Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee - By Their Son Dodd Darin [Mass Market Paperback]

A detailed, well-written account of the lives of Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin as authored by their son. What is also interesting is that Sandra Dee's own comments are included, written in her voice, as if she is speaking to the reader. Her commentary is honest, sad, and painfully revealing; at times she sounds very detached, which makes it even more touching. Her onscreen image of a sweet, blonde teen-age virgin (as spoofed in the song "Look At Me I'm Sandra Dee" from the movie soundtrack "Grease") was the antithesis of what her life was really like. Starting at age 5, she was molested by her stepfather; as she matured, she was forced to submit to sex with him. Dee's mother knew about this, but turned a blind eye and lived vicariously through her daughter's movie career. Thanks to her dyfunctional mother and stepfather, Sandra developed a severe eating disorder which plagues her to this day. Of the two, I found Sandra's story to be the most interesting and the most tragic, although Darin's life wasn't a piece of cake, either. He struggled with a heart condition, living his life as a race against time, knowing that eventually his heart would give out. Once you start reading this book, you won't want to put it down. This book shows how two gifted young entertainers lived quite tortured and difficult lives once the cameras stopped rolling.

"Dream Lovers" is a daring book. Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee's son Dodd Darin sorts through his parents' shattered lives and marriage. His express purpose is to write definitively rather than risk seeing their story further distorted by others. He also seeks therapy: making sense of himself by exploring his parents' lives.

In a fine writing job by collaborator Maxine Paetro, Dodd tracks their trail of secrets by talking to those who knew them best. They had deeper secrets than most. Bobby never knew who his real father was, a secret his mother and grandmother took to their graves with them. And Sandra's childhood sexual abuse by her stepfather - combined with her overprotective mother and the cocooning studio system - left her an eternal child who couldn't cope with life after her movie contract ended.

I praise Dodd for so unflinchingly detailing their flaws while still loving them. One may argue it's precisely warts that sell such a book. And that's true to some extent. But reading this book may be most difficult for the Darin and Dee fans who are the most likely to read it in the first place. I'm in the first category, and this tarnished Bobby's shine for me - although perhaps I just have a more realistic view of him. I find it noble of Dodd that he is willing to write, say, that his father's brash arrogance was real, not just a press distortion. Or that his treatment of his birth family was shoddy and his financial provision for them, inexcusable. Or that said family really were such vulgarians as to make filial love difficult. Or that the Darin marriage may have sexually foundered because Sandra wasn't kinky enough to do threesomes or watch pornography with Bobby. This is not a hagiography. It took great courage and honesty of a son to write this candidly of his parents, while still wanting to build relationships with long-estranged relatives, and to regard affectionately the memories of those gone.

He explores the mystery of Bobby's parentage. Some thought Bobby resembled "brother-in-law" and actual stepfather Charlie Maffia, a New York sanitation worker who helped raise him and was devoted to him. (Bobby never paid him more than $150 a week as his valet, and Charlie would have done better to remain a garbageman and at least retire with a pension, sister Vee opines.) Others thought the circumstances suggested Bobby's dad was a married mobster. But Vee recounts seeing their mother, waiting outside a doctor's office, visibly stunned at the sight of a man she then tells Vee was a friend of Bobby's father. Vee concludes it was the father himself, and that Nina's story revealed to Bobby in the 1960s - that Dad was a medical student she had a brief fling with and never told of the pregnancy - was true.

Dodd is wounded by the darker view he develops of his grandmother Mary Douvan, whom he loved. Mary was a classic stage mother who wouldn't leave Sandra's side even when Sandra was grown. Dodd touches on, but doesn't seem to grasp, the key to Mary's character: Her great fear at being alone. To cure it, she attaches herself to Sandra by making herself indispensable. And the only time this seems not to be true is while she is married to Eugene Douvan, with whom she works; little Sandra works long days modeling and comes home to an empty hotel suite in the evening. Dodd never figures out how Mary could not know about her husband's abuse of Sandra between the ages of 5 and 11 (Douvan then died) and concludes she was in denial. Dodd doesn't give Mary enough credit for forging and protecting Sandra's career, for understanding the realities of public image that predated and precluded today's confessional-style handling of celebrities' failings; and for keeping Sandra alive as the latter sank into an alcoholic and anorexic reclusiveness. Mary supported her daughter and grandson by selling real estate following Sandra's career plummet. Is this enabling, or is this survival? (I found myself wondering if Eugene Douvan might have been the model for Humbert Humbert of "Lolita", written by Vladimir Nabokov, like Douvan an upper-class Russian émigré and about the same age. Douvan told people he married Mary to get Sandy, which is exactly what the fictional Humbert Humbert does.)

There is tragedy and redemption here. Bobby Darin, condemned to an early death, rocketing to heights, constantly changing shapes, crashing to earth, emerging from a midlife crisis, only to die, from an avoidable health downturn, before his second career could really take off. (And remember, with Sinatra, it was the second career that made him an icon. The first one just made him a bobby-soxer idol. Bobby Darin died at age 37. When Sinatra was 37, he hadn't won his comeback Oscar yet.) One can find redemption in Bobby Darin's story, at least: that he emerged from the wilderness a better person and reborn entertainer, one kinder to others, less egotistical, more socially conscious, and having crossed a generational gap that his older Vegas peers could not. Sandra Dee, meanwhile, is America's sweetheart. For years she ranks with Taylor and Hepburn at the box office. She is so perfectly beautiful that, one envious onlooker says, she looks better rolling out of bed without makeup than most women ever do at all. But she leads a life bizarre at its core. She has no friends, she can't dress herself, she only eats lettuce, she drinks and gambles compulsively. After her star wanes, she briefly rallies, going public with her problems around 1990, but can't sustain the comeback. The gap in her life - from teen idol to authentic adult - is one she never manages to cross. For her, there is only tragedy.

I just finished reading "Dream Lovers" and would recommend the book to all lovers of the entertainment industry. It tells from beginning to end the life of two wonderful people who never really didn't have anything in common, struggle with their own demons. It's not a name dropping sort of book it's a story of struggle, misunderstandings, abuse in the extreme and the type of abuse we inflect on the people we really love. Dodd is quite a man and any parent would be proud of the way he turned out considering what he himself had to go through as a child of two famous people who had and still has a lot of warts. It has been out of print for awhile, but if you put a little effort into it you can still find it either through used books store or like I did on ebay. Good Luck it's worth the effort.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 37 reviews  4.6 out of 5 stars