Two in the Center

There was a day when big-time swingers in their spats and waistcoats used to go to a Broadway show, look over the girls and select the ones they would have, like lobsters from a tank. William Randolph Hearst acquired Marion Davies that way. But that was the Ziegfeld era in the Pleistocene epoch. Modern Broadway is different. Chorus lines, even in musicals, are depleted, and those old self-made audience libertines have turned into relatively timid expense-account types who go, in a big verbal way, for the unattainable elf of the smash light comedy --the bright and blue-jeaned breed of girl that can make a man of 50 start reading the Village Voice.

Two such girls in particular are the talk of Broadway's present season: Sandy Dennis, the coy mistress of a corporate president in Any Wednesday; and Elizabeth Ashley, who, as a new bride living in a fifth-floor walkup, is part wife, part nut in Barefoot in the Park.

Landed Leader. "Let me tell you about Sandy Dennis," wrote Walter Kerr in his review of Any Wednesday. "There should be one in every home." He has spoken for men everywhere. Sandy has gold hair, green eyes, a high forehead, a pouting mouth and perhaps four extra teeth, and she is so cute that she makes a fundamentally sleazy story seem like the cliche parabola of innocent love. At least, that is how the boys see it.

Some of the girls think that Sandy is really cutesy, to borrow a pejorative coinage from the play itself, because she deliberately stumbles all over her lines and waves her hands helplessly like a three-year-old, soaking up empathy for her inability to cope with the world. The girls might well ask: If she is so helpless, how did she land the president of the company?

Blushing Raves. Dennis does have something undeniably magnetic. She made a splendid young social worker in 1962 with Jason Robards Jr. in A Thousand Clowns, winning a Tony award for it. Now 27, she has moved into her stardom in the theater as easily as if her place had been reserved by celestial decree.

Daughter of a railway mail clerk, Sandy was born in Hastings, Neb., and raised in Kenesaw and Lincoln. After a short flirtation with college life, she left for New York, where she took a cold-water flat in the Village and enrolled in Herbert Berghofs acting school. Here is where the hat-check part usually comes in, and the feet graped with blisters, but not for Sandy. She had been in Manhattan only a few months when an off-Broadway producer stopped her on the street, asked if she was an actress, then said he wanted her to read for a part in Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. She got it, and everything has swum since then. She is out of the cold-water flat and into a five-room place on the-upper West Side, which she shares with a couple of dogs and a calico cat.

Bitter reversals don't happen to her. Relatively, one of the worst moments of her life occurred two years ago when she was the adolescent in the Broadway production of Graham Greene's The Complaisant Lover. Opening night, her slip came loose and began to make its way to her ankles. She waddled around behind a couch and stepped out of it, sure that the audience had not noticed. When she came back out again, the audience exploded with applause. Even her embarrassments draw raves.

Never to Cleveland. Barefoot's Elizabeth Ashley is somewhat more expectable. She is a 24-year-old girl from Baton Rouge who has used up a few million ergs making good on the stage. She has checked hats. Off-stage she wears denim slacks, a turtleneck jersey, desert boots, and about three tablespoons of mascara. At work, she consciously seems to be imitating Audrey Hepburn (just as Sandy Dennis, disconcertingly enough, seems to be copying Marlon Brando), but inside this derivative shell a considerable talent seems to be winning in its effort to come out.

The girl is engaging and a little eccentric. She talks like a hi-fi turned all the way up and left on all day. But what she says often has insight. "I was a nice girl in a nice family in a nice house in a nice town, and I ran away from home because I was unhappy," she says with no apparent sense of incongruity. She arrived in New York ("If you leave Baton Rouge, you don't go to Cleveland") and began working as a model on Seventh Avenue, but quit after two months. "The garment center is a dirty place," she says. "It's all sweaty palms, yelling and screaming. They are not nice people. They are crass and they have no manners."

Waiting for Otto. She punctuates all her narratives, like Mort Sahl, by saying "Right?" On television, she became "the chiffon-light Jell-O pudding and pie-filling girl," toured New York State as Jenny the Genesee Beer Girl for $250 a week, and "that was more money than I thought God had. Right?" While going to classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse, she worked as a waitress nights until 4 a.m. "I have a lot of guts," she says, splitting a subtle hair, "but not a lot of courage; and courage is where the money is."

Setting up an axiom for herself, she decided never to stay at home and be depressed about not working. Instead she would go to the vast Manhattan offices of the M.C.A. talent agency and be depressed there. "I would put on my most Villagey clothes--and cry loud enough for everyone to hear. I'd talk about suicide and Freud. I made sure they knew me. I would act crazy. They sent me up for jobs to get me out of their office. Sometimes it was just a two-week stint on a soap opera, but I worked. I can't stand actors who sit around on their rumps waiting for Otto Preminger to come to them and say, 'I've seen your artistry. Nobody is going to see your artistry. You can always wait on table and check hats with no loss to your pride. I get paid well now. I drive a hard bargain. I think actors deserve every penny they get."

Odds & Symbols. Elizabeth Ashley got her first toe in as understudy to Barbara Bel Geddes in Mary, Mary. Soon she was all over the big TV shows, like Hallmark Hall of Fame and The Defenders. "The only person who ever believes in you is you, and I believed in me a lot," she remembers. Her first major Broadway chance finally made hay out of her belief: in 1961's Take Her, She's Mine, she turned the daughter's role into a Tony of her own.

Separated from Actor James Farentino, she is presently invigorated by George Peppard. "I'm not going to grow up to be a man," she says. "Most actresses do. They're great people, but they're lousy women. They're the classic failures. They're the beautiful people. They're symbols. They feel a lot. They fail as women. To be a good human being, you have to adhere to the ethics of your work. Right? The ethics of the theater is that your personal problems cannot interfere with your work. Actresses have to compromise. So they marry the saxophone player, or the doctor, or the faggot. Anything so they don't have to function as women. Me, I'm going to try to commit to the real world."

While she is deciding that one, she would not mind being part of a rep company. "The only way an actor grows," she has learned, "is by playing role after role after role, and not in two-year runs. Repertory theater is great for actors because they're allowed to fail. I should have the chance to fail atrociously as Lady Macbeth right now. Then maybe I could do St. Joan."

But for her, failing as Lady Macbeth might be harder than she thinks.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.