Tuesdays With Tammy: Tammy Tell Me True

It's Tuesday, and you know what that means! It's time for another Tuesdays With Tammy, and this week we're looking at the second film in the franchise, Tammy Tell Me True. 

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If I'm being honest, this is my least favourite Tammy movie, but there is one shining part of the movie, and that's what I want to focus on today: Sandra Dee. 

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By 1961, Sandra Dee was a box office queen, starring in a string of teen hits and adult melodramas like Gidget, Imitation of Life, and A Summer Place. But an even bigger box office queen was Debbie Reynolds. 

Debbie had been the star of the first Tammy film (and my personal favourite of the franchise, Tammy and the Bachelor), but in the four years it took Universal to decide to film a sequel, her professional profile had risen, her films had gotten bigger, her personal life was on the front pages of newspapers around the world (thanks to Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher), and she was too old, too matronly (with two children), and too busy to make the Tammy follow-up, Tammy Tell Me True. 

Enter Sandra Dee, whose involvement in the film was announced in 1960. 

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Truly, there was nobody better to take over the character of Tammy Tyree than Sandra Dee. In my opinion, Sandra Dee matched Debbie Reynolds's girl-next-door persona and held the same charm and draw at the box office; as a successor to the character, she handles Tammy perfectly. Too bad the same can't be said for the movie... 

Briefly, Tammy Tell Me True follows the willful hillbilly as she tries to improve herself by going to college; and she becomes friends with a crochety old woman in the process. Also, Peter has gone to agricultural college (maybe there was something to that whole tomato business after all...or Leslie Nielsen made himself unavailable), so Tammy needs something to occupy her mind. 

The reviews were not full of praise for Tammy Tell Me True. Nor were its actors. James Gavin, who plays the college professor Tammy falls in love with (it was a different time, I repeat to myself, it was a different time...) said about it, "[Tammy Tell Me True] haunts the tube like a permanent miasma. You can't do worse than that," because it was always playing on television. 

The New York Times's review from 1961 called the film an "unstrained sequel to the Debbie Reynolds original. It is exactly what might be expected—a wholesome, sentimental and utterly harmless little family comedy in good color." 

Photoplay considered a highlight of the film to be the chemistry of two leads...Sandra Dee and Beulah Bondi. The Chicago Tribune said it was "relieved by a likeable performance from Sandra Dee," and The Washington Post savaged it, calling it "infinitely inferior to the first Tammy, everything about the film is false, especially the aggressive Sandra Dee, whose primpsy whimsy wardrobe cannot disguise the acquisitive gaze in her give-away eyes."

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In 1967, as her stardom began to wane, Sandra gave a revealing interview with Roger Ebert reflecting on her decade as box office queen and her real persona. 

"Seven years I've been on the list of the top 10 box-office draws. Knock wood. I get terrible reviews, but there are people who like to see me in the movies, I guess. The money men out in Hollywood have a system for figuring out how much of an investment will be safe in a movie. If I'm in the movie, they feel safe investing $1,800,000 in it."

She continued: "So then the movie comes out, and it makes money, and the reviewers don't like it. They call me a cute little powder puff. For 10 years, I've been the cute little powder puff. I claim I don't care about the reviews. You know, in the movie fan magazines, they quote Sandra Dee as saying, the reviewers may not like me but my millions of fans do.

"Well, I do care. Yes, I care. The reviewers tear me apart. I bleed. I'm a favorite target. They go along for six months looking at movies, praying for rain, and then a new Sandra Dee movie comes out and their eyes open and they lick their lips. Before they've ever seen it. Wow, here comes Sandra Dee again. And then they compose biting, cruel little essays about the stupid little powder puff."

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Although she claimed no relation to the sweet, girl-next-door persona she'd been forced to adopt, Sandra had spent most of the decade at the top of the box office. She was one of Hollywood's last studio actresses; she'd married Bobby Darin after their first film together, Come September, and had one child. By 1967, she was divorced and her career was waning, and her last film appearance was 1983's Lost, after several television movies. 

Sandra Dee passed away February 20, 2005 after a lifetime of complications from anorexia, alcoholism and depression led to her death from kidney disease. 

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Come back next Tuesday for a Tuesdays with Tammy post about Tammy and the Doctor!