old hollywood book club
In the latest installment of Old Hollywood Book Club, learn about the life and times of the wildly entertaining George Sanders.
By Hadley Hall Meares
“My own desire as a boy was to retire,” George Sanders once said.
In Sanders’s 1960 autobiography, Memoirs of a Professional Cad, this world-weariness is on full display. The suave, sardonic Oscar-winning star of Golden Age Hollywood made his living playing, as he put it, a “high-class sort of heel,” in classics like Rebecca, All About Eve, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Along the way, he allegedly racked up affairs with Dolores del Rio, Gene Tierney, Hedy Lamarr, and Lucille Ball and was married to not one but two of the legendary Gabor sisters.
His book is constantly cited as one of the all-time best celebrity memoirs for a reason: It is laugh-out-loud funny. His cynical observations are so precise, cutting and arch, that they seem as if they could have been written for one of his characters.
But was Sanders really such a coldhearted cynic? In the insightful, perfectly titled 1990 biography An Exhausted Life, author Richard VanDerBeets posits that this image was really a cover for an emotional, sensitive, intellectual man who much preferred inventing or reading, or sleeping to interacting and excelling in a world he found so harsh. “Just look at that fellow,” Noel Coward once exclaimed, per VanDerBeets. “He has more talents than any of us, but he doesn’t do anything with them!”
By the end of Memoirs of a Professional Cad, the reader is left with a portrait of a man constantly giving up on himself- and eventually the world. Observations of great wit and sensitivity are mixed in with long-winded bitchiness, misogynistic and occasionally racist notes, and the reader worries about what he is going to say next. Sanders seems worried as well but resigned to his role of “elegant villainy.”
“That I should choose to protect my easily wounded and ultrasensitive nature by adopting my particular mask is understandable,” Sanders writes. “Fortunately, my mask has not only protected me but provided me with a living.”
The Prince
“I was born into a world that was soon to disappear,” Sanders writes. “It was a world of clinking champagne glasses, of colonnaded private ballrooms with scintillating chandeliers, of heel-clicking be-monocled princes in gorgeous uniforms intent upon their ladies as they drove in their jingling troikas through the moonlit snow.”
George Sanders was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on July 3, 1906. His mother, Margaret, was a beautiful, wealthy heiress from a storied family. “To the best of my knowledge, my father came in the mail,” he writes of his father, Henry. In reality, according to VanDerBeets, Henry, a handsome balalaika player, was probably the illegitimate son of a noblewoman and a prince married to one of the Czar’s sisters.
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Sanders poignantly describes his lush childhood and the sophisticated, louche characters that populated it. “One of the great heroes of my childhood, my Uncle Jack, contentedly pursued one of his favorite pastimes,” he writes. “From his great carved bed, a 22-caliber pistol in his hangover-shaking hand, he would shoot flies that had gathered to eat the jam he had smeared on the ceiling.”
The coddled, already witty young aristocrat would forever be close to his family, and his love for them is the purest part of his memories. “If it is true that a man’s character develops for the good in proportion to the fun, the degree of happiness and the amount of bountiful love he experiences in childhood, then I must have the most noble and wonderful character in all the world,” he writes. “Personally, I feel that I am the living proof of this contention. However, a surprising number of people think otherwise.”
The Pauper
The 1917 Russian Revolution would shatter Sanders’s golden childhood, along with— one senses—his view of the world. “The Tsar had signed away our inheritances, our holdings, and our gilt-edged future,” he writes. “An action for which I, personally, have never forgiven him.”
The Sanders family escaped to England, and the young man found himself a high-class refugee. His memories of his time at boarding school are bitingly bitter, although he was a top student who excelled in sports, especially boxing. “The sudden descent from a wealthy and privileged early childhood…to the lonely, precarious, and often humiliating years as a foreign-born schoolboy from a family in limited financial circumstances engendered deep insecurity,” VanDerBeets surmises.
But Sanders found solace in adventure. In 1926 he became a manufacturer’s representative for the British and American Tobacco Company. In Memoirs of a Professional Cad, he is at his best recalling his colorful career as an ad man in Argentina and Chile. He swam in formal wear across the lake in Parque Belgrano, kept a pet ostrich in his apartment, and tossed cigarettes to rural villagers while standing precariously atop a small plane, while throwing up in a glove.
He is also delightfully self-deprecating, describing a drunken duel with a man that landed him in jail, which Sanders claimed resulted in his expulsion from the continent of South America in 1929. Talented musically, with a rich baritone voice, Sanders was discovered tinkling the piano at an English soiree and became a stage actor in the British theater.
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He was well aware of the ridiculousness of his new profession. In his first film, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, he appropriately played one of a trio of hunky gods. “The part called for me to ride half-naked and shiny with grease, at four o’clock in the morning during one of England’s coldest winters, on a horse which was also coated with grease,” he writes. “I was the only one of the three that didn’t fall off. In this regard at least I was already a successful film actor.”
Zsa Zsa
By the 1940s, the reclusive Sanders was well established—if not personally beloved—in Hollywood, excelling in playing what he called “damned winning heavies.” A failed marriage under his belt, he was playing piano at a party in New York when he was approached by the glamorous Hungarian Zsa Zsa Gabor, recently divorced from Conrad Hilton, Sr. and already determined to make the unapproachable Sanders her third (of nine) husband.
“Mr. Sanders, I’m madly in love with you,” she said by way of introduction, per VanDerBeets. “With a condescending smile George replied, ‘How well I understand, my dear.’”
Thus began a tumultuous, tragi-comic love affair. In his memoir, Sanders is still bemusedly fond of and fascinated by Gabor, who he married in 1949, extolling her guts and guilelessness—which it seems he clearly wished to possess. “She allows her vitality and instincts to spring from her without distortion. She doesn’t disguise her love of amorous entanglements or jewels or whatever else catches her fancy, because her character is pure,” he writes. “Not for her is the conventional mask of studied behavior. Her behavior is spontaneous and genuine.”
But their happiness was short-lived. In 1951, a hilarious talk-show appearance thrust Gabor onto the national scene, and Sanders soon found his house overrun with photographers, reporters, and gay dinners with “a lot of rich gentlemen from South America.” Though he doesn’t admit it, it is clear Sanders was jealous, and the two were separated by work, with Gabor falling into the arms of the famously well-endowed playboy gigolo Porfirio Rubirosa, the Dominican ambassador to France.
This scandalous affair became an international sensation, with Sanders in the role of cuckold. According to VanDerBeets, things came to a head on Christmas Eve 1953. That night, Sanders huddled outside Gabor’s Bel Air home with two detectives waiting for his wife and Rubirosa to retire to the boudoir. He then climbed up a rickety ladder to her bedroom, and while attempting to peer in, crashed through the glass into the room.
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Zsa Zsa screamed, quickly covering herself, while Rubirosa fled. An incensed Sanders ripped up a framed picture of himself, breathing heavily and obviously distressed. “My dear, I am an old man,” he told a concerned Gabor. “I’ve absolutely no business climbing ladders.”
In true drawing-room comedy fashion, Gabor told VanDerBeets that the estranged couple went downstairs for a drink, and she gave him his Christmas present. He laughed wickedly and said, “this visit is my Christmas present to you,” VanDerBeets writes. Then he left.
The Sham
“Back in Hollywood again, back among the rackets, the bullshit, the sham,” Sanders once wrote, per VanDerBeets.
In his memoir, Sanders presents a dark and acidic view of old Hollywood and the gloriously fake pretensions that made it tick. “There is an unwritten law in the picture business that all observations and expressed opinions must be replete with superlatives,” he writes, “Generally speaking you can’t go wrong if you make sure to use the word ‘sensational’ at least once in every sentence.”
With his eye for the absurd, Sanders makes pointed, but at times poignant, observations about stars like Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, and Vincent Price. But his venom is particularly out for co-star Yul Brynner, who he claims arrived on the set of 1959’s Solomon and Sheba with an entourage of seven. He writes:
The function of one member of this retinue appeared to consist entirely of placing already lighted cigarettes in Brynner’s outstretched fingers. Another was permanently occupied in shaving his skull with an electric razor whenever the suspicion of a shadow darkened that noble head. While these services were being rendered unto him, Brynner sat in sphinxlike silence and splendor wearing black leather suits or white leather suits, of which he had half a dozen each, confected for him by the firm of Dior.
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But Sanders’ softer side is exposed in his lovely tribute to the unexpectedly deep Marilyn Monroe, who befriended him on the set of All About Eve. “She was very beautiful and very inquiring and very unsure–she was somebody in a play not yet written, uncertain of her part in the over-all plot,” he writes. “She showed an interest in intellectual subjects which was, to say the least, disconcerting. In her presence it was hard to concentrate.”
According to VanDerBeets, Gabor was not amused. “He kept coming home and saying to me, ’that poor little innocent girl, she sits there and reads poetry, and there was no place to sit in the commissary so she asked if she could sit with me,’” she told the author. “I was furious. We were married and George would sit with that little tart. An innocent, wild animal, I would call her.”
Tyrone
For Sanders, the personality of an actor was generally “a muddle-headed peacock forever chasing after the rainbow of his pathetic narcissism,” but his friend and frequent co-star Tyrone Power was the exception. “I shall always remember Tyrone Power as a bountiful man,” he wrote. “A man who gave freely of himself. It mattered not to whom he gave. His concern was in the giving. I shall always remember his wonderful smile, a smile that would light up the darkest hour of the day like a sunburst.”
Sanders was on the set of Solomon and Sheba in Madrid on November 15, 1958, when the 44-year-old Powers staggered back while shooting a fencing scene. He went to his trailer, where Sanders went to check on him:
He was sitting in a chair twisted over on his left side and holding on tightly to his arm. His head was tilted over rigidly as though some crick in his neck prevented him from straightening it. Even though he was wearing make - up his face had a sort of bluish color, but he greeted me with a smile.
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Power convinced Sanders he was fine but died of a massive heart attack on the way to the hospital. The death of Power clearly affected the morbid Sanders deeply, and when he ruminates expansively on the handsome, energetic Power’s lost dreams, one gets the sense he is really thinking of himself. But he is back in his usual cynical protective form by the time of Power’s L.A. funeral, which became a Hollywood circus:
At one point the behavior of the public became so unruly that the police were obliged to put into effect Riot Procedure Number 3, whereby they control the crowd by simply riding into it in a phalanx. The exhausts of their motorcycles shattered the air, drowning out Cesar Romero who was speaking the eulogy … but somehow failing to ruffle the calm of a strange…woman in full Chinese costume who had been standing in a sort of trance by the coffin during this portion of the service. It was later revealed that the…woman was none other than Miss Loretta Young who had come straight from the set of a TV show.
This Sweet Cesspool
In 1959, after Sander’s divorce from Gabor, he married the elegant English actress Benita Hume, the widow of movie star Ronald Colman. “I look upon Benita as the best thing that has happened in my life,” he writes.
One wishes 1960’s Memoirs of a Cad included more of their tender, loving relationship, which friends and family told VanDerBeets was one of mutual admiration and calm. But Benita’s death from cancer in 1967, a series of strokes, the death of his mother, and brother (the actor Tom Conway), and disastrous business decisions would set Sanders on a path to ruin.
In his memoir, Sanders already hints at memory problems and instability which would plague him in later years. In 1970, Zsa Zsa Gabor, still close and unwaveringly loyal to Sanders, convinced him to marry her sister Magda, who had also suffered a debilitating stroke.
The farce of a marriage was soon over and a befuddled, infirm, and exhausted Sanders continued a downward spiral. According to David Niven, perhaps the only actor to surpass him in writing ability, Sanders had long held a wish to die by suicide. On April 25, 1972, George Sanders died of an overdose at a hotel in Barcelona. “Dear world,” he wrote in his farewell note. “I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”
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Writer
Hadley Hall Meares is a North Carolina born, Los Angeles–based journalist focusing on history and culture. Her work has been featured in outlets including Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, LA Weekly, Curbed, Atlas Obscura, and Los Angeles magazine. She makes frequent media appearances as an expert on Discovery, History Channel,... Read more
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