by Lynn Haney
Greg soon learned that, unlike Zanuck, Mayer rarely interfered with film production. At the same time, he was vitally interested in everything that concerned his people: their politics, their lovers, whom they should or should not romance, how they worked, their habits, their lifestyles, and even the color of their hair. He was a rabid Republican, and made political shorts to be shown in the Loew’s theaters. He was also a profoundly sentimental man who disliked realism in movies, press releases and police reports alike.
When a drunken Clark Gable drove around a curve too fast one day in 1933 and struck a pedestrian, killing her instantly, Mayer actually got an MGM executive to take the rap. He had a cozy relationship with the Los Angeles DA and knew where to send the money that kept things out of the newspapers.
In The Valley of Decision, Greg was playing opposite Greer Garson, a personal find of Mayer’s who was then considered one of the brightest stars in the MGM galaxy. Garson was a witty Celtic beauty with an ineffable presence and enormous drive. She got her start on the stage and rose to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s, playing noble women in films such as Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939), Pride and Prejudice (1940) and Random Harvest (1942). But it was her portrayal as a steadfast, loving Mrs Miniver in the 1942 movie that won her an Oscar – her only win out of an impressive six nominations – and made her one of the most beloved actresses of her generation. (Her Oscar acceptance speech took up so much time, the audience began to wonder if it was going to run longer than the movie itself.)
Greg knew he had to do a respectable job for Mayer or he might find himself relegated to B-movies. When it came to actors, Mayer’s standards were very high and he was not overly impressed with newcomers like Gregory Peck. He once told British actor Robert Morley that the cinema had given precisely one great artist to the world: ‘Greta Garbo . . . unless you count that damn Mouse.’
Versatile in both comedy and drama, Greer’s popularity had begun to slip about the time The Valley of Decision was being filmed. Also, she was keenly aware of being eight years older than her costar. At about the time they met, she snapped at a photographer who was shooting her: ‘You’re not photographing me as well as you used to.’
‘Well, I’m ten years older,’ the photographer replied diplomatically.
Greg found her ‘a bit of an Irish cut-up, radiant, funny, bracing, and smart.’ He called her Big Red and they got along fabulously.
On the home front, Greg was a spectator in a heartwarming domestic drama – the birth of his first child. On 20 July 1944, while he was filming at Culver City, Greta went into labor. He was called to the hospital and after several hours he heard a nurse announce over the loudspeaker: ‘Mr Peck, your son wants to speak to you.’ He shouted ‘Yippee!’ When the nurse came into the room to take him to see his baby boy, he told her, ‘The Yankees have found themselves another pitcher.’ The Pecks already had a name chosen: Jonathan.
‘A family name?’ asked a reporter.
‘Oh, no, indeed,’ Greg answered in his ‘ah, shucks’ way. ‘We found it in a book of 3,500 names, and it seems to fit him.’
Much to Greta’s disappointment, there was little time for Greg to enjoy his baby son straightaway as he still had a film to finish. And he was continuing to make a good impression on industry insiders. Valley of Decision director Tay Garnett enthused: ‘Peck has everything it takes to be a megastar. He has the looks, the personality, the poise and the control, and a magnificent voice.’
By osmosis, Greg was strengthening his mindset as a real trouper. It was a quality he admired tremendously in great character actors such as Lionel Barrymore. Greg never forgot one afternoon during the filming of The Valley of Decision that Barrymore was going all out during a rehearsal. He was working from a wheelchair (he had a bad heart), and it was a strike-breaking scene outside a steel mill in Pittsburgh. ‘He was on the picket line and he had a scene where he had to shout and go into a tirade, and he did this in rehearsal. Tay Garnett, came up and said, “Lionel, please! You don’t have to do that in rehearsal. I don’t want you to have a heart attack.” And Barrymore said, “Who gives a damn!”’
Of the old-timers, few would hold as high a place in Greg’s regard as Walter Huston (father of John Huston). The gravel-voiced character actor was in his early 60s and down to playing loveable old rogues by the time Greg got to know him, but for years Huston enjoyed success both on the New York stage and in films such as Abraham Lincoln (1930), Dodsworth (1936), The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). He liked to say, ‘Hell, I ain’t paid to make good lines sound good. I’m paid to make bad ones sound good.’ As Greg sat with him during filming breaks on the set of Duel in the Sun (1946) the two men swapped stories about boxing and baseball. Huston also shared some nuggets of advice such as: ‘Give ’em a good show, and always travel first class.’
When Huston died in 1950 at the age of 66, Spencer Tracy praised him in a rousing eulogy: ‘Two Americans have won the Nobel Prize for literature. It’s no accident that when you mention Sinclair Lewis or Eugene O’Neill you think of Walter Huston. He helped them tell their stories better than anyone else. He gave more color to their lines; he gave more drive to their action. He turned guts into a good word. He filled in with 45 years of the best playing you’ll ever see. It was the works – singing, dancing, Shakespeare. Call your shot. Huston could do it.’ That was the sort of career Greg hoped to have for himself.
The fact that Greg was working so much and spending so little time off the set added tension to the marital home. But Greg was like a miner, bidding a metaphorical goodbye to the daylight and the outside world for the duration. Even when the cast broke for lunch on the set, he was consumed with talking shop with his colleagues. In years to come, Greg would regret the large chunks of time he spent away from his family, especially Jonathan.
The Keys of the Kingdom was set to premiere in New York on 28 December 1944 and the Pecks ventured East for the occasion. Jonathan stayed home. ‘He’d just be a nuisance,’ Greg explained to a reporter who wondered why the couple wasn’t taking the baby along to visit Greta’s mother. Relaxing at the Waldorf Astoria, the couple couldn’t suppress their glee in comparing their plush rooms with the fifth-floor, shared kitchen walk-up that was their last New York address.
The luxury hotel setting appealed to Greg’s emerging appreciation of the finer things in life. ‘There must have been aristocrats somewhere back in my family history,’ he joked. Indeed, the simple guy who sported flannel-checked shirts, and barbecued humble burgers, was developing a strong aesthetic taste.
The Waldorf Astoria was a 1930s Art Deco masterpiece occupying an entire city block between 49th and 50th Streets. Greg could bathe in a marble bathroom, sink his feet into a soft red carpet, stroll along Peacock Alley and dine in the Empire Room. This was the hotel for royalty, show business and US Presidents. Decorations were executed by noted artists: the murals in the Sert Room were by José Maria Sert; the rug (The Wheel of Life) and the paintings in the main foyer were by Louis Rigal; the murals in the Starlight Roof Garden by Victor White. Thereafter, whenever he visited New York, Greg occupied one of the Waldorf ’s residential suites.
At the film’s opening, the New York press corps turned out in full force. Greg and Greta were whisked up to the theater in a white limousine accompanied by a four-motorcycle police escort. The scene was a blur of jewels, furs, celebrities, critics and jittery nerves. Looking up, Greg was confronted with a 54-foot billboard featuring his portrait. ‘It stretched for half a block,’ he recalled, ‘and the impact on me was not lost, let alone on the people it was meant to attract.’
Next came Spellbound – and Ingrid. It was a suspense thriller with psychoanalytic content about an amnesiac John Ballantine (Peck) and a Freudian psychologist Dr Constance Peterson (Bergman). Greg was at a disadvantage having to play a none-too-plausible character in what is, despite the film’s status as a minor classic, an overripe piece of melodrama. The film is really a showpiece for Bergman, who
is on camera nearly every second of the movie’s 111 minutes. Producer, David O Selznick originally wanted Joseph Cotton, Dorothy McGuire and Paul Lukas for Spellbound, but now it is difficult to imagine the film without Bergman, Greg, and, for tops, Salvador Dalí designing the dream sequence.
Greg had heard a great deal about Selznick’s sharp, impulsive mind and his daring promotional escapades. The producer’s résumé included such memorable films as King Kong (1933), Dinner at Eight (1933), Anna Karenina (1935), A Star is Born (1937), Rebecca (1940) and of course, Gone With the Wind (1939). He had a keen eye for a worthwhile project and new talent, but when he became obsessed with a project or person, he tended to go over board and his judgment often erred. He would find himself in trouble with his bankers in spite of the fact that he was able to turn out pictures that ran up fantastic grosses at the box-office.
Selznick and other major independents such as Sam Goldwyn and Walt Disney were in a class by themselves. While the big studios emphasized efficiency and productivity, these intrepid men produced only a few high-cost, high-yield pictures annually. They turned out prestige pictures that often tested the economic constraints and the creative limits of the system. But the so-called ‘independents’ were closely tied to the studio system, and especially to the integrated majors. The independents needed the system for its resources and theaters, while the system needed them to cultivate the ‘high-end’ of the market and to keep the first-run theaters stocked with quality product – an obvious benefit to the majors since they took a sizeable exhibitor’s fee on these releases.
If Greg weren’t a fan of larger than life personalities, he might have been exasperated with David O Selznick. The most fabulous and unpredictable of the independent filmmakers, Selznick was arrogant, rude, desperately insecure and wildly self-destructive. He was also a hot-tempered slave-driver, a sloppy satyr, a meddler and a poor sport when the joke was on him. But Greg chose not to dwell on his shortcomings. Of all the Hollywood tycoons, Selznick was the one with whom he socialized most.
Being around Selznick meant observing the producer’s romantic life at close range. When Spellbound went into production, Selznick’s wife was the princess of the kingdom, Irene Mayer, daughter of Louis B. (Years earlier when Selznick had married the iron-willed Irene, screenwriters Charles MacArthur and Charles Lederer composed a cruel ditty which began: ‘Someone had to marry Irene Mayer, someone had to have the guts to lay her . . . ’.) But the producer was in the midst of separating from Irene because he had fallen crazy in love with a young beauty, Jennifer Jones. Determined to present her to the public as a great actress, he would make Jones Greg’s co-star in the upcoming Duel in the Sun (1946).
Jones, recently divorced from actor Robert Walker, was half in love and half repulsed by Selznick. The producer was far from gorgeous. Tall, shaggy in appearance, with black, curly hair turning white, thick-lensed spectacles, tie awry and cigarette ash on his sleeve, Selznick nonetheless lured Jennifer with two great aphrodisiacs: money and power.
For his part, Selznick was so captivated by the ‘the big-eyed girl’ (as he referred to Jennifer in one of his famous memos) that it was endangering his precarious mental balance. She would become his obsession and he would spend the rest of his life nurturing her career. Greg recalled, ‘Selznick was so ambitious, so extravagant, such a big spoiled kid, so talented, so undisciplined. He made Gone With the Wind, which everybody seemed to think was the greatest picture ever made. So he was riding on that fame.’
The movie Spellbound came about through Selznick’s interest in psychiatry. He was a man divided into three. He submitted himself to analysis because of his confusion over leaving Irene, falling in love with Jennifer Jones, and being excessively involved in work. His fascination with psychiatric treatment led him to purchase the novel The House of Dr Edwardes (1927) by Francis Beeding, which he gave to Ben Hecht to transcribe for the screen. (Hecht was also in analysis at the time, and he and Selznick often compared their experiences.) Alfred Hitchcock was asked to direct.
For many critics, then and now, Spellbound’s treatment of psychoanalysis – a theme woven into its narrative of a fraught love affair between a repressed analyst and a potentially psychotic amnesiac – has been dismissed as obvious, even grating, and merely an inferior template of ideas that would later reappear in Vertigo (1946) and elsewhere.
Searching for surreal imagery, Hitchcock persuaded Selznick to have Salvador Dalí create a dream sequence; though the artist made hundreds of sketches, only a fragment of his efforts made it to the screen.
Hitchcock told New Wave director François Truffaut: ‘I was determined to break with the traditional way of handling dream sequences through a blurred and hazy screen. I asked Selznick if he could get Dalí to work with us and he agreed, though I think he didn’t really understand my reasons for wanting Dalí. He probably thought I wanted his collaboration for publicity purposes. The real reason was that I wanted to convey the dreams with great visual sharpness and clarity, sharper than the film itself. I wanted Dalí because of the architectural sharpness of his work . . . But Dalí had some strange ideas; he wanted a statue to crack like a shell falling apart, with ants crawling all over it, and underneath, there would be Ingrid Bergman, covered by the ants! It just wasn’t possible.’
Dalí composed more than a hundred sketches and five paintings to be filmed (at $1,000 a clip). According to Bergman’s account of the visual effects in the movie: ‘It opened with 400 human eyes glaring down at [Greg] from black velvet drapes. Then a pair of pliers fifteen times taller than Peck chased him up the side of a pyramid.’
By the 1940s, Salvador Dalí had become a darling of American high society. Celebrities such as Jack Warner and Helena Rubinstein gave him commissions for portraits. His artworks became a popular trademark and, besides painting, he pursued other avenues, such as jewelry and clothing designs for Coco Chanel. He attracted the attention of the media by playing the role of a surrealist clown. Reporters knew they could count on him for a snappy quote such as: ‘Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dalí.’ Perhaps he came by his hubris from his mother who boasted of baby Salvadore, ‘Even his pee is golden.’ In any case, he made a lot of money and was contemptuously nicknamed Avida Dollars (greedy for dollars) by Surrealist André Breton.
For shrinks, Los Angeles was the land of opportunity. Leo Rangell, a psychiatrist who arrived in the Movie Mecca in 1946 found the residents possessed a fascinating mix of great ambition, visibility, exhibitionism, cultism, and exciting and eccentric ideas.
To no one’s surprise, a mutual infatuation developed between moviemakers and psychiatrists. Mary Romm, the colorful ‘Queen of Couch Canyon,’ parlayed her role as David O Selznick’s personal analyst into a plum assignment as his advisor on Spellbound. The producers evangelized psychoanalysis and led the way in making the Freudian-led science – with all its contemporary offshoots – an integral part of American life. Quipped Nunnally Johnson: ‘As long as Hollywood stands, no freeborn American need surrender to an inferiority complex. It is the greatest boon to psychiatrists since sex. Hollywood never gets the credit due to it.’
Both Hitchcock and Hecht were familiar enough with the topic to exploit it in the service of the real subject: romance. In preparation, the writer and director toured mental hospitals in Connecticut and New York, then focused on the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. The Hitchcock–Hecht collaboration was a fruitful one. The two men shared an interest in the darker passages of the human mind.
Greg benefited from Bergman’s strong relationship with Hitchcock. She knew what Hitchcock wanted and she also had another advantage. The 300-pound, cherub-faced, pot-bellied director liked to flirt with her. With his combination of jollity and edginess, he played up to Bergman in a sort of seduction. And she responded to his mixture of humor and authority with her own charm. Years later, he would murmer, ‘Ah, Ingrid. So beautiful, so stupid.’ Their relaxed rela
tionship made it easier for Greg to loosen up.
‘Now Ingrid, for instance, is so straight – so strictly on the square about everything she does – it’s practically painful,’ said Greg. ‘She has a terrific sense of truth that it causes her great embarrassment if she has to do anything theatrical, or overly emotional. That’s one reason I like her so much. Her acting also followed clean classic lines I guess – I get tense if I have to emote.’
But Greg was bewildered by the man who had perfected himself as a machine for making movies with a clearly laid out plan in his mind. (Hitchcock contended: ‘In a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.’) Greg recalled: ‘Hitchcock is like an architect in this manner; he never starts to wreck the building until he has drawn up the perfect plan so that when he begins there is very little that can go wrong. His preparations are meticulous. He needs to be able to place actors into this plan, and he is always at his best with technical actors – that is, actors like Cary Grant who have an accomplished technique of producing effects. Grant worked very hard on his technique and it’s very facile, something he can just turn on.
‘With him, given his long record of success, you don’t quarrel. You do it his way. I don’t think I was at my most effective with him – not because I didn’t like him as a director, but because I was not quite flexible enough, nor indeed professional enough yet – it was quite early in my film career – to do everything he wanted and needed and at the same time provide my own inner truth. Because it’s quite possible to act the other way about, from the externals in. Many, many great actors do this. But I wasn’t experienced enough to do that.’
Even for seasoned actors, finding themselves in the arms of someone they don’t know well can feel awkward. Not to mention that a dozen strangers are watching your every move with interest because, as cameramen or electricians or prop men, they are being paid to do so. For this reason, passionate love scenes in front of the camera are anything but passionate, particularly in close-up. There you are lying lip to lip, while the cameramen complains, ‘I can see nothing but noses. Can’t you move your face a bit to the right?’