The fifties were a spare time. Three channels on the TV. A dozen car models. Limited choices in clothing. A handful of movie and music stars. Back in 1959 a normal teenager could pretty much name everyone who was famous. There weren’t that many stars in film or music. Until 1955 the kids pretty much followed the same stars as their parents, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, etc. But 1955 brought the Mickey Mouse Club and Annette Funicello. Annette was our dark-haired lodestar and set the standard for beauty and talent on the brunette end of the spectrum. Then we got American Bandstand and a daily dose of teen music and dancing. From a studio in Phily, high school kids just like us danced everyday on a set and evaluated new music. They got fan mail. They signed autographs. There are still websites with their photos. Things really got rolling with Elvis. But in 1959 everyone I knew rushed to the Roxy to see A Summer Place with Sandra Dee.
Sandra Dee died a few days ago in California. She was 62 years old and suffering from kidney disease.
In the fifties virginity was still prevalent and pregnant girls were hustled off to isolation, taken out of school. Our sexual primer was the really bad novel, Peyton Place, passed around the study hall. The back up reference was the dictionary.
We didn’t know much. But we did know, both girls and boys, that Sandra Dee was our model, a hopelessly unachievable goal.
In A Summer Place, a film I recall somewhat breathlessly, our beautiful heroine and her summer love, the weak-chinned Troy Donahue, get caught up in a circle of hypocrisy. Both sets of parents are adulterers yet come down hard on the young lovers. But the message of the film, such that it was, was no match for the lust or envy, depending on your gender, directed at Sandra. She was a huge star for a very short time. More like a comet that raced across the fifties’ sky, the vestige of virginity, a state that would soon lose its favor.
Memorized in the musical Grease a few years later a tough girl character made fun of Sandra and sang, "Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee."
“Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity
Won't go to bed till I'm legally wed, I can't, I'm Sandra Dee
Watch it, hey, I'm Doris Day, I was not brought up that way
Won't come across, even Rock Hudson lost his heart to Doris Day
I don't drink or swear, I won't white my hair, I get ill from
one cigarette
Keep your filthy paws off my silky drawers.
Would you pull that crap with Annette?
As for you, Troy Donahue, I know what you wanna do
You got your crust, I'm no object of lust, I'm just plain Sandra
Dee
Elvis, Elvis, let me be, keep that pelvis far from me
Just keep your cool, now you're starting to drool
Hey, fungu, I'm Sandra Dee.”
You really nailed it on Sandra Dee; she died of alcoholism in a care facility about 20 miles from here. The eternal summer of teenage love and lust. But I hate it when my youth becomes a
kind of natural museum where modern ironists mock us. Hey, you had to be there to really get it.
Posted by: dave andersen | February 22, 2005 at 12:27 PM