"When you're sixteen, thinking of getting married, and you have a crush on a boy, to you it can only be beautiful. It can only be happy. But when you finally do get married you realize that there are doubts, too ...." Sandra Dee was quiet, thoughtful, almost moody as we talked in her dressing room bungalow on the Universal-International lot, where she and her husband, Bobby Darin, were co-starring in the comedy, If A Man Answers. I had asked her, "Now that you've been married for over a year, do you feel that some of the ideas you originally had about marriage when you were still single were mistaken?"

And then I added, "Perhaps you can help other girls to avoid those 'marriage mistakes,' so, that they can enter into marriage with their eyes open. That is, if there were any mistakes.

"There had been, she admitted. And now she was trying to tell me about them, with the frankness and honesty that have always characterized Sandra Dee.

"You hear about a great movie," she said, leaning forward eagerly now as she tried to get her point across. "It got rave reviews. 'Best thing I've ever seen in my life,' someone tells you. 'Go and see It!' Your expectations are really high, you go. Well, when you get there it can't possibly be as good as the dream. In other words, life can't possibly be as good as you picture it to be. There have to be ups and downs!"

She spread her arms wide, her gesture taking in the entire room. "Especially in this business, you can't always do what you'd like to do. Bobby and I would love to go to Palm Springs next weekend, let's say. Fine. But wait! A recording session comes up, and out goes Palm Springs. Bobby goes to New York on business and I want to go with him, but I'm doing a picture so I can't. That's the sort of thing that happens--the ups and downs."

Then she paused, smiled, and was just as quickly serious again. "When I dream how things are going to be, I never picture anything but the best. When I think of my little baby growing up, to me he's going to be the best, the most well-behaved, and the happiest person in the world. And he's not! He's probably--you know--the baby will do things that will hurt me very badly, because I've hurt my mother very badly from the time I was old enough to know what I was doing, five or six, going to school. I've been a disappointment many, many times to my mother.

"There are many little disappointments, but--the most important things always outweigh them. If it's the right marriage, all the nicest things in the marriage always outweigh the disappointments. The same thing with the baby--I mean, even though I've done many things that have hurt my mother, things that every young girl does, that doesn't mean she's ever stopped loving me, or that she wouldn't want me for a daughter anymore."

And then her face seemed to light up, as she added emphatically: "It's just that you love the person all the more because you have to overcome these things. That's how it is in marriage, too."

"How was marriage different from what you expected?" I asked.

She looked out the window, deep in thought. "Oh, golly--that's hard to say. I expected...to be very much in love with my husband, which I am. I knew that I was going to be very happy with him, which I am. It's funny, we've never had an argument about something that's happened, or about something immediate. I will argue with him about careers. By that I mean that I'll ask, 'Do you have to go to New York? Why can't you stay here?' This is something I can't understand, and I forget that he's the man of the family, and that his job is the most important. But we do rearrange things so that we can be together, if we know far enough in advance. In other words, I'll say, 'I have to do a picture in May, so can you arrange to be in L.A. for the months of May and June,' or whatever it is. That's fine. But if something immediate comes up and he says, 'I have to go to North Carolina for one night,' I always get mad. I--I get furious.

Which is the biggest problem we've ever had.

"He'll say, 'Well, come on with me. And I'll say, 'No. I have to do this at home.' I forget that he's the man of the family and that I have to follow him, because he can't follow me. Otherwise there's no marriage. If you don't look up to your husband as a man then there's--there's not too much left."

"But if you know that--" I began.

"I know it," she cut in. "I know when I'm wrong. But at the time it's happening, I can't see it. And that's because I've only been married a little over a year. I'm so used to being the first person--I, I--that it's taking me a little more time to say either we or you come first, because I'm so used to me coming first. I guess this is one of the biggest problems when any two young people get married. I lived nineteen years being the center of attention to myself. There was nobody else to think of but me. My mother thought of me--I didn't think of my mother. The kids don't think of the parents. I was always the baby, and the parents think in terms of what's best for the baby, not the other way around.

"There's only yourself to think about when you're single. And when you get married, you have to put the other person first. And if you do learn to put the other person first, in turn it makes you happier. But it's a hard thing to do---especially being in the picture business. You have forty people hovering over you all day, and you're the center of the whole shebang. The hairdresser fixes your hair, the makeup man fixes your makeup, the wardrobe man fixes your wardrobe. You're pretty well taken care of! And all of a sudden you get married. It's still the same when you leave the house in the morning, again with the same forty people, you're still the center of attraction. But when you come home at night, the hardest adjustment to make is to realize that you're not anymore. There's one other person who comes ahead of you." She smiled wryly. "And the first few months it's pretty hard."

"Did Bobby make you realize that the other person should come first, or did you just realize it for yourself?" I asked.

She looked at me, grinned sheepishly, and said in a confidential tone. "I still haven't learned it. I can realize it, sitting and talking to you. But when things are happening that you're angry about, you forget it. Actually, the biggest way Bobby's made me realize it is that he applies it. He puts me first--whereas I haven't learned yet to completely apply it to him."

"In other words," I put it, "he applies it to you and thinks of you, and yet he is dominant."

"Oh, yes," she said firmly. "He's dominant in the big things. In other words, he'll make the major decisions of the family. All the little minor things are mine: 'What do you want to do tonight? Where do you want to go on a vacation? Do you want to take the baby with us?' All these little things are up to me. And all the big things are up to him. Actually, though, there haven't been many big things yet to make a decision on."

"Does he decide whether you should do certain pictures?" I asked.

"No!" she emphasized. "Never. Our careers are separate. They're two different things. For instance, he won't do fan magazine articles. You know that. And this has no bearing on me, because he knows I like to do them. We're in the same picture together right now, and I'll do all the fan magazine stories that there are to do and he won't do any."

"When did he stop doing them?" I asked. "When you were married?"

"No. It was long before that," she said. "It was when some of them started taking pot shots at him for no reason." She paused, then added: "You know Bobby."

"Sure," I said. "Do you like him?" she asked. "Very much." I replied--which is true. "Have you ever read some of the stuff that's been written about him?" I admitted that it was sometimes hard to associate the article with the person in Bobby's case, and she nodded emphatically.

"And the stories always set me up as the living doll! I'm the little angel face, and he's the big monster who all of a sudden took me over which isn't true!" She was all wife now, springing to the defense of her husband even if it meant downgrading herself.

"Do you resent these things," I asked, "or do you just figure that's what sells magazines?" "I resent them in his case, and I realize that's what sells magazines in mine,", she said, with a wry smile. "You see, I know that there has to be a separation of career and marriage. You can't intertwine them-- you just can't. Because otherwise I couldn't do a picture with him now. I couldn't."

"I was going to ask you about that," I told her. "You originally said you wouldn't do any pictures together after Come September. What changed your mind?" "We said we weren't going to do it for one reason," she revealed. At the time we were married, they all wanted publicity of togetherness, two people, a typical marriage. And we didn't want to exploit our marriage. By saying we would never do a picture together, it cut it all off. It was finished." "But why didn't you want that togetherness?" "Because he'd always been Bobby Darin and I'd always been Sandra Dee. He wanted to be a movie actor, and I wanted to be a movie actress. We didn't want to make our marriage a career, to be publicized and exploited like a career is. It would be horrible if after I'd finished my day's work at the studio and he'd done his evening's night club shows, we had to go home and do a photo layout about our marriage. For some people it might work out fine, but for us it wouldn't. I think there has to be a separation between marriage and career."

"You know, you've really matured in the last year or so," I said. "At least it seems that way to me. What do you think?" She sighed. "I hope marriage has matured me," she said slowly. "It has to. Because I was--you know--a nineteen-year-old baby when I got married. So it has to ...."

"Looking back on it, are you glad you married so young?" I asked. "I'm happy," she said simply. "That's your answer. I'm happier now than I've ever been. And when I look at my little baby--at little Dodd Mitchell Darin I know I wouldn't give him up for all the world."

"Do you think you'll continue to have a career all your life?" "I think so," she said. Does Bobby mind your going on with your work?" "No. He's great," she said, smiling. "He wants anything that makes me happy--anything that's not harmful, that is. In other words, say I don't want to eat dinner. That'll get him so mad he'll try to push it down my throat." And she laughed affectionately at the thought of it. "Because not eating hurts me. I mean, you should eat."

"I know you didn't like to eat much when you were single," I recalled. "Well, I'm still not crazy about it," she admitted. "So if I don't want dinner, he knows it'll hurt me and he'll get mad. But as far as the career, which makes me happy, this is fine with him. He won't mind if I live to be eighty and want to work! I'm not the kind of person who can sit at home twenty-four hours a day and be happy. I have got to be doing something. Even my baby, much as I love him, I wouldn't want to just stay home every day with him. I couldn't do it. And it would be terrible for the baby. Because I'm a pretty restless person. And the baby has to have his own life--he has to learn to do things on his own--especially being a boy. He has to amuse himself, to learn to play by himself. Oh, of course he knows he can always come in the room and I'll be there to play with him. But he has to learn to be by himself at times, too, so that when he gets older he will enjoy being alone at times. Because you are alone a lot of the time."

"What you seem to be saying," I pointed out, "is that it's really to the baby's advantage for you to be working, because you might become overly possessive and ruin your son by hovering over him, like some mothers." She agreed, but emphasized, "Now, I know that a lot of mothers who'll read this don't work. They take care of the baby, which is the way my grandmother and my mother did it, and Bobby's mother did it that way, too. They took care of their babies and were with them just about all the time--which is great, if that's the kind of person you are. But I'm not. I know what would happen to me if I stopped working.

"I'm not saying it's wrong for the lady across the way to take care of her baby all by herself. It's the greatest thing in the world. I did it for the first month, and I wouldn't have the nurse now except that I have to go to work. But I know I wouldn't really be happy staying home twenty-four hours every day. You know, I'm used to working practically all of my life. So for me to make the baby happy, I should first be able to project happiness to him, because he only learns from the family. To make him a happy, well-adjusted person, I have to be that way. "Mind you, I don't work fifty-two weeks a year." she pointed out. "No person does in the movie industry. You work two months, then you take a couple of months off and you're with the baby. Also, the baby comes to the studio--he'll be here this afternoon and stay until I go home. I have long breaks between scenes when I can be with him. I could never leave him alone for twelve hours and not see him!"

She smiled. "Incidentally, that's one way in which marriage is different from what I'd expected. I expected to have a nurse for my baby from the very first, and actually I didn't have a nurse for the whole first month. And even now, as I said, I keep the baby with me a lot."

"Was there any other way we haven't discussed in which marriage was different from your expectations?" I asked. "Well, when I first got married, I thought it would be the end of something. It was something I'd been planning for, and looking forward to. But actually I forgot that it's a beginning, rather than just 'They lived happily ever after.' Every day I'm learning something new."

Suddenly she thought of something, smiled, and leaned forward in her chair. "You know, Mr. Burns--George Burns,- who's been like a second father to Bobby-- Mr. Burns said something to Bobby when we first got married. Bobby was saying how happy he was--we'd just been married for two days. And Mr. Burns said, 'Come back in thirty-five years and tell me. And I'll tell you one little secret,' he said. 'Marriage is something you shouldn't work at. Don't work at it, and it'll be beautiful, and in thirty-five years you'll be just as happy as you are today. But if you start from the beginning with a plan in mind--you know, that this is the way its going to be--in other words, if you don t allow any leeway, it isn't going to be a smooth route. Because when there's troble, you've got to go with the trouble, for that's what life is. When there's happiness you've got to go with that, and when there's sadness you can't fight it. You can't try to work at it to try to make it better, because it just doesn't come that way.

Sandra added, "It's pretty hard to take two people who've lived apart and suddenly put them together in the same house. There'll be a lot of disagreements like 'I don't like the way you do this . ... Why do you leave the cap off the toothpaste. . . . How can you leave your clothes on the floor?' . . . These are just little things. So then when you start having a family and discussing how to bring children up, it's really hard. So you can't work at it. You can't do it all according to some plan. You have to take it as it comes, because that's what life is.

"And that," she concluded with a smile, "is why you can't predict what your marriage will be like. Don't predict it, and don't plan it. You'll be better off that way!"