Sonofabitch on screen, in life a ’dear, dear boy’

The end came in 1972 when he was aged 65, and his suicide note read: “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.” Sanders apparently planned his exit decades earlier, with a friend, fellow actor David Niven, telling how in 1937 Sanders had exactly predicted his demise – the means and the age.

He was found dead in a hotel in Castelldefels, a wealthy coastal town near Barcelona, having overdosed on five vials of the prescription drug Nembutal. His farewell reads as an act of bravado but Sanders had grown increasingly reclusive and depressed. Dementia was setting in, leaving him unable to bear the prospect of needing assistance for everyday tasks.

There had also been several tragedies all within the span of a year, including the deaths of his third wife, his mother and his brother Tom. A failed investment cost him millions and his fourth marriage, to Magda Gábor, was annulled after 32 days. When he found that he could no longer physically play his grand piano, he dragged it outside and smashed it with an axe.

To add to the catalogue of woe, the cesspool, his last girlfriend persuaded him to sell his beloved house in Majorca, Spain, which he later bitterly regretted. From then on, he drifted.

Fortunately for we lovers of George Sanders, he published an autobiography, “Memoirs of a Professional Cad” in 1960, and it is a wonderful read, brimful of wit, honesty, insight and intelligence. This is the appropriate way to remember this singular man, the best of whose films often reflected a character thoroughly dissolute but enormously attractive nonetheless.

No film more so than his Oscar-winning turn as cynical theatre critic Addison DeWitt in “All About Eve” (1950), when he arrives at a party with his latest amour on his arm, none other than Marilyn Monroe at her most stunning (and whom he swiftly dumps on another man).

If writers of autobiographies tend to profess themselves innocent of the bad bits that the world knows about, and skip entirely the naughty bits that didn’t come to public knowledge, Sanders is frank. Here are the idle thoughts of a self-confessed idle fellow, who willingly concedes that with more effort he might have risen even further in his profession.

He was born on July 3, 1903 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. His parents were Margaret and Henry Sanders, not Russian but of Scottish ancestry. They were well-off though not terribly rich.  It was a world that was soon to disappear, he recounts, of clinking champagne glasses, colonnaded private ballrooms with sciintillating chandeliers, and heel-clicking  bemonocled princes in gorgeous uniforms driving their ladies in jingling troikas through the moonlit snow.

Childhood meant swimming,  canoeing, sailing, skiing, tobogganing, skating and listening to his father playing the balalaika. But then the family had to flee the Bolshevik revolution. “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. Personally, I feel that I am the living proof of this contention. However, a surprising number of people think otherwise.”

Lenin was entering Russia in 1917 as the Sanders were exiting, the Tsar signing away their inheritances, holdings and gilt-edged future, “an action for which I, personally, have never forgiven him”. All the family’s possessions were left behind.

Sanders’ ever-present sardonic style continues as he recalls his schooldays in England. “Due to circumstances well within their control but not within the scope of their knowledge, my parents sent me to the wrong schools… [now] I feel that I am gradually succeeding in re-educating myself to the point I should  have arrived at thirty years ago, and, if I live long enough, I may be able to catch up with myself.”

Ditto, his employment history. First, he could not get the hang of his duties at a textile-producer in Manchester and was thrown out. Next, he worked in the factory of a cigarette-maker in Buenos Aires (where else?) and they sent him to the wilds of Patagonia to survey smoking habits. After three months away from civilisation he deduced an important life lesson upon arrival back in the bright lights of the Argentine capital.

He now saw it as an entirely new world of sleek powerful cars and elegantly dressed women – “… from this experience I arrived at the conclusion that to enjoy one’s life to its fullest, one must build contrast into it. And the more extreme the contrast the fuller the life.”

A problem with punctuality saw him sacked again, though, whereupon he took a similar job in Chile. But after becoming involved with a woman and then shooting her fiancé in the neck in a duel – the man survived – he was briefly jailed before being thrown out of both the company and South America. He found himself back in England.

“Upon my return in disgrace from South America I found it very difficult to get a job… ” Eventually he landed in advertising again but only for a “humiliatingly short period” before being  informed “in a manner I  thought unnecessarily impolite that the company had decided to dispense with my services”. However, at a party his resonant baritone singing and piano playing found him offered a part in a revue, which he accepted.

From there, films followed, first in Britain then Hollywood. “When I began my career in films I found it rather frustrating not to be cast in romantic parts, since it seemed to me that I was just as handsome, dashing, and heroic as any of my contemporaries. But I soon became adjusted to the idea that I would always be cast as the villain and I have found many compensations for this state of affairs.” Despite his professed indifference to success, he excelled portraying disagreeable characters of sophistication, elegance and cynicism.

Sanders’ back-in-print book offers insightful and always entertaining observations on audiences, fame, entourages, luxuries, Academy Awards, psychiatry, sub-standard hotels, mass production killing individual craftsmanship, interviews, learning how to say “no”, monocles and many other subjects. There were the perils during filming in Spain, Italy and Japan, actors he knew including Monroe and Tyrone Power, and odd directors such as Roberto Rossellini. Sanders has nice words for Zsa Zsa Gábor, his second wife of five years, tolerating her idiosyncracies, despite her seemingly being permanently under a hairdryer.

In tongue-in-cheek and devil-may-care fashion, here is a life lived with a sense of wonder not only at the absurdities going on around him but also at those within himself. Sanders’ own misadventures and how he dealt with them are laconically told. He may present a skew-whiff sensibility but that’s why we love him. Whereas on the screen he was invariably a sonofabitch, he writes, in life he was a dear, dear boy.

“You can see all the stars as you walk down Hollywood Boulevard… ” as the song goes. George Sanders has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for his 80 films at 1636 Vine Street and for his television shows at 7007 Hollywood Boulevard. A man with a solid appreciation for the female form, perhaps he keeps an eye on the ladies as they pass above.