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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.