(6 of 9)
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.