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| GOODBYE, GIDGET | |
 June 8, 2001 
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ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: It began at the same moment I started needing reading glasses: My determined, daily reading of the obituary pages, no doubt something to do with one's own mortality. But it's now a daily must. Not just the lengthy obits for the well-known, but even the smaller squiblets about semi- unknowns-- an athlete, or choreographer, or inventor, their lives and accomplishments laid out in often spare, fact- filled prose which tugs the imagination as much for what is left out as for what is included -- and always, the haunting pictures, inevitably taken years earlier when the deceased was at the peak of his or her game, loveliness, life. Take this one, for example, which appeared not too long ago. The face of a young woman so girlish, so perky, that you can imagine her voice, her demeanor. And then to know that it was none other than Gidget herself, dead of esophageal cancer at age 57. I have to be honest, I did not remember her real name, Deborah Walley. There was a Gidget before her, Sandra Dee. But it was Walley who starred as the Gidget I remember best, the beach bunny version. She was it: The bouncy, flirty baby doll in those early bikini movies, "Gidget goes Hawaiian" and "beach blanket bingo," the girl you wanted to be... GIDGET: Hey! ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: ...The girl the boys wanted. ELVIS: I'll take 'em any size... ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: Reporter: Frankie Avalon and Elvis, himself all pouty and young and unspoiled. They all wanted her. She was what girls were supposed to be back there in the early 1960s: Uncomplicated, petite, sweet but with a hint of sexiness. Could we close our eyes, please, and wake up in her swimsuit, with her perfect bangs and thick ponytail? Could you have just one true Gidget moment? To see her again is to relive all that adolescent angst and realize that if Gidget was the beginning of something-- of a saucy, sandy, semi-clad cuteness-- she was also pretty quickly the end of something, too, because the birth control pill, introduced in 1960, and the sexual revolution would, by and by, knock her off her surfboard and replace her with hungrier, more assertive young women. She was the transition figure. And if she seems almost comically retrograde and innocent in a world of the struttingly liberated-the Madonna's and destiny's children-- she also seems like a cutie-pie beacon of what was to come. That's Gidget, but what about Deborah Walley? Read on in the obituary, get past your own nostalgia, and you find that inevitable novel buried within. She'd been a child star, but a serious one on the stage in New York. When she got tapped for "Gidget," she was doing Chekhov's "Three Sisters" off Broadway. Who knew, watching her beach antics, that she had been that. She said that she cried when she understood how big a hit "Gidget" was. "I rode a sixth avenue bus from one end to the other line," she said, "crying my eyes out." I knew on the bus that day that part of my dream of being a serious actress was kind of destroyed." There it was: Bye-bye Broadway, hello Hollywood. The actress' arc-- if you're lucky. But she persevered, donned and re-donned her bikini, and made her money. And then she walked away, taking her three sons to Arizona. And once there, she did good things: Opened two children's theater companies and introduced live theater in inner-city schools; wrote scripts and books and trained native Americans to act and work in film production: A whole serious post-Gidget life, while for much of the public she was frozen forever in her early adorableness. How unfair we are to trap people in our own simple-minded nostalgia. And what a reminder then, to read Deborah Walley's obituary and know that however much I ached to be Gidget at 12, I wasn't ever destined to be that, and neither was she. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming. |
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