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- March 18, 1979
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March 18, 1979
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TO my knowledge there have been few if any Sylvia Sidney retrospectives at the art movie houses. And when the ‘evil tongues of the entertainment world gather to hash over professional reputations with the wicked‐sad query, “Whatever became of …,” Sylvia Sidney's name never comes up.
The reason in both cases is a simple one: Miss Sidney, with one of the longest successful careers in show business, is still very much among us and active. She shows up with great frequency in television drama, on the stage and the screen. So how can you do a film retrospective of a career that is still going strong?
Though her work takes her all over the country, she lives quietly in her home near the Litchfield Hills with the three prized pug dogs that she shows. Sylvia — her nickname to friends is spelled Sylie, but pronounced Silly, which she is not — couldn't care less. “I live here the way I would anywhere else. The Beware of the Dog signs are a great deterrent. I have my needlepoint” — she has published two books on the art of needlepoint — “and I raise and show pug dogs.”
The interior of her home is highly personal, neatly crowded with the treasures of a lifetime, ranging from collection of thimbles to two Thurber cartoon originals, a few needlepoints she has done, another collection of pugs in art and china, and her own paintings. The paintings are better than one would think from her statement that “I was unhappy with myself as a painter, which explains how the needlepoint evolved.”
She is kind to her guests, yet with certain brisk authority about her. The voice is, as it always was, suggestive of velvet sandpaper, and the eyes are still those marvelous eyes that illuminated the Depression years of motion pietures. Speaking seriously or tossing her head in laughter, there is always a kind of warm sadness in her eyes.
She knows her house is old, but knows little about its history. “I haven't the foggiest idea of its age, but it's supposed to go back to the Civil War. People have promised to give me more information about the house, but they never come up with it,” she said. “That attitude seems to be indigenous to the soil of Connecticut. If I may be polite enough to say this, everything up here is manana time. You know, ‘We'll come and fix the washing machine but we can't say when.’ So you sit and wait and wait.
“I am curious as to the age of my house only for one reason,” she added. “I want to know which end is going to fall down first.”
The chances are that if her house ever does fall, Sylvia Sidney will not be in it. Last summer she appeared at Candlewood Lake in “Come Blow Your Horn,” then went on with the show to Skowhegan, Me., and Beverly, Mass. Other recent appearances have included the films “Damien: Omen II,” and “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.” The theater has seen her in Tennessee Williams's “Vieux Carre.” Recent television appearances include “Siege,” “Raid on Entebbe” and an episode of “Kaz.”
Considering that her work always takes her someplace else, what is she doing in Connecticut at all? “My dogs. Connecticut began for me with my pug, Ch. Pug Pen's Captain Midnight. started showing him at the instigation of a very great lady named Mary Shipman Pickhardt. Mary was probably the best breeder and exhibitor of pugs on the Eastern seaboard. I carried around the cover the Kennel Gazette with a picture of her Sabbaday Echo on it.
“The first time I showed the old Captain, I looked over and said to myself, ‘My God, it's that wonderful woman, Mary Pickhardt.’ And she looked at me and said, ‘You're Sylvia Sidney.’ And then she said, ‘You keep showing that little black boy.’ “
“Well, over the summer we kept meeting, and I wasn't too happy about what was happening to the Captain. He was all too young and very immature, but he showed beautifully. Everybody warned me that I would have a tough time showing him because there were very few black pugs around, and the judges really didn't like to put them up.
“I'd go to the shows every weekend, and they were giving him so little recognition that it was breaking my heart. Finally I stopped showing him and I took him on tour with me when went out with the National Repertory.
“When I came back Mary called me and said, ‘Where is that black dog?’ said I wouldn't show him, it was too painful. Well, I went to a Long Island show with her, and when we came back, she said, ‘Let me look at that dog.’ She examined him and said, ‘If you don't show him I'll kill you. I'll even get a handler for you.’ The next two shows my pug beat her Sabbaday Bonanza. The old Captain finished his championship on Oct. 22, 1967.
“Well, I still lived in New York, and by this time I was weekending with Mary so much that I felt like a pig, so the following summer I rented Mary's little cottage in Washington, Conn. was amazed and I never found myself thinking, ‘Why can't I get to Sardi's or to a movie?’
“By the time I looked around two years had gone by and the house had gotten a little small for me and eight pugs. I picked up the Sunday Times real‐estate section and ran my finger down the column — that's how I once bought a 120‐acre farm in Flemington, N.J. The house I came up with was one down the road. The owner said it was the oldest in this town. I told her I wasn't interested in that. From now on, said, the oldest thing in any house is going to be me. What I want is instant house.
“She said there was another house down the road but that I wouldn't be interested. It was this house. The thing that sold me was the back door, because right next to it was what thought would be a perfect puppy room. The dogs can run outside from their separate entrance, and they don't have to be all over the house if I don't want them to be.
“My current pugs, by the way, are Sabbaday Kidd's Capricorn, Kochs Kidd'S Ladybug and Ch. Kidd's Star Sapphire. Sabbaday Capricorn is in the top 10 winning pugs in the country, and the only black one.”
The afternoon sun was beginning to fade, but there were still one or two questions I wanted to try on the lady. Had she ever thought of retiring? I got a whoop of laughter. “I can't afford it. My pensions won't cover me.”
I knew enough not to ask her age. One never does. But I was curious about her height. The woman who had held her own on any stage or screen on which had seen her was surprisingly tiny. “How tall are you?”
She smiled. “I don't know. I'll tell you my age, but not my height. My height is a sleight‐of‐hand trick. Everybody thinks I am tall and you cannot be a leading lady unless you're tall. Many years ago a very famous producer said to me, ‘You're going to be an aging ingenue if you don't do something about your height.’ So I made it up. I would say I was 5‐feet‐5 or 5‐feet‐6 and then I'd put on the heels to make it happen. But my age — everybody knows that. I'm 68.”
The New York Times Ken Lafla
Sylvia Sidney through the years and right, at home near the Litchfield Hills
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