by Lynn Haney
Aware of the play’s problems and knowing he would be paid only $400 per week, Greg nonetheless snapped up the contract. He would have given his eye teeth to work under Max Reinhardt, the Sons and Soldiers director. Short and stocky with extraordinary cobalt-blue eyes, Reinhardt was a golden name theater people uttered with reverence.
Viennese by origin and trained as an actor, Reinhardt became one of the most influential and original producers in the world. He created a flashy-yet-real style, which even his competitors had difficulty replicating. Today he is still studied in great detail in theater classes; his methods and techniques are copied by professional directors. To him, the theater was a place for display, for spectacle and magic. Using the plays of Shakespeare, stretching all the possibilities of light and stage, he was a master of gigantic productions and a genius of the mob scene. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, Reinhardt fled to the United States where, in 1934, he founded an acting school and theater workshop in Hollywood. He had left behind him his home, his treasures, virtually everything but his self-respect and prodigious talent. By the time Reinhardt took on the job of directing Sons and Soldiers, he was in his late sixties and had lost most of his once considerable physical strength.
In rehearsal, the play’s problems became glaringly evident. To complicate matters, Shaw left his wife with strict instructions that not one word of dialogue was to be cut in his absence. Since there wasn’t any way to contact an ambulance driver 5,000 miles away, the play was left uncut.
Greg played a small-town American boy, who, against the wishes of his parents, goes off to join the army. In one scene, he had to argue with his mother and father, shout, cry, and jump out of a window. It required a highly charged emotional performance and Greg, who in life was the consummate dutiful son, wasn’t sure he could get through it. Whenever he came to the difficult part, he would feel his chest muscles tightening. Worse still, his performance was having an effect on the other actors. ‘I murdered it.’ He confessed. ‘I couldn’t fight off my nervousness and apprehension in doing that scene and as we were getting rather close to the opening night I had to fake it.’
Finally, Reinhardt stopped the proceedings from the orchestra pit, where he was watching rehearsals. Because of his frail condition, he usually stayed put. When he had directions to give to his players, he would send his assistant, Louis Jarvis, to discuss the matter. But this time, he shuffled slowly and deliberately all the way up the stairway on the side of the stage and took Greg off in a corner.
It wasn’t a comfortable moment; Greg, 6 foot 2 inches, being held by the sleeve by a slightly portly, 5-foot-4-inch director with the most astonishing cobalt-blue eyes, who was gently chastising him.
Reinhardt whispered in his German accent: ‘You know, I can see you’re not happy, and I’ve been wondering what to say to you. Well, there’s one thing I can say. We must remember how lucky we are in the show business because we can go on playing “let’s pretend” all our lives, whereas most people have to stop when they are through being children. Look at me, and my age. I’m still pretending, and don’t you think it’s fun?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Greg. ‘I love it.’
‘Well,’ replied Reinhardt. ‘You must put yourself in the corner just offstage and then you must send the player – or child if you will – out on to the stage to playact. So let’s pretend . . . ’
‘It was,’ Greg recalled, ‘a great breakthrough. It enabled me to throw off my self-consciousness. You have to be willing to make a damn fool of yourself and be horrible and embarrassing before getting it right. I think there must be a lot of people around who would be good actors if they were able to overcome that fear, or the fear of fear.’
Given its structural problems, Sons and Soldiers was the sort of drama that needed almost unanimous critical approval in order to attract a sufficient audience; when the unanimity was not forth coming, neither were the ticket buyers. The show opened on 4 March 1943 and closed after 22 performances. Reinhardt suffered a stroke and died on 31 October at New York’s Gladstone Hotel.
For Greg, there wasn’t time to dwell on Sons and Soldiers. Soon he and Greta would be boarding the Twentieth Century Limited for the long trip to Los Angeles. The prospect of being able to take home $1,000 was something to relish, even in anticipation. Money generates its own kind of excitement. Looking forward to it created an ambience of gaiety and merriment in Greg and Greta’s lives. They were a little intoxicated with the anticipation of the great changes to come, good changes most of them. Still, Greg would lose one thing that he would never regain. Gone forever were his footloose days as a carefree bohemian. From now on, people would watch his every step.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tinseltown
‘Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn’t like it is either crazy or sober.’
Raymond Chandler, detective novelist and screenwriter
Now residing in the magical land in the sun, Greg plunged into a crazy work schedule. It was a frantic, erratic montage of ups and downs, ins and outs, as he struggled to find his feet. Far from looking down his nose at film acting, Greg only hoped to be good enough. ‘My training was telescoped,’ he remembered. ‘I had to pay attention. It was survival of the fittest.’
Days of Glory came and went in the bat of an eye. Screenwriter and producer Casey Robinson intended it to be a sophisticated film about a group of Russians who join together to resist the invasion of their country by the Nazis. What he got was a curious hybrid, caught between the trappings of the theater and the trajectory of the realistic war movie. It was made for RKO Pictures, a studio that never achieved the peaks of MGM, Paramount or Warner Brothers. With the war on, a popular crack went: ‘In case of an air raid, go directly to RKO: they haven’t had a hit in years.’
Cast as a Russian guerilla, Greg, with his clean cut features and Yankee speech inflection, proved jarringly out of sync with the role. To play the romantic lead opposite Greg, Robinson cast his fiancée, Tamara Toumanova, a former star of the Moscow ballet, who was also a novice to the film world. Fortunately, the director, Jacques Tourneur didn’t have a problem with it. ‘It was a pleasure for me,’ he recalled, ‘because I did with them everything I wanted, exactly as with clay.’
Days of Glory wrapped in early November 1943. After viewing the rough cut, Greg decided to skip the finished film. ‘I got a feeling I was amateurish,’ he said. ‘Why should I see the picture and prove it.’ Then he added defensively, ‘I just came out to pick up ten grand and go back to New York.’ In actuality, he dreaded the trek back East. With a forgettable movie under his belt, he’d be just one more actor who had made the three-day train journey to the West Coast to no avail. In fact, there was a saying on Broadway about the experience of having to ‘schlep’ one’s possessions back on the eastbound train: ‘Never buy anything in Hollywood that you can’t put on the Chief.’
Fortunately, there was someone else who saw the rushes and understood the newcomer’s potential. It was none other than the tough, cigar-smoking, lecherous and supremely gifted head of Twentieth Century Fox, Darryl Zanuck. He’d watched Greg in Morning Star on Broadway and found him an interesting type.
Zanuck was in the midst of casting for The Keys of the Kingdom in 1943, a film adaptation of A J Cronin’s best-selling novel about a nineteenth-century Scottish priest named Father Chisholm who finds himself in the line of fire during the Chinese civil war. The New Republic described it as ‘an adventure and travel story packed with melodramatic action.’ Zanuck had already tested 40 actors for the part but couldn’t find a good fit. Then he saw Greg in an early cut of Days of Glory. Like the priests at St John’s Military who encouraged their spiritually inclined student from La Jolla to pursue a religious vocation, and the girl at the Neighborhood Playhouse who inspired the moniker Father Peck, Zanuck knew he’d found his Father Chisholm.
‘I fell in love with the part,’ Greg said after reading Cronin’s novel. Still, he stubbornly refused to sign a seven year contract wit
h Zanuck. So, to preserve Greg’s autonomy and at the same time satisfy Zanuck, Leland Hayward worked out an arrangement in which Greg agreed to a four-picture deal with Twentieth Century Fox with a salary of $750 a week.
The hardiest and longest-lived of the mighty moguls, Zanuck was a small man with prominent white teeth, a tanned face and ferret like eyes. He spoke in a voice several decibels too loud for the size of the room and the nearness of his listeners. He moved around as he talked, flexing a polo mallet with a shortened stick – an exercise to strengthen the wrist and forearm. He had started out at Warner Brothers where he’d risen meteorically from dialogue writer for Rin-Tin-Tin to executive head of the studio. After making a few movies for MGM, he started a new company, Twentieth Century Pictures, which later became Twentieth Century Fox.
Zanuck’s most talked-about personal trait was his avid sexual appetite. In this regard, Gregory Peck was lucky to be an actor not an actress. ‘If you were not sexually operational, forget your career,’ remembered Joan Crawford. ‘. . . I went over to Fox, for one of my late films, and when I was ushered into his office he promptly opened a desk drawer and took out a genuine gold casting of his genitals. I must admit he was admirably hung, but I couldn’t help wondering what sort of so-called “obligations” had hung over the ladies at Twentieth over the years.’
When Greg met Zanuck, the producer looked him straight in the eye and vowed, ‘I’m never going to ask you to make a picture you don’t want to make. You can rely on me.’ Could he? Greg wondered.
Despite winning the coveted Father Chisholm role, Greg was plagued with self-doubts. Calling himself lucky was not just a way of deflecting envy, he still didn’t believe he deserved the breaks coming his way. He confided to Mary Morris of PM magazine: ‘If it weren’t for the shortage of leading men, a place like Twentieth Century Fox wouldn’t have been interested in me – think of it, they’d lost Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Tyrone Power, Richard Green and John Payne.’ Similarly, those up-and-coming actors who were drafted and fought in the Second World War lost momentum.
Irrepressible Leland Hayward spread the word that Darryl Zanuck wanted Greg for a key role in an important film. So indefatigable, so insuperably optimistic was he, people figured Greg must really be something special. As his daughter Brooke Hayward recounts, he’d wire people to warn them he was about to call or call them to warn them he was about to wire them. Anything to get a prospect worked up. Sometimes he mapped out deals in a high pitched frenzy while reclining with his feet draped over the top of his sofa and other times he’d be the archetypal mogul in his office. With one haunch parked on a desk corner, he dazzled his listener with his contagious enthusiasm about Gregory Peck.
Ballyhoo paid off. The major studios were falling over themselves to sign Greg. Louis B Mayer agreed to a nonexclusive contract for Greg to make four films for MGM over the next five years, starting with the salary of $750 a week on the first film, with a flat salary of $45,000 for the second, and $55,000 for the third and $65,000 for the fourth. David O Selznick now kicked himself for not signing Greg after his early screen test, and he managed to buy half the contract Greg had with Casey Robinson. After Greg signed his four-picture deal with the producer, Kay Brown, who first brought Greg to Selznick’s attention, recalled: ‘It cost David about four times what he would’ve had to pay originally.’ In essence, Hayward had succeeded in getting Zanuck, Selznick and Mayer to agree to signing Greg for four films at each studio. This was before Days of Glory was even released.
Thus Greg became the first actor to embark on a successful movie career without the usual exclusive studio contract, a trend that was followed by Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Charlton Heston, eventually leading to the complete breakdown of the studios’ star system. His head swam in the confusion of all these contractual complications, but Hayward told him to let the agency worry about that.
The next thing Greg knew, Hayward was selling his agency to Music Corporation of America (MCA) and moving East to produce Broadway plays. Jules Stein, founder of MCA, recalled that when they bought the agency in 1944, Hayward’s clients turned out to be the firm’s most important ones. ‘He overshadowed everybody in the business . . . I was flabbergasted to think that he had so many important people – not only performers, but writers and directors – he had the best cross-section of artists in the whole field.’
Although delighted to have Greg as one of its clients, MCA found itself with the headache of trying to unravel his tangled contracts. This unenviable task was handed to George Chasin by his boss Lew Wasserman, who told him: ‘If you do nothing else for the next six months, make yourself Gregory Peck’s agent because he’s going to be a very, very big and important star. Just devote yourself to him.’
At this point Greg made a modest investment in Hayward’s first Broadway play, A Bell for Adano. It signaled the direction he would take with his finances. Adano opened with a bang. The play made Hayward an overnight success as a Broadway producer. Greg not only received a return on his investment, but it strengthened his bond with Hayward, whose keen instincts were invaluable.
As he walked on the set of The Keys of the Kingdom, Greg knew he had to prove himself. With Days of Glory about to be released – and aware it would probably be panned – he needed to show the producers nipping at his heels that he could, indeed, act for the screen. (On 16 June 1944 Days of Glory made an embarrassingly brief appearance in the theaters. It failed miserably with the critics. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times summed up the consensus of many about the male lead: ‘Gregory Peck comes recommended with the Gary Cooper angularity and a face somewhat like that modest gentleman’s, but his acting is equally stiff.’)
Just strolling around the Twentieth Century Fox lot proved tremendously exciting for a newcomer, somewhat like Greg’s old stomping ground, The New York World’s Fair. The studio buildings, executive offices, cutting rooms, fire department, casting office and the huge towering sound stages seemed like a miniature city, and everywhere the streets teemed with cowboys, Indians, Southern gentlemen, soldiers, policemen, troupes of dancers and Hawaiian show girls, jungles, sections of Venice, New York’s streets and what passed for a medieval castle and a lake with a large schooner and native canoes on it. Inside the buildings, state of the art equipment hummed day and night. As drama critic and editor George Jean Nathan so aptly described it: ‘Ten million dollars’ worth of intricate and ingenious machinery functioning elaborately to put skin on baloney.’
Zanuck had actors, writers, directors, producers, all the creative talent and labor that was required to produce a motion picture, signed to exclusive long-term contracts to work for the studio. All he had to do was run his finger down the list of talent under contract to Fox – a list he always kept pressed firmly on the top of his desk beneath a heavy sheet of glass – and deftly put together all the elements necessary to make a movie.
He presided over his crazy wonderland like the ringmaster in a circus. He was inclined to dress in riding britches and boots. Perpetually in motion, he compensated for his slight physical stature by keeping in such good trim that few men twice his size possessed his strength and endurance. He could arm wrestle a world champion boxer and beat him (as he did several times with Jack Dempsey). He could perform on the high wire, the vaulting horse, and the trapeze to well-nigh professional standards.
Perhaps another compensation for his diminutive size was his over-sized imagination. ‘Ignore the facts,’ actress Ruth Gordon liked to say, and this might have served as Zanuck’s slogan. He could overcome the highest obstacles in service to his imagination. For example, in producing battle movies during the Second World War, Zanuck found himself with enough actors to play the good guys but was desperately short of those to play the bad guys. According to actor Sheriden Morley, Central Casting couldn’t rustle up the requisite Germans or Japanese. So Zanuck figured it would be all right to use other foreigners in the role so long as they did not look too American.
Thus, he conclude
d, for one particularly turgid war film he was making, that in the absence of the genuine Japanese – who were mainly now to be found in California internment camps – the entire Tokyo War Cabinet could be played by Englishmen. He figured that American audiences would be better able to detect by their voices that they were un-American and therefore likely to be ‘baddies’. Accordingly, Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Aubrey Smith, Cedric Hardwicke and Ronald Coleman were summoned to makeup at 5 a.m. one morning. Dedicated technicians spent the next five hours endowing them with Japanese characteristics, and they were then assembled around a replica of the Cabinet table in Tokyo.
‘When I came out here,’ recalled Greg, ‘Fox was making 65 features a year, and the others were making about that many. The parking lot was full. All the sound stages were busy. In those days, when they didn’t have the competition of television, I think they were more apt to say yes to something a little cockeyed.’
The screenplay for The Keys of the Kingdom was originally written by Nunnally Johnson for David O Selznick. When the rights were sold to Zanuck’s office, the scripting and production went to Joseph L Mankiewicz. Starting out as a newspaper man, Nunnally Johnson went on to distinguish himself as a playwright, screenwriter and movie producer. Upon meeting Greg, he surmised that the actor wasn’t very bright simply because he didn’t say much in an atmosphere of sparkling conversations. Later he realized in Greg’s case, still waters ran deep. Johnson said of Zanuck: ‘He had a kind of tough, stubborn faith. If you believed in your project, by God, he would see that it got made. There weren’t many men who could produce a script and recognize a good one, but he could.’