The Great Faffler

By Dwight Whitney

Sebastian Cabot, all 260 bearded pounds of him, sat faffling in his favorite Victoria, B.C., steak house. In front of him a 15-ounce top sirloin steak, charred on the outside, rare on the inside. Across the table his devoted wife of 27 years, Kay. At his elbow an attentive headwaiter, and beyond him a roomful of diners whose sidelong glances only barely betray their awareness that Vancouver Island's favorite and most frequent visitor from Hollywood was here.

Cabot smoothed the napkin billowing downward from his size-18 ½ collar, out over the joyous expanse of his midriff, with elaborate precision, called for the wine list, stroked the beard thoughtfully, nodded, scowled, harrumphed, fiddled with his wedding ring (which, in deference to his role of French, the bachelor butler in Family Affair, he wears dangling from his wrist-watch band), cussed out the British Columbia wine board for its incomplete selection of French wines ("Canadian is unpalatably sweet!"), and grudgingly settled on the Pontet Canet 1961. Simultaneously he kept up a running monolog on such subjects as eager-beaver TV executives who put him in long-running TV series ("They faffled me into it!" he grumbled), commission-happy actors' agents who want to make him into "the new, fat Arthur Treacher," and reporters who ask idiotic questions.

Faffling, he explained, is a term invented by the late Charles Laughton. Sabby met Laughton only two years before the actor's death. After their first rehearsal together, Laughton told him, "Cabot, you're a great faffler. You drive script girls crazy. When you blow a line, you don't stop; you keep on going. You harrumph and snuffle and pull your beard and inspect your fingernails and drift on until you find your way back, zero in on the original speech, and away you go. I like that."

Cabot is Laughton's kind of actor. The Great Faffler, on the stage or off it! It is the thing that makes everyone want to paw him, cuddle him, wrap him up, take him home like some kindly but irascible uncle, and it is the quality that makes him money-in-the-band for anybody's TV series.

It is the kind of acting that is all ear and instinct. Everything Sabby knows about it he taught himself. The son of a sometime London photographer and lecturer who died broke, he began his career at 14 as an apprentice chef, ate his way through several jobs, and at 19 became chauffeur to a marvelous Falstaff-playing actor named Frank Pettingell. When he wrecked the limousine, Pettingell fired him.

But Sabby had been infected. He loved the smell of ham and found that the one conversation in the world that didn't bore him began, "Now I remember my performance in..." Moreover, he developed an unerring sense of what suited him. A character man from the day he was born (in 1918), he weighed 228 pounds at 16, 280 at 18. The fat-man mannerisms fit like a second skin. A gifted mimic, he acquired so many dialects that the only way he can explain them is to tell you the ones he can't do. "I can't do Texas and I can't do Oklahoma and I'm not so hot in Lebanese. But that's only because I haven't listened to them very much." During his salad days as a repertory actor in the provinces, as a stage and radio actor in London, and later as a character man in English and Italian films, he was unconsciously looking for the ne plus ultra in ploys, the thing that would really set him apart. In 1950--he was 32--he found it. The beard.

Sabby chortles as he recalls it now. "I was offered a part in a play, a French beachcomber who lay back and spouted yards of wisdom and poetry. I must be unshaven. I thought, migawd, every day I'll have to come in and stick that damned chopped hair on. So I didn't shave. First thing you know I had a beard. I intended to shave it off when the play closed, of course, but meantime I got a movie offer. The producer wanted me to play a French cab-driver--without the hay. I persuaded him the muff was perfect with the beret and cigar stub. It made the part.

"I've been persuading people ever since. My wife hated it at first but threatened to leave me later if I shaved. Orson Welles insisted that I play the bartender in Mr. Arkadin shaven. Orson himself was wearing the beard. 'But, Orson, you know, I've always had the muff.' 'Shave it off, buster, or else.' We wrangled several days. Finally I said, "That's tough, here's the bill, and goodbye.' Walt Disney really did trick me out of it--temporarily. He thought the only people who wore beards were Hessians and chaps like that."

Sabby pauses, samples the Pontet Canet, smiles, pats his stomach, and stabs another ounce of top sirloin. "After Disney, I was naked for about two years. Then one day I got a call from Gunsmoke. When I walked on the set, the director, Bill Russell, didn't even recognize me. 'Who the hell's this guy?' he yelled. 'I thought we had Sabby Cabot for the part.' I grew it back."

The beard has gone through several mutations. For the urbane Dr. Hyatt in Checkmate, his earlier series, he wore it somewhat fuller than he does now. "After all, in Family Affair I play an English gentleman."

The conversation turns to the indescribable joys of the country. Sabby first was exposed to Vancouver Island five years ago on a trip to the Seattle Fair. He immediately fell in love with the place where "everything falls away, even the vast importance of the script." He and Kay bought themselves a house--Kay for the garden, with its plum, three kinds of apple trees, jonquils popping up at random on the lawn, and a fire-red Japanese maple; Sabby for the fishing, the boating, the lush vegetation, the relaxed country atmosphere with its colorful and undemanding local characters, and the opportunity to live as he pleases with plenty of faffling.

As time wore on, it became more and more difficult to pry him away. Today, when he strikes a hiatus in his TV activities, he leaves his daughter, Yvonne, 9, in the charge of her paternal grandmother in his West Los Angeles home, and he and Kay take off. He has become a commuter. He is able to leave Sidney Airport, two miles from the house, at 9:15 any morning and be faffling in Los Angeles by 3 o'clock that afternoon.

Sabby does everything. He used to do Stump the Stars, a now-defunct TV charade game; and commercials for carbonated wines, sugars, refrigerators. "Mr. Betty Furness, they used to call me." He has recorded Bob Dylan's poetry. In between times he collects and restores classic cars: a 1937 SS-100 Jaguar, a 1956 Bentley, and the gem of his collection, a 1937 Lagonda V-12 de Ville town car, very elegant.

Meantime, some fun-killer--namely producer Don Fedderson--cast him in Family Affair. Sabby really didn't want it. "I fought for three years to lose the image of Dr. Hyatt," he says. And yet, being a realistic sort of faffler, he did want it. A successful series means money, and money means freedom. Also instant recognition. And Sabby has never averse to that. He doesn't even mind the fact that Family Affair is loaded with what Laughton used to call "larceny artists"--children. Everyone know children steal scenes.

But even this The Beard finds himself able to be philosophical about. People give him knowing looks and tell him he'd better pull some tricks out of his bag with all those kids hanging about. "Sure I have a bag," he says. "These are things you must do. But I don't think about it. I automatically sense something's up, and I cover it.

"Now those kids, bless 'em, they don't use any tricks. But they grin that big empty-toothed grin and you're in trouble! Bit I still combat with honesty. No tricks, I am not swept off the screen and I come off pretty well."

If Sabby at times seems overly self-assured, this too is part of the act. He is a secret worrier. Last November he collapsed at home and was packed off to the hospital with bleeding ulcers. Not even Sabby could be cavalier about that. After six weeks (and nine shows in which actor John Williams sat in for him) he recovered, but there was still a lingering doubt about whether or not the condition was malignant. This necessitated an operation in March after shooting was over for the season. He emerged with a triumphantly clean bill of health and immediately began thinking about Vancouver again.

So it now looks as if both Sabby and Family Affair will be around for some years to come, by which time Sabby will be tolerably rich, richer perhaps than he ever dreamed when MGM first brought him over to play the Wazir in Kismet back in 1955. When that happens viewers may not see very much of The Great Faffler on TV. Pictures, maybe. Plays, no. "I'm tired of the theater," says Sabby. The plays he will leave to his son, Christopher, 23, now a promising drama student in London; and his older daughter, Annette, 25, a Los Angeles housewife who is also an actress. He'll take care of the faffle, the fishing and the just plain living.

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