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Sandra Dee: Summer Place
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Francis Lawrence (Sandra Dee, A Summer Place) saved by handsome young surfer Moondoggie (James Darren, Guns of Navarone). Suddenly infatuated with the longboard lifestyle, Francis endears herself to Moondoggie's beach bum friends, including their mentor, the Big Kahuna (Cliff Robertson, Spider-Man). She learns to surf and earns the nickname "Gidget" (an abbreviated form of "girl midget"), but Moondoggie still isn't interested-in fact, he's planning on dropping out of college to join the Kahuna as a surf-drenched drifter. Tired of being not noticed, Gidget concocts a plan to drive Moondoggie into her arms with jealousy.
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Originally a model, the petite Sandra Dee moved onto TV commercials, then broke into teeny-bopper films of the 1950s. Her most popular films were the beach movies Gidget (1959) and A Summer Place (1959). She was married to singer Bobby Darin from 1960–67 and occasionally appeared in TV movies in the 1970s.
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It's hard to envision Sandra Dee as an actual person. For so long, she was an icon, an emblem of virginal purity who seemed incapable of complexity, vulnerability, or even inner life. She was Gidget, American teenager. She was Tammy, cute-as-a-button bumpkin blessed with an altruistic streak a county mile wide. She played a classic Douglas Sirk ingénue in Imitation of Life, made us remember the enigmatic theme of A Summer Place, and even became the satirical subject of a hit Broadway show tune, Grease's seminal showstopper, "Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee."
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Dee scored a major success as the Broadway star Lana Turner’s neglected daughter in the Douglas Sirk melodrama Imitation of Life (1959), and Universal Pictures reunited them in the thriller Portrait in Black (1960). But by that time her career was veering off in another direction, after she romanced Troy Donahue in A Summer Place (1959) and played the title role of Gidget (1959), a teen comedy with James Darren and Cliff Robertson.
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Kate Bosworth had trouble seeing herself as early '60s starlet Sandra Dee in the new Bobby Darin biopic, "Beyond the Sea," despite sharing a blond-haired, blue-eyed gamine quality. "I watched two of her movies, 'A Summer Place' and 'Come September,' and then I freaked out, worrying about doing her voice and her style," says Bosworth, 21.
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The show's future now belongs to Dee Johnson, who got her writing chops at "Melrose Place" and, later, at "ER" - a minor if insignificant irony. Asked about the turmoil, she conceded in a recent interview that "like all first-year shows, it was pretty chaotic, [but] there was an enormous amount of pressure on the show to begin with, and it's kind of a big show, too, in the sense that you're telling stories about the president. So when you get behind early at the production end of things, then you find yourself in a situation that rarely gets better. It only gets harder."
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