Please Don’t Come Too Close – I’ve Got The Mumps—Sandra Dee

“Sandra, is that you?” His voice came over the telephone, just as deep as it ought to be when you measure six-feet-two from your crewcut to your white bucks. “What time should I pick you up tonight?”

I was glad he couldn’t see my face as I answered, “You’ll never believe what’s happened.”

There was a pause at his end of the line and then he said, “What?”

“Well, you see, it’s like this. I . . . uh . . . I’ve been shot!”

“You’ve been what?”

“We were shooting this scene. I didn’t tell you I was making a western, did I? Well, you know we use blank bullets, but if they hit you, you can sometimes get hurt anyway. Well . . . um . . . one of them hit me.”

“Gosh Sandy,” he said, “that’s awful. Are you hurt bad?”

“Oh, it’s only a shoulder wound,” I said. Bravely.

“Well, who shot you?”

“I was ambushed by an Indian.”

“Did you pass out?” he asked.

“Oh, no. I . . . uh . . . I just staggered a bit and then someone caught me.”

“Did you bleed a lot.”

“No, only a little. It’s just a flesh wound.”

“Gosh!”

“I told you you wouldn’t believe it.”

“How’d you get to the doctor? On a stretcher?”

“Well, there’s always a doctor on the lot. He just came over to our set and tended me there.”

“Oh, I see. Well did you have to come home in an ambulance?”

“Yes, but it was a small ambulance. And they didn’t turn on the sirens.”

“Is the bullet still in your shoulder?”

“Oh, no, they took it out right there on the set.”

“What’d they do with the bullet?”

“I have it. They gave it to me for a souvenir.”

“Gollee! Can I come over tonight anyway? Just to see the bullet?”

“Oh, no . . . you can’t do that. Don’t come over. I mean . . . well, you see . . . I’ve got to have plenty of rest. I’m not allowed to have any visitors.”

“Gee, Sandy, that’s too bad. Do you think you’ll have a scar.”

“Oh, no. Well, maybe a little one.”

“You could always have plastic surgery.”

“Ugh! I don’t really think there’ll be a scar. At least not one you can see with the naked eye.”

“How long do you think you’ll be in bed?”

“About two weeks. Oh, here comes Mother. She’s going to change the dressing on my wound. I have to hang up now.”

“Is it all right if I call you tomorrow?”

“Oh, yes. Gosh, if it wasn’t for the telephone, I don’t know what I’d do with myself. Well, bye now.”

I hung up the phone. Mother had only come in to bring me a cup of chicken bouillon and the afternoon papers. I let the bouillon cool a little on the round white table next to my bed and I plumped the pillows up against the quilted headboard, pulled my blue blanket up around me and began turning the pages of the first paper.

Then that fat black headline jumped out at me. “Sandra Dee Down With Mild Case Of Mumps.”

I could actually feel my face turning red, but Mother just laughed.

“You ought to know better than to make up such a story,” she said. “Everybody knows what good care the studio takes of its players. That sort of accident could never happen.” I’d only said it so he wouldn’t know I had anything so humiliating as mumps, and there it was, smack in the headlines. Now everybody would know I had the mumps.

Mumps! Gosh, I remember I could hardly believe the doctor when he told me . . .

I’d gotten back from a publicity appearance in Texas on a Monday and the very next day I climbed in my car and drove down to the Universal studios to have my hair and makeup done and then pose for some publicity pictures. When I walked into the makeup room with its brightly-lit wall-wide mirror and the counter shelf under it filled with pots and jars of every kind of makeup, Barbara Gayle, my stand-in and my very best friend in Hollywood, was already there. She was trying on a false goatee and it looked a scream wagging up and down on her chin as she said, “Hi, we’ve missed you.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Who’ve you been dating while I was gone?”

“Well, you know that cute boy I met at U.C.L.A. He . . .” Suddenly, Barbara stopped and looked at me. “Say, Sandy, haven’t you put on some weight?”

I laughed.

“Seriously, Sandy,” Barbara insisted, “you have put on weight. At least your face looks fuller, even if the rest of you doesn’t. You’re so lucky. Me, I always show it first in the hips!”

I couldn’t say a word, cause the makeup man was painting my mouth with a lipstick brush. But then he stepped back, looked at me critically. “Sandy, your face does seem a little puffy,” he said. “Do you have a toothache.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Maybe you ought to drop by and see the studio physician?”

It was beginning to sound like a conspiracy, but I went over to the doctor’s white wooden bungalow at the other end of the lot anyway.

“The doctor will see you in just a few minutes,” the nurse said. “Won’t you have a seat?”

I sat. Why do doctors always paint their offices green? I wondered. To match their patients’ faces? And why do they stuff them full of leather couches? Mother and I recently redid my bedroom, covering the old openwork headboard with padding and then quilting it over, so I’m full of decorating thoughts these days. Matter of fact, we just bought a new house and right now I’m in the middle of trying to talk Mother into doing it blues, silver, orchids and little touches of pink, to match the hotel apartment I loved so much in New York.

Finally, I heard the rustle of the nurse’s starched uniform and I looked up from a magazine—it was last month’s, the way they always are in doctors’ offices. She opened a door and beckoned me through it. The inner office was green, too, with diplomas hung neatly in thin black frames on one wall and an oxygen tank, also green, leaning in one corner. The doctor was seated behind a big carved-oak desk.

“Doctor, there’s nothing wrong with me,” I said quickly, “but they keep teasing me that my face looks puffy.”

“Ummm,” he said. He looked at me— stared is more accurate—then he felt my forehead.

“Any pain in your neck or around the jaw?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Where do you mean exactly?”

“Behind your right ear?”

I reached up with my hand and touched the area he mentioned. “Here? Why . . .no . . . absolutely not . . . ouch!!!” After I’d yelped, he poked and prodded some more himself.

“Sandra,” said he, “we’d better get you home. You have the mumps.”

I just looked him straight in the eye and said in a very dignified manner, “Oh, doctor, you must be mistaken. I feel fine. Besides, mumps are for kids.”

He replied, equally as dignified, “Even adults of sixteen can get them, although,” he smiled, “it’s very rare. You have the mumps. Go straight home and I’ll call your mother and tell her what’s to be done.”

What they did was to put me to bed. Mother found an old flannel nightgown that she hadn’t worn since we left New York. It’s kind of turquoise with wisterias climbing all over it and when Mother generously offered me this heirloom, what could I say but “no”? It didn’t do any good. She calmly slipped the tent over my shoulders, wrapped an ugly flannel rag around my neck and then handed me some white bobby sox to keep my feet warm. I looked in the gilt-framed mirror and my face looked puffy even to me. My eyes looked a little red, too, but that might have been because I was crying.

I climbed into bed. “Mother,” I gasped, “what have you done to the mirror? It’s so distorted.”

I guess I’d been swathed in flannel for about two days when Mother staggered into my bedroom with a load of packages all wrapped up in peppermint-striped paper and tied with fat red bows.

“I’ve brought something new for you to wear in bed,” she announced. And she opened the package.

“Where,” I demanded, “in Hollywood did you ever find a flannel nightie?”

Mother sniffed, “Paris says flannel is the thing this year.”

I slipped the wrappings off the first package and opened it. There, carefully folded with tissue paper, was a lovely pink silk bedjacket, with a lace trimmed peter pan collar and ruffled sleeves. For fun she added a multi-striped top sheet with pillow cases to match. I felt better already. Next time a friend of mine is sick, I’m going to buy her one of those happy-looking pillow cases. It’s better than penicillin.

After I and the bed were all dressed up, Pom Pom, my pomeranian, and Melinda, my white poodle, jumped back up on the blue blanket where they’d been since the first moment I went to bed.

“Don’t worry,” the doctor had told me when I worried that they’d catch the mumps, too. “Your quarantine doesn’t apply to dogs, they’re immune.”

I was terribly relieved to hear that, ’cause I’d have been but real lonely if it hadn’t been for Pom Pom and Melinda. You see, just the exact week that I got sick some very good friends of Mother’s arrived from the East. We’d made so many plans to take them around and show them Hollywood and I just couldn’t let Mother give up all those plans even though she offered to. I told her to go ahead, I could fix my own lunch. Besides, while mother was gone, I could get on the phone and call my friends in New York. After the first long-distance call I made, to my best friend in New York, Lorna Gillin, I decided it would be better to do my long-distancing while Mother was out. Because she complained so about the money, said it would have bought two tickets there and back.

I’d felt so much better when the operator had put the call through and I heard Lorna’s voice at the other end. “Hi, Lorna.” I said. “Gosh, it’s good to hear your voice. Did you see the papers? Isn’t it the worst? No, I don’t feel too bad, the only thing is I’m quarantined, absolutely isolated, can’t see a living soul except for Mother and the doctor. And just when I was going to have a vacation and go to a premiere and . . . I know only children are supposed to get the mumps. days already, and I’ve got another ten days to go. And I haven’t been to the movies for four whole days! ever. What? Oh, yes, I’ve seen just about every last show they have on TV. . . . You did? Well you’ll never guess what happened to me. I finally got to meet Rock Hudson. Dreamy! Lorna, if Don Ameche hadn’t invented the telephone I don’t know what I’d do.

“Oh, here’s Mother. More bouilon I think.

“Mother, I’m talking to Lorna. say hello?” Mother put the cup down, said Hi to Lorna and then started to leave. In the doorway, started to mouth something to me.

“What? Hang on, Lorna, Mother wants to tell me something . . . Oh, she says I should remember we’re talking long-distance. You know, before I got sick I was always thinking about what good friends I had in New York and mooning around about how I didn’t know anybody out here. But I guess from the way the phone’s been ringing I’ve got a lot of good friends out here, too.

“You should see all the flowers people have sent me. Mother says the next bunch that are delivered better come with its own vase. The best things though are the funny gifts. Someone sent me a round squatty hand mirror shaped like a cocoanut, with a note that the mirror is specially designed for mump victims. And someone else, that nice girl from the studio that I told you about, sent five yards of the loudest red and white polka dot flannel to warm my neck, plus the biggest pair of sunglasses ever, all trimmed with rhinestones. And one of the boys I had to break a date with sent me a Frank Sinatra album, only he made a new record jacket with a picture of a girl with a face the size of a melon and a new title, ‘Music to Have Mumps By.’

“Oh, Mother’s back. She’s pointing to her watch. Oh, I know . . . It’s all right Mother, I know it’s long distance. I’m timing myself. It’s only been eleven minutes. I just want to tell Lorna about the songs on my mump album. . . . It had all sorts of ‘phony’ selections printed on the jacket, like ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin,’ ‘You Go To My Head,’ ‘Catch a Falling Mump,’ and, oh, yes, ‘Sandy, the RedFaced Starlet.’

“Oops, Mother’s waiting in the doorway again. . . . What, Mother? . . . Mother says s I don’t hang up I’m going to bankrupt her.

“I’m reading “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoievski. Yes, it is kind of deep, but real great. And Ive got a whole stack that Mother brought me, “The Last Hurrah,” “The World Outside” and “The Success.”

“Gosh, Lorna, you should see the look on Mother’s face! Oh, oh, Mother’s got a big scissors. I think she means to cut the telephone wire. Well, I’ll call you tomorrow.”

After Mother clamped down on the telephone I worked out a schedule for myself, reading, watching TV, telephoning, playing solitaire—and sleeping—just to keep busy.

“Try to get a little rest, dear,” Mother would say. “You mustn’t tire yourself.”

Tire myself! I had to invent the most energetic sort of dreams, like chasing Johnny Saxon clear to Pasadena, just to feel tired enough to sleep for forty winks. I didn’t think my two weeks of quarantine would ever end.

They did, though. Finally the day came when I was allowed to go back to work and back to school. Actually, since I’m her only pupil, my teacher, Mrs. Hoene, used to call every day and give me homework assignments.

I woke up early that day, stuffed my feet into my furry slippers and went to the closet. It was so long since I’d gotten dressed that I couldn’t decide what to wear. I wanted to look extra pretty on my first day out. I kept wishing Mother would let me buy that black sheath I’ve been wanting, it would have made a dramatic return. But she keeps telling me I’m too young. Finally, I chose a pink shirtwaist dress, so the color would brighten up my face, which was a little pale after two weeks in bed.

By the time I got down to breakfast Mother was on her second cup of coffee. “Hi, Sandy,” she said. “I’ve been thinking that maybe I’d better go to the studio with you today. After all, it is your first day up.”

“Oh, no, Mother, I feel just fine. You go ahead being a walking guide to Hollywood for your friends. I’ll be all right.”

“Are you sure? Maybe I’d better drive you down there, at least,” Mother offered.

“Nope. I can drive—if I remember how.”

It was a beautiful day, all bright and clear and not a trace of smog. My car purred along and I felt almost giddy at seeing all those people on the streets and in their cars, after those awful days of quarantine. I felt so great I decided to do something to brighten up the doctor’s green office. I parked, ran into a florist shop and bought a bunch of blue irises for him. Then I got back into the car and headed for the studio.

“Hi, there,” the gateman called out to me. “Welcome back.”

I waved, drove on through and pulled up in front of the doctor’s white bungalow. I hid the flowers behind my back as I walked in, planning to surprise him. The nurse wasn’t in the waiting room, so I walked up to the door to his office and knocked.

“It’s me,” I said, “Sandra Dee.”

“Come right in,” he called out.

The nurse was in there with him and they looked as though they were catching up on the paper work.

“Hello,” I said. “I just thought I’d drop by and tell you how well I’m feeling and to thank you for being so sweet through all my complaining. And I brought you these.” I whisked the flowers out from behind me.

“Oh, how lovely,” he said. “Nurse, can you find something to put them in?” He got up from behind his desk and was really beaming as he walked toward me.

He shook my hand. “That was a very nice thing to do,” he said. “You are a sweet. Girl.”

And then he patted me on my left cheek.

“Ouch!” I shouted.

The doctor’s smile faded as he looked at my face more closely.

“Well, Sandra,” he said. “You’re a very unusual girl, one of the special people.”

“Special?” I said weakly.

“Very special,” he answered. “Lots of people only get mumps on one side and a great many others get them on both sides at the same time. But you, my dear, can go back to bed with the knowledge that you are very special indeed. You have gotten your mumps one mump at a time!”

I went back to bed for seven more days.

THE END

—BY SANDRA DEE

SANDRA’S IN; U-I’S “IMITATION OF LIFE” AND COLUMBIA’S “GIDGET.” WATCH FOR HER IN U-I’S “THE WILD AND THE INNOCENT.”

 

It is a quote. PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE APRIL 1959