"Gidget" star Sandra Dee also dies but Media buzz is mainly "gonzo" Hunter Thompson

Is there a message in the fact that although both Sandra Dee - aka "Gidget" - and "gonzo journalist" H.S. Thompson both just died most of the media are only talking Hunter Thompson??

I have to admit I'm more affected by Alexandra Zuck/Sandra Dee's death. I was one of the zillions of Americans who watched her performances, especially the many TV re-runs of her films.

Stepping back and speaking critically (though not unappreciatively), Sandra Dee was much more the mainstream u.s. gender-cultural/racial symbol of the late 1950s to mid 1960s than actress. Perhaps she could've done more emotionally & professionally as an actress, but she was pretty typecast. But she wasn't Black so she did get to work, she was well-paid - and as far as I know she never had to play a maid.

Dee's most memorable role for me was as Lana Turner's daughter in Douglas Sirk's 1959 version of Imitation of Life.

In Imitation - his film farewell to Hollywood - German film director Sirk (shown below) held a mirror up to U.S. society with a vengeance (and thankfully so) before returning to Germany. Sirk was actually Hans Detlef Sierck, born Hamburg; died Lugano, (Italian-speaking) Switzerland.

Many of the best still images from the 1959 Imitation seem to be on sale by a company whose website is here.

The still below shows Sandra Dee with co-star Susan Kohner in a scene from Imitation. In real-life a white Jewish actress, Kohner was given the role of a "light-skinned Black American woman" trying to distance herself from her brown-skinned mother in order to "pass for white".

With 2 film versions plus the original 1920s/30s book, "Imitation of Life" comes from places deep in U.S. culture, and - although in serious psychological denial - rooted in the white social experience & cultural imagination. For further evidence of this read Sinclair Lewis's novel Kingsblood Royal.

Sandra Dee's TV/movies heyday came in the same moment as the emergence of the civil rights movement. This was still well before most young Black Americans had turned our energies to Black Power and "Black is Beautiful" as embodied (as of 1970) in Essence magazine.

Gidget seemed have so much fun, and perhaps in that way many American girls wanted to be like her.

[Sandra Dee photo circa 1995]

In her article on Sandra Dee Associated Press writer Laura Wides writes: "... at the height of her fame in the 1960s [Sandra Dee] was arguably the biggest female teen idol of her time... "She was Gidget, and she was Tammy, and for a time she was young America's ideal," film historian Leonard Maltin once said of her. Dee later married another pop icon, singer Bobby Darin."

"She didn't have a bad bone in her body," Steve Blauner told The Associated Press. "When she was a big star in the pictures and a top five at the box office, she treated the grip the exact same way she treated the head of the studio. She meant it. She wasn't phony."

"With her squeaky-clean image and girl-next-door charm, Universal Studios cast Dee mostly in teen movies such as "The Reluctant Debutante," "The Restless Years," "Tammy Tell Me True" and "Take Her, She's Mine." Occasionally, she landed secondary roles in more mature films, such as "Imitation of Life," "A Portrait In Black" and "Romanoff and Juliet." "

I believe that much like at least 2 other now-deceased female U.S. media legends - Dorothy Dandridge and Marilyn Monroe - Sandra Dee's life, career and her place and symbolism in U.S. society will be studied for years to come. And perhaps even more than Hunter Thompson.