What it’s like to live with the fear of cancer
By Brooke Scott

They’d put him in a hospital bed and told him it would be six days before they knew if he had cancer or if he did not. They put a white cardboard sign on his door, “No Visitors,” and they left him to his torment. There was nothing more they could do for him. “For those six days,” Sebastian says, “I was right there on the top line, and I don’t know that I can describe the feeling. Pray? Yes, I prayed. I don’t know that I am what you would call a particularly religious man, but, indeed, I believe in God. And I prayed.”

The voice that so perfectly fits the man rumbled on. “I didn’t make any drastic bargains with God that I recall…like, for instance, promising I would become a monk or something. Yet, I made what I suppose you would call bargains. ‘If I live, I will do this and I won’t do that,’ if I live! But mostly, I lay there with tubes in my nose and down my throat—and the mind races until it tires and you sleep.”

“Sabby,” as his friends call him, had been home from the hospital less than two weeks when he welcomed Photoplay into his West Los Angeles home. He was settled in the living room, his girth pinched between the arms of a large leather chair.

Even though he had been terribly ill, collapsing from loss of blood, a major operation, it did not appear that he had lost many of his 260 pounds. “But now,” Sabby smiled, “once I sit down it really takes me a hell of a long time to get back up again.”

Together with his attractive wife, Kathleen, and seven-year-old Yvonne, Sabby lives in his two-story house surrounded by his one great weakness, cars.

In front of the house is a company car from the Family Affair people; in the drive and flanking a rear two-car garage, there is a fire-engine red Jaguar, a prized two cylinder Citroen, a ’56 “Sand and Sable” Bentley, and a late model station wagon. Inside the garage, there is a classic SS-100 Jaguar and a model of the famed British La Gonda.

In contrast is the unpretentious décor inside the house. There is an over-abundance of reading material. Books, magazines, newspapers, scripts, letters, etc. A wooden TV table is set up in front of Sabby’s chair, and it holds an overflow of correspondence and the telephone.

“Most people are afraid of the word cancer,” he said seriously. “Why look at the Los Angeles Times, for instance. Now, I’m born on July 6, I’m a Cancer—the astrological sign—but according to the times, I’m a ‘Moon Child.’ Well, this is a lot of balderdash. They say I’m a moon child because they don’t want to use that word, cancer.

“Granted, it’s terrible to hear that you might have cancer, but certainly it’s worse not to know. At least if they find it, they can cure it—half the time, anyway.

“And what’s the difference, if you know or do not know? Sure if you don’t know, you may have a few months of blissful ignorance of it, but if you are going to die, you are going to die. One day you have a pain, so you go to the doctor, and he tells you then you have cancer. You see, you are going to find out anyway, aren’t you? Unless, of course, you are fortunate enough in the meantime to drop dead from something else

“I’ll tell you one thing, though, that is rather ironic. My mother is suffering from ulcers, too, and I took her in for a check up on the Friday. She had been complaining of pains, and as it turned out, she was ‘deliciously tender’—yes, that’s the way the doctor described it.”

Sabby chortled, smoothed his beard and allowed that he simply loved the way doctors phrased things. “Anyway,” he went on, “he looked at me then and he said, ‘Well, work must be agreeing with you, you look great, simply marvelous.’

“That was on the Friday. On the Sunday, I collapsed and was carted off to the bloody hospital. One minute I was standing, the next minute I was down.”

They took Sebastian to a Culver City hospital and called his doctor, who diagnosed his condition. A bleeding ulcer.

Serious, of course, but at least the diagnosis doesn’t scare you to death. They know how to treat a bleeding ulcer. Actually, in quite a short time, Sabby was on the mend. He was home again and “feeling full of beans” for a couple of weeks. “But, when I went back for a check, wham, there was another ulcer.”

And there was something else, too. This time they found a “mass” behind it. Could be an inflamed ulcer, they told him, or it could be a carcinoma. Cancer!

“When he told me,” Sabby recalled, “I stood there and thought, ‘This is not happening to me.’ You cannot believe it! They shifted me to UCLA that very day—because they are better equipped to handle a man of my size.

“As you might imagine,” Sabby shifted slightly in his chair, “I’m not the easiest person in the world to operate on.” The doctor at UCLA scheduled more tests. First, an acid test.

“Theoretically, if one has a malignant ulcer in the stomach, you don’t produce much acid. But I poured it out, and that was a good sign.” There were other tests that day and they also came back benign.

“So, they told me I was 95 percent home safe and the final thing was, will the ulcer cure? Well, it seemed to, and I was out of the hospital and fine. But a month after I came home, bing, I was back in the hospital. Then, of course, there is a great nervousness. Was it malignant after all?

“So they operated on me and they took away half my stomach. That’s when they told me it would be six days before the biopsy report would be available. It’s so terrifying, and you can’t do a thing.”

True to their word, six days later they told Sabby the biopsy was benign. It seemed as if he would be one of the lucky ones. And, through it all, his wife Kathleen was at his side.

“I met my wife about 30 years ago in London when I was a struggling young actor. She worked for a paper company and was dating a friend of mine. He introduced me to her as the man who could tell her a joke a day, and all of them a bit, shall we say, ‘colorful.’

“I thought she was most attractive, but she was dating this other chap, as I said, so I didn’t think too much about her. But then, not too long after that, I ran into her again and she told me she wasn’t seeing my friend, so we went out. We liked each other, you know, that sort of thing, and three months later we married.”

Sebastian held various jobs before he succumbed to the theater. Born in 1918 in London, he had a normal type childhood, that is, until he was 14. Then he left school to take a job as a garage helper. Elbow deep in grease and oil, the boy was in heaven repairing automobile engines.

However, his usefulness at the garage came to an abrupt end, after six months when his enthusiasm got the best of him, and he “creased” a customer’s car.

His next job was as a cook, and, up to his elbows in sauces and savories, Sebastian was soon 16 and weighed 228 pounds; at 18, 280 pounds.

When he had had his “bit of truck” with cars and cooking—his enthusiasm for both has never waned—there followed in due course his introduction into the third world in which he thrives. The theater. Working as a chauffeur for the British actor Frank Pettingill, Sabby knew at last that he, too, would be an actor.

This, as Sabby was to learn, was easier said than done. But, he was young and very dedicated—and besides, his pretty, red-haired Kathleen encouraged him.

His first appearance on the London stage was in A Bell for Adano in 1945, and by this time, his first child, Annette, was two years old. As his career flourished then, so did his family. In 1946, a son, Christopher, was born, and in 1947, Cabot came to the U.S. for the first time.

“Annette is married now and lives just a few blocks from here.” Sabby pointed his finger in a southerly direction. “And she does a bit of acting now and then, too.

“Christopher is 21, and he lives in London. He’s a drama student.”

Had Christopher felt the pang of comparison to his father? “Oh no-o-o-o-o,” Sabby was emphatic. “For one thing, he doesn’t look like me. He’s tall and slim, looks rather like my father. Of course, he’s young and filled with causes. It will take him a time to settle down, but I will admit, he has talent.

“Actually, he thinks I’m a great ham. But then he’s so busy over there with his drama lessons. You know the type of school. He goes to class, and they tell him he’s a tree, and he stands there like a fool, saying, ‘I’m a tree.’ Can you believe it?” The youth of today

Sabby harrumphed. “I don’t understand it. When I was his age, I was working for Frank Pettingill, who was older than I, but I didn’t think he was a ham. I just thought he was a damn good actor. Ah, well, I don’t understand the youth of today.

“And their causes! I have no time for these kids who stomp around and say, ‘What is this world you have made for us? We’re living under the bomb.’

“Well, so am I living under the bomb. And I lived under the bomb years ago in London, and then it wasn’t just a threat. They were falling all around us.

“I’m a worrywart, I will say that. But I don’t worry about world affairs. No, this is not why I have ulcers. And I certainly don’t worry about the show. We have a very happy company on Family Affair. And I don’t worry about my children. To tell you the truth,” he laughed, “I don’t know what I worry about.”

Sabby had hooked his thumbs over his belt, his hands spread out over his stomach, and when he laughed, his stomach bounced as you felt it would. As a friend recently quipped, “fat-man mannerisms fit him like a second skin.”

The afternoon was fading and shadows now filled the living room. Certainly, he must be tiring. “I’m looking forward to five days in Arizona with lots of sun and rest. When I get back, I will have the final results of the last batch of tests.”

More tests?

“Yes, things are not quite perfect, so they have to keep after me. There is still—even now after this operation thing—quite a bit of acid, and they must check to see if another ulcer shows up.

“But an ulcer I can cope with. And I’m back to work, back with my family, and there is so much to be grateful for.”

Friends and family are grateful, too, for they are privileged to know a man of great courage and great character. He is a man who will tell you that he sweated and suffered and prayed to God because he so desperately wanted to live.

And he knows that we mustn’t fear the word cancer. “Anybody who doesn’t check is an idiot,” in Sabby’s opinion, “even though you might not like what you hear. True, you may lose a few months because of an operation; you may be laid up recuperating, but at least you’re having a go at living. The other way is simply a form of suicide.”