Memoirs of a Professional Cad Read online

  George Sanders

  Memoirs of A Professional Cad

  What might we dare to expect from an actor’s autobiography, even one from a star as personable as George Sanders? In the case of Memoirs of A Professional Cad, we possibly get more than we deserve. George Sanders undoubtedly led a colourful, glamorous and even action-packed life, spanning the peak years of Hollywood’s golden age. But the greatest joy of his memoirs is how funny they are, and how penetrating their author’s wit. Endlessly quotable, every chapter shows that the sardonic charm and intelligence he lent to the silver screen were not merely implied.

  George’s early childhood was spent in Tsarist Russia, before he was obliged to flee with his family to England on the eve of the Russian Revolution. He survived two English boarding schools before seeking adventure in Chile and Argentina where he sold cigarettes and kept a pet ostrich in his apartment. We can only be grateful that George was eventually asked to leave South America following a duel of honour (very nearly to the death), and was forced to take up acting for a living instead.

  Memoirs of A Professional Cad has much to say about Hollywood and the stars George Sanders worked with and befriended, not to mention the irrepressible Tsa Tsa Gabor who became his wife. But at heart it is less a conventional autobiography, and more a Machiavellian guide to life, and the art of living, from a man who knew a thing or two on the subject. So we are invited to share George’s thought-provoking views on women, friendship, the pros and cons of therapy, ageing, possessions, and the necessity of contrasts (Sanders’ maxim: ‘the more extreme the contrast, the fuller the life’).

  Previously out of print for many decades, Memoirs of A Professional Cad stands today as one of the classic Hollywood memoirs, from one of its most original, enduring and inimitable stars. This edition also features a new afterword by George Sanders’ niece, Ulla Watson.

  This book is affectionately dedicated to my father, who is the source of my past experience, and to Benita, who is the sauce of my present laughter.

  G.S.

  BOOK I

  CHAPTER 1

  On July 3, 1906, the world was at peace. Nothing of any consequence seemed to be happening in the capital cities of any of its countries. Nothing disturbed the summer lethargy of its population. Everywhere people dozed contentedly, unaware that an event of major importance was taking place in St. Petersburg, Russia. At number 6 Petroffski Ostroff, to Margaret and Henry Sanders, a son of dazzling beauty and infinite charm was being born. It was I.

  I emerged somewhat reluctantly from my mother’s womb at 6 o’clock in the morning. My father, who had been warned of the impending event only a short time prior to its occurrence, had rushed off to get the midwife who lived across the Neva on the Vassilsky Ostroff. He drove in a droshky to the Toochkoff Bridge, a wooden bascule, or draw, bridge, which was opened sometimes in the summer to let the river traffic through. It was opening when he reached it. Alighting from the carriage and disregarding the warning cries of the boatmen, he leapt across the widening gap and ran the rest of the way to the midwife’s house. He brought her back across the river in a rowboat, and in a state of exhaustion, pushed her into my mother’s room, where she accomplished a successful delivery.

  In the light of the fact that I have been supporting my father for the past twenty years, his concern for my welfare at the time of my birth would appear to have been thoroughly justified.

  I was born into a world that was soon to disappear. 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.

  A world that was not to be recreated for forty years – and then by M-G-M in Cinemascope with Fernando Lamas.

  My parents were not members of the nobility nor were they terribly rich. But like most people seemed to be in those days, they were well-off. They were both born in St. Petersburg but were not orthodox Russians, since their ancestors came from Scotland. My mother was descended through her grandmother from the Thomas Clayhills of Dundee, who went to Estonia in 1626 to establish a business there. Thus it was from forebears of solid social position and impeccable respectability that my mother came.

  To the best of my knowledge, my father came in the mail.

  We had a summer house in Estonia at a place called Hungerburg. In common with its neighbors, it had a large veranda overlooking the beach.

  Mixed bathing was not allowed, since everybody swam or paddled in the nude. Men and women went into the water in shifts controlled by the position of a pennant attached to a tall flagpole that dominated the beach.

  When the pennant was down it was the men’s turn. When it was raised the men would come out of the water and disappear into their respective beach-house enclosures.

  Then, timorously, casting wary looks to right and left, and crossing their arms across their breasts to clothe their nudity, the women would tiptoe out of their cabanas and, gaining courage with every step, make their way down to the water’s edge where they would dunk themselves like so many doughnuts, squealing with sensual delight, secure in the conviction that they were not being observed.

  Meanwhile, the men would take up their favorite positions on the verandas, whence they watched these activities through high-powered binoculars.

  In this manner a commendable degree of decorum was preserved within an atmosphere of genteel concupiscence.

  And my own instruction in anatomy, though frequently interrupted by the importunities of my nurse, was initiated on a solid foundation.

  Many of our winters were spent on an estate we had acquired across the Finnish border at a place called Mustamaki.

  While in the grounds of our town house in St. Petersburg we had a private skating rink and a couple of artificially built-up toboggan runs, in Mustamäki the whole countryside, blanketed with crisp, sparkling snow, lay open to us for skiing, skijoring and riding spaakstotin.

  There was the incomparable, invigorating air scented by the pine trees. There was the ice-yachting on the frozen lake. There were the high-speed sleighs, drawn by diminutive fast-running Finnish ponies, their bridles hung with merrily jingling bells.

  The estate was to prove a godsend when the time came for my parents to flee from the Bolshevik revolution.

  When I look back on my childhood it seems to me that all of my activities consisted in swimming, canoeing, sailing, skiing, tobogganing, skating and listening to my father play the balalaika.

  My father was regarded as the best amateur balalaika player in St. Petersburg. He was in fact the co-discoverer of the instrument with the celebrated Andreyeff. Previously the balalaika was known only to country folk who used it for accompanying their village choirs. Andreyeff and my father brought the instrument to St. Petersburg and together they had a lot of successful soirees in fashionable circles. It was at one of these that my mother met my father for the first time and became fascinated by his balalaika.

  She was a woman of great beauty, as well as being an heiress to a modest fortune, a fact which struck as responsive a chord in my father as any that he could pluck from his bizarre-looking instrument.

  It was inevitable that a number of balalaika concerts later they were married.

  The concerts continued. Andreyeff and my father became the rage of St. Petersburg. In the course of time word of their virtuosity reached the Imperial family and they were invited to perform at court. Their debut at the vast castellated palace at Gatchina that was the summer residence of Tsar Alexander III was so successful they were given medals and decorations of a size and of an order of magnificence that would have turned Douglas Fa
irbanks positively green with envy.

  I myself was being taught the violin, but I could not see myself winning any medals at it, so I chucked it. My interest lay in sport, in fun and in games, and of these I had plenty.

  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.

  At all events, until the day that my mother took me to school in England my life seemed to be nothing but fun. I remember having an odd feeling on the day we left St. Petersburg that we would never return. As it turned out, we never did. It was this poignant moment of leave-taking that was also my closest brush with history.

  Sir Winston Churchill touched unwittingly upon this moment of my life when he wrote of certain events that were taking place in 1917:

  In the middle of April the Germans took a sombre decision... they turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin, in a sealed truck, like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.

  Lenin was going in as I was coming out. At the Finland Station in St. Petersburg he was being met by his pals Joe Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolshevik gangsters.

  I was being seen off by my father, my Uncle Frederick in his scarlet Cossack uniform, my Aunt Margaret, Prince and Princess Erivansky, Count Benkendorff and my Cousin Agnes.

  Lenin was arriving full of plans for my money. I was leaving for school in England, serenely unaware of his existence.

  To the rest of our gay and well-to-do gathering, Lenin and his fellow conspirators were just a bunch of rather badly behaved peasants.

  Lenin’s plans were not confined to the appropriation of the trust funds that various affluent uncles and aunts of mine had set up to insure for me the sort of life that would have suited my indolent nature – they were far more comprehensive. They included everybody else’s money as well. They also included the murder of most of my relatives.

  I must confess that there are times when I wish they had included the murder of all of them. However, I think I might have spared the ones that provided for me. Quite frankly, I am sorry about the money. I would have liked to have had it.

  On March 15, 1917, in the drawing room of his special train which had been immobilized at Gatchina by the revolutionaries, the Tsar received Minister of War Guchkow, and right-wing Deputy, Basil Shulgin. They induced him to sign a document which read in part: In agreement with the Imperial Duma, we have thought it good to abdicate from the Throne of the Russian State and to lay down the Supreme Power...

  Unbeknown to my family and myself at the time, in signing this document the Tsar had signed away our inheritances, our holdings and our gilt-edged future, an action for which I, personally, have never forgiven him.

  Anyway, it was not long after this that the revolution got started in earnest.

  It erupted like an angry boil that had been squeezed too soon, its skin becoming red and inflamed, its poisonous pus spreading over the face of Russia, contaminating all but the well-to-do, who languidly turned a blind lorgnette upon it.

  Incredible though it may seem, in corrupt, fun-loving St. Petersburg life went on the same as before. In private ballrooms and fashionable restaurants the effete nobility, immaculately attired in their colorful uniforms, toasted one another in vodka and Crimean champagne, while gypsy orchestras played the Mazurka, the Polka, and the Waltz. Gambling for high stakes in the clubs continued uninterruptedly, unaffected by the shooting that was going on outside.

  The supply of, and the demand on, the services of the hard-working prostitutes remained in fine balance.

  The great Karsavina danced to spellbound audiences at the Mariinsky Theatre.

  Chaliapin still sang.

  One of the great heroes of my childhood, my Uncle Jack, contentedly pursued one of his favorite pastimes. 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. Liveried footmen stood by with champagne, extra rounds of ammunition, orange marmalade and strawberry jam.

  Outside in the streets men were dying for a cause to which they were passionately attached, and did not really understand. A cause which only specious dialectics sought to explain.

  In the houses of the rich, men were dying in a different way. Desuetude had signed their death warrants, they were incapable of believing that anything serious was happening.

  No one took any notice of the fact that on April 2, 1917, President Wilson spoke of “The wonderful and heartening things that have been happening in the last few weeks in Russia.” American sentiment was solidly on the side of the revolutionaries.

  The very next day, April 3rd, Kerensky’s provisional government was granted credits by the U. S. A. amounting to $325,000,000.

  For this modest sum America not only guaranteed the success of the revolution, she also bought herself a lifelong enemy, to defend herself against whom it has cost her untold billions of dollars and a tax burden as onerous as that of 1776.

  The Tsar certainly had at his disposal the means with which to subdue the revolutionaries. But he didn’t have the heart.

  In 1917 woollen-heartedness seemed to be the order of the day, for in far-off peaceful Hampshire, my mother received a letter from my father in which he said that there were no signs of the threatened revolution and that it was perfectly safe for her to return and join him in St. Petersburg.

  This she did, having left my brother and myself in the care of English relatives.

  Not long after her arrival in St. Petersburg, the situation became untenable. My mother and father had to flee for their lives across the ice to Mustamaki whence they eventually made their way to England. All of their possessions were left behind and were never recovered.

  The Tsar and his family were shot, along with most of our relatives and friends.

  My Uncle Bob got a job playing the cello in a cinema in Finland, and eventually became a professor of biology in Sweden.

  My Uncle Jack became a professional house guest until his welcome wore thin. Then he became a guest in the wrong sort of houses until in the end he died of syphilis on the Riviera.

  My grandfather escaped to Switzerland, where he was able to live in great comfort while at the same time providing financial support not only to my family but also to our surviving relatives, whose number was fortunately not great enough to put a strain on his resources.

  He was able to do this by virtue of having had investments in Wall Street which lasted until the crash in 1929.

  Not long after this greatest of all our catastrophes it became my lot to assume his mantle of responsibility and to give rather than to receive. It was no surprise to me to discover that the former set of conditions was infinitely more blessed than the latter.

  Although we made good our escape from Russia in a physical and economic sense, in a psychological sense no escape was possible. The mechanisms at work within the minds of White Russians which prevented them from accepting the reality of the revolution when it started, also prevented them from accepting it as an immutable fait-accompli when they became its refugees.

  Even today after forty-one years of uninterrupted communist rule, the Bolshevik revolution has not been fully accepted by White Russians.

  My father has never wavered from his conviction that in the course of time Russia will go back to what he calls normal and that he will get all his property back. He is today, at the age of ninety, in active negotiation for the return of our house in St. Petersburg.

  Among the White Russians in Paris and elsewhere the habit of living in the past became just as deeply ingrained. Consequently, aptitudes and talents were enfeebled, and opportunities to start a new life tragically neglected. So much time was spent in thinking and
talking about the past, that there was little time for the present. Consequently though Russian refugees were glamorous and deeply sympathized with at first, their inability to adjust to their situation became in the course of time an irksome bore to their friends, and an insoluble problem to themselves. A young Russian refugee I know in California told me how much he missed Paris, and how he longed to go back. “Well, why don’t you?” I asked him. “I’m afraid of the Russians,” he said. “You mean you think they’ll move in and take over Europe?” I asked him. “Good Lord, no,” he said. “I’m afraid of the White Russians.”

  It is perhaps interesting to note that even the most gifted, the most virtuous, or those most assiduously addicted to the practice of common sense are all equally at the mercy of the almighty booby trap of circumstance. It makes little difference whether one is kicked upstairs or down, the adjustment is hard to make. The essential requirement is flexibility and the ability to improvise.

  Football-pool winners and impoverished refugees are often found in the same boat. It is not the degree of ill or good fortune that seems to matter. It is the sudden change that unseats people.

  Of course all this has been said before in many different ways and by many different people. Perhaps it has never been said better than by W. Somerset Maugham when he wrote:

  In other arts proficiency can be obtained, but in life little more can be done than to make the best of a bad job. Art is an effect of design: life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

  CHAPTER 2

  Due to circumstances well within their control but not within the scope of their knowledge, my parents sent me to the wrong schools. They did what most if not all parents do, for the appropriate method of educating any individual can only be determined in retrospect. Environment, atavistic tendencies and inherited talents create needs which are not always catered to by institutions of learning. These needs may lie dormant in an individual repressed by fear of failure to conform. Years later, they manifest themselves in various ways, but by then it is usually too late, the individual has become a square peg in a round hole and the burden of responsibility he has acquired in the meantime is too heavy for him to set aside.