"Oh crap, I'm not like that. Nobody can really be like that. I mean, if I really believed all that stuff, I'd have to be mentally retarded or something. And I'm not."

Sandra Dee was interviewed by Roger Ebert in 1967. And she railed against her public image...

"I'm 25 years old, and it so happens that I like to smoke. So out in Hollywood the studio press agents are still pulling cigarettes out of my hand and covering my drink with a napkin whenever my picture is taken. Little Sandra Dee isn't supposed to smoke, you know. Or drink. Or breathe."

Roger Ebert once complained about the lack of real access to the movie stars of today. In the the golden age of film criticism - the late 60s - Ebert performed these sit-down interviews which were candid and revealing.

"I'll never take off my clothes in the movies... Never...."

Even when the answers are evasive - the observant film critic can still capture a celebrity's special essence.

"The other day on a radio program, I really got carried away. The interviewer asked me what I thought about premarital sexual relations, and I told him."

Uh, what did you tell him?

"Never mind," said Sandra Dee.

Three years later, Sandra Dee changed her mind and appeared naked in The Dunwich Horror.

And two years after that, Ebert's film essays won him a Pulitzer Prize

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