by Lynn Haney
According to Confidential stories, Greg and Payton once held up shooting for an afternoon. They borrowed a single horse from the studio corral and Greg perched Payton in front of him. With one hand on the reins and another clutching Payton, he rode off into the hills. On other occasions, they ducked into each other’s dressing rooms. When first assigned to the movie, Greg protested bitterly about his accommodations. His room had no windows and he complained it was stuffy. According to Confidential, he turned happily silent after trysting with Payton.
In egregious bad taste, Payton openly praised Greg’s boudoir talents. She rated him as five-star material.
The magazine article didn’t appear until sometime after the fact. In the meantime, there was talk about the two on the set and around town. Greg must have heard it and perhaps also Greta. In any case, his solution – though hard-hearted – is a testimony to his strong survival skills. According to Payton, he had her banned from the Only the Valiant set, except when she was scheduled to play in a scene. Yelped Barbara: ‘I’m banned from my own movie.’
When Only the Valiant premiered on 11 April 1951, the Los Angeles Times observed: ‘Barbara Payton had little to do but look glamorous, quite a trick in an early day New Mexico fort.’
This would be the last high-quality film for Payton. The misbegotten actress continued her downhill slide with public displays of drunkenness and, finally, into prostitution. In the years following the release of Only the Valiant, she moved into an old, shabby, rundown apartment building on the edge of Hollywood, amid unsavory characters. With all her furs and jewelry gone, she was sometimes spotted wondering Sunset Boulevard, waiting for a bus or hitchhiking.
In 1962, at age 35, she was found sleeping on a bench at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Stanley Avenue. Her body, clad in a bathing suit and coat, was covered with bruises, her skin blotched and her front teeth missing. She told police she had been beaten by a youth gang. They charged her with being drunk and loitering. Frank Sinatra offered her a walk-on in Four For Texas (1963). Sadly she was never even given a screen credit if, indeed, she showed up for work.
A few years later, according to John O’Dowd, author of The Barbara Payton Tragedy, sanitation workers mistook her for a bag of trash scattered beneath a dumpster in a parking lot behind a Thrifty Drug Store on Sunset Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in the heart of Hollywood. ‘As they drew closer,’ writes O’Dowd, ‘they discovered instead the body of a woman lying on her side, wearing only a thin, cotton shift and a pair of slippers. With a smudge of dried blood caked thick around her nose and upper lip, the woman appeared, at first glance, to be dead. The woman’s brassy blonde hair, with two inches of dark roots, was bunched in knots atop her head, like some tangled beehive gone awry. So battered was her appearance that it made it almost impossible to determine what she actually looked like underneath all the layers of blood and dirt. One of the men later said that the sight of her crumpled body lying on the pavement made it appear as if she had been “dumped out of the sky.” When at last they noticed she was still breathing, the two workers rushed to get help.’
On 8 May 1967, her father E Lee Redfield discovered her ravaged body on the bathroom floor. She died of liver failure. Her physical appearance was so drastically changed that it was two days before the police realized who she was. One of them gasped: ‘You mean, that was Barbara Payton the movie star? God, what happened to her?’
Whatever actually occurred between Payton and Greg, one thing was certain: he was not happy with himself or the world. After the heart spasm in La Jolla, he worried about his health. Like Frank Savage, in Twelve O’Clock High, he was holding his emotions tightly within himself while he tried to appear supremely in control. It was just a matter of time before his body would rebel.
In the meantime, his career sped forward like a fast-moving train. Fortunately for Greg, his dark Irish features qualified him for a lead in one of the pious sexy epics so popular in the early 1950s. His dense black hair in a split widow’s peak had stray hairs that frequently fell over his brow. He also had a strongly carved nose, a finely molded mouth, the upper lip not as full as the more generous, and cleft, lower one; and hard-working jaw muscles. Studio executives such as Darryl Zanuck, ransacking through the Old Testament for hot stories, were on the lookout for faces like that. He got the lead in David and Bathsheba (1951).
The McCarthy years of fear and blacklisting coincided with the age of epic extravaganzas: David and Bathsheba (1951), The Robe (1953), The Egyptian (1954), Land of the Pharaohs (1955), Alexander the Great (1956) and The Ten Commandments (1956). Dramas based on the Bible and on ancient history responded to the conservatism of the time, and simultaneously allowed for lots of sex and gore.
Such films were inspired partly by Hollywood’s exploration of large-screen technology as a weapon against the Lilliputian television screen. Beyond all such technical questions, though, beyond all commercial questions of the struggle against television (weekly moviegoing continued dropping from about 60 million to 40 million during the 1950s), these epics represented a kind of self portrait of the Hollywood studios in their decline and fall.
In David and Bathsheba, Peck played opposite Susan Hayward. She was a tough, husky-voiced redhead known as the firebrand from Brooklyn. Hungry is one of those words that always seemed to come to mind for Susan Hayward: hungry for success, for money, for love and for work. ‘I learned at a very early age that life is a battle,’ Hayward often said. She knew exactly what she wanted (at this particular time, the title of the movie changed to Sheva and David). And she knew she had to fight for what she wanted. She stormed her way through the movies and its moguls. ‘The only thing a woman should ever be afraid of in her life,’ Hayward used to say, ‘is never having lived.’
‘I’ve never considered myself a beauty,’ she also claimed. ‘I can look at the mirror and know I’m not bad looking, but I’m no raving beauty by a long shot. I guess I never thought so much about glamour as ideas about becoming a good actress.’
If there was anybody who wasn’t in the mood to crack the Bible and refresh their memory of the trials of ‘Dave and Sheb’, Greg was prepared to feed them a catchy synopsis of the plot: ‘We have a great combination – religion and sex – in David and Bathsheba. David gets into as much Dutch as a fellow can get into. He has four or five wives before he spots the redhead [Susan Hayward]. His own son, Absalom, turns on him. The prophet (Raymond Massey plays that part!) warns him, but he goes so far out on the limb you think it will break. Then he goes straight to the Man upstairs and promises to work differently in the future. It proves that everything will be okay with the world if we can only get back to God.’
Greg needed a sense of humor to alleviate the tension building on the David and Bathsheba set. He put up a wall between himself and the other actors. One of the principals in the film said of Greg: ‘I have never worked with any actor who held himself so totally aloof from the rest of the cast.’ Susan Hayward was also miffed at him because she resented the close bonding between Greg and Henry King, figuring she was getting short shrift in terms of acting direction and camera angles.
Born in a Brooklyn tenement and growing up hell-bent on escaping squalor, she had evolved into an accomplished actress who found stardom playing alcoholics, a death-row inmate, and a ruthless rag-trade queen. She wasn’t about to be dismissed as a pretty young thing in flowing robes. Once after filming a love scene with Greg, she asked her dresser for a cup of coffee and acted as if Greg wasn’t even there.
To judge by the glowing reviews for Greg’s performance as the standout in the film, her paranoia was justified. The New York Times claimed that without Greg as a convincing David, ‘this combination of romance and religion would have been merely a two-hour dissertation no more exciting than a lantern-slide projection. However, in Gregory Peck’s delineation the producers have an authoritative performance. He is a man filled with anguish at the death of Jonathan and of Saul. He is a King willing to forego his regal right for his
love and he is the frail vessel who movingly confesses his sins but one who also is strong enough to exclaim, “lift Thine hand from Thy people who suffer for my crimes.”’
One morning Greg was undergoing make-up tests at the Fox studio. He suddenly felt his left arm go numb and an agonizing constriction in his chest. He found himself covered with sweat and said to the make-up man, ‘I think I’m having a heart attack.’ He was rushed to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital and given an electrocardiogram, which revealed he hadn’t suffered a heart attack, but it was another indication that he was bottling things up and needed to slow down and unwind.
After the picture wrapped, Greg and Greta went to the Yucca Loma Ranch in Apple Valley, California, for a month’s vacation. The children came for weekends.
Interviewed about this break in his routine, Greg said he didn’t drink the whole time. His mentioning of abstaining seems to indicate that he was concerned about his drinking and its impact on his health. He didn’t think of himself as particularly young anymore.
Around this time, a reporter asked him, ‘How about Shakespeare? Ever had a hankering?’
‘Now you’ve got me,’ Greg said, grinning ruefully. ‘You’ve pinned me to the mat. I had a hankering but I’ve overcome it. I’ve got it licked. I’m a thirty-fiver – halfway around the track. This is no time to begin coaching for a Shakespearean role.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
Gentleman Hero
‘Here’s to girls and gunpowder!’
Gregory Peck in The World in His Arms
When Greg signed on for Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951), he approached the project with high spirits because he liked C S Forester’s story and he was gung-ho about doing a film that would finally give him a chance to travel abroad. As a bonus, he had the opportunity to work with a legend in filmmaking. ‘There are directors for whom I would walk through fire,’ said Greg ‘and Raoul Walsh is one of them.’ He considered Walsh ‘a nineteenth-century kind of fellow, very funny, ribald, a curmudgeon.’
Roistering Raoul Walsh, known as ‘the one-eyed bandit’ was 66 years old when he directed Captain Horatio Hornblower. He had more than a hundred movies under his belt as actor, director, producer or a combination thereof. He tackled a variety of genres but was at his best with virile outdoor action dramas, which he often mellowed with moments of genuine tenderness. Producer Jack Warner contested this appraisal, maintaining: ‘To Raoul Walsh burning down a whorehouse is a tender love scene.’ Like King Vidor and Henry King, Raoul Walsh used his colorful early life as the wellspring for his imagination.
The son of a clothes designer, he ran away to sea as a boy and later broke horses in cattle drives in Mexico, Texas and Montana. He did some stage acting from 1910 and entered films in 1912 as an actor and assistant director to D W Griffith at Biograph. It was Griffith who gave him his first directorial assignment, in collaboration with Christy Cabanne, The Life of General Villa (1914), a seven-reel mixture of staged scenes and authentic footage of Pancho Villa’s military campaign starring the Mexican bandit himself. Walsh’s most notable appearance as an actor was in the role of John Wilkes Booth in Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915).
A straightforward storyteller, Walsh made many fine, unpretentious, smoothly paced films with the accent on entertainment and slick production values. Douglas Fairbanks Sr, Errol Flynn, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable were among the actors who typified the masculinity of his screen heroes. A dynamic, instinctive director, he was considered by many as one of the great primitive artists of the screen. Critic Richard Shickle contended: ‘. . . the fact that Raoul and his contemporaries had something other than movie making, had lived hand-to mouth doing rather humble work, gave them an edge in their work. For one thing, it was impossible for a mogul to frighten them. Since they had survived and apparently even relished living on the margins of society, they could always turn away from the big do in the glamorous life of Hollywood and go back to the life they had known before.’
Adding to his mystique, Walsh sported an eye patch having lost an eye in an automobile accident in which a jack rabbit crashed through the front window. He liked to say: ‘A buzzard plucked it out.’
Walsh was famous for his tall tales and practical jokes. One yarn – which he swore was true – concerned the borrowing of the corpse of his close pal John Barrymore. After the actor died, Walsh and two of his cronies bribed the undertaker into ‘lending’ Barrymore’s body to them for an afternoon. Since Errol Flynn was a close friend of the departed actor, they took the corpse to his home and propped up the ‘Great Profile’s’ body in Flynn’s favorite chair behind the front door with a drink in hand ready to greet the swashbuckling star. Fortunately, Flynn got the joke. ‘I forgave Walsh,’ he said later. ‘He brought this distorted touch of genius to his films.’
The part of Hornblower was tailor-made for Greg. He would once again play the role of the martinet who was really a softy beneath the grim exterior. Greg devoured Forester’s books and appreciated the fact that Hornblower was not 100 per cent heroic and that ‘he got seasick.’ He was ‘unhappy in love yet refreshingly humane, he turns his talents to the needs of his country.’
Greg’s meticulous attention to detail can be seen in his approach to this film. He learned to ‘shoot the sun’ with the quadrant. He developed an intimate knowledge of gunnery. He learned the principles and the rules of navigation. And he could explain the intricacies of a square-rigged frigate or even a ship-of-the-line. What’s more, he could splice a line with the saltiest of them. He also did a lot of general reading: naval histories, records of decisive sea battles and memoirs written by great naval figures. Homework paid off. As the lean and hard Captain Hornblower he paces the quarterdeck, shouts to his crew, and conducts himself as the epitome of Forester’s fictional hero.
Walsh had the formidable challenge of bringing to the screen what many consider to be the greatest sea story of all time. ‘The worst enemy a motion picture director can have,’ said Walsh as the production got underway, ‘is a preconceived notion.’ He was referring to the preconceived notion held by hundreds of thousands of readers of Forester’s Hornblower stories all over the world.
It was only proper that Captain Horatio Hornblower should be filmed in its natural British and Mediterranean setting; and Warner Brothers made use of two London studios, a couple of British seaports and much of the south of France, including coastal water there.
‘Ever since I started acting, I’ve cherished the idea of playing this role,’ Greg said, schoolboyishly excited about the swagger, romantics and excitement of the part. ‘We shot in four months,’ Greg said. ‘We worked a six-day week all through the picture.’ With Greta and the boys in tow, he journeyed along the French Riviera and also rented a house in London for part of the shoot. He recalled: ‘We had an Irish staff. It was all very fine, except the cooking; but they were such nice hearty girls I didn’t have the heart to ask them to leave.’ A nurse came along for five-month-old Carey and Jonathan and Stephen attended nursery school where they got a kick out of seeing Scots lads in kilts. One aspect of their London stay, which received a lot of publicity, was a visit to the set by Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. They came specifically to see Peck – Princess Margaret admitted he was her favorite actor – and were disappointed when they learned it was his day off. Adding to Greg’s mystique, his co-star Virginia Mayo proclaimed him ‘the best kisser in the business.’
For Greg, the European sojourn opened new worlds to him – and widened the distance between himself and Greta. It brought out a restless longing in him and he wasn’t sure where it was going to lead. The French Riviera completely captivated Greg, so much so that years later, he bought a house in Cap Ferrat. His entire being responded to the tranquility of the olive trees, exotic flowers and superb light. And the people loved him. Everywhere he went Greg was given a warm reception. At Cagnes sur Mer, a small medieval village not far from Nice, where Walsh was shooting a number of scenes for the film
, the young country girls lined up to give him flowers.
Walsh recalled a funny incident during the shooting: ‘I had this big frigate down in a place called Villa France in the Mediterranean, south of France. And I had a sailing scene with Peck standing up, giving the helmsman orders to bring it up to this big wharf. Now, right close by this wharf is a series of cheap apartments. Most of them have a balcony. They are very cheap places; in fact, they are all inhabited by prostitutes. So when we got ready to take this scene – all of a sudden, up on one of these balconies, a naked woman appeared. Stark naked. Right in the center of the camera. So I had to stop the scene.
‘I told my French assistant to call out to her, that if she wanted to watch the scene, would she please put something on? She disappeared. Then we turned the boat around and came back, and as we started to approach the dock again, out she came, stark naked, with a big picture hat on.’
Filming outside of America affected Greg’s tax position and there was concern as to ‘whether or not Peck would be entitled to any tax exemption under the tax treaty [between the United States and Britain].’ It was not clear that Greg was working for an individual or company currently resided in the United States. This sort of tax bargaining would eventually appear to work in his favor and lead to his shooting several films overseas.
Arriving home in LA, Greg was once again put under the microscope and pressured to present the image of the happy husband and ideal father as promoted by the film studios. He had been named Father of the Year back in 1948 and so it was not surprising that Good Housekeeping magazine paid the Pecks a visit on the couple’s return so they could chronicle the star’s blissful family life.