It started, the way almost everything else starts these days, with a phone call. “George Sanders is in town!” said the press agent excitedly.
So?
“So he has vertigo, and he’s convinced he’s going to die soon, and he just played a homosexual-transvestite cocktail-pianist spy in John Huston’s The Kremlin Letter and he’s only in town two days before he retires from the movies forever!” He sounded persuasive. After all, George Sanders is the closest thing we have left to the bitchy memory of Clifton Webb and Monty Woolley. So, figuring it might be fun to ask the cantankerous distingué how it felt, after winning an Oscar for tongue-lashing Margo Channing in All About Eve, to finally play Margo Channing, I showed up at the Drake at 10 a.m. Breakfast was promised.
There is no way to prepare anyone for George Sanders, but in the elevator, the press agent bravely gave it the old college try. “You may find him difficult, child-like . . . no memory . . . he remembers absolutely nothing about his movies . . . he’s very short-tempered . . . he’s 63 years old and this is his 40th year in films . . . he’s played more than 80 roles, almost always cads . . . he was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor and Ronald Colman’s widow Benita Hume, who died of cancer in 1967 . . . he says the only thing he remembers about Zsa Zsa is that he could never talk to her because she was always under the hair dryer. . . .
The room was gray. Gray light from a gray Manhattan sky shattered the windowpane in gray, blinding splinters. The rug was gray, the lamp was gray. George Sanders, the only spot of elegance in the room, reclined on rumpled gray sheets in an impeccably tailored gray suit, his pearl gray eyes staring at the ceiling in an expression which could only be described as gray. “No coffee, no breakfast, none of that nonsense!” he growled at the press agent, who interrupted his call to room service as though he had just touched an electric fence. “Let’s get this thing over. I’m a sick man and I’m on my way to a hospital in Boston. I’m taking a plane as soon as you finish. Do you want to ask me anything, or did you just come here to order coffee?”
Pow! I lit into the questions. First, let’s talk about The Kremlin Letter. Did you enjoy making it? “No.”
But the part of a transvestite was certainly a departure from your usual character. How did you go about it? “I’m a spy and I play cocktail piano in a San Francisco night club which was actually located in Rome, that’s all. I did it in drag, how do you think I did it? You play a man in drag, you have to be in drag. What a silly question.”
The press agent laughed uneasily. “Actually, the club was called The Kinky and after Mr. Sanders showed up in basic black with a choker and a dress slit from ankle to thigh, it became the most popular club in Rome.”
Sanders raised himself in bed with the aid of a cane. “John Huston had a different idea, but I’ve got good legs, so I asked them to slit the skirt in order to show them off. It will be amusing, but I really don’t understand the film. It’s too modern for me. I just do what I’m told.” He lay back down. “I didn’t read the book. I started, but couldn’t finish it. The part wasn’t written for a transvestite originally, but I ended up with a blonde tumbling-down wig and modified sausage curls, sitting at the piano because of my magnificent baritone voice.”
“Just like Dagmar,” said the press agent.
Sanders let out a great sigh of agony. “They finally used a woman’s voice instead of mine. I don’t want to talk about that. Don’t ask me anything else about The Kremlin Letter.”
You’ve made some very impressive films—Dorian Gray, Uncle Harry, Hangover Square, Samson and Delilah, Rebecca, etc., etc.—do you have fond memories of the pictures you’ve made? “No.”
Not even All About Eve? “No. Why should I?”
Well, it’s the only film you ever won an Academy Award for, and it certainly holds fond memories for most moviegoers. “Well, you may have fond memories of it, but it was just another picture to me.”
Did you enjoy working with Bette Davis? “No. She was all right.”
Which of your leading ladies did you most enjoy? He grimaced and slashed the air with his evil-looking rococo cane. “Oh, all right—Lucille Ball! Lucille Ball was my favorite.”
What film was that? “I don’t remember the name of it.”
The press agent leaned forward with a slight trace of panic in his voice. “It was Lured, Mr. Sanders—the movie was called Lured!”
I understand you were a great friend of Tyrone Power. . . . “Who told you that? He died on the set of Solomon and Sheba but he was just someone I knew. One knew lots of people. Every film is like an ocean voyage, a transatlantic crossing. You swear you will meet each other again, but you never do. I have no friends, no relations, no family. Everyone is dead. Now I am going to die too.”
He looked like the picture of health to me—pink rosy cheeks, ruthless twinkle in the eyes—so I asked him what was wrong. “Maybe it’s pernicious anemia. The doctors will have to tell me what it is.”
How has it affected you? “I CANT WALK! That’s how it’s affected me!” He leaped out of bed and stalked from one side of the room to the other, leaning on his cane. “See? I can’t move without a stick! This cane belonged to my wife. Now it’s my turn. But anyway, that’s none of your business.”
I changed the subject. There was great excitement at one point about your coming to Broadway in Sherry, the musical version of The Man Who Came to Dinner. What happened? “Oh my God, do we have to go into that rotten fish? There must be a boring psychopathological explanation somewhere. I have a wonderful voice. People kept grabbing me and saying ‘You must do a musical.’ They told me if I was ever going to do one I’d be perfect in the Monty Woolley role. Of course it wasn’t perfect and I never should have gone near it, but I did. Then my wife became ill and I left the show before it ever got to New York. She died a year later. It was a horrid show and a horrid experience.”
Does the theatre interest you now? “No, not at all. Not in the least. I was also announced for South Pacific but I refused to do it. I have this wonderful voice, see . . .” Do you sing around the house to keep your wonderful voice in shape? “No! I’m dying now, so I never sing around the house or anywhere else. I have no intention of becoming an octogenarian baritone.”
Do you remember your first film? “Yes, I was the wicked husband of Madeleine Carroll in Lloyds of London and I’ve played nothing but wicked bastards ever since.” (Actually, his first film was Strange Cargo in 1929. He doesn’t remember it.)
Didn’t you even like That Kind of Woman, the Sidney Lumet film in which you actually played a sympathetic character who gave Sophia Loren her freedom to run away with Tab Hunter? “No. The only thing I remember is how hot it was. We filmed it in 100-degree temperatures here in New York in a horrid little studio with no ventilation, and on a stage which was not air-conditioned, and they had to keep my head wrapped in ice packs. Absolute agony, and all because the woman Sidney Lumet was married to refused to go to California, or something like that, so we had to sweat it out here.”
What was your last film before The Kremlin Letter? “I don’t remember. All I know is there were some planes going over, some parachutes fell out of the planes and there was a big mystery of some sort because there were no bodies attached. I was playing a general or something, because I remember looking through binoculars and saying ‘Good God!’ and a lot of rubbish like that. Before that, it was a film in Mexico City. Phone up and find out if you care. I don’t know what it was. I never see any of my films.”
Do you think a lot of the fun has gone out of filmmaking today in comparison to the old days? “I think all the fun has gone out of everything, but I’m not qualified to comment on films because I never see them. I loathe the theater and I loathe movies. I will never make another one.”
What will you do then? What would you like to do with the rest of your life? “Nothing. I would say I’d like to do nothing. The only reason I ever acted was because some agent would ring up and say ‘There’s this picture, and I think I can sell you into it.’ I will never miss it, or feel out of it. I feel out of it when I’m in it and can’t wait until the whole damned thing is over.”
But while hating it, you also made quite a bit of money at it . . . “I don’t want to talk about money. Money or ex-wives.”
Are you still friendly with Zsa Zsa? “Not very.”
I read once that she considered you the best of all of her husbands. “I was.”
You now live in seclusion in Majorca. Why did you choose Majorca? He yawns. “Must I have a reason? All right. Because it has a nice climate and a nice airport. Also, nobody speaks to me there. They leave me alone. I never see anyone. I don’t want to be uncomfortable. I’ll do anything to avoid discomfort. I have an English butler and his wife who look after me and a native boy who helps out. The people there are not like stupid Americans, always rushing about like fans, asking for autographs.” He smashes his cane into a copy of Time magazine with Temple Fielding on the cover. “He lives in Majorca, too, but nobody ever pays any attention to him there. You have to come to America to find out what your neighbors are doing. He writes guide books. I know that from reading Time. But nobody knows what he does there.”
“Mr. Sanders has a wonderful solution for the war in Viet Nam,” volunteered the press agent enthusiastically.
Sanders’ eyes brightened to a saucy shellac: “Send over from here some long-range planes, drop a few canisters of nerve gas on the whole country, and kill everyone in it, including half a million American troops, and that would eliminate any problem of whether to lose face by bringing them all back home or not. Furthermore, they’ll all be killed anyway. Even if they tried to get away now, they’d be machine-gunned on the beaches as they tried to get into the transports. This way it would be noiseless, odorless, and tasteless. You just wake up in Heaven.”
With that, I began to gather up my pencils, but he seemed excited for the first time. He was pacing the room, pointing his stick threateningly. “I’m a cynic. Our values are all false and life is simply a matter of pretense. Take the subject of these young people burning down the colleges. I don’t know what their problem is, or what they want, or who isn’t giving it to them, but I understand them. They say ‘Tell it like it is’ and they look through their parents’ keyhole and watch them doing everything, then the parents pretend such things don’t exist and refuse to let their children see it in the movies. I was in Forever Amber when they got so upset because Linda Darnell showed cleavage.” His eyes rolled back and he sent a sigh of ecstasy toward the ceiling. “Ah, cleavage! Now they do everything in movies but they are rotten to the core because they still wear jock straps. The whole world wears a jock strap. It’s either so dark you can’t see, or you see their naked backsides. The whole world is a sham. It’s not erotic, it’s just boring! I don’t want to see a pornographic film unless it shows everything! I don’t know where society is going and I don’t care, I’m just happy I won’t be around to see it.”
He sat back on the bed, spent, like a gruff child who has been lashing out at everyone because he stubbed his toe—sad, passionless, exasperating, but strangely touching. As I left, I wished him luck. “Don’t bother, I shan’t need it. I have no friends, I have no interests, I have no plans, I already wrote my life story called Memoirs of a Professional Cad so I have nothing left to say. I won’t be bored, because I’m bored already. I just want to be left alone.”
Which, surrounded by gray, is exactly the way I left him.