Sandra Dee was 63, filmed A Summer's Place, and was married to Bobby Darin.

Hunter S. Thompson was 67, wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and was honorary night manager at the Mitchell Brother's adult theatre...

It's ironic that two such different people died on the same day. They were only four years apart - but that put them on opposite sides of the line dividing the 50s from the 60s. Ironically, I'd been thinking about Sandra Dee just recently...

Four months ago I'd wanted to rent a beach movie, and ended up with A Summer's Place. Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue fight very hard not to have sex. At one point after a chaste night on the beach, Sandra Dee returns to find her obsessive mother has even called a doctor to examine her to determine whether or not she's lost her virginity. There's lots of speeches from the kids and from the parents about the need to be honest, about the guilt of previous generations.... Not all of them are anti-sex speeches; some actually bemoan hypocrisy.

After the movie I did an obligatory web search for trivia. There's that song in Grease called "Look at Me I'm Sandra Dee," with a stanza specifically addressed to Dee's co-star in "A Summer Place."

As for you, Troy Donahue,
I know what you wanna do.
You've got your crust,
I'm no object of lust.
I'm just plain Sandra Dee.

Er, so then how does she get knocked up in the last reel? (Whoops - I gave away the ending...)

And then the police are looking for them - because they're under-aged. They hide under a bridge as the sirens go by. Poor lost teen lovers....

In fact, for years I always thought the lyrics to "A Summer Place" were..

"There's
a summer place
where we can go,
we two,
be alone,
just you..."

That would've made alot more sense. But no, according to a web search, the lyrics are:

And the sweet secret of
A summer place
Is that it's anywhere
When two people share
All their hopes
All their dreams
All their love.

Reading her obituary tonight, I see a friend of the family saying Sandra Dee "didn't have a bad bone in her body." And that song in Grease? "She always had a big laugh about it. She had a great sense of humor."

There's more. "In a March 1991 interview with People magazine, Dee said she was sexually abused as a child by her stepfather and pushed into stardom by her mother. Dee, who turned to pills and alcohol, said she hit bottom after her mother died in 1988.

"'I couldn't function,'" she told People, adding that she began drinking more than a quart of scotch a day as her weight fell to 80 pounds. She said she stayed home almost constantly for three years."

I prefer to remember her as the drive-in icon she was. Apparently one of her last movies was "The Dunwich Horror" in 1970. Dee plays a librarian at the library with the only known copy of the Necronomicon. She gets drugged and kidnapped to a spooky old mansion where there's something scary in the attic....

One Amazon reviewer noted it's Sandra Dee's only movie with a nude scene.

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