Actresses: Talent Without Tinsel

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At an unpretentious restaurant in Manhattan’s theater district, an unpretentious woman tucked a napkin in her dress and wolfed a hamburger lunch. Not that the dress was worth protecting; it was just another tent. After finishing, she wiped the napkin across her mouth. No need to freshen her lipstick; she wore no makeup. Then she strode out in her beat-up pumps—and as if on cue, heads turned, cars slowed, and a sailor rushed up at flank speed. “You’re in the movies, aren’t you?” he asked. “But I can’t remember your name.” Said she: “Who, me? You must be kidding.”

The name is Sandy Dennis, and she couldn’t care less whether you know it. As far as credits go, she is a major star at 30. Yet by dint of personal force and preference, she has thumbed her perky nose at glamour and the constraining star system. In 1963 and 1964, she won Tony awards for her first big Broadway roles, the sensitive social worker in A Thousand Clowns and the delectable mistress in Any Wednesday. For her next big success, the screen version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which she played the frightened young faculty wife, she won a supporting-actress Oscar, skipped the presentation ceremonies, and gave the Oscar to her business manager.

Instant Tears. In her newest film, Up the Down Staircase, Sandy gracefully portrays the grim trials and triumphs of a green young teacher in a New York City slum school. Staircase was the official U.S. entry at the Moscow Film Festival in July. Sandy was there, rubbernecking and restaurant sampling, but left before she became the first American ever to win the festival’s best-actress medal. Chances are that she still neither knows nor cares that last week Staircase (No. 2 draw in the U.S.) produced Christmas in August for Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall by grossing $248,651 — the alltime opening-week record for a U.S. theater.

“Sandy is Sandy in whatever she does,” says Playwright Muriel Resnik (Any Wednesday), but not surprisingly, herself-possession rubs some people the wrong way. Some actors dislike working with her, and one called her “a golden pain in the behind.” They abhor her trademark mannerisms, the way she stutters and flutters her hands before uttering a line, as if about to goof it. Sandy is a constant hair pusher: in the first few minutes of Up the Down Stair case, she pushed three times. She is also an oral actress: a lip biter, tongue twitcher, mouth closer and chin wrinkler. Her vocal rhythm is a hesitation tango; her midsentence gasps leave audiences gasping, too.

On the other hand, she is widely lauded as a “totally original actress” and “complete professional.” Most actors need ammonia capsules to weep even once; Sandy must hold the Olympic record for instantly crying on cue—ten times in one hour during the shooting of Virginia Woolf. Mark Rydell, director of her recently completed film, The Fox, calls her an “emotionally fluid actress” capable of doing anything.

Passing Panic. The paradoxes abound. Sandy is part American Midwesterner, part American bohemian. She is soft, cuddly, feminine—yet a blue-streak cusser and a four-letter woman. She looks like the idealized schoolteacher that boys remember falling in love with. Her skin is transparent. Her features, with one exception, are almost perfect. Her windswept hair is a lovely honey color.

All the same, she is no beauty, largely because of her mouth—or rather, the buck teeth that make her look like a young Eleanor Roosevelt. “I smile with my hand over my mouth,” she explains, “so no one will see the spinach.” Her figure, in the simile of one friend, “is like a cup of tea—all the sugar went to the bottom.” Partly because of indiscriminate eating of heavy Russian food, she has lately swelled to 132 Ibs. (at 5 ft. 4| in.), twelve over her working weight. Yet it takes practically a congressional resolution to force her into a girdle; she also shuns bras and stockings, to say nothing of accessories. She doesn’t own a fur coat, and about the only jewelry she wears is a man’s pocket watch on a chain. “She just couldn’t care less about clothes,” says an old friend, who recalls that even in the days when she was winning her first awards she wore $7 dresses. She can afford more ex pensive clothes now, but she hates to get dressed up in them.

“Men want to protect her—and women don’t mind it,” says one director. For one thing, Sandy is a natural victim. Sturdy chairs collapse when she sits on them; hurtling taxis somehow spray mud just on her. Yet, despite her seeming fragility, she could hardly be tougher as an actress and a woman. And though she is not exactly a sex symbol, “sex,” as the same director says, “is completely associable with her. If a guy had to make a pass at Sandy Dennis, he wouldn’t panic.”

Suicidal Stereotypes. When Sandy first arrived in Hollywood, the studios worriedly urged first aid for those front teeth that protruded and the bust that didn’t. Hands off, growled Sandy. In 1962, she walked out on one television job rather than pad her bustline. She said she wanted to be hired for acting ability, period. Says Herbert Berghof, her Manhattan drama coach off and on for years: “From the beginning, she knew how to find in each character she played the story that was original and new and worth telling.”

In her early appearances on TV, she inevitably played stereotypes—”suicidal or pregnant” teen-agers—yet fired them with a sullen hostility reminiscent of Kim Stanley. She was equally skilled in comedy in the style of the early Jean Arthur or Judy Holliday.

Among her most delirious scenes in A Thousand Clowns was an epiphany in which she wondered if she was really an asocial social worker. “I hate Raymond Led-better,” she bawled, “and he’s only nine years old.” The dew-behind-the-ears charm and the sobs of self-reproach with which she delivered the line inevitably broke up the house.

In Any Wednesday, the Dennis tricks saved a so-so show—the faucetlike crying, the stumbling over lines, the vocal tremolo between laughter and tears. Reviewers were almost separated from their critical faculties. John Chapman of the Daily News closed his mash notice by pleading for Mrs. Chapman’s forbearance. Walter Kerr, then of the old New York Herald Tribune, led off simply: “Let me tell you about Sandy Dennis. There should be one in every home.”

Chopped Liver. In Virginia Woolf, Sandy played a drunken child bride with stomach-turning realism and cannily turned the part into that of an anemic ant asserting itself against dragons. “Sandy,” Co-Star Elizabeth Taylor says overgraciously, “made chopped chicken out of me—or chopped chicken liver, which is even worse.” In Up the Down Staircase, she persuasively demonstrates the importance of being earnest amid the cynicism and bureaucracy of big-city schools. In her most affecting scene, she reaches unreachable kids by getting them to relate their time to the opening lines of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). “Sandy gave a special dimension to the picture,” says Bel Kaufman, author of the grab-bag epistolary novel on which the film is more or less based. “She’s a much more vulnerable and sensitive person than the character in the book.”

Despite her “gingerbready” mannerisms, Sandy is fast becoming known as one of the most imaginative actresses around. “She’ll never play a part in a conventional manner,” says William Daniels, co-star of her new play, Daphne in Cottage D. “She drives the less imaginative directors up the walls.” That she gets away with it doubtless reflects a growing U.S. hunger for actresses of talent rather than tinsel. But equally important is Sandy’s own single-minded drive for theatrical achievement. Her background has a lot to do with it. She comes from Nebraska, and as a matter of odd fact, so do a remarkable number of other well-known names in show business—the Astaires, Marlon Brando, Johnny Carson, Montgomery Clift, James Coburn, Henry Fonda, Dorothy McGuire and Robert Taylor, to name a few. Just why, may have been explained a few years ago by ex-White House Aide Ted Sorensen, another Nebraska refugee. “The state,” he complained, “is old, outmoded, a place to come from or a place to die.”

Ferocious Reader. Sandra Dale Dennis was stamped for export almost from her birth on April 27, 1937, in Hastings, Neb. (pop. 15,412), where her father, Jack Dennis, was a bakery driver-salesman who also happened to have a tested IQ of 160. After the war, Jack joined the post office as a railway mail clerk based in Lincoln (pop. 98,884), where Sandy was mainly raised. Her mother toiled as a secretary, lest their daughter ever be unindulged. Sandy, after all, was a quick, creative child who read ferociously long before she got to school. Later on, she regularly gobbled six or seven books a week, favoring Willa Gather and Shakespeare.

Though she whizzed through tests and got top grades, Sandy hated all formal education, and still almost deliberately uses such solecisms as “illigita-munt” and “I shouldn’t have spoke of that.” At the age of three, she was even kicked out of a tap-dancing class: “All I wanted to do was stand in front of the mirror and look at myself in my Uncle Sam suit.”

Indeed, Sandy was to the mannerism born. As long as the family remembers, she could sob at will or fake a stomachache until after the dishes were washed. Her brother Frank, now a consulting engineer in Des Moines, recalls that for two whole years around the house, Sandy played Margaret O’Brien. “I remember especially,” he says, “because I didn’t like Margaret O’Brien.” Finally Sandy switched to Alexis Smith and Bette Davis, all the while developing an odd urge to use the accent of almost any person she was talking to.

An early public appearance came in the third grade at Lincoln’s Capitol

Grammar School, when she adapted a Cinderella-based drama—and coolly junked the carefully typed script on the eve of the performance. She was also director and leading lady. Rehearsals were held in the cloakroom, she says, because the plot got to be a “very sophisticated and sexy thing, with a prince and princess in bed together.” Her mother says: “I walked out right in the middle, because Sandy was ordering everyone around.”

Invisible Student. A three-a-week movie addict, Sandy saw Roman Holiday nine times and The Member of the Wedding 15. She was fascinated by the performances of the stars, Audrey Hepburn and Julie Harris. But it was watching Kim Stanley in a television play that locked in her sights. “I knew I had seen something really good,” she says, “something special. I knew then I had to be an actress.” She was already wired into a $3,000 orthodontia program to tame those teeth (they used to be worse), and her parents got her a tape recorder into which she emoted Shakespeare.

At Lincoln High, she wrote poetry, joined the pep club, and then despised her cheerleader’s orange beanie and orange socks. “She used to get sick on days there were football games,” her mother says. “I don’t think she ever saw one.” She was so “anonymous,” quips Classmate (now Comedian) Dick Cavett, that “she managed to get from class to class without going through the halls.” But when the junior play came along, she auditioned and was cast opposite Cavett. “Sandy was so good and so moving,” he recalls, “that I forgot my lines and ended up ad-libbing something from Noel Coward.”

Rattling Roaches. Simultaneously, she was mopping up choice parts at the surprisingly ambitious Lincoln Community Playhouse. “I must have been awful,” she says, “but I was as good as I could be.” To appease her parents, she tried two semesters of college, one at Nebraska Wesleyan, the other at the University of Nebraska. But in 1956 a drama prof advised, “Go to New York, where the action is,” and at 19 she did. “I was so young I never once thought I would fail.”

Inevitably, some of her early engagements were at the unemployment-insurance office, and she had to live in a cold-water flat “where the roaches rattled the dishes.” Within three months, though, she was accosted in Greenwich Village by a Hungarian producer named William Gyimes, who looked “like an Oriental-rug salesman.” “Hey,” he said, “are you an actress?” “He’s crazy,” she thought. But she said yes and was launched.

Gyimes staged an off-Broadway revival of Ibsen’s Lady from the Sea that lasted only three weeks but got Sandy an agent who wheedled her into a Palm Beach production of William Inge’s Bus Stop. At the same time, Elia Kazan was casting Inge’s new Broadway production, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and when Tuesday Weld suddenly lammed for Hollywood, Sandy became understudy for two roles. She used to report in with a pun reflecting her desperation: “Dennis, anyone?”

Slippery Splash. She was off-Broadway next in John Steinbeck’s Burning Bright. Then followed two bigger opportunities, Motel with Siobhan McKenna, which folded in Boston, and Face of a Hero, starring Jack Lemmon. Says Jack gallantly: “If Sandy had been playing my role, we’d probably still be running.” The show closed after 36 performances, and she switched to Graham Greene’s Complaisant Lover, which starred Sir Michael Redgrave. In an ingenue supporting role, she made her splash opening night when the elastic of her half-slip gave way. As the silk was heading for the boards, she glided upstage behind a sofa and deftly stepped out of it, thinking she had been unobserved—until the house rattled with applause. Sir Michael dryly recalls “her obvious star quality.”

Meanwhile, Elia Kazan remembered her “originality” and cast her as Natalie Wood’s nasty girl friend in her first film, Splendor in the Grass. Then came “my most favorite play, my favorite experience,” A Thousand Clowns. “Before that, I was always in a position to be fired. After every rehearsal, I knew they were discussing whether to let me go.” Besides, the Clowns company (including Gene Saks, William Daniels, Jason Robards) meshed like the Budapest String Quartet. Robards was “wild, fantastic, my most favorite actor that I ever worked with.” Among other things, “he taught me what it means to have a full enjoyment of what you do. I hear actors say, ‘Oh, I hate to act,’ you know. And I do, too, sometimes. But I know I really don’t, you know.”

Winging & Plinking. That led to Any Wednesday, which had a tryout so calamitous that before the play opened it went through one leading man (Michael Rennie), five directors and 13 endings—the 13th on opening night. The script was so unpromising that it took five coproducers to cajole in the $100,000 nut. As it turned out, Any Wednesday came in on rubber heels—a Broadway term describing a sleeper smash that confounds the handicappers.

Smash or not, Sandy endured “the most horrible year of my life.” At the time, she was breaking up with her lover of six years, Actor Gerald O’Loughlin, and falling in love with a prominent (and married) star. Second, she “was sick of Any Wednesday before it even opened.” One of the stunts she had learned from Robards was to jigger with a script during a run. In Any Wednesday, she improvised to an indulgent and irresponsible extreme.

One night in the middle of a love scene, someone in the audience sneezed. Instantly she called out, “God bless you.” During other performances, she got into a coughing match with the customers or waved goodbye to those who left early.

She did so much winging that some nights the curtain went down at 10:45, others at 11:15. After the show, the cast would take turns with an air rifle, shooting down the show’s best-known props, the balloons, which had floated to the ceiling. It was a sublimation that kept them from plinking away at each other. At one point, Colleagues Rosemary Murphy and Gene Hackman refused to speak to Sandy offstage. But several of her revisions stayed with the show after she left—and even now adorn Any Wednesday productions in summer stock. In any case, she could do no wrong with audiences: her first-scene line “I’m really adorable” invariably got a rapturous ovation.

Wed or Dead. Sandy got her comeuppance during the ill-fated Actors Studio London run in 1965. Playing Irina in Chekhov’s Three Sisters after too little rehearsal, she was booed and got the worst roasting of her career. The London Times described Sandy and Kim Stanley, who played another of the sisters, as “ludicrous and painful.” Zeroing in on Sandy’s speech (“I-er-I-ah”), Critic Bernard Levin of the Daily Mail reported that “I could barely restrain myself from screaming aloud with the pain of my throbbing nerves.” Worse, Sandy was bypassed for the screen versions of her Broadway hits. That hurt, though neither Barbara Harris in A Thousand Clowns nor Jane Fonda in Any Wednesday quite matched Sandy’s original interpretation.

But by that time, Sandy had got some solidity in her life. She had always sworn better dead than wed (“My life is on that stage; I am an actress; I can’t do both”). But in June 1965, after three weeks’ courtship, she married one of the pathfinding composers of modern jazz, Baritone Saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, now 40. Curiously, Mulligan had been the last love of the tragicomedienne most often likened to Sandy, Judy Holliday, who had just died of cancer. One dissonant note: Sandy is tone-deaf, ignorant of jazz, and the only records she owned were in a different groove—Andy Williams. Says Mulligan: “She’s a kid who had a fear of music laid on her as a child. She’s just now learning to relax.”

Nitty Belcher. At that point, shrewd old Jack Warner, sensing that Dennis was “going to be a very big star,” foxed the trade by gambling on her in his $6,000,000 adaptation of the bile-black comedy Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Director Mike Nichols was frankly worried about Dennis’ reputation for being obstreperous, but happily found her “just about the easiest actress to work with that I have ever met.” And her co-stars agreed.

George Segal, cast as her husband, pronounced Sandy “100% disciplined.” Unlike the run of Hollywood girls he had played opposite, he found that stage-steeped Dennis “really listens; she isn’t just waiting to speak. You are really talking to someone.” Richard Burton found her “exceptionally professional.” Or as Elizabeth Taylor put it, “terrifyingly professional.” Which doesn’t suggest, added Liz, that Sandy isn’t “rather nitty at times—I mean she is not like your next-door neighbor one bit.”

One manifestation of her nittiness:

Sandy, then and still, belches throughout rehearsals. “Gigantic belches,” recalls Burton. “I mean enormous ones, like a drunken sailor. Elizabeth is also a good belcher, so they had competitions, but Sandy nearly always won for number and volume.” Musing over Dennis the Retired Menace last week while shooting an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Milk Train in Sardinia, Richard and Elizabeth seemed about to replay Edward Albee’s “Get the Guest.” Then Liz turned to Richard and purred: “It’s awful, dear, but I’m afraid we just can’t find anything nasty to say about her.” As for the ever-cryptic Albee, he says: “One of my fondest memories is the bubble of spittle on Sandy’s mouth toward the end of the picture.”

By the time she had finished bubbling and won her Oscar, Sandy’s market value had more than doubled, to $125,000 a picture. A garden-variety Hollywood Venus would henceforth instruct her agent to go after only big-budget, reserved-seat extravaganzas and leading men of maximum candlepower. Not Sandy. Her concern is not the price but the property, not her image but her interest in the work. She settled on The Fox, based on a D. H. Lawrence novella, in which she plays a lesbian, hardly a career-booster.

Sober Scenarios. For The Fox, she had to go on location in the bone-chilling (25° below) bush of Ontario last winter. Cheered Co-Star Keir Dullea:

“She is one of the most selfless and unactressy actresses I have ever worked with.” The picture will be released before the Oscar deadline in December, because Director Rydell scents a best-actress nomination for Sandy. Her next film, in the can but not due for release until next summer, also has a somber-sounding scenario, suggesting that Dennis movies may soon see the last of the Radio City Music Hall. Sweet November is the name, and Sandy plays a dying girl who changes lovers every month.

For the past three weeks, she has toiled for as long as 16 hours a day, seven days a week, on Daphne in Cottage D, a Broadway script by a never-produced playwright, Stephen Levi, 26, and she has been waiting for two years to do it. To bring it in, Sandy’s own business manager has had to raise half the backing, most of it her money. The director, stage manager and co-star are all colleagues from former productions, and Sandy is more in charge (though less egocentric) than in any production since her third-grade Cinderella.

Admittedly, it is a dicey proposition: Daphne is hardly escapist fare. Sandy plays the suicidal widow of a movie star; her co-star plays a man who has just run over his son in a driveway accident. But Sandy, chewing over and blowing her lines at rehearsals, is so hyped up about the Boston opening Sept. 4 that some fear she may blow all the fuses. “Marty,” she asked Manager Martin Bregman at one desperate juncture last week, “how much do we lose if we quit now?”

Realities /. Unrealities. Bregman politely points out that she could earn eight to ten times as much per week in pictures, but for all the trauma and financial sacrifice, Sandy is happier on Broadway than in Hollywood. “Standing around waiting for sets to be lit and scenes to be shot is a bore. I’d do plays all the time,” she says, “but there really aren’t that many good ones around.”

Turning philosophical, Sandy divides her world into “realities” and “unrealities.” Her professional activities are the unrealities, her relationship with Mulligan and their possessions the realities. Not that Sandy has so crystalline a view of her own mind and goals. She had a miscarriage during the shooting of Virginia Woolf, and in speaking about it she says: “I don’t want children, and I don’t not want children, you know?”

Actress Barbara Baxley, an old friend and trouper since their Inge days, says that Sandy responds more to animals than to humans. “She figures that humans can take care of themselves. It’s the helpless that she responds to.” Her response approaches aeluromania. Between her Hudson-view apartment in Manhattan and her handsome country home near Weston, Conn., Sandy now has five dogs and 21 cats. She just can’t resist a stray. She has been heard to comment, while emptying yet another box of Kitty Litter: “I bet you wouldn’t find Ava Gardner doing this.”

Hose Down. The Mulligans are not very gregarious. “I don’t go on the road much any more,” says Gerry. “The marriage is working. Of course, you have to like cats.” The cats pretty well preclude inviting people in, though Sandy’s recently divorced mother presides over most of the menagerie at the Weston retreat. Sandy doesn’t like gadding about, anyway. Still a keen reader, she rips through nearly a book a day, is currently working on English and Russian history.

Besides, going out might require her to dress up. “When I was a kid, I worried about the way I looked,” she says, “because other people always looked better. But I’ve come to the point in my life where I realize that looking good takes time, and I don’t have that time. I appreciate people who do—you know? I don’t look down on it. Now, I never wear hose. And the reason I do not wear hose is, No. 1, I have to shop for them and, No. 2, I have to wear them and they get runs in them and, No. 3, I have to wash them and take care of them. And then you have to have something to hold them up with. And that gets into a whole … a whole way of life that I just don’t have time for. But I love to see it—I love to see a beautiful woman who has beautiful shoes and crosses her legs and has hose on, an’ I think, ‘Oh, hell, why? Why do I fail in those areas?’ But I’ve just given up.”

Her only failure? Perhaps. But on stage, where it counts, there are very few. With Sandy Dennis, the playing’s the thing.