Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin:
The Sin She Can't Forgive!
This article, written by Fowler Smith, appeared in Movieland and TV Time Magazine February 1962
"I wish," Sandra Dee said, her eyes full of hurt, "that I could make believe it doesn't bother me when I read all those unkind things they say about Bobby. And I know it doesn't change anything, really. It doesn't change Bobby--that's for sure. Nothing they say--no matter how untrue or how unfair--ever could make him crawl, and sometimes I think that's what they can't stand."
It was a subject Sandra didn't like talking about and one which, ordinarily, she took pains to avoid. But once it was mentioned, her pent-up resentment poured out in torrents. She could not pretend that she was indifferent to the besmirching of the man she loved--the father of her child.
"Bobby, fortunately, seems to have learned to live with it," she smiled softly. "I wish I could be like him. He can take
it--I suppose because he knows deep down in his heart that he is right and they are wrong. I know that, too. But I can't take it when they attack him. I can't let it go that lightly. I can't live with it. I think it's horrible.
"I guess it's because I love Bobby too much--and I know him too well. That's what makes it so hard to shrug off. Sometimes I get so hurt, I can't help crying. If they only knew him, just a little, they could never say those things....."
Sandra's lips fell apart in a sad half smile as she recalled a line--she thought it was from Shakespeare--that said it so well. "Who steals my purse steals trash....who steals my name steals everything."
The thing she found herself least able to understand was what Bobby's spirited clobberers seemed least able to forgive. She
wondered how it was that the same thing that enthralled her seemed to upset others. It was one of the most hallowed and
most infrequently encountered virtues--Bobby's fearless honesty.
"I guess they're just not used to meeting people the likes of Bobby," she sighed, almost forlornly. "All I can figure is that they're so unaccustomed to such simple amd uncompromising honesty, that they don't know integrity when it bites them. So they have to find other words for it--brash and rude. I guess they find it easier to praise honesty as a remote ideal than to
cope with it."
Sandy did not choose to single out any specific diatribes against Bobby, but there were many, and there could be no mistaking that they had drawn blood--and anguish. To Sandy they seemed so uncalled for, even cowardly. A weekly television magazine, for example, carried a profile of Bobby in which the writer described his unwillingness to believe Bobby was as obnoxious as he had heard. Then he wrote, "I was wrong. In person, Bobby Darin is fully as offensive as he is in public."
To Sandra, understandably, it is sharp-shooters such as these, not Bobby, who are offensive. In person, she has found her husband alive and warm, compassionate and unselfish---and tender beyond description. Compared with the Bobby Darin she read about before she met him---and even since marrying him---the real Bobby Darin was a total stranger.
"Before I met Bobby I heard all about the type of person he was supposed to be," Sandy acknowledges. "How arrogant he was, how uncouth, how conceited, how overbearing and insufferable. But of course it didn't take me long to know that he wasn't anything at all like people said he was."
Sandra's face becomes flushed and she bites her lips when she thinks about it. She reacts like any other loving wife. All that comes to her mind is the protesting cry--why do they pick on my husband?
It is the sin she can't forgive!
"It's not," a girl friend of Sandra's explains, "that Sandra doesn't realize a lot of people--in the entertainment business as well as in the press--rap Bobby out of envy and jealousy. It drives them crazy that he has no false humility. Sandy knows enough about human nature to understand that they can't tolerate his assurance because it is something they lack. And she knows Bobby is often criticized not because of what he says, but because he has the courage to say what other people
feel like saying but don't dare say for fear of being unpopular,"
She concedes that Bobby's remarks occasionally might be impolite--but shares Sandra's view that it is this very
willingness to be unpopular and disliked if necessary as the price of speaking his mind which is the measure of his honesty.
This quality seems to appall Bobby's critics--but it leaves Sandra, who is so thrilled to get away from sham and
phoniness, overcome with awe. A withering case in point was a recent statement by Bobby citing how unlike Pat Boone he
considered himself.
"I can tell you one thing," Bobby said. "I'll never write any book like 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty,' I'm here to entertain people, not to preach to them. It's not my business to tell them to go to church or not, to wear a tie or not. Whenever I hear some humble little singer being congratulated for being such a good example to his teenage followers I feel like
throwing up."
That may not be the ideal way to win friends and influence people. But it is unadulterated honesty--honesty without fear of consequence. Sandy feels her husband should be respected by others, as is by her, for having the guts to speak the truth even when it may not seem prudent. She thinks it's outrageous that he should be condemned for being outspoken.
"God could bestow no greater gift," Sandra says with unashamed emotion, "than for my children to grow up with the same honesty and integrity as their father. I don't see how any mother could wish for more for her baby. A baby's greatest possible gift is not the worldly possessions of its parents, but the example of its parents. No father anytime, anywhere could be a more wonderful example of good character and honesty than Bobby."
Sandra to this day, finds herself amazed at the extent of Bobby's honesty. But she sees this characteristic not as rudeness or impertinence, but as a shining virtue which she prays her new baby will inherit.
"Bobby's simple honesty," she marvels, "is so rare--I guess that's why it's so astonishing. I myself am repeatedly amazed by it. It used to be that it wasn't corny when people said honesty was the best policy. With him honesty isn't a policy. It isn't some kind of gimmick. It's a way of life. It's the only way he knows how to live.
"And for this," Sandy exclaims, "do you go around crucifying people? I don't get it. I just don't get it."
With Bobby, Sandy says proudly, it's not a matter of being honest only when it's convenient. He thinks that dishonesty even in the name of politeness is just as phony as dishonesty for more naked purposes. This came home dramatically to Sandra one night when she got a phone call while she was working on a script. She asked Bobby to say she wasn't in, and would be back later. It wasn't that she wanted to lie. It was just that she didn't want to hurt the feelings of the person calling.
But to Bobby this would have been compromise--deceit. He would have no part of it, nor did he want Sandy to be any party to it.
"Sandra," he told the caller, "would rather not come to the phone right now. She's busy. If you'll call back later, she'll probably be free."
At first Sandra quaked at the thought of the person being hurt. But she soon realized that it was better that way---it was so clean and honest. And unphony. Later she was complimented by the man who had phoned. He told her how refreshing he had found Bobby's honesty. It hadn't offended him. It had delighted him.
"With Bobby," Sandra smiles, "you know exactly where you stand. He always tells the truth. Sometimes it may hurt--but you're never in the dark, you're never left wondering, which hurts a lot more. When he says something, you can bet your life that that's the way it's going to be."
Were it just a matter of logic, Sandy's friend explains perceptively, Sandy could just dismiss the whole unpleasant matter and forget about it. But naturally, she's emotionally involved. She cares about Bobby's good name. She cares about Bobby being hurt. And anytime anyone tries to hurt Bobby, it hurts her--particularly since she is so convinced that Bobby has done nothing to deserve it.
"What bothers her is that Bobby ends up the whipping boy for other people's neuroses," Sandy's friend goes on. He's one of those rare people, who really knows who he is, where he's been and where he's going. Sandy loves that about him. That's part of what makes him so great in her eyes--why she's so proud that he, of all possible people, is the father of her baby and will be the father of all her babies to come.
"The idea of their baby growing up and reading lies about Bobby doesn't sit well at all with Sandy. She honestly and truly believes that Bobby is a great man. She realizes that all great men have their detractors, but that's all the more reason
why Sandy gets so furious when people take potshots at him. She simply feels that villification is a poor reward for greatness---and that slander is a shabby comeuppance for honesty."
Yet Sandy does not make a habit of defending Bobby, because she doesn't really think he needs her or anyone else to defend him. She's satisfied that she is married to a man who can take care of himself--and who does so unblushingly when the occasion calls for it. Such as Bobby's own doubtlessy brash--but devastatingly honest--reply not long ago when he was asked to comment on charges that he was conceited.
"Conceit," he snapped, "is thinking you're great. Egotism is knowing it."
This is the kind of unnerving self-confidence that prompted one critic to remark that Frank Sinatra could become another Bobby Darin if only he had Bobby's assurance. But by Bobby's own definition, Sandra is the first to attest to her husband's lack of conceit.
"The thread on which I exist," Bobby has said, "is simple directness. If I'm in a mood, I'm in a mood for everybody."
"That somehow sums it up," says Sandra's friend. "This is what she admires so much about Bobby-- that he's not only honest in what he says, but in the way he lives and feels. To Sandra this is rare and wonderful--and she adores Bobby because of it."
Those who persist in drawing less flattering images of Sandra Dee's husband are guilty of the sin she can't forgive.
THE END
Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin are in
Universal-International's "If a Man Answers."
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