Sunny, sophisticated Sandra Dee, the precocious star of classics including Gidget, A Summer Place, and Imitation of Life, was the Eisenhower era’s ideal teen. Bobby Darin was an electric singer, performer and producer whose iconic songs included “Beyond the Sea” and “Mack the Knife.” Together, they seemed like America’s perfect young couple.
But their golden public personas masked dark reservoirs of private pain, as their son, Dodd Darin, writes in the loving yet searingly honest Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee.
“Together, my parents embodied a dream of what one could be, or have, or marry,” Dodd writes. “Dream Lovers is about two peoples whose childhoods were cruelly twisted by forces they could not control… It is the record of my search for the truth about my parents as people, so that I can accept them, separate from them, and have my own life as Dodd Darrin.”
When seventeen-year-old Nina Cassotto discovered she was pregnant out of wedlock in 1935, she decided to keep the baby. But she made a deal with her mother, a widowed, effervescent ex-showgirl with a morphine addiction: Polly would pretend to be the child’s mother, and Nina his older sister.
Robert Cassotto, born May 14, 1936, would not find out his true parentage until he was 32. A sickly child from the start, Dodd writes, his family would hover over the cardboard box that served as his crib. As a child his heart would be severely damaged by four bouts with rheumatic fever, leading the doctors to believe he wouldn’t live past 16. Often too sick to go to school, Polly would teach her son/grandson at home, regaling him with stories of her time in show business.
Called “the King” by his family, Darin grew into a charming, exhibitionist egotist who expected the world. “I remember being told all my life, ’Bobby’s sickly. You have to be careful and you have to protect him’,” his sister Vee later told Dodd. “So that’s…what my family did. And it was a mistake. I’m not saying that he should not have been protected…I’m saying we should have also made him into a human being, and we didn’t do it.”
Alexandra Zuck was born in New Jersey on April 23, 1944, to Mary and John Zuck. Mary, only 19 when her only child was born, soon divorced John—and became obsessed with her uncommonly beautiful daughter. “Mary always dressed Sandy like a little doll…a skirt with an Eisenhower jacket and a little hat,” one cousin told Dodd. The good-natured, intelligent little girl was a loner, quietly playing with her dolls in her Russian grandparents’ large, rambling home.
But Mary was always there. According to Dee, she would often keep her home from school, pulling down the shades, claiming it was raining. “Of course it didn’t rain,” Dee told Dodd. “My mother just wanted me to keep her company. She loved to spend the day curling my hair.” Mary also spoon-fed Dee until she was six, the actor said, leading to Dee’s lifelong battle with anorexia.
Mary’s overprotective instincts would catastrophically fail when she started dating the debonair NYC commercial real estate entrepreneur Eugene Douvan. According to Dee, Douvan began molesting her when she was five, and raping her when she was eight. As Dee told Dodd:
The newlyweds took me along on the honeymoon, I slept between them. That became our routine. Eugene always said he was marrying both me and Mary. It sounded nice because I was included but later I saw he married two children. One of them was me and I became his pet girl.
The abuse would continue for years. Dee recalled her mother forcing her to say goodbye to her stepfather before school, and then coming out 40 minutes later, rumpled and traumatized, asking seemingly oblivious Mary to button her up. As Dee told her son:
Thirty years after Gene’s death, I told my mother what had happened at last. She was ranting…about what a saint Gene was, and I finally couldn’t stand it. I said, “He wasn’t a saint. He had sex with me.” She said, “You’re crazy and you’re drunk. Go to bed.” I went to bed, and the next day I said to her, “Now I’m sober. And it happened.” She didn’t say anything. She had nothing to come back with.
By 1959, the multi-talented Robert Cassotto had become Bobby Darin, a teen idol with hit records including “Mack the Knife” and “Splish Splash.” Darin was obsessed with getting ahead—the oxygen he had to take between shows no doubt reminding him he was on borrowed time.
A womanizer who had wooed legendary singer Connie Francis, Darin was unapologetic in his pursuit of a career and lifestyle bigger than Frank Sinatra’s. “There is a difference between conceit and egotism. Conceit is thinking you’re great; egotism is knowing it,” he once explained, per Dodd. This attitude could exhaust contemporaries like Sammy Davis Jr., who had a cutting quip for his pal, Dodd writes: “Let me know when you stop being a legend so we can be friends again.”
But the legendary George Burns saw through the bravado—and knew there was a massive talent, and heart, underneath. When Darin opened for Burns in 1959, the two had an instant father/son rapport. Burns observed his surrogate son’s success with wry amusement. One night, he came across Darin and his friend Elvis Presley hiding from fans in a casino dressing room. Burns told Dodd:
They were standing together, and the people were knocking down the doors. The girls were screaming, “Elvis! Bobby!” …So just to be funny, I went over to where they were standing and said, “Kids, just in case you run short on broads, let me know and I’ll fix you up.” And Presley said, “Thank you Mr. Burns.” He thought I was on the level.
The two would remain close for the rest of Darin’s life. When Burn’s beloved wife, Gracie, died in 1964, Darin took care of him like a true son. “When Gracie died, Bobby slept in my bedroom with me for three or four nights,” Burns recalled, per Dodd. “We talked about Gracie, about show business, about what I’m going to do without her…When you love someone, you cry, you keep crying…I couldn’t sleep. When Bobby left me, he said, ‘Sleep in Gracie’s bed. You’ll feel better. I took his advice and that did the trick. After that I could sleep.”
At the age of eight, Dee had gotten a casual gig as a model for the Girl Scouts. By the time she was 11, that had turned into a serious, $78,000-a-year modeling career. Dee took the subway alone to gigs, writes Dodd, and went to a professional school with future movie stars Tuesday Weld and Carol Lynley.
In 1956, Dee’s stepfather died of a heart attack. She took herself to a screen test with mega-producer Ross Hunter days after his funeral. “Here was this tiny, lovely, sophisticated little girl who was crying. I just flipped out when I saw her,” Hunter recalled to Dodd. “And I said, ‘Why are you crying?’ And she said, ‘My daddy just died.’”
Hunter knew he had struck box office gold. “I saw that moms all over the world would say ‘Gee, if my daughter could be like little Sandra Dee, that would be wonderful,’” he told Dodd.
Mary and the newly christened Sandra Dee moved to Hollywood in 1957. During the filming of Dee’s first film, Until They Sail, her body was so underdeveloped that the studio made her wear a curvy rubber suit beneath her clothes. Only 12—though the studio believed she was 14—she was so excited by her new curves that she called out to her co-star Paul Newman. “Mr. Newman, Mr. Newman,” she cried, per Dodd. “Want to see my body?”
Dee was soon Universal Studios megastar, the golden teen queen, cosseted by her studio “family” and adored by her legions of fans. But according to Dodd, every Saturday Dee would lock herself in her room, indulging in walnuts and then drinking Epsom salts until she was sick—and, one time, comatose. “I wanted to punish myself for being bad,” Dee told him. “The food was bad. I punished myself, and then I felt good.”
Once Bobby Darin had conquered the charts, he was ready to make his name on the silver screen. He got his chance in 1960, when he was cast as the junior lead opposite Dee in the Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida film Come September.
Once on location in Italy, Darin immediately began to pursue Dee. “He was standing on the shore wearing a yellow suit, and she was in a boat just pulling in to dock,” their son writes. “’Will you marry me?’ he called out to her. ’Not today,’ she replied.”
Dee was not impressed with her cocky co-star, and wasn’t afraid to say that to Dodd. “I just thought, this is a conniving S.O.B. I didn’t want anything to do with him.”
A frustrated Darin resorted to juvenile tactics, taunting her with chants of “Sandra Dee has a flea.” He also wooed Dee’s attractive young mother, writes Dodd, charming her late into the night while a bored Dee went to bed to read.
Mary finally convinced Dee to go on a carriage ride with Darin. It turned out to be a fateful evening. “Bobby told her he acted as he did because he was scared,” Dodd writes. “He was out of his element. He wasn’t the main attraction. He was falling in love with her and was at a loss how to get her to pay attention to him.”
The two were soon an item, giggling and flirting all over Rome. They eloped on Dec. 1, 1960—much to the chagrin of everyone from Ross Hunter to Rock Hudson and Dee’s mother Mary. “I do remember my thoughts that first morning when I woke up in bed with my husband,” Dee told Dodd. “I thought I had never felt so safe in my life as I felt with Bobby.”
The smitten newlyweds were a couple made in teen magazine heaven.
For Dee, the marriage was an introduction to a whole new world—one centered, primarily, in Vegas casinos. According to Dodd, his father expected his mother—normally an early riser—to be at every one of his late-night gigs, perfectly coiffed and captivated. “He had me sitting through shows, and then he was with the guys every night,” Dee recalled. “I never had to worry about another woman. It was just guys…I had no life, and we had no life together.”
Dee began drinking heavily and gambling excessively. According to Dodd, Dee would tell Darin his toupee was crooked right before shows, while Darin would make her cry before an appearance on TV. When one associate asked Dee why she had caused a scene, she replied, “To stir things up. I’m bored.”
By 1963, the Darins’ childish antics had caught up with them. After Darin became convinced Dee was having an affair with her Tammy and the Doctor co-star Peter Fonda, writes Dodd, he had a lackey call her to tell her he wanted a divorce. (Per Dodds, Dee absolutely denied the affair and claimed they were just close coworkers.)
The separation would be short-lived. A newly chastened Darin recommitted himself to the marriage, and to Dodd, who was born in 1961. But in 1966, after Dee struck up a conversation with Warren Beatty at a buffet at the home of Joan Collins and Anthony Newley , writes Dodd, Darin had their psychiatrist tell her he wanted a divorce.
This time, it stuck. The late 60s were a tough time for both: In 1968, Dee left Universal, the last contract star to leave the lot. Darin threw himself folk music, and was devastated by the assassination of his hero, Bobby Kennedy. “It’s been said that the gravediggers left the coffin above ground for the next shift to bury, and that my dad, alone, stayed with Kennedy’s body throughout the night,” Dodd writes.
By the 1970s, Darin’s heart was in major trouble, and so was Dee’s—she couldn’t stop loving her ex-husband. “He would come to the door with his vitamins and say, ‘I have nowhere to go,” Dee recalled, per Dodd. “And I would let him in and things would start again.”
Darin had long known he would not live to be an old man. Now, that reality was coming true—and he was angry, bitter and scared. He had developed sepsis and began to suffer from dementia. On his son’s twelfth birthday, he called from the hospital. Dodd recalled:
He was part hysterical, part sobbing, almost unintelligible. I eventually understood that he was calling to wish me [a] happy birthday. He told me that he loved me and that he was very sorry he could not be with me…his manner distressed me so much, I cut the conversation short.
Days later, on December 19, 1973, while Dodd stayed over at his best friend John’s house, thirty-seven-year-old Bobby Darin died after open heart surgery. Sandra Dee called Kay Gable, widow of Clark Gable, in the middle of night to say she was coming to get Dodd. Kay, whose son John had been born after his father’s death, convinced her to let Dodd get a good night’s sleep. “Believe me,” she told Dee. “He’ll know for the rest of his life what happened.”
“I feel like a has been that never was,” Dee would say before her thirtieth birthday, per Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair’s The Bad & the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties. After Darin’s death, a reclusive Dee would focus on raising her son (who says she was a loving mother) while battling alcoholism and anorexia. Her mother took up the slack as a real estate agent, and the two continued their destructive, codependent dance. According to Dodd , his grandmother told him on her deathbed in 1988: “Don’t be a victim as I was. Don’t waste your life cleaning up after her.”
For Dee, her remaining life (she died of kidney disease in 2005) was a struggle- relapse, recovery and isolation. However, she was always supported by her loving son Dodd (a happily married father), who wished his damaged mother, who had never been able to live a normal life or develop a sense of self, understood she was more than just her image.
“I would love for her to be able to feel good about herself and to take some pride in what she has accomplished. Because she really doesn’t,” Dodd writes. “In her mind, unless she was Sandra Dee, who had a major career and had things going, she was nothing, an absolutely nobody. That’s how she feels about herself.”
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