Bobby Darin:

"What If I Said You're Going To Be A Father?"

Sandra Dee gazed with the soft moist look of longing and love in her eyes at her husbands figure sprawled in sleep on the nine foot sofa. He looked so small as he lay there, his usually quick mind now suspended in limbo.

"I wonder," Sandra thought, "if even in his sleep he is still fighting the snap judgments that are made of him by those who look too fast, those who don't take the time to look a little longer and see down into his heart. I wonder if it hurts him as much as it hurts me.

"Maybe Bobby's right when he says that little guys have to be smarter and tougher or they just don't survive in a world of big guys. He's got so much to give. He wants so much to give. If they only knew him as I do."

Bobby shifted and resprawled his body. His eyes flickered open for a moment and for an instant Sandra thought he had wakened.

"He likes to wake up and find me near him," she remembered, smiling gently as she recalled the first time he had mentioned it. He had said that to find her by his side when he opened his eyes gave him the comfortable feeling that at last someone was watching over him while he took time out from the world. "A world that is just waiting for me to let my guard down so it can clobber me."

She laughed silently and said to herself, "Well, he's changed his position again. This time he's curled up like a little baby. No wonder ---" At the word "baby" her mind shifted. She stared out the window into the darkness of the late evening.

"Perhaps," she thought, "I ought to discuss it with him. But I'm not sure." Now she stared down at the arm of the chair and slapped the upholstery with her hand. "Darn it," she continued, "how does a girl know for sure. How long do you have to wait to be positive. Maybe a ---" She picked up a leather-bound phone index, opened it and studied her doctor's name and number. She shook her head.

"No," she thought, "there must be more definte signs. They said you could begin to feel changes right away. Changes no one could see, changes only the woman herself recognizes. But what if ---"

Sandra settled back in her chair. "It's nice just sitting here watching him sleep." She wondered if all new wives got as much pleasure observing their husbands during these moments. Whatever it meant, Sandra liked it. It was one of the many unanticipated pleasantries of wifehood.

IT WAS NOT AN EASY TASK to be Mrs. Bobby Darin. It was especially difficult for a beautiful 19-year-old actress, who, relatively, had had it easy all her life. The ease was made possible by Sandra's ever-present mother. Mrs. Mary Douvan. Since Sandra's childhood she had been the buffer that had protected her daughter to a point that was almost incredible.

A movie executive who had worked with Sandra had once commented privately that, "Sandra, for example, is so sexually pure that someday a boy is going to come along with a particularly virulent kiss and maculate her so completely that she will suffer from love the rest of her life."

Now, however, as Mrs. Darin, Sandra knows that as beautiful and romantic as marriage to Bobby had seemed before the wedding, there were a number of unromantic facts that had to be dealt with.

"And life," Sandra thought, "does not much care whether you're ready to deal with them or not." Sandra understood now that which she had once heard referred to as "the terrible panic in a woman's heart the first day after the honeymoon."

"Yes," Sandra mused, "I can see why it comes in like a panic." She was learning as most young new brides learn that the high passions, the turbulent, ecstatic emotions, the sighs, the whispered words, the warmth of their intimacies and all the heart-pounding rapture of the love that had seized them both was still there, but marriage was, indeed, more than that.

There was, for instance, the problem of getting his shirts laundered the way he wanted them. There was the question of what he'd like for dinner which raised another question -- how to cook the lamb chops if they were what he wanted. There was the ever-demanding responsibilities she had to her studio and the thousands of details that went with it. The obligations she had to Bobby as his wife, to be a wife. A million maddening, pestering decisions that had nothing to do with love and yet, in a way, had everything to do with it.

WHAT DO YOU TELL your husband? What do you keep from him? Do you tell a husband of four months that you are pregnant?

Suppose a woman tells him she is expecting and then learns she isn't. Is the husband's "that's-all-right, honey" a cover for his disappointment or is it really "all right?" Sandra sighed.

She rose now and went into the kitchen. She took a glass down from a cabinet shelf and went to the water-cooler.

"You've got a slight kidney problem, Sandra," the doctor had said, "Now it's only a mild disturbance, but for a while I want you to drink distilled water only. We don't want anything serious coming of it, so let's do what we heave to do and avoid complications."

The pain was most severe in the mornings when she awoke. She hadn't mentioned it to Bobby other than to remark casually that she "felt stiff in my back."

It had been enough for Bobby. His concern was immediate and serious. He wanted to know everything.

"It's just a little twinge," she had replied. "There's no need to get excited. You're making something out of nothing."

Bobby turned away and for a moment Sandra thought she had hurt him by rebuking his anxiety so bluntly.

She had taken his chin in her hand and gently turned his face back to hers. "I'm sorry, darling," she said, "in a way it makes me feel good to know that such a little thing wrong with me can worry you so much. I consider it a compliment."

Bobby had liked that. He had liked it because she had understood.

He told her so.

"That's what I love about you, Alexandra," he said. He liked to call her by her real first name. "It's crazy," he continued. "I never knew how much I needed you until I discovered, back in Italy, that you didn't like me at all. And you really didn't like me, did you?"

Sandra laughed, "I couldn't stand you. I told Mom when she said you'd be in COME SEPTEMBER." I said, 'If Darin's in, Dee is out.'"

She put her arm around him suddenly as if something had frightened her.

He took her hand. "Hey," he said. "You're shaking. What's the matter?"

She hugged him harder. "I was just thinking. Supposing I hadn't gone to Italy. Supposing I had refused absolutely to make the picture. We wouldn't be here and as happy as we are now. Would we?"

Bobby chuckled at that. "I would have found you, somehow," he said kissing the tip of her nose. "You didn't have a chance of escaping." He shrugged and gave her a big grin. "Neither did I," he added.

It had been wonderful after that . . .

THE NEXT DAY she hadn't seen him at all. She was asleep when he finally came home after a long weary day and night recording a new album at the studio.

She didn't know why she asked the question just then. Maybe because she was half asleep and didn't know exactly what she was saying.

"Why," she had asked, "do so many people write so many unkind things about you in the papers and the magazines." If I didn't know better I'd think, that considering everything, there had to be a reason. I know there isn't. Why, Bobby?"

"I don't know, honey," he said quietly, "not for sure, I mean. I guess maybe it's because I come on too strong. You said it about me yourself once. Remember what you told your mother the first day we were together on the set? You said I came on like gangbusters."

Sandra turned sleepily in the bed. "You did," she mumbled. "You acted like you were the producer, director and star. Ooooh, how I was hoping you'd fall down right on your head."

Bobby looked at her for a moment. "Well, you're partly right. I fell that day. But not on my head. I fell on my heart -- and you knew it. . . . "

All of this was going through Sandra's mind as she sipped the distilled water. She rinsed out the glass, dried it and put it back in the cabinet.

She returned to where Bobby lay sleeping.

Her husband, awake now, had folded his arms behind his head and was looking straight at her.

She went over to the sofa and knelt beside him. She put her head on his chest.

"Bobby?" she said tenderly.

"Yeah, honey."

"I was just wondering what would happen if I told you that we were going to have a -- I mean -- supposing I were to tell you that -- Bobby, you do like children, you haven't changed now that we're married?"

"Of course I like kids, I'm nuts about them," he said sleepily. Suddenly his eyes popped wide open. "Honey!" He grabbed her. "Yes?"

She laughed, shaking her head. "No, no, no," she said. "But wives get curious."

Bobby breathed a big sigh. "Man, you had me scared. I thought -- "Now cut that out Alexandra!" It's no way to treat a man fresh out of a sound sleep. But since you mention it I can't see any reasons why we shouldn't."

"Neither can I," Sandra replied.

"IN FACT," HE SAID, "the more I think the more I'm convinced there are good reasons why we ought to have a few."

Sandra turned and with a half-coy, half-mischievous twinkle in her eye asked, "And what reason are you thinking of?"

Same reason you are," he whispered.

"Boys ought not to talk to girls like that," she said, "it's not proper!"

"It is when they are married!"

Sandra smiled to herself.

She just couldn't help feeling happy, that Bobby was so right. . . ." END

Sandra stars in ROMANOFF AND JULIET, TAMMY, TELL ME TRUE, and COME SEPTEMBER, all U.I. Bobby is in COME SEPTEMBER, U.I., HELL IS FOR HEROES and TOO LATE BLUES, both Para.