Sandra Dee & Bobby Darin

Take the case of Alexandra Zuck, a beautiful, brown-eyed brunette from Bayonne, N. J., whose hair, Hollywood bleached baby-blonde, whose name it changed to Sandra Dee, whose avocation it altered from junior model to a full-fledged movie star, purportedly representative of the younger generation, and who today ranks number three in screen popularity, just below Elizabeth Taylor and Doris Day. Three years ago when she had just turned 18, Sandra was earning $1,500 a week. She owned a hillside mansion in Beverly Hills, a $12,000 mink coat, a red Thunderbird, all the material possessions popularly equated with success.

Young actors who were paired with her on arranged premiere dates found her a warm, down-to-earth, a remarkably unspoiled star. Her career potential seemed limitless, and she appeared blessed with an inordinate amount of common sense.

"The last man I'm going to marry," she used to say, "is a man in show business. They're selfish, unreliable and make lousy husbands. The Hollywood type of marriage is not for me. I want all my children to have the same father. I'm going to take a good long look before I get married. I'm not going to jump into it. Certainly, not with a show-biz character."

A few months later, after she had filmed "Come September" in Rome with Walden Cassotto, a talented, diminutive pop singer who calls himself Bobby Darin, this very same levelheaded girl eloped with him in the middle of the night in a red Rolls Royce to Elizabeth, N.J. Their courtship had lasted one month.

People who knew both parties gave odds that the marriage wouldn't endure, and the unanimity of that prediction cleared the market of takers.

* TWO YEARS LATER *

A few months ago after one child, a handsome boy named Dodd Mitchell, and two and a half years of a happy-scrappy, tumultuous-tempestuous marriage Sandra turned up on a music recording stage at 20th Century-Fox to sing a tune for "Take Her, She's Mine." She removed her dark glasses revealing a blackened right eye, swollen and discolored. Then she admitted that she was no longer sharing her husband's bed and board, that, in fact, Bobby Darin had moved out. They had separated; a divorce seemed imminent.

Today after four months of separation, the Darins are back together. "I found out," Sandra says, "marriage isn't the story-book romance I thought it was. It's putting up with a man's snoring and his putting up with you when you look like a drip without makeup. It's realizing that no one is perfect but if you love someone and he loves you and you have a lovely son, then it's worth all the pain and aggravation to work it out and come to some understanding.

"Bobby is the first boy I ever dated, other than for studio-arranged dates, and I guess if I had been a little older or more mature when we got married, if I'd had some preparation for marriage, maybe I would've handled our problems better. But when I married him, I just didn't take on a husband. I took on a boyfriend and lover and husband and father, and I didn't know how to cope with all these different personalities and especially with a husband on the road night after night. You'd have to be insane to like sitting in a nightclub dressing room through two shows every night and traveling with a baby.

"It's a rough life, and it doesn't square with a young girl's dream idea of marriage. If I had my life to live over again, I think I'd go to high school and college before I got married. But, still, I wouldn't want to give up for a minute what I now have.

"You know" Sandra goes on, "when Bobby and I were quarreling, I wouldn't go to a marriage counselor because I don't believe you and your husband can do this together. At least I couldn't, so I went to an analyst, and I told him we had problems, and he heard me out and said the problems existed because I was childish. I had never dated any other men; I didn't know how to adjust to Bobby. But the key line in his advice was this: 'If you can realize your problem -- not knowing how to handle your husband -- then you don't need me, because I can't solve the problem. But you don't need analysis if you can face up to the problem and try to cope with it. You just go home and try.'"

* IS THIS THE PATTERN *

Why did Sandra Dee get married so quickly in the first place? Is impetuous, reckless, instant marriage typical of most contemporary teenage brides? What can other teenagers learn from Sandra's marital and pre-marital behavior and the heartache it brought? In Hollywood, the know-it-alls blame the actress' elopement on the over possessiveness of Mary Douvan, 40, her attractive mother.

Says a family friend: "The trouble with Mary is that she was the most intensive stage mother Hollywood has ever known. She never let Sandra out of her sight. She never let the child develop any self-reliance or self-sufficiency. She did everything for the kid. She was Sandra's constant, 24-hour-a-day companion. "Naturally, the girl rebelled. She used Bobby Darin and marriage as an escape mechanism. Bobby was the first guy she had ever gone with out of personal choice, and when he suggested marriage, Sandra was overripe."

"The biggest mistake Mary Douvan made was to object to the marriage. When she and Sandra argued about it in the Hotel Drake in New York, Mary should never have walked out. But she did. She got angry and left Sandra and went home to her own mother in Bayonne, N. J."

Sandra had never before been alone in her life. "I was frightened to death," she admits. "I didn't even have my poodle with me. Naturally I phoned Bobby. He was in another hotel around the corner someplace. I think he was singing at the Copa at the time. He came running, and four days later we eloped."

"My mother said to wait, that I was too young for marriage, not to do it. That was her mistake. She should have said, 'Go ahead. Get married.' Then I would've backed off. That's how all kids are. You can't really tell them. I remember as a kid if my mother said, 'Don't do this, I immediately wanted to do it. The great, important word that bugs teenagers is "No." The best cigarette I ever smoked was hidden behind the screen in the bathroom. Ever since Mom said, 'Go ahead and smoke' I've never had a cigarette that tasted quite as good. I guess I would have avoided a lot of problems if I'd been more mature."

Sandra Dee's mother, an intelligent, perceptive woman who married a New Jersey bus driver when she was 18 and divorced him when Sandy was 4, says, "I've been made the heavy in Sandra's marriage to Bobby, and I don't think I deserve it. I did only what any mother would do under the circumstances. "After all, I had no husband to turn to for advice. My second husband, Eugene Douvan, who helped me raise Sandra died of a heart attack just before we came to Hollywood, so I was both father and mother to the child in her most formative years."

"There we were, the two of us, alone in Hollywood. Naturally I was solicitous of her welfare. I didn't make her an actress. I never projected through my child. She was ambitious, and she wanted to make it on her own."

* DATES WITH ACTORS *

"I guess I should have had her go out with boys who weren't actors, who weren't in show business, but the studio kept putting her in one film after another -- she's made 21 in 5 years -- and they wanted to publicize and promote her, so they always had her going out with one of their young players, John Saxon or someone like that, and who could blame them? But Sandy never cared for actors or singers or men in show business. She said she'd never marry any of them. If ever she married, she'd choose a professional fellow or someone out of the business so there'd be no career conflict. And she was sincere, so I never worried on that score. "I bought us a nice house with a swimming pool and I thought it was just a question of time before a flock of young college boys would come courting. But it never happened."

"In 1960," Mrs. Douvan recalls, "we went to Rome on location, and Bobby Darin was in the picture, and you know how things are on location. The whole crew gets thrown together, and soon everyone is buddy-buddy. But at the start, Sandy wouldn't even give Bobby the time of day. She was nice and polite, but she wasn't interested. But the last month something happened. I don't know what. Maybe it was the lure of first love or the magic of Rome or something. It sure wasn't Sandy trying to run away from me. "I was so happy when they got engaged. After all, Bobby was of age. He was then 24 or 25. He seemed to know what he wanted from life and he seemed capable of getting it."

"When we returned to New York, it was November, around Thanksgiving, and Sandra said she and Bobby planned to get married in February. I thought maybe they should keep company more than 90 days, after all, a girl who has never dated anyone before, how does she truly know she's in love? What standard of comparison does she have? But three or four months was okay by me. But then the next day I saw Sandra with an adhesive patch on her arm, and I asked her what it was from. She said she and Bobby had taken a blood test, and I was sure they planned an almost immediate marriage."

* THINK IT OVER *

"I asked Sandy to wait, to have a regular courtship. It wasn't that I didn't want her to marry Bobby. I just didn't want her to do it so quickly without her getting to know and understand this young man and his problems. I wanted both of them to have a sustained dating period. I just said to her: 'Think it over. Think it over. All I have in mind is your own personal happiness.'" "When later they split up -- it was Bobby who left, not Sandra -- and she came to me, I didn't say, 'I told you so,' or anything like that. I merely said, 'If you love him, if you feel happier with him than without him, go back.' So now they're back together, leading their own lives, certainly without any interference from me. So you can see I'm not the terrible, demanding, over possessive mother I've been made out to be." Sandra Dee succumbed too quickly to the lure of first love and impetuous marriage.”

Fortunately, she and her husband have now given their marriage a second chance, largely because they are convinced of their mutual love, and they prize highly the future welfare of their infant son. In many other young marriages, however, there is no such second chance, only disillusionment and divorce.

Sociologists and authorities on marriage point out that the girl who is prepared for and doesn't rush into marriage -- a girl in her early twenties -- has a much better chance of forming an enduring marital partnership than an eager, unprepared, emotionally unsettled teenager.

How does a parent prepare a girl for marriage in her early twenties? Sandra Dee's mother, who's learned the hard way, says: "Don't let your daughter start dating boys when she's 11 or 12 or 13, because when she's been through it all, the thrill and experience of dating, marriage is all that's left for her. That's the trouble with so many girls today. Nothing's left for them, they imagine, but marriage, and that's why they want it so desperately and are so anxious to enter into it so quickly."

"I think the best way is to let a girl start dating boys, going out on triple dates, to parties with a number of friends when she's 16. By the time she's 20 or 21, she's finished her formal education, she's had a full social life, she's had enough experience to develop the capacity to judge a man. Nowadays so many girls are more interested in marriage than the man they're marrying."

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