by Lynn Haney
That spring Greg started to wonder what he wanted to do with his life and dropped out of school. He drove a truck for Union 76. ‘I was a good driver, I liked it, I was proud of that. I knew I was somebody, rolling that big trailer around town.’
With his $125-a-month salary, he bought himself a Ford Roadster. He was very proud of his car – a blue model with wire wheels, a white canvas top and a rumble seat. With he-man truck and a convertible, it’s no wonder he soon had a girlfriend. Her name was Betty Clardy. Her two brothers were friends of Greg.
With Betty, he experienced the joy of falling in love for the first time. And he started to feel good about himself and his physical appearance. Fortunately, his handsomeness, deep voice, and height developed at the end of adolescence rather than earlier. While as an adult Greg certainly had his share of vanity, he never regarded his looks as his stock in trade.
At work his boss, Mr Tilson, was giving him more responsibility. He was allowed to start driving the huge trucks that carry 5,000 gallons of gasoline from one end of San Diego to the other. He was also a night watchman. His boss told him: ‘I’ve been watching you. You could be a plant manager one day – like me.’ Greg thanked him, but he also knew his boss was getting only $350 a month. It was a wake-up call to think about his future.
Betty Clardy’s family took him under their wing. They were Irish Americans and Greg fit right into their home life. This was fortunate since he was once again experiencing domestic upheaval. Doc Peck planned to marry again, this time to Harriet Harrington, a conservative Protestant from Denver. Greg didn’t get along with her and for her part she was wary of the tall, stubborn, brooding 18-year-old. Exacerbating the situation, her mother planned to moved into the Peck household. So, once again Greg didn’t feel he had a place he could really call home.
Betty Clardy turns out to be an unsung heroine. (When he talked about her after he became famous, Greg changed her name to Kathie Moore to spare her embarrassment. She’s now deceased.) She encouraged him to set his sights higher. Now fueled by the desire to leave home, he returned to San Diego State and took his classes seriously. In the evenings, he studied at the Clardys’ dining room table. The work began to pay off. Recalled Greg: ‘For the first time I got As and Bs.’ With a dramatic improvement in his scholastic average, he gained admission to the prestigious University of California at Berkeley.
Greg’s moving away and his subsequent breakup with Betty were a harbinger of his split with his future wife Greta. Both women gave him the belief in himself to make a leap forward. And in doing so, he left them behind. Greg mused about Betty: ‘I often wonder if just about every successful man doesn’t have behind him a first love who is primarily responsible for his success.’
In the fall of 1936, Greg walked though the green-filigreed arch at the entrance to the University of California at Berkeley and entered a whole new world. He looked around the hillside campus with its streams, stunning architecture, groves of trees and spectacular views of San Francisco Bay and he knew he was where he wanted to be. Yet it wasn’t the geographic setting that stirred his mind and heart as much as the whirlwind of intellectual, political and artistic possibilities spinning around him. ‘I don’t know what the hell would have happened to me if I hadn’t gone to Berkeley,’ said Greg, ‘for I see my life before that time as not going anywhere.’
Although Bunny and her husband Joe Maysuch had an apartment nearby in San Francisco, Greg lived in boarding houses during his three years at Berkeley. Tuition for a full 15-credit course load was $26. Thinking back to 1936, Greg said: ‘It was a very good year for college boys without independent means.’ He was required to pay for his books and supplies, room and board. Doc sent him pin money as did Bunny. But it wasn’t enough, so Greg became a one armed paperhanger doing anything and everything.
With three of the other students he became a janitor in an apartment house, trading those chores for a free room. Alas, sometimes he overslept, incurring the wrath of the occupants for failing to turn on the hot-water heater, at 4.30 a.m. At another point, he bunked on a cot in the attic of a boarding house. During sports events, he parked cars for the fans. He charged them $2, yet never mentioned that the lot was a mile from the stadium. For free meals, he worked as a ‘hasher’ for the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority house on Haste Street. ‘The girls were a bunch of dogs,’ Greg told a reporter. ‘They’d put on records and dance with each other.’ Nonetheless, the gig kept his belly full – an imperative because Greg was a junior member of Berkeley’s first-rate varsity team.
No longer so withdrawn, he started to get to know people and was included in social events. ‘One of the things I loved about Cal was the eccentrics. The professors who served turkey hash and red wine with string quartets at home on Sunday evenings,’ Greg recalled with relish. ‘There was “Bull” Durham, an English professor who loved to recite Shakespeare. He spent a semester getting in shape, then took a sabbatical and married Judith Anderson. He returned looking just terrible but still married. Not for long, though . . .’
The high 1930s were a particularly exciting time to be at Berkeley. The campus reverberated with the tension, vitality and crosscurrents of America’s hard times. The Great Depression was still a scourge upon the land. Millions of families, with their savings exhausted, were living not far from the edge of starvation. Among students and professors, the prevailing sentiment was one of tremendous sympathy for the underdog. In classrooms, dormitories, parties and public plazas the air was filled with lively discussions about Bonus Marchers, the bloody miners’ strikes in Kentucky, the Southern Agrarians, the John Reed Club, and the massive May Day parades.
Berkeley then as now had a reputation for pushing the envelope, bringing issues to the forefront; a sounding board, before the same issues gained momentum in other parts of the country; free speech exercised with passion and intensity. ‘It woke me up and made me a human being,’ Greg said of his Berkeley experience.
Though he enrolled as a pre-med student at Doc’s urging and ‘liked the idea of becoming a doctor,’ Greg floundered in his physics, chemistry and biology courses. His mind lacked the grounded precision for those kinds of courses. Later he quipped: ‘The best thing I did for the medical profession was not to become a doctor.’
Switching his major to literature, he studied English and American writers, as well as the French, Greeks and Russians in translation. He also took history and political science, and even psychology and anthropology. At the same time, he became interested in the arts, in the graphic arts and in music.
He’d take out books by the bagful from the library, read late at night and in between classes in the day. Books were the solution to his life. He lived along with the authors of the great novels, transported by the light of their stories. It helped him understand the drama of his own life.
He liked Marcel Proust, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and satirist Ambrose Bierce. (Little did he imagine that one day he would be portraying Bierce in Old Gringo (1989) opposite Jane Fonda.)
Greg’s roommates, both engineering students, teased him about burying his nose in Hardy or Shakespeare. ‘What do you call that, majoring in bullshit?’ Greg countered. ‘This is good stuff. It’s going to come in handy someday.’ In his classes, there was much discussion about contemporary writers, Theodore Dreiser, F Scott Fitzgerald, Allen Tate, Clifford Odets, and others – who in the phrase of the time, ‘went Left’ in search of a more just social order. Greg thought of becoming a writer himself. With his formidable tenacity, he could easily have found work as an investigative reporter. In fiction, he may not have faired so well. His writing showed clarity, grace and precision, but it lacked the visceral intensity that a fiction writer needs to compel the attention of the reader.
The 1930s were made for writers, many of whom felt they were living in history. A perfect example is the signature play of the era, Waiting for Lefty, written by Clifford Odets and directed by a young Elia Kazan. It was inspired by what Odets read about
the New York taxicab drivers’ strike of 1934. Lefty opened in 1935 and stunned the audience because it was such an expression of the times. Swept up in the fervor of the performance, the crowd participated in the actors’ lines, especially the concluding call to ‘STRIKE!’
The sense of upheaval and social collapse would be expressed in many novels of the era, most directly in Dos Passos’s The Big Money (1936), where everybody and everything goes to pieces, but also with the end of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night (1933) and in the Key West chapters of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937).
Students like Greg, who were reading politically conscious writers, felt anger, a need for social change and a hunger for comradeship. They wanted to surrender their middle-class identities and join the common effort to make a better world. This was the dream in their shining young eyes.
On Sprawl Plaza, the hub of Berkeley, volunteers would cluster around a recruiting table for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Students were signing up to go off and fight in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), a cause that evoked fierce passions. Greg was sorely tempted to join their ranks, but he decided to postpone the decision until after graduation. By then, it was too late; but in any case, it wasn’t in his nature to throw caution to the winds in such a dramatic fashion. Still, the conflict was very much in his consciousness during his college years.
The Spanish Civil War was a turning point in world history, the dress rehearsal for the Second World War; the moment, signposted by Picasso’s Guernica, when civilization began its slow relapse into barbarism and the new dark ages. A worldwide outcry was raised when, for the first time in history, a civilian population was bombed from the air and an entire town was destroyed.
Though largely forgotten by Americans now, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade – organized by Communists – was a group of 2,800 American volunteers who took up arms to defend the Spanish Republic against a military rebellion led by General Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. To the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which fought from 1937 through 1938, the defense of the Republic represented the last hope of stopping the spread of international fascism. The Lincolns came from all walks of life, all regions of the country, and included seamen, students, the unemployed, miners, fur workers, lumberjacks, teachers, salesmen, athletes, dancers and artists. They established the first racially integrated military unit in US history and were the first to be led by a black commander.
The members of the Brigade were great romantic figures to idealistic young men such as Greg. He could follow their adventures in news reports by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn and Lillian Hellman who helped strengthen anti-fascist opinion in the United States. He could read about luminaries rallying for the cause by raising money for medical aid to the Spanish Republicans. Such participants as Albert Einstein, Dorothy Parker, Gene Kelly, Paul Robeson, Helen Keller and Gypsy Rose Lee reflected the wide base of support for the Republicans.
If Greg had quit college and headed for Spain, his life would surely have turned out very differently. Those who did go experienced a rude surprise when they returned in 1939 after Madrid fell to Franco. Instead of being greeted by any of the usual pomp and circumstance that meets soldiers upon their home coming, they were met by the police waiting to arrest them as they stepped off the boat.
Little in the way of experience was ever lost on Greg. The romance and the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War stayed with him. In 1964, in partnership with Fred Zinnemann, he co-produced and starred in a film about the war called Behold A Pale Horse. Though Greg received enthusiastic reviews in his role as an anti-fascist hero, the movie was panned. Lamented Greg: ‘It lacked passion and that’s a big lack.’
When Greg was in his seventies, he returned to the Berkeley campus to show the students clips from his movie career. He told the standing-room-only audience that Berkeley represented ‘the three happiest years of my life.’ Only a glutton for punishment could make that statement, but then, people who row usually are.
Crew played a big part in Greg’s first two years at Berkeley. He was rowing 18 miles a day on the Oakland Estuary under the tutelage of Berkeley’s legendary coach Ky Ebright. He led Berkeley crews to Olympic gold medals in 1928, 1932 and 1948, a record unequaled by any crew coach in the world. ‘There are no stars in crew, we all had to work together,’ said Jack Collins, who rowed with Greg in 1937 and 1938, and said he was just one of the guys.
‘It’s the most grueling sport known in college,’ asserted Greg, who, although he never rose above the ranks of junior varsity, credited rowing for teaching him rhythm, harmony and discipline as well as the capacity to go beyond his limits. ‘It’s a sport where strong men faint as they go over the finish line because they have spent every last ounce of their strength and consciousness. Your chest feels like cement, your legs feel like rubber, your mind is numb, your back feels broken but you learn never to give up.’
The oarsmen put in terribly long hours, often showing up at the Berkeley boathouse at 6 a.m. for pre-class practices. Both physically and psychologically, Greg and his crew buddies were different from their classmates. They had to be able to endure pain in order to turn themselves into exceptional competitors.
Greg learned the glory is in the team, not the individual. Rowing proved to be excellent training for the collaborative work of filmmaking. No picture can get off the ground without the synergy of the actor, director, producer and other members of the crew. Similarly, a boat does not have ‘swing’ unless everyone is putting out in exact measure, and because of that, and only because of that, there is the possibility of true trust among oarsmen.
Greg was often chosen to ‘stroke’ the boat – that is, sit in the first seat and set the pace the seven other oarsmen would follow. A great stroke is mostly a fighter and racer, someone who loves going into battle and always thinks that he can win. For Greg, it helped instill confidence in himself, a belief that when the race came down to a short distance between his boat and another one, he, as the stroke, would be able to make the difference between winning and losing.
Rowing is a tremendous discipline for developing concentration, a skill that became a hallmark of Greg’s approach to acting. The sport permits ordinary and not particularly talented men to reach beyond themselves. ‘The key is not God-given,’ writes David Halberstam in The Amateurs, a classic on rowing. ‘It’s in the rowers themselves.’
Then, too, for someone like Greg who tended to repress his emotions, rowing was an outlet. What better way to exorcise anger than through hard rowing. Yet, perhaps more than anything, it touched his sense of beauty. He relished the feel of the boat, all the oars in the water together when the synchronization was almost perfect. In moments like that, the boat seemed to lift right out of the water. George Pocock, a legend in the sport, once said: ‘It’s a great art, is rowing. It’s the finest art there is. It’s a symphony of motion. And when you’re rowing well, why it’s nearing perfection – and when you reach perfection you’re touching the divine. It touches the you of you which is your soul.’
In 1938, as stroke of the third boat, Greg traveled to the annual Poughkeepsie Regatta in New York. His manner of transportation is a testimony to his grit. Coach Ebright issued free train tickets for team members in the first two boats; everybody else was on their own. Knowing the university also reserved a baggage car for the racing shells, Greg hopped aboard as a stowaway.
At the time the Poughkeepsie Regatta was considered the ‘World Series of Racing.’ Teams were drawn to it because it was so popular among spectators, and because the Poughkeepsie course was considered the best straight 4-mile stretch of water available in the country.
Although the competition wasn’t a triumph for Berkeley, Greg had the satisfaction of seeing the first man he ever voted for – Franklin D Roosevelt – in the flesh. The President was staying at ‘Springwood’, his home in nearby Hyde Park and came to watch the race. It saddened Greg to see his hero diminished by illness and confined to a wheelchair.
With the competition completed, each team member was given a Pullman ticket home and $75 spending money. Setting out with crewmate Frank Lawrence, Greg traded the train ticket for more money and went off to see New York City. They would do the town and sleep in Central Park. ‘I liked jazz,’ explained Greg, ‘and we hit all the spots along 52nd Street, Red Nichols and His Five Pennies for instance, then we went to Harlem and caught drummer Chick Webb, then on to Greenwich Village for more music.’ He also went to his first Broadway show; it was Joshua Logan’s first production, I Married an Angel starring Vera Zorina. A ballet dancer by training, Zorina burst upon national consciousness the year before starring in the 1938 film The Goldwyn Follies in which her husband choreographer George Balanchine made use of her outright sex appeal as well as her arabesques when he cast her as a nymph in a wet, clinging tunic, rising out of a pool. Greg remembered: ‘I went mad for Vera Zorina. Like a dream.’
Returned to campus for his senior year, Greg was thus primed for the moment that would change life. He was galloping down the sidewalk wearing his navy blue rowing sweater with the gold varsity C on the front when he heard the penetrating voice of Edwin Duerr. The esteemed director of the Little Theater, who was known around campus for presenting plays of high professional quality, had wisps of hair under his tweed hat and thick glasses.
‘Hey you,’ Duerr called. ‘I wanna big guy for my new play.’
‘What play?’ asked Greg.
‘For Moby Dick,’ replied the Professor. ‘I have a short, fat Ahab and I need a tall, skinny Starbuck.’ It happened he was planning to present the play on 17 November 1938. ‘Will you do it?’
Greg didn’t even pause to think about it. He was well aware of Duerr’s reputation. Moby Dick would be a change of pace from the director’s usual fare. Most at home in twentieth-century theater, Duerr gave the campus an opportunity to see excellent productions of modern plays during the Depression, when few companies toured. Under his direction, the campus mounted a production of the English language premiere of Jean Giradoux’s Intermezzo, the world premiere of Robinson Jeffers’ Tower Beyond Tragedy, Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen, and many others. Duerr’s Mask and Dagger Revues were eagerly awaited each year, and, under his sponsorship, student writers, directors and actors received a thorough, if informal, training in all aspects of the theater.