Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

“The Fox” (1967), Claridge Pictures via YouTube

April 27, 1937 – Sandy Dennis:

”I take everything they offer me. I never turn down parts.”

Dennis was one of the most eccentric stars of stage and screen. Loved and loathed equally by critics, she was known as a stammering and muttering nut case, but also winsome, adorable and hopelessly mannered. She was the titan of tics.

She has won two Tony Awards and an Academy Award. Dennis, Anne Bancroft, Zoe Caldwell, Viola Davis, Colleen Dewhurst, Maureen Stapleton, Irene Worth, and Audra McDonald are the only Tony Award winners for both Best Actress in a Play and Best Featured Actress in a Play. Her Oscar is for her performance in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (1966).

A little too quirky to be considered an ingenue, even at the start of her career, she was a real character actor and a real character. No role was too peculiar for Dennis.

For three decades, Dennis lived in a early 19^th century Georgian house in Connecticut with 17 cats. The house had an unusually orange living-room. Dennis:

”When I was in Same Time Next Year on Broadway, this fancy restaurant invited the cast for a lunch because we mentioned their name in the play. I got so drunk that afterward I rolled over to Bloomingdale’s and bought the ugliest orange furniture you’ve ever seen. I hate orange, and I don’t know why I did it. I have tag sales all the time, and everybody just walks right past it. But the cats love it. They’ve torn out the cotton stuffing and eaten the legs away.”

I know the cat lady thing seems creepy, but the kooky Dennis was also a neatnik. She told an interviewer:

”Cleaning gives me more pleasure than anything in the world. I’d clean all day long if I could. I used to wake up in the middle of the night and start waxing the floor. Then I’d lie on it and wait for the shine to rise. I just don’t want anyone to say my house smells or looks dirty.”

Her career started when she was chosen to be an understudy for the Broadway production of Dark At The Top Of The Stairs in 1957. Her first film role was Kay, Natalie Wood‘s nasty pal in William Inge‘s Splendor In The Grass in 1961. The next year she was back on Broadway opposite Jason Robards in A Thousand Clowns, winning a Tony Award. Her first lead role was in Any Wednesday (1964), for which Dennis won another Tony, and it made her a star.

Mike Nichols chose her for his film version of Edward Albee‘s Who’s Virginia Woolf?. She played opposite George Segal and the planet’s most famous couple, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who found her beguiling. Burton:

”Sandy is really one of the most genuine eccentrics I know of. She sat on the set like a schoolmarm and suddenly produced the most gigantic belches, like a drunken sailor. Elizabeth is also a good belcher, so they had competitions, but Sandy nearly always won.”

George Segal, Dennis, Elizabeth Taylor in
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966) via YouTube

By 1968, Dennis was a big box office draw and the darling of the critics. Brooks Atkinson, the NY Times theatre critic wrote:

”Let me tell you about Sandy Dennis. There should be one in every home.”

Yet, her maddening mannerisms were also attracting notice. Dennis was described as giving neurotic and mannered performances; her signature style included running words together and oddly stopping and starting sentences, suddenly going up and down octaves as she spoke, and fluttering her hands. She was the only actor I know of who would take pause in the middle of an ”uh”.

The New Yorker‘s great film critic Pauline Kael wrote:

”Sandy Dennis has made an acting style out of postnasal drip.”

As for her recurrent gesture of covering her mouth with one hand, which irritated critics, Dennis said:

”It’s true. I had these big buck teeth as a kid, and they called me Bugs Bunny. I had braces for five years, but they just didn’t work. Then this wonderful dentist filed them off.”

The Hollywood establishment was resentful in 1967, when Dennis, nominated for her role in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? refused to attend the Academy Awards, and instead watched them from a NYC restaurant. Dennis:

”The Oscars are just not the kind of thing I’d get some clothes and go to. I never dress up if I can help it.”

With an Academy Award, Dennis seemed ready for film stardom. Warner Bros. recognized her talent and Hollywood was aware of the acclaim she had achieved on Broadway in Any Wednesday, but they didn’t have the imagination to see the woman who played Honey in Virginia Woolf playing the role of a saucy kept girl in the film version of Any Wednesday. Jane Fonda got the role.

Instead, Warner Bros loved the Broadway play Sweet November but didn’t see its star Barbara Harris as having movie star potential, so the same film director, Robert Ellis Miller, who directed Fonda in Dennis’s original role would also direct Dennis in Harris’s role, a part that she was all wrong for.

Yet, her curious behavior may be the reason she wasn’t offered more starring roles. Dennis;

”I should have kept myself blonder and thinner, but I just didn’t care enough.”

Shortly after the mistake of Sweet November, Dennis received a truly great role when she was cast in Robert Altman‘s experimental That Cold Day In The Park (1968). Altman knew just how to best use Dennis. His directing worked perfectly in reigning in Dennis’s eccentric take on her characters. The film is a warped psycho-sexual thriller, plus it features male nudity, unusual for the era. It is worth seeking out.

“That Cold Day In The Park” (1969) with Michael Burns via YouTube

Oddly, Dennis was next cast in her most mainstream success opposite Jack Lemmon in Neil Simon‘s The-Out-Of Towners (1969). Filmed on location in decaying NYC, Arthur Hiller‘s film is as silly as it is an insightful look at a dying city. Lemmon and Dennis play off each other brilliantly. It has genuinely comic moments. Dennis’s frequent ”Oh, my God!”s are just too, too funny. It was a big box office hit.

“The Out-Of-Towners” (1970) with Jack Lemmon, via YouTube

She played a lesbian in a sexy film adaptation of D.H. Lawrence‘s The Fox (1968), an idealistic teacher in Up The Down Staircase (1967) and a photographer fixated on vegetables in Alan Alda‘s Four Seasons (1981) with Rita Moreno and Carol Burnett.

Dennis never seemed comfortable with success. She continued to take film roles, but they were as peculiar as her acting style. One of my favorites is the smart satire Nasty Habits directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. It is one of my favorite films, a zany satire of The Watergate Scandal and the Nixon White House, with nuns as stand-ins for the major players! It has amazing performances: The Mother Superior played by Glenda Jackson as Richard Nixon (it may be her greatest role), Melina Mercouri as Henry Kissinger, Geraldine Page as H. R. Haldeman, Anne Jackson as John Ehrlichman, Anne Meara as Gerald Ford; plus Rip Torn, Jerry Stiller and Edith Evans. Dennis is John Dean; I am not making it up.

About her performance in Nasty Habits, Vincent Canby of the NY Times wrote:

”Miss Dennis, mugging outrageously and badly, gives the kind of performance that, 40 years ago, would have sent her to bed without her supper. It’s rude, show-offy and, worse, it’s incompetent. Watching her do a double-take is like watching a small tug trying to work the QE2 into her Hudson River berth in a gale.”

In the very early 1980’s when Altman convinced her to take a role in Ed Graczyk’s Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean she found herself working with the unexperienced Cher. Cher did not encounter a fragile person; she stated that Dennis was quick to point out her “bad reading” of her role. Cher, no fragile person herself, pushed hard until she earned Dennis’ respect. Cher:

“Sandy was the great peacemaker of the group when we were doing Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. She was the solid one with her feet on the ground, which was interesting to me at the time, because she had such an ethereal quality as an actress. I also remember her wonderful sense of humor and her gorgeous hair.”

Critic Frank Rich said of Dennis in Come Back To The Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982):

”She either runs on her sentences incoherently or scrambles them with false starts, jerky internal word repetitions and teeth-baring snorts.”

A life member of The Actors Studio and an advocate of method acting, she was a unique and visionary actor blessed with undeniable charisma and a presence that was hers alone. Once you had seen her, you could never be able to forget her. Her odd take on realism and her characters could drive you crazy, but there was no one else doing what she did.

Dennis was a private person. She a decade-long term relationship with Jazz musician Gerry Mulligan, and a four-year relationship with actor, Eric Roberts. She never bothered to come clean about her bisexuality. Roberts said that she was open about her sexual relationships with other women to him and to her other close friends. She wrote Sandy Dennis, A Personal Memoir (1991) where she is not personal at all, writing mostly about the Actors Studio and her animals.

Her two closest friends were Brenda Vaccaro and Jessica Walter, which speaks volumes.

1967
Illustration by Boris Chaliapin

Dennis was taken by cancer in 1994, leaving this world at home with her cats. She was only 54-years-old.

In 2004, Ian McKellen, wrote of Dennis:

“Had she lived, by now she would have been a veteran actor of formidable powers or perhaps, eschewing work, she would simply be an animal-lover at home, smiling indulgently at the craziness of the world around her.”

Photo from CBS News via YouTube

April 28, 1926– Nell Harper Lee:

“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”

Seemingly impossible, I did not read To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) as a young person, and I didn’t even see the film until 2007, and then only at The Husband’s insistence. I certainly would have been better briefed for adulthood if I had encountered this American novel in my early teens rather than my mid-50s.

Harper Lee was a very quiet nonconformist. Her cold shoulder to any celebrity is challenging to conceive in today’s culture, especially for a popular writer. Lee had hoped her famous book would meet a “quick and merciful death”. Instead, it achieved immortality, certainly the most popular American novel of the 20th century. The film version, with a perfect screenplay by Horton Foote, is so spot on that the film and the book have merged in most peoples’ brains.

In 1950, as a young frumpy girl, fresh from the University Of Alabama, minus her law degree, Lee moved to NYC from her hometown of Monroeville. She didn’t think she was going to accomplish anything, she was just renewing her friendship with her childhood buddy Truman Capote. She said she was maybe going to write a book. She did, and the book was published in 1960. Lee became very famous.

That book is a barely disguised version of her Alabama family and Monroeville’s Southern racial consciousness, but it is also very much about Lee and Capote, childhood chums who become personally and artistically linked legends. The two kids were precocious with little in common with the other young people in the town. Lee was too rough for the girls, and Capote was too soft for the boys. They each had emotionally remote mothers. Capote’s mother was a self-centered social climber; Lee’s mother suffered from deep depression. Capote’s father attempted to seduce Lee when she was in her teens, and she punched him in the nose. Capote hated Lee’s gossipy mother, and later used her as the basis of his story Mrs. Busybody.

Through the decades, one of the most asked questions about Lee was about her sexual orientation. Lee always kept the answer hidden from the public, but her annoyance with the question only added to the curiosity. She was socially awkward and shy. She left no diaries or love letters revealing her romantic interests. However, there are tales of Lee’s unrequited crush on married literary agent Maurice Crain, who encouraged her to try writing a novel after reading several of her short stories.

Like so many Harper Lee fans, I have sometimes speculated that she was a lesbian, because she seems gay to me, but mostly because of how tough it was for any gay Americans in the 1950s, with McCarthyism as a tool for taking on not only Communists but also the activities of suspected homos through near constant police harassment and countless raids on gay bars.

The primary reason her readers speculate about Lee’s possible gayness is because of her much loved gender-nonconforming fictional characters Scout and Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Scout is a tomboy and Dill is a little effeminate lad, which inextricably connected gay readers to the novel and Lee. Young gay readers came away from the novel feeling that there was someone else like him or her, either Scout or her friend Dill. So loved and lauded are Scout and Dill in the American gay literary canon that To Kill a Mockingbird is ranked 67th on the Publishing Triangle’s list of The 100 Best Lesbian And Gay Novels.

If Lee is to be judged by the company she kept, her childhood friend Capote, the writer of Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961) and In Cold Blood (1966) was notoriously gay, and he was the inspiration for the character of Dill.

In winter 1960, Lee worked with Capote on the New Yorker article that he was writing about the 1959 murders of four members of the Clutter family on their farm and the impact of the killings on their small Kansas community. Lee and Capote went to Kansas to interview townspeople, and the family and friends of the Clutters, along with the investigators working on the crime. Working as Capote’s research assistant, Lee helped conduct the interviews, reaching out to the locals using her unpretentious manner. Capote’s flamboyant personality made it harder to reach out to the people in the town.

Via YouTube

While Lee and Capote were in Kansas, the suspected killers, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock were captured and returned to Kansas for questioning. The two old friends interviewed the suspects after they were arraigned in January 1960. They then returned to NYC and Lee continued to work on the manuscript for her own first novel while Capote started working on the article that became his nonfiction masterpiece In Cold Blood. They returned to Kansas for the murder trial in March. A few months later, Lee turned over all of her notes about the murder, the victims, the killers, the local community and more to Capote. Many critics suspected that Lee had a larger role in shaping the manuscript that became Capote’s most famous work.

Lee had moved to NYC in 1949 to be a writer, but perhaps also, like so many of us, to be more authentic and open. She only returned to Monroeville permanently after suffering a stroke in 2007.

Lee had wry sense of irony. She was the editor of the humor magazine at the University Of Alabama. When told that her book had great appeal for children, Lee stated:

“But I hate children. I can’t stand them.”

Lee became a great friend to Gregory Peck, who won an Academy Award for his portrayal of the ultimate father, Atticus Finch, in the film version of To Kill A Mockingbird. She remained close to the actor’s family after his passing. Peck’s grandson, Harper Peck Voll, is named for her. In 2005, Lee was portrayed on film twice, in two completely different Capote bio-pics, by Catherine Keener in Capote (Oscar nomination), and Sandra Bullock in Infamous.

In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded Lee the Presidential Medal Of Freedom, the first of several high honors. She received the National Medal Of Arts, presented to her by President Barack Obama in 2010.

In 2013, Lee was forced to file a lawsuit to regain the copyright to To Kill A Mockingbird, seeking damages from the estate of her former literary agent. Lee claimed that the agent had “engaged in a scheme to dupe” her into assigning him the copyright on the book in 2007, when her hearing and eyesight were in decline, and she was residing in an assisted-living facility after having suffered a stroke.

She finished her first novel in 1955 and she waited five years to publish it on the advice of her editor who worried it would be too provocative. Lee’s second novel, Go Set A Watchman was published in July 2016, 55 years after her first. It was controversially published as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, although it has been confirmed that it really was the first draft of her famous novel. Go Set A Watchman is set some 20 years after the first book, with Scout returning as an adult from NYC to visit her father in Alabama. It received nearly unanimous bad reviews and much talk about the revelation of the racism of its main characters, and much speculation about the health and reasoning powers of Lee for allowing it to be published. Personally, I chose to skip it altogether and reread To Kill A Mockingbird instead.

Lee lived a quiet life after she returned to Monroeville, up until she left this world last spring. She stayed active in her church and community, moving easily around the town, protected from the press and unwanted fans by her neighbors. She avoided anything to do with her popular novel (still selling a million copies a year and having never been out of print).

The public will never know if Lee was gay or straight. She has taken the answer about her sexual orientation to her grave, and may we all rest in peace with it.