Sandra Dee, Original Gidget, Dies
by Bridget Byrne
Feb 20, 2005, 2:45 PM PT
Sandra Dee, once Hollywood's ideal blonde teen star and the original Gidget, died Sunday morning outside. She was 63.
Dodd Darin, her son from her marriage to the late singer Bobby Darin, told CNN his mother had been on dialysis for four years and was recently hospitalized for kidney failure and pneumonia. She died about 6 a.m. at Los Robles Hospital and Medical Center in Thousand Oaks.
Decades before Britney, Lindsay and Hilary provided endless fodder for Us, Star and People, Sandra Dee was the reigning It Girl, thanks to the beach blanket romp Gidget, the Tammy sequels, the racy melodrama A Summer Place and her marriage to Darin in 1960, when she was just 16 and he was 24. Their romance, breathlessly covered in the day's fanzines, was recreated last year by Kevin Spacey in the movie Beyond the Sea in which Kate Bosworth played Dee.
Dee's wholesome image was so entrenched in pop culture that it was famously spoofed in the Grease song "Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee."
Despite her picture-book early career, Dee struggled later in life with alcoholism, anorexia and depression. She also claimed in a 1991 interview with People that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather.
Dee was born Alexandria Zuck in Bayonne, New Jersey. After her parents divorced and her mother remarried, she was pushed into show business by her mother. Dee modeled and competed in talent shows before attracting Hollywood's attention and being signed as a contract player by Universal Studios.
Her first starring role came as an American teen thrust into the whirl of upper class British society in 1957's The Reluctant Debutante. Her onscreen beau was John Saxon, who also wooed her her in the melodramas The Restless Years and Portrait in Black, in which she played step-daughter to Lana Turner. Dee also played Turner's daughter in the 1959 racial drama Imitation of Life.
Although Debbie Reynolds, played the eponymous perky country girl in the hit Tammy and the Bachelor, Dee stepped in for the sequels Tammy Tell Me True and Tammy and the Doctor, which failed to repeat the success of the original.
But by the early '60s she was one of the top box-office attractions and starred as James Stewart's college-age daughter in the comedy Take Her, She's Mine.
After her marriage to Darin, they costarred in Come September, If a Man Answers and That Funny Feeling in 1965. The couple divorced in 1967.
"He just woke up one morning and didn't want to be married any more," Dee once said. She reportedly carried a torch for him the rest of her life, and they remained friends until his death following open-heart surgery in 1973.
Following her divorce to Darin, Universal, figuring her image had been tarnished, dropped her contract.
"I thought they were my friends", she once remarked to the Associated Press. "But I found out on the last picture that I as simply a piece of property to them. I begged them not to make me do the picture, but they insisted." That picture was a comedy titled A Man Could Get Killed.
By her mid-20s, Dee's career was virtually over. She was rarely seen again on screen--her final film role was in the forgettable 1983 drama Lost--but many years later did star with Saxon in a Beverly Hills theatrical production of the two-character play Love Letters. She also appeared in some TV movies in the 1970s, including the original two-hour Fantasy Island.
"She didn't have a bad bone in her body," Steve Blauner, a longtime family friend who represents Darin's estate, told the Associated Press. "When she was a big star in the pictures and a top five [draw] at the box office, she treated the grip the exact same way she treated the head of the studio. She meant it. She wasn't phony."
Dee is survived by her son, Dodd, and two grandchildren.
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And I didn't know this .. very sad:
Dear Marilyn: Estelle Getty of The Golden Girls is my favorite. How are her health and career today? Margie, Birmingham, Alabama Dear Margie: Sadly, the 79-year-old actress suffers from Alzheimer's disease and reportedly has round-the-clock nursing care. Her former Golden Girls costars Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan and Betty White have visited her. She seemed to have been the one member of The Golden Girls team who got along with everyone. Getty also suffers from osteoporosis, which has caused a severe stooping of her back.