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George Segal, cast as her husband, pronounced Sandy "100% disciplined." Unlike the run of Hollywood girls he had played opposite, he found that stage-steeped Dennis "really listens; she isn't just waiting to speak. You are really talking to someone." Richard Burton found her "exceptionally professional." Or as Elizabeth Taylor put it, "terrifyingly professional." Which doesn't suggest, added Liz, that Sandy isn't "rather nitty at times—I mean she is not like your next-door neighbor one bit."
One manifestation of her nittiness:
Sandy, then and still, belches throughout rehearsals. "Gigantic belches," recalls Burton. "I mean enormous ones, like a drunken sailor. Elizabeth is also a good belcher, so they had competitions, but Sandy nearly always won for number and volume." Musing over Dennis the Retired Menace last week while shooting an adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Milk Train in Sardinia, Richard and Elizabeth seemed about to replay Edward Albee's "Get the Guest." Then Liz turned to Richard and purred: "It's awful, dear, but I'm afraid we just can't find anything nasty to say about her." As for the ever-cryptic Albee, he says: "One of my fondest memories is the bubble of spittle on Sandy's mouth toward the end of the picture."
By the time she had finished bubbling and won her Oscar, Sandy's market value had more than doubled, to $125,000 a picture. A garden-variety Hollywood Venus would henceforth instruct her agent to go after only big-budget, reserved-seat extravaganzas and leading men of maximum candlepower. Not Sandy. Her concern is not the price but the property, not her image but her interest in the work. She settled on The Fox, based on a D. H. Lawrence novella, in which she plays a lesbian, hardly a career-booster.
Sober Scenarios. For The Fox, she had to go on location in the bone-chilling (25° below) bush of Ontario last winter. Cheered Co-Star Keir Dullea:
"She is one of the most selfless and unactressy actresses I have ever worked with." The picture will be released before the Oscar deadline in December, because Director Rydell scents a best-actress nomination for Sandy. Her next film, in the can but not due for release until next summer, also has a somber-sounding scenario, suggesting that Dennis movies may soon see the last of the Radio City Music Hall. Sweet November is the name, and Sandy plays a dying girl who changes lovers every month.
For the past three weeks, she has toiled for as long as 16 hours a day, seven days a week, on Daphne in Cottage D, a Broadway script by a never-produced playwright, Stephen Levi, 26, and she has been waiting for two years to do it. To bring it in, Sandy's own business manager has had to raise half the backing, most of it her money. The director, stage manager and co-star are all colleagues from former productions, and Sandy is more in charge (though less egocentric) than in any production since her third-grade Cinderella.