by Lynn Haney
Collins had not exchanged many words with Greg until they came to a scene where they rode side by side, hard and fast and expertly for days. She recalled in her biography Past Imperfect: ‘He was a wonderful-looking man, tall and rangy, with a classically handsome profile and a strongly carved nose,’ she wrote in her biography. ‘His aloofness, I found out when we rode for so long, was a form of shyness. He was basically not at ease around new people. I found he had a wonderful sense of humor, and knowing my fear of riding, he was considerate toward me.
‘But on the last day he teased me unmercifully by riding so fast that I was sore for a week. “Come on, Collins” he yelled as we cantered faster and faster beside a deep canyon that I knew with a sickening lurch meant plunging to certain death if Adonis [her horse] placed a hoof wrong. “They say you English women can ride,” Greg said mock-scornfully, digging his spurs in and making his mount fly even faster. “Let’s see you show ’em all, Collins – show ’em you’re a real horsewoman, will you?” He galloped even faster. The wind almost took off my Stetson and I jammed it down like Greg’s until it covered my eyes. It was enormously exhilarating. I felt in command of that three hundred pounds of sinew and muscle beneath me; I wasn’t afraid at all, in fact it was a wonderful, free and joyous feeling I had of space, power and purity.’
The camera car was hard put to keep up with them. They hadn’t expected Greg to gallop so fast, and even less expected that Collins would be right alongside him, urging her horse to ever greater speed. Even when Henry King yelled ‘Cut,’ they continued galloping faster and faster into the distance. They were laughing now as they heard the assistant director plaintively calling them back to their positions. They reined in the horses. Collins amazed herself with her newfound expertise.
‘Thank you, Greg,’ she yelled over her shoulder as she galloped away, out-racing him!
‘For what?’ he called.
‘For curing me of my fear of horses – you really did it. I’m not scared anymore.’
‘Don’t mention it, ma’am.’ He smiled gallantly.
Reminiscing about making The Bravados with Collins, Greg told Michael Freedland in the 1970s: ‘She was a sensational young girl . . . a kind of knockout. I see Joan today and, if anything, she is prettier now than she was then.’
Another Peck baby arrived at Santa Monica Hospital on 1 May 1958, and Greg dutifully contacted ‘Auntie Lolly’. Parsons led off her column: ‘In a matter of minutes after Miss Cecilia Peck made her appearance in this world, her happy father, Greg, was on the telephone to tell me his good news. He said, “This is the fifth time I’ve called you with news of a birth, but this is the first time I could say it’s a girl.” He added, “She’s a real gift from heaven.”’
For his next production, Greg set out to show the human face of war. As co-producer and star of Pork Chop Hill (1959), he took great pride in making a picture depicting the futility of combat. Even though it failed to make a killing at the box-office, Greg still called it ‘One of my favorite pictures. We made a realistic war film, without sentimentality, without mom’s apple pie, without letters from out in the old hometown. I like it because of the extreme, tragic irony.’
Based on the true account of Brigadier General S L A Marshall, the gritty film is a harshly realistic depiction of the bloody capture of a hill with no military value during the final days of the Korean War. While peace negotiations are being conducted in Panmunjon, not 70 miles from the Chinese-held ridge, the company of Lieutenant Joe Clemons (Peck) must take the hill to prove to the Chinese diplomats that the US is ‘serious.’
The ambivalence of the soldiers, many of whom feel the hopelessness of fighting for ground that is simply a diplomatic token, is contrasted with the gung-ho attitude of those who believe that they must do their patriotic duty. If not outright anti-war, Pork Chop Hill showed soldiers questioning their involvement.
After breaking the bank with The Big Country, Greg scouted about for unknowns in lieu of name stars and put together a superb cast. Among the troops are Forstman (Harry Guardino), Fedderson (George Peppard), Lieutenant Russell (Rip Torn), Marshall (Martin Landau) and Velie (Robert Blake).
Greg chose Lewis Milestone, an excellent craftsman with a fluid camera style, as his director. In 1930, Milestone helmed the landmark All Quiet on the Western Front – probably the greatest of pacifist, anti-war films. He also directed other combat films: Edge of Darkness (1943), The Purple Heart (1944) and A Walk in the Sun (1946). Like William Wyler, he knew his own mind and by the time Pork Chop Hill was ready for release, Milestone was fed up with Gregory Peck.
In S L A Marshall’s book, also called Pork Chop Hill, the brigadier general describes Joe Clemons as a young West Point graduate with no fighting experience. As a greenhorn officer, he made some fundamental military errors. Greg, now 42 years old and a guardian of his image, played Clemons as the stereotypical hero.
Greg said he took Milestone’s edited version of the film and ‘sharpened it up and speeded it up,’ while Milestone claimed the 20 minutes of footage that did not feature Greg was cut out, allegedly at the suggestion of Veronique. (She was becoming a familiar figure in the editing rooms of her husband’s films, standing in the back, not talking, but taking everything in.) So a picture with a noble purpose became the source of lasting friction between Greg and his second co-producer. ‘Pork Chop Hill became a picture I am not proud of,’ regretted Lewis Milestone, ‘because it looked as if it were cut with a dull axe. All that remained was Gregory Peck and a gun.’
Greg liked money. No doubt about it. But it isn’t what drove him to continue producing movies. More than anything, he wanted ‘to make or appear in a great film – the kind that shows every year or so at New York’s Museum of Modern Art or is hailed as a great film world around.’
In the meantime, he was off to Australia to make On the Beach (1959) with Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins and Ava Gardner. Oh, that Ava! How happy he was to be getting together with his bosom pal from The Great Sinner and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. With ‘the Barefoot Contessa’ around, life was never dull.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Role of a Lifetime
‘On the Beach is a movie about the end of the world. I cannot think of anywhere better to film it than Melbourne.’
Attributed to Ava Gardner
In the quiet city of Melbourne in 1959, Greg and Veronique rented the elegant Victorian mansion of Sir Norman Brookes, a former tennis star. With them were Anthony, three, Cecilia, 18 months, and Carey, ten.
One of the well-wishers on hand to greet Greg was June Dally Watkins, the model he escorted around Rome in 1952. This time they connected as old friends.
‘Are you happy?’ she asked him.
‘Yes,’ he answered. Then he added that he not only liked being married to Veronique, but he was thrilled to finally be the father of a little girl.
Carey Peck found to his surprise that he was behind grades of Australian children the same age.
‘What do I do, Pop?’ He asked Greg.
‘Surpass them,’ said Greg. Just as he was tough on himself, he also held the bar very high for his children.
Although the house was staffed with servants, Veronique brought along her French chef and between the sumptuous food and splendid drinks the estate soon became a mirthful refuge for the cast of On the Beach. It gave the besieged actors a chance to let their hair down unobserved by their besotted Melbourne fans.
Very few Hollywood faces had thus far been seen in Melbourne, a city of eager moviegoers. In the 1950s, the locals were still suffering from ‘cultural cringe.’ So it is no wonder that Greg, Fred Astaire, Ava Gardner and Anthony Perkins were fêted, cheered and mobbed wherever they went.
On the Beach was to be a movie based on best-selling novelist Nevil Shute’s bleak, moving tale about the consequences of full scale nuclear war. Only the inhabitants of Australia and the men of the US submarine Sawfish are left after the Big One goes off in the Northern Hemisphere. Who started it? Fred Ast
aire’s character, a cynical scientist gives his take on the tragedy: ‘Some poor bloke probably looked at a radar screen and thought he saw something . . . he knew that if he hesitated one thousandth of a second his own country would be wiped off the map and so he pushed the button. And the world went . . . crazy.’
As On the Beach opens, the radiation cloud is slowly moving toward Australia, where the only pro-active role left for people to play is to minimize the suffering of radiation sickness, and take their own lives using the government-issued suicide pills. A glum story.
Ava Gardner’s arrival brightened things considerably. This was particularly true for Greg. Seven years had passed since they made a picture together. Now he could resume his role as rescuer and confidant. Though her spectacular beauty – with its luminous skin and languid eyes – was gone, her face was still arresting. She was looking bruised and world weary, which ironically suited her character in On the Beach. What could be more fitting than to have Gardner play Moira Davidson, a Melbourne party girl finding love too late?
By now, Gardner was divorced from Frank Sinatra but the drama rolled on. Their epic fights spanned the globe – he followed her to movie locations in Spain, Australia and England – and usually ended up with one of them leaving on a plane. Gardner tossed out words like primitive, passionate, bitter and acrimonious when describing their romantic jealousy. Journalist Pete Hamill believes if they had stayed together it would have got very violent and somebody would have died. Yet their love endured.
Since the locals didn’t meet many women who ‘live for the moment,’ Gardner’s arrival was put under intense press scrutiny. Her resolve to lay off drinking and her conscientiousness about her tennis lessons with professional player Tony Trevor were evidently dashed by the boredom of Melbourne. She was eagerly awaiting a visit from Sinatra. And the press kept badgering her because she was such great copy. She tossed off tidbits like: ‘Deep down I’m pretty superficial’; and ‘Everybody kisses everybody else in this crummy business all the time. It’s the kissiest business in the world. You have to keep kissing people when you’re penned up and working together the way we are. If people making a movie didn’t keep kissing, they’d be at each other’s throats.’
Her much-quoted remark about Melbourne being the end of the world was actually invented by Sydney journalist Neil Jillet. When Jillet was working in the Melbourne office of the Sydney Morning Herald in 1959 he was told to do an interview with the actress. She was unavailable, so he wrote a few paragraphs about her inaccessibility and about the number of cigarettes and bottles of whisky going into her South Yarra flat (Gardner was frequently drunk by noon). To spice up his copy, he dropped in the infamous line about Melbourne.
Jillet expected a sub-editor to spot the joke and cut it out, but it was printed that way in the Sydney Morning Herald. He now wryly comments: ‘It’s not easy to live with the fact that, after 48 years as a journalist, I have only once written anything worth repeating – and someone else got the credit.’
Another cast member Greg looked forward to working with was Fred Astaire. Smooth, suave, debonair, dapper and intelligent, Astaire was in high spirits at the prospect of taking a break from his song-and-dance movies and trying his hand at a straight dramatic role. About to turn 60 and not looking a day younger, the project also made him nervous. On the long flight from California to Australia, he found himself sitting next to Donna Anderson, the 19year-old discovery of the director, Stanley Kramer. She admitted she was terrified on her first trip out of the United States. She added, ‘My great-grandmother told me not to worry, that Mr Astaire would take care of me.’
Astaire grimaced. ‘Your great-grandmother! Couldn’t you at least have said grandmother?’
It is hard to imagine anyone but Stanley Kramer having either the power or the inclination to tackle Nevil Shute’s novel. A self possessed and candid man, with a wiry body and angular features, he had a reputation for producing movies with social relevance: Home of the Brave (1949 – racism), The Men (1950 – post-war veterans), The Caine Mutiny (1954 – battle fatigue) and Inherit the Wind (1960 – educational freedom).
Kramer was never regarded as a distinguished stylist, preferring to blend his progressive themes with conventional storytelling techniques. His critics labeled him self-righteous and self-congratulatory. They disparaged his films as manipulative and sentimental, peopled by cardboard characters representing social types and beliefs.
‘I’m not interested in message films,’ Kramer insisted, ‘– of which I have been accused – because I don’t have messages. I do have provocations, thoughts, doubts, challenges, and questions to offer.’
At this stage of his career, it was Kramer’s practice to load his films with big-name stars, thus ensuring that his productions were deemed sufficiently ‘important’ to go into general release, despite their sometimes controversial subject matter. With On the Beach, the film reflected a shifting away from the then popular attitude that a nuclear bomb is a friendly deterrent to the position that it is a clear and present danger.
As the film got rolling, Greg found himself studying Astaire as the two men went through scenes. He knew Kramer had worried about removing all indications of Astaire the dancer and even considered weighing the great dancer’s legs to eliminate his inimitable walk. But that didn’t prove necessary. Astaire developed his own characterization, and even abandoned his toupée.
Praising Astaire, Greg said: ‘He wanted every move set – the lighting of a cigarette, the body language, every gesture and movement.’ He was in total agreement with Astaire’s willingness to rehearse endlessly in order to get that effortless quality. As Astaire said, ‘A scene must look as if it’s being done for the first time.’
In their free time, the two men developed a strong friendship. ‘Fred and I sometimes sneaked off to the dog races. The track was a semi-shabby place where the low life of Melbourne congregated, and Fred enjoyed the raffishness. Fred wore a trench coat and pork pie hat, and he darted about unnoticed. I wore dark glasses, and a trench coat, but eventually I was spotted. While I signed autographs, Fred disappeared. I was amazed what a fast mover he was. After the races, he and I met at the gate and went home.’
Greg looked forward to playing opposite Gardner. He had witnessed from the inside how Gardner had been kicked around by the best in the business. Such prominent figures as Humphrey Bogart, John Ford, Louis B Mayer and George C Scott had each in their own way let her know they considered her a minimally talented actress.
This crippled her self-esteem and certainly played a role in her heavy drinking. As her friend and protector, Greg wanted to do all he could to make sure she turned in a solid performance in On the Beach. He took her aside and coached her in her role.
Greg prized the fact that Gardner could be fun in tough situations. ‘There was a spell where the temperature was over one hundred degrees,’ recalled Greg about location shooting on the movie. ‘Ava and I, our characters having become lovers, were trying to play a lighthearted romantic scene on a beach. But the air was so thick with flies they almost blackened the skies. There would be thousands of flies crawling on Ava’s forehead and in her hair, and the effects men would rush in with a smoke gun and blow smoke in our faces. That would get rid of the flies for a minute or two and allow us to say a few more lines before they settled in again.
‘I have worked with a few actresses, who will remain nameless, who would just not work under those conditions. But Ava was never, never the kind of actress who would complain about her working conditions. She took it like a trouper and we just kept plugging away despite everything until we got the scene.’
Greg was better for Gardner than any of her lovers. Over and over again he proved to her he was a true friend who was always in her corner. Years later, when she died, he brought her housekeeper Carmen Vargas back to Los Angles to live and work in his home. And he even adopted her Welsh Corgi, Morgan, who was not an easy dog. Yet Gardner could never have fallen for a man like Greg. As
she put it: ‘Nice guys are the kiss of death.’
To mount his production, Kramer leased the 72-acre Royal Showgrounds, the site of Melbourne’s yearly agricultural fair. For interior shots, he put up a sound stage in the cavernous Agricultural Hall. But rustling up a US submarine presented a challenge. The State Department refused his request. Kramer recalled an officer said ‘I was taking myself too seriously and the film too seriously. There might be four or five million casualties, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.’ Not to worry. The British came through with a ‘Guppy,’ rigged up to pass for a nuclear-powered sub.
During the course of filming the movie, there was a lot of bad blood between the book’s author, Nevil Shute, and Stanley Kramer. Shute was an English-born Australian, a well-mannered country gentleman and an accomplished storyteller. In his novel, the central character, Dwight Towers, is loyal to his dead wife right to the end. For this reason, Shute was livid at the way Kramer distorted the two main characters – Greg’s Towers and Gardner’s Moira Davidson to give the inference that the two of them ‘hit the sack’ in a mountain hotel bedroom scene. The whole point of On the Beach was that they rose above themselves and the relationship did not become sexual.
Greg fought with Kramer to retain the integrity of the author’s story. Kramer felt that it was totally unreasonable for a man in Towers’ situation to remain loyal to his convictions. Moreover, he believed that the audience needed the relief of some romance and sex. As critic, Stanley Kaufman wryly noted: ‘Kramer, like the rest of us, doesn’t want the world to be blown up. But he doesn’t want to lose money saying so.’