SANDRA DEE A Lifetime of HEARTBREAK

EVEN LOVE COULDN’T CHASE AWAY THE SECRET SHAME THAT DESTROYED HER LIFE by Louise A. BARILE

- Reporting by Katie Bruno

Sandra Dee arrived at The Polo Lounge inside the Beverly Hills Hotel with a smile. “We sat at a table in the back and she looked beautiful,” recalls former Hollywood Reporter columnist Sue Cameron to Closer. “Then, I ordered an iced tea and she ordered a martini...and then another one.”

A dozen years earlier, a showbiz trade publication had proclaimed Sandra the “Number One Star of Tomorrow” thanks to her portrayals of spirited, engaging, wholesome young women in the movies. In 1959, she starred in two of the year’s biggest hits, the surfer-girl comedy, Gidget, and the romantic drama, A Summer Place. But the sunny persona of Sandra Dee was purely a fabrication. The secret pain the actress carried would taint the triumphs of her life and drive her to an early death at age 62. “She really wanted to die,” says Cameron.

By the time Sandra met the writer in the 1970s, she’d already been married and divorced from singer Bobby Darin, the father of her son Dodd, and dropped by Universal, the studio that signed her as a teenager. “Sometimes I feel like a has-been that never was,” Sandra said in 1967.