"Content with Mediocrity"

It is probably true that Western civilization could have muddled on without an autobiography of George Sanders; but the same might be said of the new precracked bottles of guaranteed-foaming nonchampagne for E-Z ship hunching. Uncorked this week by G. P. Putnam's Sons, the champagne in Actor Sanders' Memoirs of a Professional Cad ($3.50) is at least genuine, and it foams fairly often.

By maintaining a sharp crease in his pants and a permanent wave in his upper lip, handsome Actor Sanders has caused spasms of resentment and loathing among the viewers of some 70 movies (in his most notable villain's role, he won an Oscar as the caddish critic in All About Eve). The antipathy he evokes with his frigorific stare is all the more violent because he is an upper-class rotter, and the only actor since Erich von Stroheim and Charles Coburn who can wear a monocle without looking as if he is going to drop it in his soup.

Regress into Cinema. In prose that is often witty and sometimes arch, Author Sanders (who swears he is ghostless) describes his descent into cinema villainy. No memoir can be got under way properly without the introduction of a clotty relative, and the author, who was born into a wealthy St. Petersburg family, recalls with admiration the pre-Revolution pastime of his favorite uncle, who used to lie in bed with a .22 pistol and shoot flies which gathered on the ceiling to eat the jam he had smeared there. Footmen stood by, Sanders recalls, with champagne, ammunition and more jam. After his family fled to England, Sanders easily withstood a British public-school education (Brighton College), got a job with a South American cigarette company, but was thrown out when he pinked his mistress' fiance in a revolver duel. A bounder, but not yet a villain, Sanders returned to London and developed a low opinion of singers by briefly becoming one (bass-baritone). The move to cinema came naturally, and the author's sneer became permanently and profitably fixed.

Whirling through his career with airy speed, Sanders tells how he might have become a matinee idol if he had not been too bored to keep a crucial lunch date with Louis B. Mayer, how he was signed to replace Ezio Pinza in South Pacific but could not face the tedium of nightly performances on Broadway. "During the five years I was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor," he confides, "I lived in her sumptuous Bel Air mansion as a sort of paying guest." Communicating with Zsa Zsa was never easy, since she seemed to do almost everything under a hair dryer. But once she did come out long enough to recommend a good analyst for poor darling George. "In due course he not only cured me of my obsessional impulses and my periodic backaches, but he also cured me of Zsa Zsa."

The Ultimate Question. Of Sanders' various comments on the passing scene, some of the more acid concern the death of Tyrone Power on the Solomon and Sheba set in Spain and the gaudy funeral that followed in Hollywood, where loud cheers greeted Yul Brynner, as if, by replacing Power in the film, "he was somehow making everything all right." When big bald Yul later arrived in Spain, Sanders cattily reports, he brought along twelve leather suits by Dior (six black, six white) and a retinue of seven stooges, one of whom "was permanently occupied in shaving Brynner's skull."

Sums up Sanders: "I invariably play myself ... I am content with mediocrity and I defy any producer to send me a good script ..." Television? "I only turn it on occasionally when something very special is being presented. (Such as myself.)"

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