Posts tagged Zsa Zsa Gabor

GEORGE SANDERS — Bored to Death?

May08
2013 2 Comments Written by classicmovieguys

When George Sanders killed himself – by downing a fatal mixture of Nembutal and vodka in a seaside resort hotel suite some 10 miles south of Barcelona, Spain — the world concluded that the 65-year-old actor known for the silky cynicism of the characters he played onscreen for nearly four decades simply tired of life, and decided to pack it in.

This notion was confirmed by the suicide note police discovered at the scene: Dear World. 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.

Hello, everybody.  Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, here today to take a closer look at the circumstances surrounding the death of one of our favorite actors.  George Sanders may have been bored, but other key factors figured into his decision to take his own life in the spring of 1972.

Homeless and without roots, overwhelmed by loss of loved ones, by financial disasters, by humiliating errors of judgment in his personal life…George recognized as inevitable the continuing and relentless attacks of illness and age that had ravaged his last years and that would ultimately present him with an intolerable loss of dignity and control against which the mask of disdain and indifference would prove hopelessly inadequate, writes the actor’s biographer Richard VanDerBeets.

He had not exhausted life; life was slowly exhausting him.

Healthy most of his life, the hulking six-foot-three Sanders had suffered strokes, vertigo, and other ailments that limited his physical mobility. He was drinking heavily. His  happiest marriage — to the third of four wives, former actress Benita Hume (Ronald Colman’s widow) – ended in 1967 when she lost a long battle with breast cancer.

In that same year, Sanders also lost his older brother, actor Tom Conway, who ended his life as a down-at-the-heels alcoholic. His beloved mother Margaret, rendered “a vegetable” by a series of strokes, also died in 1967.

Then there were financial reversals.  In an attempt to “get out of the ridiculous acting profession” and obtain respectability, Sanders sunk a small fortune into a venture that his friend Noel Coward called “a scheme for making sausages in Scotland.” The venture went belly up (pun intended), and from April 1961 through November 1964 it racked up losses of nearly $2 million with George on the hook for much of it.

On the advice of his lawyer he fled Europe for California and in October 1966 filed a petition for bankruptcy, listing assets of $57,657 and liabilities of almost $1 million, according to VanDerBeets, author of 1990′s George Sanders: An Exhausted Life.

Sanders was still getting work as an actor but most of the roles he landed proved totally uninteresting to him.  He rarely saw his own movies. Worst of all, he was enduring periods of depression gaining in both intensity and duration. His beloved house in Majorca had been sold at the urging of a passing mistress, a decision he deeply regretted.

During these declining years there was a less than one-year marriage to Magda Gabor, Zsa Zsa’s older sister. It was annulled in 1971.

Concludes biographer VanDerBeets:  The soul which sought escape from an inevitably cruel and protracted final exhaustion by slipping gently into death…was not that of the bored and cynical cad but of the bewildered and despondent prince who in this instance chose to fly to the undiscovered country rather than make calamity of so long life. 

 

 

 

 

 

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GEORGE SANDERS Stares Down Zsa Zsa’s Lover.

May03
2013 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

Hello everybody, classic movie guys Joe Morella and Frank Segers back with another of our  several blogs covering the life and career of one of our favorite actors — George Sanders.

Sanders was married four times, most famously to wife No. 2,  Zsa Zsa Gabor from 1949 to 1954. (The actor was later married at wife No. 2′s urging to wife No. 4, Zsa Zsa’s sister, Magda, for a year beginning in 1970.)

The marriage to Zsa Zsa was the romance of his life.  It certainly generated the most talk in Hollywood, and the most headlines. Although it legally ended with some acrimony the two remained close friends throughout Sanders’ life.

It is the end of the Zsa Zsa marriage that we discuss in today’s Sanders anecdote, quoting from two sources — author Richard VanDerBeets’ 1990 biography, George Sanders: An Exhausted Life, and from a letter scriptwriter-director Nunnally Johnson wrote to a Hollywood pal in early 1954.

Seems that Zsa Zsa was prickly about reaching a final property agreement as part of the couple’s divorce settlement. She kept upping the ante at the last minute, demanding more and then still more, which irritated the extraordinarily money-conscious Sanders. “But he figured it wouldn’t be difficult to get something on her,” wrote Johnson.

At the time Gabor had taken up with Dominican playboy-diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa — a notorious womanizer said to have been exceptionally well endowed, and who held Zsa Zsa in sexual thrall. Sanders came up with the idea of catching Zsa Zsa in flagrante delicto with Rubirosa (known as “Rubi”) at the Bel Air residence they shared.

Accounts of what happened next differ.  VanDerBeets’ biography discreetly tells of George climbing a ladder and bursting into Zsa Zsa’s second floor boudoir through a shattered French window. After the initial shock was absorbed at this surprise visit, Zsa Zsa turned to Sanders and inquired if he was sick.  My Dear, George replied, I’m and old man (he was nearing 50 at the time). I’ve absolutely no business climbing ladders.

Zsa suggested that George should “come downstairs and have a drink. Responded George: Well, perhaps just one.

Johnson’s far more detailed and entertaining version begins by setting the scene: So on Christmas Eve, that holy day, (Sanders) prepared to raid her home to catch Rubirosa in the hay with her.” In this version, George managed with the help of four private detectives to hoist a ladder to a second-floor balcony outside Gabor’s bedroom, and to actually climb up and into her boudoir.

(There) he saw two naked forms break the record for the dash to the bathroom, where the light was on… Rubi and Zsa Zsa had slammed the door shut but in their excitement they forgot it could also be locked.

The door opened inward and then it became a head-on push between George and Rubi, Rubi trying to hold the door shut, George trying to bull it open.

Now, according to George, he was hitting low, just like Knute Rockne always said, and with a powerful lunge he managed to get the door open about a foot, which to his astonishment brought him face to face with Rubirosa’s organ, whereupon, in a moment of whimsy, he shook it heartily and called Merry Christmas to them both.

Now, George, really!, exclaimed Zsa Zsa. Please be seated and I’ll be out in just a moment.

She emerged in a diaphanous negligee, leaving the shy Mr. Rubirosa skulking in the can. Johnson’s letter goes on to note that Zsa Zsa employed her charm to calm the situation, even showing Sanders and his gumshoes the living room Christmas tree and inquiring of Sanders if he had received her gift.

Sanders and entourage exited through the front door, handshakes and exchanges of “God bless you’s” all around.

According to biographer VanDerBeets, Gabor later said that despite their marital misadventures, she and Sanders had really never been out of each other’s lives entirely from the day we first met. He was part of my life — like my child, my father, my family…He was the love of my life.

By the way, Sanders and Zsa Zsa appeared in only one movie together, RKO’s 1956 crime drama Death of a Scoundrel.  The interaction and byplay between the two is most entertaining, as is this picture as a whole.  Highly recommended.

 

 

 

 

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TOM CONWAY–The Lesser-Known (and nicer!) Older Brother.

Apr17
2013 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

Hollywood can be rough on sibling actors but those Sanders boys got on for the most part pretty well.  No professional jealousy.  For all their shortcoming, both felt the other was family, after all.

Hello, everybody.  Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, continuing our series of periodic blogs on one of our favorite actors, Tom Conway’s younger brother, George Sanders.

Conway was born in 1904 under the name Thomas Charles Sanders.  When he followed George to Hollywood, he lost a brotherly coin toss and changed his surname to Conway.

In time, the likeable Conway was referred to as “the nice George Sanders.”

Subsequent comparisons with his much more successful younger brother (by two years) apparently never bothered him. It was George who persuaded his brother to try Hollywood after his desultory radio and stage appearances in their adopted country, England. (The Sanders came from a wealthy St. Petersburg family who had fled the Russian revolution to England, and then lived in genteel poverty.)

George wrote their father (who also came to Hollywood) lengthy missives quite practically spelling out how Tom should approach Hollywood.  What clothes to buy, what pictures should be taken. In one entertaining letter, he advised how to handle producers and studio bigwigs.  The cynicism is abundant, and the recommendations are dead on.

In Hollywood, Sanders was supportive of brother.  The fact that Tom made an unsuccessful (screen) test should not depress him, he wrote in a 1937 letter to their father. I have made plenty of unsuccessful tests, and so has everyone else in the business. And the fact they said Tom did not photograph well should be no cause for alarm, since they said precisely the same thing to Ronald Colman!

After a stint at MGM, Conway shifted to RKO where he made his most memorable film appearances. He starred in 10 titles of the studio’s profitable Falcon mystery series, taking over the lead abandoned by brother George — on his way to bigger things. Be that as it may, the series with Tom in the lead performed every bit as well, if not better, at the box office than versions starring brother George.

But to fully appreciate what a solid actor Conway was, we suggest you take a look at two classics, 1942′s Cat People and 1943′s I walked With A Zombie, both directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton.

In the former, Conway is silkenly ominous as Dr. Louis Judd, the villainous Freudian psychiatrist treating star Simone Simon as a kittenish Serbian immigrant with feline issues.  In the latter, he plays a more complex character, the proprietor of a Caribbean plantation beset by voodoo, a zombie wife and lust for costar Frances Dee.

In both these excellent movies, Conway is terrific. He appeared in a supporting part as the aristocratic “Whitfield Savory II” in the 1948 fantasy musical One Touch of Venus, starring Robert Walker and a young Ava Garner on loanout from MGM.

By the Fifties, Conway concentrated on television, and logged a host of credits on several tube series.

Ironically, he was a panelist on a TV show called Bachelor’s Haven, and arranged to have Zsa Zsa Gabor, George’s second wife, turn up as a guest.  Gabor, decked out in what she called her “working diamonds” was a sensation, becoming “an instant star.” The tube appearance launched a career that Sanders feared, since he preferred his wives to be docile and professionally non-threatening.

The Sanders brothers, close for much of their lives, were estranged by the time Conway expired.  George got fed up dealing with Tom’s alcoholism. Battling drinking problems and coping with failing eyesight, Conway died more or less destitute in 1967 at 62.

Sanders expired five years later, the subject for another blog.

 

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George Sanders Greets Rubi’s Penis!

Aug24
2011 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

“You’re maudlin and full of self pity… You’re magnificent.”

This, one of our all time favorite movie lines, was superbly delivered by George Sanders in 1950′s “All About Eve.” It is directed at Bette Davis as stage diva Margo Channing in the throes of an temperamental explosion encapsulized by the familiar line: “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

For our money, Sanders’ delivery of his line (as dyspeptic and ultra-cynical drama critic Addison de Witt) was more than sufficient to earn him 1950′s best supporting actor Oscar. This is a notable time when the Academy got it exactly right.

Sanders’ line also sounds like something that the actor himself might have written, although he didn’t (director Joseph J. Mankiewicz wrote the “All About Eve” script.) The Russian-born Brit was not only a facile and entertaining actor — not great but very good — but also a gifted writer.

Hello everybody, classic movie guys Joe Morella and Frank Segers with the first of several blogs to come on Classic Movie Chat about George Sanders both as actor and as writer.

The Sanders material that we have unearthed is not just a pleasure to read but also provides humorously incisive behind-the-scenes looks at Hollywood’s social mores over two decades beginning in the late 1930′s.

After appearing in several British movies in 1936, he decided that his fortunes lie in America. He was right. His Hollywood career lasted more than three decades, covering well more than 100 movies, many dogs but several gems including “Eve.”

Sanders himself was married four times, most famously to Zsa Zsa Gabor from 1949 to 1954. (The actor later was married for a year beginning in 1970 to Zsa Zsa’s sister, Magda.)

It is the end of the Zsa Zsa marriage that we discuss in today’s Sanders anecdote, quoting from a letter scriptwriter-director Nunnally Johnson wrote to a Hollywood pal in early 1954. (Later blogs will come directly from Sanders writings.)

Seems that Zsa Zsa was prickly about reaching a final property agreement as part of the couple’s divorce settlement. She kept upping the ante at the last minute, demanding more and then still more, which irritated Sanders. “But he figured it wouldn’t be difficult to get something on her,” wrote Johnson.

At the time Gabor had taken up with Dominican playboy-diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa — a notorious womanizer said to have been exceptionally well endowed. Sanders came up with the idea of catching Zsa Zsa in flagrante delicto with Rubirosa (known as simply “Rubi”) at the Bel Air residence they shared.

Wrote Johnson: “So on Christmas Eve, that holy day, (Sanders) prepared to raid her home to catch Rubirosa in the hay with her.” Somehow George managed with the help of four private detectives to hoist a ladder to a second-floor balcony outside Gabor’s bedroom, and to actually climb up and into her boudoir.

Johnson recounts what happened: “(There) he saw two naked forms break the record for the dash to the bathroom, where the light was on… Rubi and Zsa Zsa had slammed the door shut but in their excitement they forgot it could also be locked.

“The door opened inward and then it became a head-on push between George and Rubi, Rubi trying to hold the door shut, George trying to bull it open.

“Now, according to George, he was hitting low, just like Knute Rockne always said, and with a powerful lunge he managed to get the door open about a foot, which to his astonishment brought him face to face with Rubirosa’s organ, whereupon, in a moment of whimsy, he shook it heartily and called Merry Christmas to them both.

“‘Now, George, really!,’” exclaimed Zsa Zsa. “‘Please be seated and I’ll be out in just a moment.’

“She emerged in a diaphanous negligee, leaving the shy Mr. Rubirosa skulking in the can.” Johnson’s letter goes on to note that Zsa Zsa employed her charm to calm the situation, even showing Sanders and his gumshoes the living room Christmas tree and inquiring of Sanders if he had received her gift.

Sanders and entourage exited through the front door, handshakes and exchanges of “God bless you’s” all around.

Stay tuned for more about George Sanders, whose life was often far more interesting than the roles he played onscreen.

 

 

 

 

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