An Ode to Sandra Dee
Let me paint a picture for you: It’s 2008, and I am 14-years-old, and newly attending a local homeschool co-op that meets every Monday in a church that’s forty minutes from my home. A homeschool co-op is an educational construct in which a bunch of homeschool moms (and it’s always moms) create their own insular school system and then teach the children of the other moms so that the art moms can just focus on art, the theology moms theology, the founding fathers moms the founding fathers, and the one mom who is really good at math tries to explain calculus to a bunch of teens who had taught themselves how to add and subtract and multiply and divide. There is no science mom.
This is as close to a classroom or school setting as I had ever been at the time, and I was delighted by the concept of school supplies at last (oh, how I had coveted those overflowing bins at Target), and naturally, immediately decorated my class folders with photos printed out at the public library. I had a James Dean folder, a Grace Kelly folder, an Audrey Hepburn folder, an Ingrid Bergman folder, and a Sandra Dee folder.
On that first Monday, the teacher-mom for the Sandra Dee folder class (it was something like American Citizenship 101) asked me who was on my folder. I said with enthusiasm, “It’s Sandra Dee!” This was a few months before I started my film blog, and I was eager for any outlet to talk. In a move that prepared me for every internet-splainer to come, teacher-mom responded, “No that isn’t Sandra Dee. Sandra Dee is a character in Grease. ‘Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee…’” (She did not finish the lyric, which clearly was a spectre from her heathen youth, as Grease was not co-op approved.) I was torn between knowing that adults should never be corrected, and also by knowing that, well, it was Sandra Dee on my folder. I went with a mumbled, “This is Sandra Dee, the actress.” Teacher-mom said, “No, you must be confused.”
And that was that. I saw no path to victory, but internal fuming, and going home and turning on my library’s DVD of Gidget (1959, dir. Paul Wendkos) that was on semi-permanent loan to me, and watching Sandra Dee prove all her doubters wrong.
Sandra Dee on-screen always proved her doubters wrong. And it was exactly what I needed. She remains one of my favorite people to return to on film: a friendly cinema companion. Her presence carries a quality, a tangibility, a gravitas that has never been allowed to be attached to her name by critics or public opinion. Lucky then that Sandra Dee did not need permission to be indelible.
She is unmistakable onscreen and entirely irreplaceable. The Gidget sequels are enough to tell you that. I mean, look, I am one of the bigger supporters of Gidget Goes Hawaiian, and yes, I did once tell Carl Reiner that Gidget Goes Hawaiian was a great film to which he responded, “No.” But, Deborah Walley as Gidget is just filling space. (And we do not talk about nor acknowledge Gidget Goes to Rome.)
Sandra Dee’s Gidget is alive, so fully alive. She is energy and enthusiasm and vulnerability and confusion and angst and elasticity. Her triumph in learning to surf feels like an earned triumph and the joy is palpable, and equally her scenes late in the film with Cliff Robertson’s predatory Big Kahuna are genuinely distressing because of her performance and her efforts. While Sandra Dee’s work is often tossed away as light-weight and sterile based on some historical collective false memory, her performance in Gidget should really be considered a direct predecessor to Elsie Fisher’s recent acclaimed work in Eighth Grade (2018). Sandra Dee gave us a realistic vulnerable yet determined teen girl who absolutely triumphs (with the loving support of her teen girl BFF) and teen girl me said, “You love to see it! Can you please ditch Moondoggie though? He is a drag.”
Sandra Dee’s known public image today and her original popularity was definitely predicated on her fulfilling some sort of white wholesome teen girl ideal for a 1950s American audience, but conversely her characters are boundary-crossing troublesome girls and young women. A defining characteristic across so many of her roles is a refusal to conform--in small ways and big.
In The Reluctant Debutante (1958, dir. Vincente Minnelli), only her second film, in the midst of swirling mania, she is the cool one--observing the hysteria with bemusement and maintaining her personal sense of self throughout. She assuredly partners with Kay Kendall and Angela Lansbury with a level of confidence that astounds. Her comic timing is already excellent here, and so is her ability to work ensemble. Her most perfect ensemble obviously being Come September (1961, dir. Robert Mulligan), a film that is surely one of the reasons cinema exists as a visual art medium. Sandra Dee and her tangibility are vital. With all due respect to the blonde youth actresses of the 1960s (I love many of them), how many of them would have the precise energy to match so comfortably on-scene with peak powers Gina Lollobrigida and Rock Hudson? There is a scene in which she psychoanalyzes Hudson that is masterfully funny. Her scenes with Bobby Darin are equal parts tentative and confident; sweet and confused. And with Gina Lollobrigida, she is sincere and kind with immediate rapport. There is no danger of fading into one-half of the obligatory forgettable youth B-couple of the movie--even in the presence of the dazzling Lollobrigida and Hudson.
The other two films in the Sandra Dee-Bobby Darin trilogy are also particular fun--with outlandish plots. In If A Man Answers (1962, dir. Henry Levin), she decides to change Darin’s behaviour with a dog training manual, and in That Funny Feeling (1965, dir. Richard Thorpe) via some classic mistaken identity she convinces him his apartment is actually her apartment. She is the firm center, sweetly spinning Darin and the rest of the film around in circles of befuddlement while she decides what she wants and when.
This aura of self-autonomy made Sandra Dee one of my figures of aspiration as a girl. In her characters, she lets the audience see the process of doubt and vulnerability while also making the decision. Her way of speaking is memorable: sometimes halting with clipped sentences and sometimes too many words spoken too quickly, but she really does always keep speaking.
Her openness onscreen is definitely why young me always preferred to rewatch her comedies rather than her melodramas--the vulnerability was too real. I have a very vivid memory of watching A Summer Place (1959, dir. Delmer Daves) as a 12-year-old hoping it would be another Gidget and my dawning horror as the melodrama played out. Sandra Dee played yearning angst and vulnerability so acutely--it hurt me. I must confess I have never rewatched the film, and to this day, hearing that wistful theme tune is enough to re-traumatize me.
Sandra Dee played Lana Turner’s daughter twice, most famously in peak melodrama Imitation of Life (1959, dir. Douglas Sirk), and again in the seedy Portrait in Black (1960, dir. Michael Gordon). Dee and Turner match up perfectly, both so adept at playing girls and women grasping for self-autonomy and self-preservation in a world that has no intention of making it easy. I wonder if Sandra Dee’s career had continued past her 20s if she would have found herself in Lana Turner-like roles?
Instead her final film appearance came in 1970, at the age of 28, in The Dunwich Horror (dir. Daniel Haller). She plays opposite another former teen-actor-with-substance Dean Stockwell in a freaky tale of the occult and monsters that feels subtly template-like for many films that followed. Her soft vulnerability amidst the chaotic production stuns. In Sandra Dee’s hands, Nancy is not a stupid, gullible woman led easily into danger, but an open and empathetic woman trying to balance danger against desire: a navigation that is true in every day life even when your job and studies do not include the possibility of your body becoming a gateway vessel for demons.
Oh Sandra Dee, I wanted to compose an ode to you, but I do not have all the words I need.
Oh Sandra Dee, you’re not a pastiche of people’s false memories, a relic from a plastic era, or the line from a song-- instead, resolve and humor, humanity and kindness, and an absolute knowledge of the ridiculousness of life--it all showed up on screen and bolstered a girl who desperately needed to see another girl triumph. 💖
originally published on The Classic Film Collective on 09/05/2021.