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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."