Sandy Dennis and Robert Altman: An Almost Perfect Pair

“He [Altman] said that people assumed I was afraid of sex. I might not have even have had sex. Maybe all my pregnancies were hysterical, imagined. He told me this!"

Barbara Baxley was, as the director would later tell me, one of Robert Altman’s most vocal supporters. Baxley told her actor friends to make every effort to work with this man, who was, in her words, something of a shaman. “What Lee [Strasberg] had been for me in the early years, and what Sandy Meisner continued to do for me in class, Altman did for me on a set. He opened me up. What else can I say? He wiped away all my errors of thinking, and in making me look again at myself and my character made me a better actress. I trusted him entirely.”

Baxley knew that her friend Sandy Dennis did not trust easily, so she recommended that the two of them meet, then work together. Altman was resistant. “He told me he had heard she was a pain in the ass,” Baxley told me. “And she was. In the sense that she resisted direction. She had little to no trust in herself, so she had little to no trust in others.” Baxley offered an example: “I went into Plaza Suite. It was a hit. It had been running, and people wanted to see it. I was impressed that Mike Nichols came and worked with me and Dan Dailey. Usually, after a play has been running, and you come in for a few weeks, you don’t even meet the director: The stage manager puts you through your paces, but Mike came and directed us. Really directed us. Mike never said or did anything that didn’t improve the both of us. I know he made me better, and I could see how he improved Dan Dailey. Dan was a good surface actor: He could ride one adjective well, and Mike got him to juggle about three of them, so there was depth in what he did. Mike took the fuzz off my work. Made it sharper. I was so focused and detailed in that. So the play improved.

“Sandy had been with him for [Who’s Afraid of] Virginia Woolf? so I mentioned that we were friends. Mike really liked Sandy, but he hold me about her resistance, and that surprised me. I mean, Mike had no grandeur about him. He wasn’t brash and demanding. His control came from the actor’s submission to him, because we could see that he was right. I talked to Sandy about this later, and she said she knew she had fucked up, but she finally did what Mike told her to do.

“So I hear this and now I’m determined to get Sandy and Altman together, and it happened.”

It happened with That Cold Day in the Park.

I was able to gather one comment from Sandy Dennis, in a hallway of HB Studio in 1989, about That Cold Day in the Park. She smiled and said, “He [Altman] said that people assumed I was afraid of sex. I might not have even have had sex. Maybe all my pregnancies were hysterical, imagined. He told me this! But, he said, I know you have a good sex life. How? I wondered. I think you can play the repression well from the perspective of a woman who is not repressed. Okay. And then…Fuck Ingrid Bergman. Huh? Well, Ingrid Bergman had turned it down. What did I have in common with Ingrid Bergman? A great beauty and great star. Nothing, Bob said, and that is what is so great.” Sandy laughed, shrugged, and then got into her waiting car.

Back to Baxley:

“Sandy is actually very good with men. Always has been, since I’ve known her. I get what Bob meant though: Sandy doesn’t announce sexuality. She can appear frigid and uncomfortable. But Bob came to see that nothing is so frightening as a vivid sexual imagination—nasty desires—locked up inside of a person and then given an outlet. How does it come out? I know some people who were virgins until they were thirty, and then it was open season. The dam burst, you know? And Bob wanted Sandy to be this orderly, awkward dam. He actually would make the sound of water slapping against a dam, like you hear in storms. You know, the sound of angry water. Bob would make these sounds with Sandy to indicate how high the level was, how angry the tide. I think you can see Sandy cracking through that film. Fine lines emerge in her performance. You know something is coming. Bob is into these types of women. He did it again, in a different way with Images, and he brought me in to do a voice for that film, so I got to see an almost complete film, and then did my work. Susannah York is also cracking in that film. It’s a fascinating performance. I don’t know anything about how he worked with Susannah York, but I’d like to know. I wonder how it compares with the work he did with Sandy. But I think they’re both remarkable performances. Odd films with some interesting things going on. I think working with Altman was good for Sandy, and it didn’t stop there. I bet they do a lot of things together, God willing. They are an almost perfect pair.”