then. I wanted to be in high school, walking along some beach in Maine, holding hands with my Johnny Hunter, kissing in the shadows, the score from ``A Summer Place'' - a song that was the top selling single of 1960, by the way, and won a Grammy - playing in the background.

“We've got to be good, Johnny,'' Dee said as they embraced on the sand. In 1959, no one laughed at these words. But in 1997, the audience roared.

Troy Donahue died four years ago. He was 65. Sandra Dee died Sunday. She was 63. Both had hard lives. It was all illusion, the happiness and innocence they portrayed on the screen.

But what is wrong with a few good illusions?

My daughter said the other day how everyone in the United States understands that Muslim women are oppressed because signs of their oppression are the shirkas and veils they must wear to fit in.

But no one sees that U.S. women are oppressed, too. That to fit in, we have to be skeletal and young. And when we're not skeletal, we starve ourselves. And when we get old, we have surgery to make us look young.

Worse is what our children do to fit in. “Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee. Lousy with virginity,'' are the words of a song from ``Grease,'' that poked fun at old morality.

Sandra Dee epitomized that old morality, both she and it, illusions.