by Lynn Haney
The Hollywood spin didn’t quite work. The relationship that develops between Dwight and Moira is close to clichéd; we’ve seen it in too many other films for it to have the intended impact. Worse, Kramer chose to focus upon the couple in preference to the film’s other characters. Consequently, the slow building of atmosphere that the film requires never occurs. The continuous cuts to Dwight and Moira take away from developing an appropriate sense of tragedy and impending doom.
Nevil Shute’s daughter, Shirley Norway, claimed Kramer’s film was ‘by far the worst interpretation of any of his books that had been turned into film.’ She even contended: ‘. . . we’ve always believed in our family, that On the Beach killed him.’ As to Shute’s relationship with the principals involved, she added: ‘Stanley Kramer’s film crew and actors, with the exception of Fred Astaire, were persistently and uniformly ill mannered to Dad, and I don’t think he went anywhere near them.’
Did she really mean all the actors, including the male lead? ‘Gregory Peck, we could never talk to Gregory Peck. We always had to talk to his people and it was, you know, would Thursday be convenient? No, I don’t think so; Mr Peck is busy on Thursday. And what about Friday? Well, we’ll let you know. And so Friday morning – is Mr Peck coming to lunch? Oh, no, no, no, he’s not doing anything like that. Anyhow, this sort of thing went on, until finally one day they called us and said, Mr Peck can come to lunch with you today, and my mother said, I’m sorry, it’s not convenient.’
Despite this shortcoming, Kramer devised an inspired closing sequence, which has no counterpart in the novel itself. The Queen Victoria Hospital, symbol of healing, becomes a dispensary for suicide pills, and the classical façade of the Public Library, conventional symbol of culture, becomes the backdrop for Melbourne’s Savonarola to call the city to repentance, under the banner ‘There is still time . . . brother.’
Kramer secured the unique arrangement of having On the Beach simultaneously released in 18 world capitals in December 1959. The Pecks used it as an excuse to visit Russia. The picture became one of the most celebrated anti-bomb films, and attracted much attention in Moscow because it was the first full-length American feature to have a premiere in the Soviet Union.
‘We flew to Moscow in a blizzard on December 17,’ recounted Greg, ‘and the policemen at the airport were on horseback dressed as though they were going to the North Pole – fur hats and fur collars. I don’t know what the temperature was, but it was certainly maybe twenty or thirty below zero. It was a strange experience, the sky was very dark, the blizzard was blowing and it was freezing cold.’ Kramer and Greg were surprised when the Russians told them they would have given the film a happy ending. ‘We would not allow the world to blow itself to smithereens.’
The New York Daily News review of the movie on 18 December 1959 is a measure of the sentiment in some quarters at the time: ‘This is a would-be shocker which plays right up the alley of a) The Kremlin and b) the Western defeatists and/or traitors who yelp for the scrapping of the H-bomb . . . See this picture if you must (it seems bound to be much talked about), but keep in mind that the thinking it represents points the way toward eventual Communist enslavement of the entire human race.’
Now we come to one of Greg’s ‘turkeys.’ In Beloved Infidel (1959), he found himself absurdly miscast as the frail, alcoholic writer, F Scott Fitzgerald. Although Greg was proud of his raucous drinking scenes in the movie, it was always one he preferred to forget. ‘Every film is a risk, artistically and financially,’ Greg said philosophically, ‘and none of us is bomb-proof.’
His co-star, Deborah Kerr, proved equally unsuited to her role as Fitzgerald’s on-the-make mistress, Sheilah Graham. The refined and elegant English actress gave the impression of being, in the words of Laurence Olivier, ‘unreasonably chaste.’
As with many projects that are better skipped, Greg agreed to co-star in Beloved Infidel as a matter of expediency. He admitted: ‘Deborah Kerr and I both did it to kill off final commitments we had made to Fox.’ (Kerr was a top name in the late 1950s, demonstrated by her 1959 Golden Glove as the world’s most popular female star.)
The movie was based on a memoir Sheilah Graham wrote in collaboration with Gerald Frank. It was revealing enough about the quarrels and reconciliations of the couple, about Fitzgerald’s disastrous binges and equally disastrous behavior, but it was tainted by purple prose. Eager to have the book make money, Gerald Frank added a sense of violins trembling near the surface of every sentence. He portrayed Fitzgerald as a wounded genius and Graham as his self-sacrificing nurse.
Fitzgerald’s years before his death in December 1940 contained enough drama for a compelling film – with his relationship to Sheilah Graham fitting in as a small sub-plot to the big issues. That’s how Greg saw it and there is much to support his point of view. By the time Graham met Fitzgerald, the dazzling young man of the Jazz Age was now in his early forties, down on his uppers and working as a screenwriter for the big Hollywood studios.
Many of Greg’s friends and acquaintances had known Fitzgerald personally during the last period of the writer’s life. Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson observed his valiant efforts to conquer an alien medium. Recalled Johnson: ‘He had simply wandered away from the field where he was a master and was slugging around in an area for which he had no training or instinct.’
Anita Loos, who created some of the most memorable screen plays of our time including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), considered Fitzgerald a sad sack: ‘Poor Scott had quit drinking and, from being a nuisance when tight, had taken on that apologetic humility which is often characteristic of reformed drunks. I would hear a tap on my door in the Thalberg Building and know it was Scott because nobody else ever bothered to knock before entering my office. I’d ask Scott to join whoever happened to be there; he’d enter a couple of steps, then stop. “You people don’t really want to see me!” he’d say with an embarrassing meekness. We were sorry for Scott because he seemed so alone. He never mentioned a girlfriend who popped up after his death.’
It was only after Fitzgerald died on 21 December 1940 that the world learned he had actually been using his Hollywood experience to write The Last Tycoon, an extraordinary ‘insider’s book’ about the film industry. For despite all its inherent contradictions and curious puzzles, The Last Tycoon is a heroic – though unfinished – book; a fascinating work that established beyond any question that Fitzgerald had indeed regained his ability to write as well as he ever had in the past. In a letter penned to his daughter Scottie in 1939, he told her: ‘I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.’
Greg dismissed the Graham–Frank Beloved Infidel book as a potboiler. ‘What Sheilah Graham wrote was a Cinderella story: a cockney girl who clawed her way to the heights, which means becoming a syndicated Hollywood gossip columnist.’
Graham, who had been hired as a consultant on the film, strongly objected to the casting of Greg and Kerr as the leading figures in her personal drama. She later wrote: ‘Greg was too tall and self-contained for Scott, Deborah Kerr too thin and ladylike for me. (I had second thoughts about the latter after reading Stewart Granger’s autobiography in which he implied that he and Deborah had an affair in a taxi in London.) Marilyn Monroe or Jean Simmons would’ve been better in my part, and for Scott, Richard Basehart, the poetic fool in La Strada.’
Except for the fact that they both were of Scots-Irish origin, Greg and Fitzgerald couldn’t have been more dissimilar. Fitzgerald was 5 feet 7 inches with fading blond hair and a delicate almost feminine mouth. His biographer, Andrew Turnbull, described him as faun-like and a friend of the Fitzgeralds recalled his appearance as ‘too pretty for a man.’ By the time he met Graham, Fitzgerald had lost the glow of his scintillating youth. His strong physique had become soft and flabby and there were deep circles under his bloodshot eyes. The first two fingers on both h
ands were stained to the palm with nicotine. His hair was thinning and his medicine chest was a forest of dandruff cures. There seemed to be no colors in him. Greg, on the other hand, looked strikingly fit for a man of 43. And most of the time he projected the confidence of success.
Knowing he’d be laughed at for trying to resemble Fitzgerald, Greg sought to resolve the problem by getting the script changed. He urged director Henry King and the film’s screenwriter, Sy Bartlett to transform the story into the last episode in the life of an American writer of great stature. Stick to the theme of the besieged writer, reasoned Greg, but give him the gravitas of a John Steinbeck, William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway.
Through each stage of the movie’s production, Greg bombarded King and Bartlett with letters urging and pleading for changes. One letter was 18 pages long. The studio then turned the script over to Robert Allen Arthur, but he too failed to satisfy the producers or Greg.
Greg recalled: ‘They were pulling and tugging at the script from start to finish, and I don’t think those two schools of thought were ever resolved. Sometimes you get into such situations when we’d be writing the script from day to day as we went along. There were even two little groups of writers, I think, at one time: one group tugging toward the Cinderella story and the other tugging it toward something meaningful. I think it landed somewhere in between, and didn’t do either story justice. Although I don’t think there was any justice to be done to Sheilah Graham’s story.’
Too many cooks stirring the script made it exceedingly difficult not only for Greg but also for Kerr. ‘The film wasn’t all bad, but it became disjointed, between Sheilah’s original story, the film script and Greg’s own writers, and I was unable to characterize, because half the poor woman’s personality was cut out. It was difficult for me to pick up the threads halfway through her life and, for my own self, be genuine. I wasn’t able to show where she came from, and what she was, and why she became the way she was later on.’
Doomed movies call for desperate measures. Greg believed, ‘. . . you do your best acting in your worst pictures because this is where you must provide the coherence that is lacking in the script.’ In this case, Greg decided to showcase his ‘best acting’ with the help of some ‘Dutch courage.’
‘I had a big drunk scene,’ Greg explained. ‘I pushed her and slapped her around. She ran for a gun and I wrestled it away from her. Finally, the gun went off and brought me to my senses. Well, I had rehearsed that at home about 200 times. We rehearsed it on the set, and while they were setting it up, I had a couple good shots of vodka to set me on edge – because I wanted to go all out. I wanted there to be a certain wildness and an uncontrolled frustration and fury in this man.’
As Sheilah Graham tells it, she found a gun in Fitzgerald’s dresser drawer and he tackled her to the floor to get it back. Graham threw it across the room and screamed, ‘Take it! Shoot yourself, you son of a bitch! See if I care. I didn’t pull myself out of the gutter to waste my life on a drunk like you!’
As Greg remembered it, the scene was ‘funny, outrageous and very true to life.’ Maybe a little unorthodox but ‘still we got a helluva scene out of it.’
The director, Henry King, wasn’t amused. In fact, he was shocked. He contended, Greg ‘scared Deborah Kerr half to death. You would think he was a drunken demon.’ And one has to wonder about the in vino veritas factor. Greg had a strong temper and he liked to drink. Plus, he was big and strong. Did his wife, children or friends ever see him behave in a frightening manner after imbibing?
After viewing the rough cut of the movie on 20 November 1959, Greg fired off yet another three-page, single-spaced letter regarding the script flaws. He pleaded for a postponement of the film until the script could be reworked altogether, but to no avail.
It probably wouldn’t have made much difference. Above all, movies are a visual medium. A performer with Greg’s engaging good looks would have to possess extraordinary gifts as an actor to be believable as a dilapidated writer who was about to die. As it is, the viewers of Beloved Infidel see a gorgeous guy and they wonder: if this man needs money and he works for the studios, why doesn’t he get an acting gig, pay off his debts, and pump out books on the side?
Nobody was happy with the movie – at least, almost nobody. ‘I was heartbroken that Beloved Infidel did not do what it should have done,’ said Kerr, ‘but, on the other hand, I understood Gregory Peck’s point of view, and I was happy to work with him.’ Sheilah Graham was scathing in her criticism of the film, claiming ‘even Bing Crosby’ would have made a more credible F Scott Fitzgerald. She waited anxiously for the reaction of Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, assuming the young woman would also hate it. But Scottie never saw Beloved Infidel in the theaters. At a later date, she caught it on television, adored it, and phoned Graham to say: ‘I thought Gregory Peck was so like Daddy!’
Not long after Beloved Infidel, Greg accepted a tempting offer. It was to play opposite Marilyn Monroe in a movie titled The Billionaire. The film’s original producer Jerry Wald was looking for an actor ‘with the audience image of a shit-kicker – a Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, or Gregory Peck – so that his inability to perform would be all the more funnier.’
Finally, another shot at comedy. Who could tickle his funny bone better than Marilyn Monroe? He needed to be paired with a force of nature like Monroe who, with her mock innocent charm, could crash right through his granite defenses and startle a spontaneous performance out of him. Her comedic talent was remarkable. Joshua Logan pronounced her ‘as near genius as any actress I have ever known.’
As soon as he approved the script, he gave his agent, George Chasin, the go-ahead to make the deal. Then he reported to the studio for singing lessons and even learned to ‘croak a few songs.’ He also tried his feet at dancing.
Alas, at this point in time Monroe was accelerating her downward spiral. She had lost a baby, increased her dependence on sleeping pills, and almost died from an overdose. She could not find happiness with her husband, Arthur Miller, or have his child, two things that might have reconfirmed her self-worth.
Monroe’s tremendous success in comedy roles such as Sugar Cane in Some Like it Hot (1959) only inflamed her wild anxiety. This translated into work habits that were diametrically opposite to those of punctual Greg. Here was a man who did everything in his power to make sure a picture came in on schedule. There was no time lost on temperament, clowning, blown lines or hangovers. Monroe, on the other hand, liked to boast: ‘I’ve been on a calendar but never on time.’
She would keep a set in a perpetual incendiary state with her lateness, lack of preparation and inability to remember lines. This did not make her a favorite with her co-workers. During the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), Laurence Olivier fumed: ‘Why must you be so fucking late?’
Marilyn looked at him in wonder, replying sweetly: ‘Oh, they have that word in your country, too?’
Greg’s friend Nunnally Johnson wrote How To Marry a Millionaire (1953) starring Monroe and may have shared with Greg some of his experiences with the darling blonde: ‘Marilyn was blowing take after take, either fluffing or forgetting a line completely,’ remembered Johnson. ‘Every man and woman on the set was loathing her. I said: “Don’t worry, darling, that last one looked very good.” She looked at me, puzzled, and said: “Worry about what?” I swore then that I’d never attribute human feelings to her again.’
Tony Curtis, who played opposite her in Some Like it Hot, came away with similar sentiments. He claimed embracing Marilyn Monroe was ‘like kissing Hitler.’ When Billy Wilder, the film’s sardonic director, was asked if he would ever work with her again, he said: ‘In the United States, I’d hate it. In Paris, it might not be so bad. While we were waiting, we could all take painting lessons on the side.’
Marilyn Monroe was happy to have Greg as a co-star and everything was perking along beautifully until Greg noticed that the script of The Billionaire was undergoing mysterious changes. ‘My part
began to diminish,’ he recollected. ‘Marilyn’s part started getting bigger and bigger, and the whole thing stopped being funny.’
The script had obvious problems, Monroe agreed to do the film in order to fulfill the Fox commitment, and Miller agreed to revive the screenplay. Miller recalled: ‘During the shooting of Let’s Make Love [the eventual title of The Billionaire] and Some Like it Hot I had all but given up any hope of writing; I had decided to devote myself to giving her the kind of emotional support that would convince her she was no longer alone in the world – the heart of the problem, I assumed. I went so far as to do some rewriting on Let’s Make Love to try to save her from a complete catastrophe, work I despised on a script not worth the paper it was typed on.’
Although Hal Kanter (another writer drafted in to work on the script) did not acknowledge that any important script revisions were being made, he did admit ‘we are deepening the character a little for Marilyn and . . . writing in some special parts for others . . .’
Greg confronted George Cukor, the film’s director, who seemed to be avoiding him. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ he fumed. ‘This isn’t the script I agreed to do!’
‘Well, Arthur Miller is rewriting it,’ Cukor said.
How ironic. One of Greg’s aspirations was to work for Miller and it was turning out to be in a second-rate vehicle.
At this point, Cukor got uppity and reminded Greg: ‘He’s one of the greatest writers in America.’
‘Yes,’ Greg agreed, ‘but he’s not funny. And my part is getting smaller all the time.’
When Greg met with Miller, the playwright said: ‘You don’t think the script is funny?’