by Lynn Haney
For Greg, who had steadfastly resisted opening up the Pandora’s Box of his childhood wounds, this introspective approach to acting provided salutary benefits; it enabled him to release his pent-up emotions while taking on the personality of the character he was portraying. He developed the capacity to use everything that had happened in his life, such as the painful absence of his mother while he was growing up and the heartbreaking disappearance of his dog Bud, to create the character he was working on. He learned to dig in the dark cave of his subconscious and root out every experience he had ever had.
Greg embraced Meisner’s ideas. He focused on the mental and emotional processes that go on beneath the words, contending, ‘What’s underneath the words is more important than the words themselves because what’s underneath produces the external effect.’ Nevertheless, he still suffered from stage fright even in small groups. He’d break out in sweats, develop rapid shallow breathing and feel faint.
In class, he was learning for the first time to share pieces of his life and, in the process, reveal his secret self. During one improvisational exercise, a girl in the group suddenly stood up and pointed her finger at Greg. ‘I know, you be a priest, Greg, and I’ll confess to you.’ The idea brought approving ripples from the others. Thus he earned the nickname ‘Father Peck’. The group sensed he was someone trustworthy, a sympathetic listener who could keep a confidence. It was a role he would play not only in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), but also with troubled and unhappy friends such as Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant. In the scandal strewn world of Hollywood, he found his niche as father confessor.
Three times a week, Greg took a movement class from Martha Graham. He regarded her as one of the most provocative minds he ever encountered. She was far from the first dancer to toss out her toe shoes and break ballet conventions with modern dance, but her technique – the fierce pelvic contractions, the rugged ‘floor work’ – caught on, becoming the cornerstone of post-war modern dance.
She was also a tempestuous innovator and an unrelenting taskmaster, who would sacrifice everything – love, friendship, money – for the sake of her art. She knew how to use her power to entrance the opposite sex. And although most of the men had no thought of anything physical with her, they nevertheless sensed the overtones and responded with electric excitement and eagerness. Among these was playwright Horton Foote, a modest, unassuming, charming Texan who wrote the screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird. At one point in his youth he collaborated with Martha Graham on a production at the Neighborhood Playhouse. In telling about his first meeting with her, he said: ‘She made you feel as if you could take on the world . . . I’ve never been so charmed in my life. She acted as though it were a great privilege to work with me. With me! Imagine! . . . She could have had anything I had . . . I’ve never fallen so totally for anybody in my life. On what level I still don’t know. If she had said, “Walk across the desert in bare feet on burning coals,” I’d have said, “Indeed, I will.” . . . And if she had said, “Come tonight and bring your pajamas and don’t bore me,” . . . I would have loved it, I think. I think I would have . . . I might have been a little frightened of that.’
Greg, in his early 20s at the time, remembered her as a voluptuous woman with a strong sensuality. ‘She didn’t have a sense of humor,’ said Greg, ‘but there were compensations in her richness, inner womanliness, and in her passion. She was not funny – she was something else. She was also a disciplinarian – determined, firm, demanding. It wasn’t playtime.’ Greg once asked Graham if he had moved properly. She icily responded: ‘Tears are running down the inside of my cheeks.’
The idea was not to turn the students into dancers, but to use dance to make them better actors. One of the most difficult, and for Greg most embarrassing, projects that Graham’s students were required to do was choreograph a piece of 32 bars of music that they chose. ‘If you’ve never created original movement before,’ said Greg, ‘it’s as if you were in deep water and didn’t know how to swim.’
Greg’s concept was a factory line – inspired by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936). He had harsh, mechanical gestures. ‘It was horrible,’ he admitted. Still, in the long run it proved to be an invaluable experience for him. To get up and do the assignment gave him courage. It helped his stage presence. He learned to use his body in acting as a matter of choreographing his own movement as he went along, so that each movement helped to reveal the character. It benefited him when he was acting in Westerns such as Yellow Sky (1949) and The Gunfighter (1950) because he always found himself almost subconsciously moving in a way that would complement the cinematography – the way he walked, the way he got out the words.
It was during one of her classes that Graham permanently injured his spine. Graham told Greg to put his legs out front and his head on his knees. And then she placed her knee against his back and pushed. The snapping sound was so loud that the other students heard it.
‘I had ruptured a disk in my lower back,’ said Greg. ‘The school sent me to an orthopedic specialist who just put me in an old-fashioned canvas strap which I wore for two or three years and gradually the condition began to remedy itself, though off and on, it bothered me all my life.’
Despite the injury, Greg always spoke well of Graham as he did of his other teachers at the Playhouse. Being in the circle of such highly gifted people had an enormous effect on him. Bound by ties of temperament and congeniality, he emulated them and, figuratively speaking, developed more backbone. He would not be someone for whom life called the shots.
Those were great days for Greg, even though money was hard to come by. Of course, the standard of living was quite different back then. A trolley ride cost 10¢, a room at the Plaza $7.50. His scholarship provided him with a small amount of cash each month. Sometimes he turned to the school’s patrons, Rita Morgathau and Irene Lewisohn. ‘I was often broke,’ recalled Greg, ‘and once in a while I would go upstairs to their rather stylish, old-fashioned offices with pictures and nice furniture, and I’d borrow ten or twenty dollars.’ Plus, he picked up some modeling gigs. He appeared in the 1940 Montgomery Ward catalog in dozens of assorted guises: tennis player, business executive and more casually dressed camper. When things got desperate, he sold his blood.
For lodging Greg often doubled up with Ken Tobey, fellow Berkeley grad – and previous nemesis – who was equally destitute; they usually lived in basement rooms. At one time, Greg rented an apartment on 54th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues for $6 a week. During good weather, when they couldn’t spring for rent, they’d deposit their belongings in a locker at Grand Central Station and sleep in Central Park. Even when they were living apart, they often got together for breakfast at Nedicks for the Nine-Cent Special. The street corner joint was best known for its hot dog on a butter-toasted split-top roll washed down with an orange drink. When they walked in they not only smelled toasting bread, but the hot dogs as well.
For dinner they feasted at the Automat, the ‘in’ spot for the fiscally challenged and a gathering place for the acting crowd. By popping 20¢ in a slot and flicking his wrist, Greg could purchase spaghetti and three vegetables or he could enjoy such mouthwatering delicacies as Macaroni and Cheese, Boston Baked Beans, Chicken Pot Pie and Rice Pudding. As Lorraine B Diehl explains in her book The Automat, eating at a restaurant with self-serving vending machines rather than waitresses, and Art Deco architecture instead of stuffy dining rooms was an unforgettable experience. Asserts Diehl: ‘By the peak of its popularity – from the Great Depression to the post-war years – the Automat was more than an inexpensive place to buy a good meal: it was a culinary treasure, a technical marvel, and an emblem of the times.’
More typically, Greg and Tobey dined in their quarters. One celebrated evening, Greg arrived at Tobey’s room with 17¢ in his pocket.
‘Don’t flaunt your wealth before my starving face,’ Tobey told Greg.
‘Have you checked your cupboard?’ asked Greg.
A minute
search revealed one half-box of buckwheat flour in which there were no trespassers from the animal kingdom. ‘Muffins,’ announced Ken. ‘I’m celebrated for my secret recipe.’
While Tobey was measuring out the buckwheat, Greg took his 17¢ to the neighborhood delicatessen and bought two eggs and a quart of milk. One egg and a portion of the milk was added to make the batter, the rest of the milk was divided between two glasses, and the remaining egg was scrambled. Something proved to be wrong with the oven, which hadn’t been used much, so that the outer rim of the muffins formed a horsehide casing, whereas the interior was still viscid. However, the boys ate the muffins, diligently shared out their portions of the scrambled egg, and drank their milk in simple gratitude.
Clothes – or lack of them – presented another problem. Greg was greatly heartened when he received a box from one of his California relatives. Inside was a note saying, ‘I’ve grown too hefty around the perimeter to get into this, so decided to forward it to you in hope that you can derive some good from it.’ Neatly wrapped in tissue was a handsome gray flannel suit boasting such niceties as hand picked detail, leather buttons, and pleated trousers. Greg, beaming, slid into the coat. Slowly his delight turned sour. His arms extended from the sleeves for 3 lonely inches, and if he had taken a deep breath, the back would have split from collar to vent.
In 1939, a beguiling sketch by legendary caricaturist Al Hirschfield appeared in the drama section of the New York Times. It showed patrons of the Barter Theater in Abington, Virginia, lined up to watch a play. They were holding produce or livestock in their hands ready to hand them over in lieu of tickets. Greg may have seen the illustration. In any case, he certainly heard the clarion call of the Barter Theater’s founder, Robert Porterfield, coaxing New York actors to head south for summer stock. Porterfield exhorted them: ‘It’s better to eat in Virginia than starve in New York.’
The Barter Theater had a short, interesting history. Back in 1933 – the nadir of the Depression – Robert Porterfield was one among thousands of struggling actors trying to keep body and soul together. He was working as an elevator operator in New York after the touring Shakespearean Company to which he belonged folded. Suddenly, he was hit with a brainstorm.
He figured that with actors out of work and hungry and residents of southwest Virginia in need of good theater, why not combine the two. The residents could feed the performers and the actors could give them ideas, laughter and music. So food items were used in exchange for theater. When Barter opened, comedian Fred Allen quipped: ‘Along about Labor Day, if Bob wants to tell whether he’s had a successful season, he just weighs the actors.’
The box-office had to contend with some interesting scenarios. One man tried to stuff a dead rattlesnake through the ticket window. The frightened ticket seller didn’t want to accept it, but the man talked her into it with the argument that the paper said they were going to accept anything good to eat and that ‘rattlers is good vittles.’ Another man brought a cow, milked the cow to the required ticket value, sent the animal home and proceeded to enjoy the show he had purchased. Greg remembered, ‘Someone brought a live pig and got a season ticket.’ The local barber brought his clippers, combs and razor and gave haircuts to the actors for admission. Others brought corn, pickles, preserves, bacon, apples and cakes to barter for their tickets.
Actors weren’t the only ones to receive payment in edibles. Early on, the custom was established to pay the playwrights their royalty fees in Virginia hams. Claire Booth Luce was the recipient of a ham for the rights to The Women (1936) as were playwrights Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams and Thornton Wilder. One exception was George Bernard Shaw, a vegetarian, who bartered the rights to his plays for fresh spinach.
This ‘crazy idea’ of Robert Porterfield turned out to be just crazy enough to be successful. He was able to secure so much publicity and cooperation in the fledgling theater primarily because it was such a great scheme and, secondly, because of his own personal charm and enthusiasm. He was the quintessential Renaissance man, one part Southern gentleman, one part hustler, one part actor and one part Madison Avenue advertising genius.
Since it sounded like excellent training and a change of cuisine from Nedicks and the Automat, Greg and Ken Tobey applied to be members of the Barter Theater’s summer stock company. Ever the competitor, Greg set his sights on winning a scholarship. At the audition, he jumped up on stage and did a speech from Saturday’s Children (1924) a play by Maxwell Anderson that examines the marital problems of a young couple. The New York Times reported that he won the scholarship along with classmate Evelyn Fargo (of Fargo, North Dakota). Dorothy Stickney, who was starring at the Empire in the enormously popular Life With Father (1939), was the one to select the scholarship winners.
Greg’s enthusiasm was dampened when he was told his first job would be to drive the theater truck, loaded with the sets, props and lighting equipment for a comedy called Button Button (1940) to a school hall in Big Stone Gap, Virginia.
However, just the day before setting off, the leading actor had fallen ill and so a script was thrust in Greg’s hands and he was told to do the part. In only 24 hours, he had to learn the whole play and, at the same time, drive the truck. And there was no time for rehearsal.
Chugging across country, he did his best to commit the play’s lines to memory. Making his entrance in Button Button, his mind went blank. Tobey sat in the wings feeding lines to him. ‘It was a complete disaster,’ said Greg. ‘We got the second and third acts mixed up and I kept giving the wrong cues to the other person. Still, we got through it all and the audience never noticed the difference.’
Usually the plays were produced at the town hall on a stage that once saw both John Wilkes Booth and Sarah Bernhardt. In addition to acting, the cast also did the production work of the company, lugging cables, wiring sets, and, in Greg’s case, driving the bus or trucks to theaters across the state; tough work for actors subsisting on bartered food. Greg recalled eating spinach ‘until I though it would come out my ears.’ Already thin, he began to lose weight.
Greg played in at least five shows during the summer of 1940. Porterfield later recalled in his memoirs: ‘Repertory offers the greatest challenge possible to an actor’s development, and I found tremendous joy in watching an actor like Greg Peck mellow like wine from the experience of playing a piece of comic trivia like Button Button one night and electrifying audiences with his portrayal of Judah in Family Portrait the next.’
In the spring of 1941 the graduating class of the Neighborhood Playhouse put on a play titled The Chief Thing by Nicholas Evreinhoff. Greg played a con man decked out in a moustache and brandishing a cigarette. Members of the New York theater establishment were invited to attend what was known as a commencement performance.
In the audience that day was famed Broadway producer Guthrie McClintic. He ran a theatrical touring company in conjunction with his wife Katharine Cornell. She was a huge talent who was often referred to as the First Lady of American Theater.
A dazzling theatrical presence, Katharine Cornell was one of the two most famous and successful actresses in America at the time (the other being Helen Hayes). With McClintic, she toured from coast to coast and was known throughout the length and breadth of the country. From their first production together, The Green Hat in 1925, they proved to be a successful team, with such productions as The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1931), Saint Joan (1936) and Candida (1937); now they were mounting a production of The Doctor’s Dilemma. Cornell was often able to carry a weak production on the basis of her strong voice, expressive face, and acting style. McClintic’s vigilant and canny management of her career provided Cornell with everything she needed to function perfectly. He had staged all her performances and produced many of them. This kind of arrangement enabled her to carry out her work freely and hold her own against stage competitors such as Helen Hayes and Jane Cowl. The sexual aspect of their marriage may not have been of great importance, as it often isn’t in these kinds of un
ion, because so much energy passed into the work. The celebrated couple had recently garnered enthusiastic publicity for proving ‘the road is not dead.’ They had taken their repertory company on a tour of 75 cities, giving 225 performances and covering 17,000 miles.
The day after the Neighborhood Playhouse commencement performance, following tradition, Greg and the other graduates assembled at the Playhouse to wait for calls from producers. It was a very tense room.
The moment of truth had arrived. Acting school days were done. All the techniques they had so painfully acquired; all that palaver about ‘level of emotion’ and ‘playing in depth’ and the superb technical training of the Meisner Technique might not mean a damn thing. It’s personal chemistry that matters. Your instrument is you and not the skill. Your face, your body and your personality is what sells. No acting teacher can give you the magic. That occurred at the instant of conception. As playwright and author of Peter Pan, J M Barrie said, it’s like charm in a woman: ‘If you have it, you don’t need to have anything else; and if you don’t have it, it doesn’t much matter what else you have.’
Greg was just as scared as everyone else; two obsessed, passionate, exultant, despairing years were suddenly up. The Neighborhood Playhouse, with its immersion in the murky waters of one’s own psyche, would now be behind him. The world where teachers were gods suddenly dwarfed. The world outside was the real one.
Where did he want to work? Who would have him? If he didn’t find work, what would he do? He liked to work; he needed to work. He couldn’t feel like an actor unless he was working. Was his father right in calling his theatrical infatuation ‘a false errand’? Doc continued to urge him to forget about the grubby rewards the theater offered and get a solid profession.