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Admittedly, it is a dicey proposition: Daphne is hardly escapist fare. Sandy plays the suicidal widow of a movie star; her co-star plays a man who has just run over his son in a driveway accident. But Sandy, chewing over and blowing her lines at rehearsals, is so hyped up about the Boston opening Sept. 4 that some fear she may blow all the fuses. "Marty," she asked Manager Martin Bregman at one desperate juncture last week, "how much do we lose if we quit now?"
Realities /. Unrealities. Bregman politely points out that she could earn eight to ten times as much per week in pictures, but for all the trauma and financial sacrifice, Sandy is happier on Broadway than in Hollywood. "Standing around waiting for sets to be lit and scenes to be shot is a bore. I'd do plays all the time," she says, "but there really aren't that many good ones around."
Turning philosophical, Sandy divides her world into "realities" and "unrealities." Her professional activities are the unrealities, her relationship with Mulligan and their possessions the realities. Not that Sandy has so crystalline a view of her own mind and goals. She had a miscarriage during the shooting of Virginia Woolf, and in speaking about it she says: "I don't want children, and I don't not want children, you know?"
Actress Barbara Baxley, an old friend and trouper since their Inge days, says that Sandy responds more to animals than to humans. "She figures that humans can take care of themselves. It's the helpless that she responds to." Her response approaches aeluromania. Between her Hudson-view apartment in Manhattan and her handsome country home near Weston, Conn., Sandy now has five dogs and 21 cats. She just can't resist a stray. She has been heard to comment, while emptying yet another box of Kitty Litter: "I bet you wouldn't find Ava Gardner doing this."
Hose Down. The Mulligans are not very gregarious. "I don't go on the road much any more," says Gerry. "The marriage is working. Of course, you have to like cats." The cats pretty well preclude inviting people in, though Sandy's recently divorced mother presides over most of the menagerie at the Weston retreat. Sandy doesn't like gadding about, anyway. Still a keen reader, she rips through nearly a book a day, is currently working on English and Russian history.
Besides, going out might require her to dress up. "When I was a kid, I worried about the way I looked," she says, "because other people always looked better. But I've come to the point in my life where I realize that looking good takes time, and I don't have that time. I appreciate people who do—you know? I don't look down on it. Now, I never wear hose. And the reason I do not wear hose is, No. 1, I have to shop for them and, No. 2, I have to wear them and they get runs in them and, No. 3, I have to wash them and take care of them. And then you have to have something to hold them up with. And that gets into a whole ... a whole way of life that I just don't have time for. But I love to see it—I love to see a beautiful woman who has beautiful shoes and crosses her legs and has hose on, an' I think, 'Oh, hell, why? Why do I fail in those areas?' But I've just given up."