by Lynn Haney
Catherine McCauley’s gentle manner masked her radicalism. She had a passion for the plight of the poor and spent her time in the slums of Dublin, a commitment that won her loyal friends. When she was 40, she inherited a fortune from a childless couple that she had befriended. With the money she established the Sisters of Mercy as a community of ‘walking nuns’ who would live outside convent walls. Their mission was to introduce Catholic education and healthcare to immigrants in poverty-stricken communities throughout the world. When they arrived in the United States in 1854, they lived in whatever space was available, sometimes in stables, railway cars and quarantine or ‘pest’ houses. At the same time, they nursed victims of cholera, earthquakes and floods. In some towns, anti-Catholic feeling ran rather high and they were driven out.
Putting down roots in Los Angeles, the good sisters opened orphanages, shelters for working girls, hospitals and a tubercular sanitarium. Their purpose in founding St John’s was to develop future Catholic leaders out of a select group of boys. These students would be given a solid education in the importance of activism on behalf of social justice. Irish culture permeated the school. Athletic teams were named ‘The Shamrocks’. Embracing the culture, Greg took ‘Patrick’ for his confirmation name.
According to biographer Michael Freedland, Greg’s best friend at St John’s was Augustine Mackessy, a recent Irish immigrant and the undisputed hero of the school, who came over to the United States after his father, a Dublin policeman, had been killed by a bomb thrown by Eamon de Valera himself.
On Sundays Greg and his school chums liked to hop on a trolley to see a movie, often going from one film to another. ‘We really went overboard about them,’ Greg recalled.
Hollywood in the 1920s was a land of enchantment. Here were wildly talented directors (such as King Vidor, William Wellman and Raoul Walsh – all of whom would eventually work with Greg), legendary stars and classic films. In the sanctuary of the movie house, Greg could see people on the screen who were more beautiful and fascinating than mortals leading ordinary lives. It was his kind of world.
In the mid-1920s, Hollywood made the transition from silent to talking films. The idea was met with opposition in some quarters. Studio boss H M Warner cracked: ‘Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?’ D W Griffith, the film pioneer often referred to as the ‘father of the movies’, protested: ‘It will never be possible to synchronize the voice with the pictures.’ Screenwriter and director Joseph Mankiewicz said later: ‘I can remember vividly how tough it was on actors and actresses when the silent pictures gave way to talkies. That microphone was a nemesis – if you didn’t record well, you were finished. There was a fire one day at Paramount, and Clara Bow ran out screaming, “I hope to Christ it was the sound stages.”’
Greg thrilled to The Jazz Singer (1927) starring Al Jolson at the exotic Egyptian Theater. It was the legendary first talkie that is in fact silent with several sound musical sequences. In it, Jolson sings a full-throated rendition of ‘Dirty Hands, Dirty Face’, then he raises his hands and stops the audience’s applause, speaking his first words on the screen and some of the most famous lines of dialogue in film history: ‘Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothin’ yet! Wait a minute, I tell ya. You ain’t heard nothin’! Do you wanna hear “Toot, Toot, Tootsie”!? All right, hold on, hold on.’ The Jazz Singer is the story of Cantor Oland’s son going into show business over the objections of his father. The conflict paralleled Greg’s own later experience with Doc Peck, who disapproved of his son becoming an actor.
Another unforgettable event for Greg was being present at the opening of Mann’s Chinese Theater in 1927 where Cecil B DeMille’s King of Kings premiered. Greg recalled: ‘The ushers were dressed in Chinese Mandarin garb, the carpets were a foot thick, the air was perfumed with Chinese incense, and along with the movie, a biblical epoch, there was a magnificent stage show.’ Years later, when Mann’s had become the most famous movie theater in the world and the forecourt boasted the imprint of Hollywood legends such as Jimmy Durante’s nose, Harpo Marx’s harp and Betty Grable’s legs, Greg was invited to put his handprint in the cement in front of the theater. The experience didn’t come close to matching the joy of being there when the theater first opened.
The movies he watched in the first days of the talkies made a profound impression on him. Greg explained: ‘I’d never seen any live theater, and I was watching these great actors – who could speak so well – playing out dramas and comedies and eventually Westerns and adventure stories, and it was just a revelation.’
Rowdy newspaperman Ben Hecht (screenwriter for Spellbound) arrived in Hollywood in 1925. He marveled at the city’s endless possibilities, seeing Filmland not as a child like Greg but through adult eyes. In his memoir A Child of the Century (1954), he recounts how producers were greedy for talent, ‘any kind of talent, from geese trainers to writers and actors.’ Hecht contends his nerves were alive to its hawker’s cry an hour after he left the train:
Hungry actors leaped from hall bedrooms to terraced mansions. Writers and newspapermen who had hoboed their way West begin hiring butlers and laying down wine cellars. Talent, talent, who had talent for anything – for beating a drum, diving off a roof, writing a joke, walking on his hands? Who could think up a story, any kind of story? Who knew how to write it down? And who had Ego? That was the leading hot cake – Ego or a pair of jiggling boobies under morning-glory eyes. Prosperity chased them all. New stars were being hatched daily, and new world-famous directors and producers were popping daily out of shoeboxes.
Greg’s forays into this world stayed with him. Meanwhile, at St John’s he was developing a bulldog tenacity that impressed the nuns, priests and veteran military officers. He was promoted to Cadet Captain Peck and was given the responsibility of whipping 60 of the youngest students, aged from eight to ten, into shape. ‘I shouted at them like Erich von Stroheim,’ he recalled, acknowledging that his martinet tendencies were evident even then. ‘God knows what I did to the psyches of those poor little kids. But having put the fear of God, the Pope and the school chaplain into them, we won the gold medal for drill.’
Greg gorged on books, reading everything from Zane Grey to Walter Scott, and as the editor of the school’s monthly newspaper, The Bugle Call, he developed a keen writing skill. Obedient and dutiful, he also proved adept at winning the support of teachers and other adults.
The pressure to be a ‘good Catholic boy’ points up the limiting quality of this impressionable period of his education and proved to be a liability in some of the roles he played as an actor. It encouraged a self-imposed constipation, a rigidity of posture that translated into conventional heroics rather than the go-for-broke intensity we see in actors like Marlon Brando and James Cagney that really strikes a nerve. Still, St John’s imbued him with sensitivity to the social importance of authority figures and a high regard for persistence, which enabled him to stretch his modest talent to the limit. Recalled Greg: ‘One of the things that you didn’t do there was quit anything once you’d started. You went to the finish.’
By the spring of 1930 Greg had completed ninth grade at St John’s and was ready to graduate. Decked out in his gray-blue military uniform for a photograph, he looks composed yet somewhat melancholy. Upon graduation, it was decided he should live with his father. Since he knew few young people in the port city of San Diego, it wasn’t going to be easy. Father and son shared a box-like bungalow next to the apartment house his grandmother had owned located on Broadway Street in Golden Hill, a lower middle-class part of town. Doc still worked nights at Ferris and Ferris drugstore at Fifth and Market – for years the only 24-hour pharmacy in San Diego County.
They saw each other mostly at breakfast in what Greg called ‘a barren household.’ Then Greg would catch the trolley for a school made up of gray granite structures with ivy crawling up the front that were designed to resemble the buildings at West Point.
When Greg entered San Diego High School in the fall of 1
930, the confidence gained at St John’s quickly eroded. He had worked diligently to create an identity at the Military School and now it was stripped from him. Also, he missed the support of a structured routine. There was no polishing brass, no marching drills, no mass in the morning. He kept fairly much to himself, feeling depressed and sleeping a lot. One classmate remembered him as an ‘angular, painfully shy, rail of a boy.’ Another said he was ‘not impressive in any way – not anyone you ever heard about.’ His mediocre report cards included a D in geometry.
He was too caught up in the quagmire of adolescence to take much notice of world or local events. But in the early 1930s, everybody listened to the radio. The news was desperate. Across the land there were bread lines, soup kitchens, uncontrolled floods, devastating droughts, migrant workers moving north and west, general despair. As Americans tried to come to grips with the Great Depression, they avidly followed the fireside radio chats of their newly elected President, Franklin D Roosevelt. He assured his countrymen they ‘had nothing to fear, but fear itself.’ Roosevelt was creating his ‘New Deal’ with many programs meant to bring immediate relief to the needy and recovery to the economy. He set up a federal agency to provide the states with funds to feed the hungry. Legislation was passed to aid farmers and homeowners in danger of losing their property because they could not keep up mortgage payments. The Civilian Conservation Corps was organized, providing jobs for unemployed young men in forest conservation and road construction work. ‘I have no expectation of making a hit every time I come to bat,’ Roosevelt liked to say. ‘What I seek is the highest possible batting average.’
Though his father was a ‘Hoover Republican,’ Greg instinctively sympathized with Franklin D Roosevelt. In fact, the President became one of his heroes. Unlike Doc Peck, FDR was an optimist. He was an interesting choice for Greg’s hero in other respects as well. FDR could put up a show of being frivolous when in actuality he was dead serious. And when the chips were down, his strength showed through. Before becoming crippled with polio, he was debonair and somewhat thoughtless and arrogant. Polio toughened him. Then he became courageous, polite and generous.
Some nights Greg would go by Ferris and Ferris on Market Street to see his father. The Stingaree district was located south of the pharmacy; it was comprised of several blocks of bawdy houses, gin joints and gambling halls. The habitués of this neighborhood would come into the drugstore revealing a world quite different from pristine La Jolla.
Greg may well have witnessed some of the racial prejudice that was condoned – even encouraged – in establishments like Ferris and Ferris. One night in 1936 a black boy walked into the drugstore and sat down at the soda fountain. Instead of waiting on him, the white employee behind the counter threatened to beat him up. ‘We don’t serve no blacks in here . . .’ he yelled. Even when an officer intervened, the employee continued to make threats.
Greg missed his mother, whom he saw rarely now, and yearned for a warm family life. His ache for happiness was palpable. ‘I was lonely, withdrawn, full of self-doubt,’ he admitted. He vividly recalled the Christmas of 1931 when he was 15. He spent it shooting baskets at a local athletic club. Then he went to a movie. Afterwards he wandered home in time for his father to wake up and take him to dinner at a local café. Just as he had done with the bleak stretch he passed with Bunny in St Louis when he was six, Greg stepped outside the experience and looked at it as a story. ‘I’ve often thought it would make a nice little scene in a film,’ he said one time in recounting the incident. ‘If I were producing it, I would want a young Tony Perkins or James Dean in the role in his hometown with nothing else to do one Christmas Day.’
New Year’s was better. Father and son had a tradition of driving to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl parade and football game on New Year’s Day. They’d watch the colorful floats sail down Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard and bask in the clear and sunny Southern California skies while most of the nation was in the throes of the winter chill. Then it was on to the big game and eating hot dogs. Sadly, Doc was no longer alive in 1988 when his 71-year-old son presided over the 99th Rose Bowl parade.
Greg’s inhibitions held him hostage in many ways. He joined the glee club of Walter (Pop) Reyer but still held back. ‘If you could hit a few notes, you were in. I tried never to be heard.’ Once he entered a set of lyrics in a contest to select a new school song. Greg remembered: ‘Each student was to sing his song in front of the glee club. When my turn came, I froze. I was just too shy to get up in front of all those people and sing. Naturally, my song lost.’ He did manage to land a role in the all-male variety show called Boys’ High Jinx.
Doc strongly believed his son should be involved in sports and encouraged him in that direction, but Greg was paralyzed by bashfulness. ‘My first hero was a football player on the school team . . . I was too shy to speak to him, but I used to watch him, admire everything he did, and glow over his triumphs.’
Finally Greg went out for football. His brush with greatness came in the B-team tryouts of ‘The Cavers’ as the team was known. He told Welton Jones of the San Diego Union-Tribune: ‘We had great football teams then. The quarterback was Cotton Warburton, about 165 pounds, swift, elusive, later a famous star at USC. In a scrimmage one day, he was coming right at me. I closed my eyes, threw myself toward him and got hit with his knee as he went by. Though stunned, I scrambled to my feet and was proud ever after.’ He also joined the San Diego Rowing Club.
Despite his shyness, Greg was developing resiliency and independence. ‘By the time I was 15, I realized I was going to have to look after myself – I was pretty much on my own as for education, money, and my future.’
Schoolwork was the least of his concerns. Though he lugged bags of books home from the library, his intellectual curiosity wasn’t fully awakened. For example, when Albert Einstein came to San Diego and drove past the high school, the students lined the curbside. Greg joined them but he had no idea why Einstein was famous and didn’t bother to ask.
About the age of 17, nature took a hand. He shot up from 5 feet 4 inches to 6 feet 2 inches. ‘I grew like an asparagus – and looked like one too.’ Maybe so, but he was an eye-catching asparagus. His appeal was not lost on girls.
Greg screwed up his courage and asked a classmate named Harriet for a date. He saw her as an almost unobtainable beauty and since he had never had a date before, he was both thrilled and terrified that she accepted. Reminisced Greg: ‘What I remember most about the night is a ten-minute wait with her father while she was getting ready. I had supposed that like my father he was interested in sports, so I had boned up on all the latest scores in preparation. It turned out that he didn’t care at all about them. It was a dreadful wait.’
One failure in high school gnawed at Greg for years to come. In 1933, he was passed over for the lead in Oh Wilbur, the senior class play. Three decades after graduating, Greg returned to San Diego. He was in town for the local premier of To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), the film that won him an Oscar. Walking into the Spreckles Theater lobby, he spotted a familiar face. Pointing a finger at this gentleman, he exclaimed: ‘YOU! You are the one who beat me out for the lead in the senior play!’
The man to whom Greg’s finger was pointed was Richard Lustig, a San Diego accountant. Robust in build with bushy sideburns, Lustig said he honestly didn’t remember competing with Greg for the lead. However, he did recall him as ‘very shy, a tall, bashful, gawky guy – very awkward in his movements. He was all voice and no body.’ And did the success of his classmate surprise Lustig? Did it ever! ‘I think the whole class was stunned.’
Greg graduated on 16 June 1933 in a class of about 450 students. In the fall of that year he enrolled at San Diego State Teachers College. (The institution dropped the name Teachers in 1935 and became known as San Diego State University.) He took the standard courses for a freshman, but for an elective took speech class from Professor Paul Pfaaf. There he made an acting debut of sorts: ‘In speech class, I was assigned to recite a sel
ection from Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, and without realizing what I was doing, I acted it out.’ Seeing talent, Pfaaf encouraged Greg to pursue acting, at least in college.
In April 1934 Greg turned 18. Like many boys growing up in Southern California, he ventured across the border to Tijuana for a rite of passage. Here, a youth walked down the main drag, Avenida Revolucion, passing beggars, shoeless tattered children, con men, whores and beaten up wrecks of cars. A sewer-like stench traveled on the thick breeze and challenged the olfactory sense, but it also carried with it the delicious scent of onions, pepper, charred meat and fish. The air vibrated with yelling and screaming from the balcony bars. Entering a darkened restaurant, a traveler like Greg was invited to quaff down Mexican beer (colloquially known as buzzard piss) and watch ancient porno flicks. Some of the cruder establishments featured live stage shows involving naked women and donkeys. Afterwards, the local prostitutes introduced themselves and let it be known they were available to clear up any mysteries a young man might have about sex. The Sisters of Mercy at St John’s would have called Tijuana ‘an occasion of sin.’
Despite this, the principles of social justice learned at St John’s did prevail. When Clifford Odets’ smash hit play Awake and Sing! came to town, Greg was determined to see it. Written in 1934, it established Odets as the defining American playwright of the 1930s and the champion of the underprivileged. Filled with tragedy and hope, Awake and Sing! chronicles the struggles of the Berger family in the Bronx. It’s funny and heartbreaking as they cope with survival and grasp for dreams in the Depression era.