by Lynn Haney
Moby Dick was one of the Thalian Society workshop plays that were staged weekly on the campus. Greg was thrilled to be given the chance to act, but the thought of facing an audience made him so nervous he wanted to ‘disappear down a hole and come up in Mexico.’
Before Moby Dick, Greg made his debut on the Wheeler Auditorium stage on 28 October 1938, as the lead in Rain from Heaven by S N Behrman, which originally opened on Broadway in 1934. Behrman was known for his sophisticated comedies, which often attempted to probe the consciences of the wealthy and privileged. Greg played Rand Elderidge, a Lindbergh-like explorer, innocent and waiting to be duped by the Nazis. In rehearsals, the nervous neophyte rattled the prop teacup so badly that it had to be taped to the saucer. His fellow thespians felt he was playing out of his depth. Ken Tobey, who would go on to fame as a star of science fiction movies, was particularly scathing. He suggested that the theater group should get rid of people ‘who can neither speak nor act. I mean, of course, Mr Peck.’
Despite his less than auspicious start in show business, Greg saw that he had found his way into a unique and special world. ‘It was hard for me to communicate with people,’ he later remembered. ‘So I tried to reach out to that audience – to try to make contact with them, to try to make friends with them and to tell them a story that I wanted to tell.’ Offstage, he was enjoying the company of young women, especially while walking them home after rehearsals. ‘I felt for the first time that I was making conversation with my kind of people.’
In Anna Christie, which was presented on 17 and 18 March 1939, he played the young sailor Matt Burke who is saved in a storm by Anna, a prostitute with whom he falls in love. The reviews were mixed and included a scathing one from the Daily Californian: ‘Eldred Peck . . . almost endangered the success of the production with his exhibition of inexperienced acting technique. Lack of restraint was his chief fault. There was almost no variation in his gestures or voice, so that he never accomplished the difficult transformation from swashbuckling seaman to a changed man who had experienced a genuine emotion.’ Greg agreed with the review. ‘I was lousy,’ he admitted. ‘It did something to me. It made me sore. You can call it a challenge if you like.’
Just when he needed it, he got a boost. George Marion, the actor who played Chris, Anna’s father, in Anna Christie in the original New York production of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize winner, sat in the audience of the Berkeley production. He then met with and read parts of the play with the cast. Afterwards, he talked with Greg and encouraged him to pursue his career in the East, to aim for Broadway. Greg needed an encouraging word because he had been skirting the edges of the drama crowd at Berkeley. The student actors took themselves very seriously. They didn’t consider Greg talented enough to really be one of them.
Then a Berkeley alumnus showed him the way. Crahan Denton, who would later play the leader of the lynch mob in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), had blazed a path for a legion of young actors migrating from the Little Theater of Berkeley to New York. In 1938, he enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse and he thus served as a role model for Greg.
Living close by in San Francisco, Bunny attended his performances and cheered him enthusiastically. She also endorsed his plan to take off for New York and train as an actor. Meanwhile, down in San Diego, Doc (who by now had become a father again to a son named Donald) had dreamed of Greg becoming a doctor and was appalled that he wanted to be an actor. Fussing with makeup and exhibitionism was for females. Grown men didn’t dodge the hard work of life by playacting in a fantasy world shrouded with fake options. He warned his son: ‘You’ll be ridiculed. You’ll be sorry. You’ll have missed your chance to learn a profession or a trade. You’ll be broke at 35 and you’ll end up borrowing from me. Don’t do it.’ But it was too late. Greg was stage-struck.
In the spring of 1939, Greg headed for the train station after his last exam at Berkeley – where his diploma would list his name as Eldred Peck – and, with $160 and a letter of introduction in his pocket, he took a coach seat on the Twentieth Century Limited to New York. Somewhere over the Rockies or maybe the Great Plains, he jettisoned ‘Eldred’ forever. Gregory Peck, the actor, stepped off the train in Manhattan.
CHAPTER FOUR
Call of the Stage
‘He was the most gorgeous creature I’d ever seen in my life.’
Lauren Bacall upon meeting Gregory Peck
A visitor to the 1939 World’s Fair may have noticed a tall young man clad in a white coat, aviator glasses and a flying helmet standing in front of the Meteor Speedway. He is haranguing the crowd, urging them to try the Speedway, a carnival ride imported from Belgium consisting of caterpillar cars on long arms that climb the wooden walls of a bowl. ‘Step this way, folks, for the ride of a lifetime!’ he hollers. ‘Just 25¢. It’s a mile a minute and a thrill a second!’
The barker – called a ‘talker’ by the cognoscenti – was none other than Gregory Peck. Enduring the sweltering summer heat, he was fumbling through his first theatrical job. ‘Twelve people could get in the contraption,’ explained Greg. ‘It’d crawl up the wall and hang almost upside down.’ As the cars accelerated faster and faster, the customers shrieked with fear and delight, praying to survive ‘the wall of death.’
Alternating with a professional talker, a Cockney named Buck Boochester, Greg worked 12-hour days, one half hour on and one half hour off, noon to midnight. The pay was $25 per week.
Boochester taught Greg to single out any guy who had a girl on his arm. They had someone to impress; they’d be an easy mark. So, endangering the rich, dark voice that would be his trademark, Greg delivered his spiel at the top of his lungs: ‘Hey, Buddy, ya’ got any sportin’ blood in your veins? Give that girl a R-E-A-L thrill! Step right in and climb the walls of the bowl. Come on, brother, defy the laws of gravity!’
What was our future Academy Award winner doing in a place like this? Well, it wasn’t his first choice. Like most actors, he felt the magnetic, powerful and overwhelming pull of Broadway. But before he could grace the Great White Way, he had to survive and get some training. So, to keep the wolf from the door, he made use of an entrée his stepfather, Joe Maysuch had given him and called on Mr J W Shillam who owned the Meteor Speedway concession at the Fair. Then Greg talked himself into this ‘off-Broadway’ gig. Alas, it was quite a distance from the Great White Way – in Flushing Meadows, Queens, to be exact.
Greg traveled an hour by subway from his $6-a-week room on West 110th Street near Columbia University, to the site in Queens that had once been a swampy landfill known as the Corona Dumps. In 1939, in the teeth of an arming Europe, these 1,200 ignominious acres had been transformed into an architectural wonderland gleaming with cities and civilizations of the future. The colossal New York World’s Fair beckoned all comers with its extravaganza of fireworks, exhibitions and country fair gaiety.
Greg loved the razzmatazz. In the Amusement Park, he could see the Frozen Alive Girl, the Penguin Village, Jungle Land and Little Miracle Town – a collection of performing little people (then ungraciously called midgets). There was a winter sports resort with punctual snowstorms and there was Billy Rose’s Aquacade, which featured Eleanor Holm and Johnny Weissmuller of Tarzan fame swimming in waltz time. The impresario ignored his own advice: ‘Never invest in anything that eats or needs painting.’ The Aquacade was a true spectacle, a Broadway musical in swimsuits complete with hundreds of swimmers, divers, singing and special effects.
Or Greg could enter Salvador Dalí’s Surrealist Fun House. Paying 25¢ at the Dalí Pavillion, Greg entered a fish-head box-office and passed between a pair of parted, gartered female legs. There he beheld a dream – a tank filled with topless swimmers known as ‘Living Liquid Ladies.’ He also encountered a mummified cow, some rubber telephones and a piano keyboard painted on a woman’s torso.
With wit and cunning, Greg teamed with Boochester to bring in extra income by charging spectators a dime to climb the steps of the scaffolding holding up the bowl. At the top they
were rewarded with a commanding view of Norman Bel Geddes’ Crystal Lassies (near-naked dancers gyrating within a mirrored octagon). Word got around and business picked up.
‘It was the lowest rung of show business,’ Greg said of his World’s Fair job, but it allowed him access to other worlds. ‘I made friends with the Pin-headed Boy from Yucatan. And the Lindy dancers.’
His tenure was short. ‘At the end of the month, I had a voice like a gravel mixer,’ Greg recalled. To save his pipes, he took a job as a $40-per-week guide at Rockefeller Center on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. He also applied for and received a two-year scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse, a prestigious drama school that was renown for its avant-garde approach to acting. Classes were to start in the fall.
To sell himself as a guide for the summer, Greg claimed to be a New York native. He even purchased a map of the area and studied it. Still, he couldn’t quite remember if the Bronx was up and the Battery down – or vice versa. After escorting a group of tourists through Radio City Music Hall (where one day he fell asleep and let the tour-goers watch the whole show instead of their allotted ten minutes), he’d take them to the roof of the building. There, with his sketchy grasp of local geography, he’d point out the landmarks. Motioning towards the New Jersey Palisades, for example, he’d announce with a flourish: ‘There’s Brooklyn over there.’
In his own sly way, Greg also managed to draw the crowd’s attention to the cause of a certain man embraced by young liberals such as himself. ‘I used to give ’em big talks about those wonderful murals – all about progress of industry in America. You know the Rockefeller stuff. When they were training us they implied it would be good if we wove in a little propaganda, a happy glow. But if anybody ever asked me I was ready with the story of the Rivera murals that never got put up.’
Greg was alluding to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera’s battle with Nelson Rockefeller over the walls of Rockefeller Center. In 1933 the Rockefeller brothers commissioned Rivera to paint a mural on the wall of the RCA building. ‘Man at the Crossroads’ was to depict the social, political, industrial and scientific possibilities of the twentieth century. In the painting, Rivera included a scene of a giant May Day demonstration of workers marching with red banners. Included was a clear portrait of Lenin in the demonstration. When Nelson Rockefeller asked Rivera to substitute an unknown, Rivera refused to yield and the whole affair became a cause célèbre. Around midnight on 9 February 1934, the painting was removed from the wall and smashed. Rivera’s patrons in the United States boycotted him and he was blacklisted.
When classes started at the Neighborhood Playhouse on 3 October 1939, Greg found himself in a fascinating new environment. He had a direct link to all the big names in show business. New York was the center of theatrical glamour. Ruled by a handful of writers, stars and producers, it was the prime source of energy, ideas and talent. Through his teachers and the people he was meeting, he was being plugged directly into the excitement.
The school was located at 16 West 46th Street where it remained for nearly 20 years. (It is currently located at 340 East 54th Street.) Founded in 1928 by Alice and Irene Lewisohn and Rita Wallach Morgenthau, the school offered a two-year program led by a formidable roster of teachers.
Alice Lewisohn traveled abroad extensively, recruiting lecturers and teachers and collecting music and costumes. Her sister Irene worked actively with Rita Morgenthau on maintaining and strengthening the faculty. The students were carefully chosen for talent and character; a good percentage received working fellowships. The curriculum included dancing, music applied to movement, voice, acting, literature of the drama, psychology of place, design, costume and stage direction.
The school was located on the second floor. It had dark, interconnecting rooms, and the students had to go through the boys’ lavatory to reach Martha Graham’s dance studio. Sassy dancer, Anna Sokolow always flushed the toilet by way of salutation.
Laura Elliot taught voice. She had been a singer of some note but had forsaken an opera career to concentrate her time and talents on groups of working artists. She was coaching several theater and opera stars when she joined the staff of the Playhouse. Of Laura Elliot, Martha Graham’s assistant Dorothy Bird said: ‘She was a very strong lady. She used to pull out her hair in exasperation while teaching. She was so frustrated by us she had a bald spot from pulling.’
Elliot had a distinct teaching style in that she focused on movement and voice together – on movement in relation to music, that is, total simultaneous expression in the body: vocal, visual, invisible. She was intent on freeing the personality.
Rita Morganthau sat in on many of the dance classes. She had a little, short body and she would sit with her knees wide apart, wearing stout shoes and she would nod in total approval no matter what Graham happened to be up to. One day she shared her philosophy about the school with Bird: ‘Now, Dorothy,’ she said, ‘I want you to understand we’re not in business to find pretty blond girls and handsome boys and put them on Broadway. We’re in the theater business as opposed to the Broadway business. I want you to know the one with the glasses who is knock-kneed and has buck teeth is probably the playwright. And that one, the gangly one who is too tall and poorly coordinated, is going to do the lighting. This one’s going to be the stage manager. That one’s going to be, maybe, a star. Maybe the others will be in the theater. Maybe they’ll just love the theater. You’re not going to decide what they’re going to do. You just throw everything you have like grain to chickens. Your job is to give everything that’s in your heart and in your experience. Give out.’
Sanford Meisner, the school’s director, assumed his position in 1935 and held it for 56 years. Sandy, as his loyal followers called him, came from the enormously influential generation of acting teachers that also included Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Robert Lewis.
Acting has been called the revenge of the shy person. This adage held true for Greg as well as for Sandy Meisner who started out as an actor. Reflecting on his lonely childhood, Meisner said: ‘When I went to school . . . I lived in a state of isolation as if I was some kind of moral leper, because my parents, who were good people but not too bright, told me that if it hadn’t been for me, they wouldn’t have had to go to the country, where my younger brother got sick, and from which illness he died. The guilt of this tragedy haunted me. In my childhood I rarely had friends. I lived, as I’m afraid I still do, in a world of fantasy.’
Meisner was a member of the Group Theater, actors who believed in acting as a means of promoting social change. Their productions included Awake and Sing!, The Young Go First, Men in White and Gold Eagle Guy. Although the Group dispersed at the end of the 1930s, its philosophy had a strong impact on Hollywood and, also, in the creation of the Actors’ Studio.
Like other veterans of the Group Theater, Meisner adapted and refined the ‘Method’ approach to acting to suit his particular philosophy. The Method was a system of vocal, physical and emotional exercises initiated in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavsky, which encouraged the actor to use his psyche and subconscious in preparing for a role.
The essential and rather simple technique consists of recalling the circumstances – physical and personal – surrounding an intensely emotional experience in the actor’s past. Elia Kazan, who directed Greg in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), explained it this way: ‘It is the same as when we accidentally hear a tune we may have heard at a stormy or an ecstatic moment in our lives, and find, to our surprise, that we are re-experiencing the emotion we felt then, feeling ecstasy again or rage and the impulse to kill.’
The Meisner Technique focused on actors becoming aware of their emotions through daydreaming and imagination. Once he is aware of his emotional resources, the theory goes, then the actor can awaken, by self-stimulation, a great number of intense feelings, and these emotions are the material of his art. Arthur Miller said he could tell Meisner-trained actors, because they were honest and simple and didn’t lay on complications that wer
en’t necessary. They communicated emotions they really felt. They gave you a sense of life.
Opponents of the Method – of which there are legions – believe it encourages actors to be self-indulgent, to forget the character in pursuit of behavioral motivation, and that it does not prepare actors to play classics. Stereotypically, opponents contend, the Method actor is mannered to the point of unintelligibility.
As Greg would find out when he migrated to Hollywood, the Method was scoffed at and lampooned by many acting veterans. James Cagney dismissed it with contempt: ‘You don’t psych yourself up for these things, you do them.’ Before rehearsals for Major Barbara (1941), Charles Laughton cornered fellow actor Eli Wallach and barked, ‘I don’t want any of that Stanislavsky shit from you.’ And Humphrey Bogart had two rules for playing with Method actors: ‘1. Let them improvise to their heart’s content and just wait for your cue; and 2. Don’t ever play an eating scene with them, because they spit all over you.’
The Method requires that an actor, in preparing for a role, delve not only into the character’s life in the play, but also, far more importantly, into the character’s life before the curtain rises. Tony Randall, who was Greg’s vintage at the Neighborhood Playhouse, recalled that Meisner taught them that the character they were playing had a background – a history – that his life didn’t begin when he walked on the stage. ‘It was up to each actor to create his character’s biography – a back story – that brought him up to the point where he walked on the stage.’