Interview w Gerald S. O'Loughlin 8/26/11:
I understand you were close to the actress Sandy Dennis.
Yeah, we lived together for seven years, in New York.
Tell me about her.
What was she like?
Extremely gifted, extremely talented, and a lovely, lovely woman.
How did the two of you meet?
We were both understudies in a William Inge play called Dark at the Top of the Stairs.
I understudied Pat Hingle, and she understudied two people, Eileen Heckart and somebody else.
She usually played neurotic or high-strung characters.
Was she like that off-screen?
No, not really.
One time when we lived together – I myself was a dyslexic, and I was going to a psychiatrist, and I was bemoaning my fate – how it was a terrible job to keep a checkbook balanced and accurate, and the psychiatrist said, “Did you ever think of adding a column of figures twice?”
And I said no.
It was true – I never did.
I got through college, I was studying engineering, I took it for granted that I could handle the figures.
I never did that.
So I started adding them twice, and I was elated at the results.
I went out and rented a little electric adding machine, and I loved it!
Punch up the combination and then press the button to print, and it would go click-click-click-click-click.
It was a ball!
I really had a good time.
And she came into the room while I was doing it one day, and I looked at her and she looked at me, and she said, “Oh, I hate that look on your face, when you’re like that.”
I said, “Well, that’s because you don’t bother with that.
In your life you” – how did I put it? – “you just go running around to department stores, charging things up and then going on the road, and then I have to pay for them.”
She had half a glass of water in her hand, and she threw the water out of the glass at me.
I jumped up and grabbed her and shoved her back into the shower with her clothes on.
It was all good-natured and fun.
But not long after that she left me.
Boze Hadleigh’s book Hollywood Lesbians includes an interview with Dennis, in which he suggests that she was bisexual or gay.
I never heard that.
I know that she left Gerry O’Loughlin, an Irish alcoholic, for Gerry Mulligan, an Irish . . . he used all kinds of substances.
From one to the other.
But I don’t know anything specific about her lesbianism.
Were you still a couple when she made Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1966?
We were not still together, but we were friends.
I stopped in on the set and said hello to her one time.
We’d essentially split up by that time.