by Lynn Haney
Kids and animals were favorite themes during the 1940s, featured in such films as Lassie Come Home (1943), My Friend Flicka (1943), National Velvet (1944) and The Red Pony (1949). Claude Jarman, who played the boy in the movie, was one of the 12,000 children who auditioned for the part.
MGM had taken an assembly line approach to the deer ‘character’ – they had 24 at various stages of growth – but such forethought could not offset the delays brought about by rain, heat and insects. Nature stalled the shooting while perpetuating the growth of the deer, bears, bobcats, raccoons, foxes and squirrels. It took 72 takes to film a scene featuring the fawn. Not receptive to training, the creature kept disappearing from the shot while the actors delivered their dialogue. Over the two days it took to get the single scene, director Clarence Brown paid more attention to the fawn than he did to the actors. After the film was finished, he said: ‘Never again. You have to direct a fawn or a stock of corn to understand my problems.’
A great amount of effort was spent on difficult locations in the Florida Everglades, resulting in much spoiled footage and a later decision to re-shoot on the sound stages at MGM. Acknowledging ‘it was the most difficult film to make’, Greg added that the pressure and tension were eased by Jane Wyman’s ‘plucky humor.’
Funny and formidable, Jane Wyman was one of the great stars of the time. She was also a moody person, temperamental, ambitious, restless and seeking. Like Greg, she learned early how to be a survivor, and she cultivated that trait as she made her way to the top. After working up from bit parts at Warner Brothers playing leggy, wise-cracking cuties in low-budget films, she finally got some respect as an actress for The Lost Weekend (1945). With the release of The Yearling she received an Oscar nomination and, finally, with Johnny Belinda (1948), a tender portrayal of a deaf-mute farm girl, she won the Oscar in 1948. As Jane’s career peaked with Johnny Belinda, her second marriage, to Ronald Reagan, was slipping. When Greg asked her about the divorce, she said: ‘I couldn’t stand to watch Kings Row [1942] one more time.’
The location was wrapped in February 1946 and the rest of the film shot in the luxury of MGM’s Culver City studio. About this time, the Pecks were invited to their first formal party – and Greta was galvanized. She had to figure out a way to get casually dressing Greg into a dinner jacket. Finally, in exasperation, she took the tailor down to The Yearling set, where she made Greg stand still between scenes for a fitting. The suit turned out fine, but her next challenge was trying to buy him a white collar. ‘I finally showed up at the studio with two, one too small and one too large. When I finally got him dressed, wearing the big collar as the lesser of two evils, we were late to the dinner party and Greg said: “See, everybody’s too busy to notice what I’m wearing.”’
Concurrently, David O Selznick was doing retakes for Duel in the Sun, and Greg found himself going from one studio to the other. ‘I’d get out of my Southern cracker overalls in my Southern accent and put on a cowboy suit and slide into my Texas drawl. I really enjoyed it, actually. It was frantic and fun.’ It was interesting for Greg because each film required him to be completely different in character: solid, decent and kindly for The Yearling, and crude and lascivious for Duel in the Sun.
After the films finished, the Pecks rented a place at Lake Arrowhead, an hour’s drive from Los Angeles, near a place leased by Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman. Greg took two months off and put on 20 pounds. He recalled: ‘It was the first vacation I had since hitting Hollywood and for the initial two weeks I went for it. I did nothing but walk around and I filled out a lot, which I needed, for I was still only 185 pounds for my 6 foot 3. But by the beginning of the third week I began to get restless and by the eighth week I was stir crazy. The truth is I can’t stay away from acting. I’m really all ham and I’m never so happy as when facing a camera or an audience.’
The Yearling was released in the winter of 1946 to good reception from critics and moviegoers. On 23 January 1947 it began a long run in New York City at Radio City Music Hall. It earned several Oscar nominations including Greg and Wyman for Best Actor and Best Actress. The New York Times praised its vitality, zest and sensitivity. When Time criticized the Technicolor as too brilliant, Rawlings wrote them that the ‘too blue sky’ and ‘too bright sand’ were made by God and not by MGM. But she admitted to friends that only the superb, sensitive acting of Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman made them acceptable to her as Penny and Ma Baxter, for ‘Penny was a little runty man and Ma was as big as a barn.’
In the summer of 1946, when he finished The Yearling and Duel in the Sun, Greg ventured east to the Cape Playhouse for a brief return to the stage. In part, it was a gesture to express gratitude for the early training he’d received under director Arthur Sircom and also because he wanted to portray Christy Mahon in J M Singe’s Playboy of the Western World. Greg chose the classic Irish play as a vehicle because he admired the work and he was attracted to the challenge of achieving an Irish brogue. Some of the critics who came to see the play were not convinced he completely conquered the accent, but Greg was undaunted by the bad reviews. ‘I stuck my neck out and that’s what happened,’ he told an interviewer. ‘I really care, though. I got what I came for. I wanted to try something I hadn’t done before. I did. And I feel better for it and I think I’ll go back to Hollywood and do better work because of it . . . I think it’s good to do things the hard way once in a while.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ungentlemanly Behavior
‘You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.’
Fred Allen
In 1946, Greg still owed one more film to Casey Robinson, the screenwriter-producer who brought him to Hollywood in the first place. Greg, the omnivorous reader, suggested they make a movie based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway called ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.’ A bitter tale of big-game hunting and marital infidelity, it portrays a cuckolded and cowardly American on safari who regains his manly courage in time for his wife to shoot him in the back of the head. Robinson liked the idea. Then he asked: ‘Who should direct it?’
Greg replied, ‘How about Zoltan Korda?’
Intriguing choice. A one-time cavalry officer, Zoltan Korda started working in films as a cameraman, then an editor before becoming a director with London Films, run by his brother Alexander Korda. Stubborn and headstrong about his liberal/ socialist ideals, he often clashed with the more successful Alexander who, despite being born in Hungary, was a proud supporter of the British Empire.
Zoltan Korda’s name undoubtedly popped into Greg’s head because the director had made a number of entertaining, exotic adventure movies with African themes. He directed Elephant Boy (1937) (collaborating with Robert Flaherty), The Four Feathers (1939) and Jungle Book (1942) as well as Shahara (1943) filmed with Humphrey Bogart in the deserts of California. Zoli, as he was called, liked India and Africa as much as he liked tales of high adventure. He was also known as a genuinely gifted director who could goad a strong performance out of an undistinguished actor.
Now, Zoli was a tough customer. Mercurial, bitter, suspicious and eccentric, he had earned his place on the Mount Rushmore of difficult directors. For starters, he hated noise, chatter, conversation, fuss, fixed mealtimes, shopping, in-laws and the opinions of women. He was so sensitive to noise, he refused to have celery or toast served at the table. Once in a restaurant, he reached across a table to throttle a young woman who was eating melba toast after he had warned her to stop.
Teaming up with Seymour Bennett, Robinson adapted ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ into a solid screenplay. What makes the movie work is its nasty story, and Robinson’s excellent and correct interpretation of it. The Hemingway mood, macho and misogynist, and misanthropic more than anything else, is caught to such perfection one might almost suspect that he was technical advisor. (He definitely wasn’t as we shall see.)
In th
e film, a wealthy couple (Robert Preston, Joan Bennett) arrive in East Africa ostensibly for a safari vacation but it soon becomes apparent that they are ill-matched and resentful of each other’s failings. Their safari guide (Peck), attempting to conduct things professionally, becomes an unwilling spectator to their petty arguments and vicious insults. But as the party treks through the jungle in search of game, the true personalities of the warring couple emerge, playing havoc with Greg’s sympathies and his growing interest in the beautiful wife.
The story actually centers on Robert Preston as Francis Macomber, a paranoid tycoon and hunter whose courage is in question. Greg as Robert Wilson is hired by Macomber to guard him on a hunt, during which Macomber has to overcome his cowardice to establish his manhood. As the hard-bitten white hunter, Greg provides the romantic interest with Joan Bennett as Margaret Macomber.
The Macomber Affair marked Robert Preston’s return from the army; his best films, including his stunning success in The Music Man (1962), lay ahead. He was known as a sturdy, capable performer who always seemed to end up in the second lead position. Unlike Greg, he was neither wildly in demand in Hollywood nor hamstrung by contract obligations. So, like Greg, he was free to mix making movies with playing on Broadway. Growing his talent in front of a live audience paid off big for Preston; he came into his own as Harold Hill in The Music Man. As the gifted con artist who sells the gullible residents of River City on the virtues of a student band, he was a smash hit in both the stage and screen versions.
On the other hand, lovely Joan Bennett didn’t give a fig about developing her talent. A divorced single mother when she started out, she acted in movies to pay the bills. Appearing with such stars as Ronald Coleman and Spencer Tracy in the 1930s, she was known as an undeniably beautiful but frequently vapid leading lady who was blossoming into a more interesting actress. She made her finest films in the 1940s with director Fritz Lang, Man Hunt (1941), Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945), becoming the queen of femmes fatales. The Macomber Affair enhanced her reputation as an actress of note. Unfortunately, in December 1951 producer Walter Wanger (by then her husband of 11 years) shot her agent in a jealous rage; the resulting scandal virtually ended Bennett’s film career. Looking back, she said: ‘I don’t think much of the films I made, but being a movie star was something I liked very much.’
As shooting got underway, Greg and Zoltan Korda developed a good rapport. Greg remembered: ‘He could be bad-tempered but not to me; he liked me and I liked him. He was one of my favorite directors.’
The principal target of Korda’s ferocious anger was the film’s co-producer, Benedict Bogeaus, a flashy Chicago real estate dealer who was trying his hand in the movies. According to Greg, Bogeaus bedecked himself in gold jewelry and expensively tailored suits and was ‘always moving in a cloud of cologne.’
At this point, everybody knew ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ was too long a title to fit on a movie marquee. So, what would make a catchy, shorter one? Since the film crew had a buffalo under construction made of rubber and hair, looking very lifelike and costing $30,000, novelist Graham Greene suggested that they call the film ‘The Rubba Buffalo’.
Then Benedict Bogeaus had a brainwave. One morning, he burst on the set calling: ‘Zoli, Zoli, I’ve found it. Get this – Congo!’
According to biographer Michael Freedland a deathly silence descended on the company, as the director reached into his back pocket, pulled out a switch knife, clicked a button and jabbed the blade against Bogeaus’s rib cage. As he began twisting it, he sneered at the producer: ‘Stupid son of a bitch. You come on my sound stage again and I’ll cut out your liver!’
Location shooting is rife with temptations for actors – and The Macomber Affair was no exception. Much of the praised visual realism of the film came from background footage shot in Africa and the creation of a credible camp setting on the studio backlot. But Korda insisted they not shoot exterior scenes on the studio grounds, and he took his crew and cast off to the Mexican border in the northern part of Baja. Greg found himself bouncing over rough Mexican terrain while firing his rifle at nothing; the attacking beast would be matted in during the editing. When shooting ended for the day, Greg was faced with boredom and missing Jonathan, as well as Greta who was pregnant again. The nights got mighty lonely.
Greg recalled, ‘We were there for about six weeks, 80 men, only two women – Joan Bennett and the hairdresser. We were all going kinda stir crazy.’
Every evening on location Bennett went to bed at 8.30, as did her hairdresser, who shared the bungalow. The men, said Greg, had ‘one big stag party every night. Zoltan Korda sensibly avoided these parties we had – he went to bed at 10. Sometimes some of the crew drove 80 miles to Tijuana to take advantage of whores and bars.’ The road to Tijuana was so terrible they called it ‘dead man’s highway.’ The group descended on a scruffy bar and joined the local band in roughhousing, drinking tequila and playing poker.
Greg, Preston and the whole crew, minus Zoltan Korda, stayed up till sunrise getting more and more sloshed. Then someone said, ‘The cars are leaving for the location in 20 minutes.’ The gang stripped, swam, drank as much black coffee as possible and climbed into the cars for the long trek back to the film location. Ever the pro, Greg was sober and ready to shoot at 8.30 a.m.
To please the censors, the final moments of the movie had to be changed. For five-sixths of the action, the story and dialogue was pure Hemingway. In Hemingway’s story, the hunter and the killer wife simply go their own ways. But the tale of the sexually frustrated wife (Bennett) who shoots her husband (Preston) and gets clear away with it, had to be altered for the censors to make it seem that she got her just deserts.
All this would have been easy enough, if only Hemingway could have been found. At his Cuban hideout, he refused to answer the telephone or to reply to telegrams. Greg recalled: ‘We appealed to Hemingway to write the new ending himself. We appealed by letter, by telephone, by telegraph. Nothing! Total silence!’
‘Ernest sold his books to the movies,’ Mary Hemingway explained, ‘then he paid absolutely no attention whatsoever to what they did with them. He made no effort to influence them in any way . . . his theory being that whatever he might try to do it wouldn’t be effective anyhow.’
As for Hemingway, he offered this advice to authors. ‘Let me tell you about writing for films. You finish your book. Now, you know where the California State line is? Well, you drive right up to that line, take your manuscript and pitch it across. First, let them toss the money over. Then you throw it over, pick up the money and get the hell out of there.’
Finally, the studio had no option but to produce its own ending. Bennett goes to jail, but the audience knows that somewhere in a Nairobi white hunter’s bar, Greg will be waiting for her.
The studio’s advertising department dreamed up tantalizing ads for the film: ‘Gregory Peck makes that Hemingway kind of love to Joan Bennett! . . . After the biggest game of all – a woman! On the hunt he took two things as they came – the charge of a snarling lion – the fury of a fear-crazed coward – the lips of a love-crazed woman – cruelty and yearning – of such things was their love made.’
The ending irritated many reviewers. A typical reaction came from Herald Tribune’s Otis Guernsey Jr, who wrote, ‘. . . the whole thing ends up in the air, a model of motives and excuses.’ However, the film pleased literary-minded critics who then and now regarded it as the best adaptation of Hemingway’s work.
After The Macomber Affair, Greg took a breather and helped Greta prepare for the arrival of a new baby. Having made so many dry runs when Jonathan was expected, Greg knew the 15 miles from their Coldwater Canyon home to the hospital by heart. About 4 a.m., when Greta went into labor, he handled the chauffeuring task with aplomb. He recalled: ‘I took the wheel, calm and collected, which comes from being an old hand at that sort of thing.’
Sailing into the waiting room with an air of authority, he found about eig
ht other expectant fathers. He recalled they were ‘a collection of sad sacks . . . Collars askew, whiskers on their chins, knee-deep in old cigarette butts – some of them had been there all night. I couldn’t help feel superior when, after just one long hour, the nurse called out my name and said, “It’s a boy!” Darned if I didn’t feel those other fellows had something to learn about efficiency.’
Stephen Joseph Peck weighed in at 7 pounds 6 ounces. Greg brought a large camera complete with lights and other equipment for photographing the baby and Greta. Because of regulations at the time, he could only photograph Stephen through the glass window of the hospital’s nursery.
Greta relished the pampering. ‘I tried to think it was because I was such a pleasant patient that the nurses liked to do things for me. But I couldn’t help noticing that the extra attention always began just a few minutes before visiting hours.’
Good fortune blew Greg’s way when Darryl Zanuck asked him to star in Gentleman’s Agreement, a film about a magazine writer who poses as a Jew in order to experience and expose anti-Semitism in America. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents later described Gentleman’s Agreement as ‘the movie that says you better be nice to a Jew because he might turn out to be a gentile.’
Seen in the light of all that has happened since, Gentleman’s Agreement seems a mild assault on snobbism as practiced against Jews at suburban white-collar clubs. But when it first appeared in 1947, it was hailed as a brave and outspoken denunciation of bigotry in the enclaves of establishment America.