Living With Miss G (24 page)

Both Miss G and I read the novel
On the Beach
by the British author Nevil
Shute and wept. Producer Stanley Kramer read the book, bought the film rights
and sent the film script to Miss G. We read it and wept again. Gregory Peck
read both book and film script and immediately agreed to play the part of U.S.
Nuclear Submarine Scorpion Commander Dwight Towers. Stanley’s offer of
four hundred thousand dollars helped Miss G to make up her mind, but it wasn’t
the money that committed Miss G to the part of Moira Davidson, the Australian
girl who falls in love with Dwight. She had fallen in love with Greg Peck long
ago. Only it was a platonic relationship for a change. Moira was a fine part. Miss
G induced Stanley to employ Giuseppe Rotunno as the cinematographer, so she
knew she was in safe hands.

Why was the book so compelling? It anticipated the appalling disaster
everyone feared–a nuclear war and its aftermath. In Nevil Shute’s evocative
book, a nuclear war between the great powers had broken out two years earlier,
and within weeks radiation fallout had obliterated all forms of human and
animal life in the northern hemisphere. Now, driven by the spin of the planet and
its prevailing winds, the silent, death-carrying clouds were moving at their
measured pace to slowly envelope the rest of the globe.

Melbourne, at the southern-most tip of the Australian continent, was
expected to last until the end. They would survive for about another seven
months. It was in Melbourne and its surrounding countryside that Nevil Shute
had set his scene for the terminal days of human existence.

Stanley Kramer had assembled his assorted company there for a different
purpose. We all hoped we would make it for a few more years. Nevertheless,
there was no doubt that we were all a little awed, even scared, at the terrifying
imminence of the movie’s theme.

“What would you do if it really happened?” That was one of the first
questions I asked Miss G.
“What is there to do?” she countered. “Rush out into the street and start
screaming? Before long, you would just run out of screams.” She continued her
theme.
“I love that part in Shute’s book about the Pastoral Club in Melbourne. It is
now the best club in the world because it is the only club left in the world. This
lovely old guy has discovered that there are three thousand bottles of lovely
plank, and club members are already beginning to feel sick from radiation
exposure. He had better raise his consumption by at least a dozen bottles a week
if the supply of port is going to end before the world does.” Miss G guffawed at
the thought. “I’d certainly have pitched in to help him. I mean that is realistic.”
If nothing else, Miss G was usually realistic. I often thought that Miss G’s entire
life was lived as if the world might end the day after tomorrow or that she might
run out of lovers before the next weekend.
Miss G insisted I go with her. “Rene,” she said, “You can’t miss this trip.
You are coming to Australia.”
“What about Bappie?”
“To hell with Bappie. She’s hogged the last two Italian trips. She will get
into this one–never fear. But you are coming because I need you.”
On the happy flight from L.A. down to Sydney and onto Melbourne,
sharing the aircraft with us was a contingent of U.S. tennis players. I can’t
remember if they were representing the U.S. in the Davis Cup or competing in
the Australian Championships. It was possibly both. Miss G and that bunch of
bronzed, handsome, healthy young guys sure did get on fine together. She was
particularly taken with one cute young tennis player, Henry.
Melbourne was a graceful old city, but its founding fathers had not really
established the nightclub or restaurant business. Really, the only places with any
life were the pubs, and they closed at five in the afternoon. Even in the
expensive restaurants, wine was prohibited on tables after nine in the evening.
Miss G was on edge most of the time, and some of her behavior was
erratic. We would go to a restaurant, and halfway through dinner she would get
up and leave or decide she had to scour the city to find some happy music. We
could eat in the St. James Hotel, but that became a bit of a bore. As we had a
perfectly reasonable kitchen between the three of us–Miss G, Bappie, and me–
we managed to produce some reasonable meals.
Veronique Peck had been much wiser. She had done her homework before
arriving in Australia, declining offers of accommodation in our hotel. She had
rented a large Victorian house near the beach, a delightful place to accommodate
Greg, herself and their baby daughter. She also knew about Australian food.
Their meat, fish, vegetables and fruits were wonderful. All that was needed was
a cook. Veronique brought a French chef with her. He could have earned
Veronique three Michelin stars. Miss G often dined with them.
Miss G was glad to be back with Gregory Peck. Their last two films
together,
The Great Sinner
and
Kilimanjaro
, had not created mile-long queues at
the box office. They had not done either of their reputations any harm either.
Now they were fast friends.
As Greg always recalled with one of his gorgeous chuckles, “You can’t
keep the audience’s eyes off Ava. There she stands, not a line to say, but
radiating that almost unearthly beauty. The rest of us in the cast are tearing up
the carpets with our great performances and acting our socks off, but no one is
looking at us. They are staring at Ava.” Greg loved and cherished Ava like an
older brother. Greg, his wife Veronique, and Ava stayed bosom friends until the
end of her life.
Despite the meals that Miss G gobbled up with the Pecks, she was a
beautifully designed female who could eat like two horses and never get fat.
When she came home late at night, around midnight, she would often say, “Rene
honey, think you could make me a Spanish omelet?”
Usually I had all the ingredients for a Spanish omelet in the fridge: cooked,
chopped potatoes, onions, green peppers, garlic and eggs. I found making it no
problem, but on one evening while Miss G was having dinner with the Pecks,
Bappie and me were sharing a bottle of Scotch and having a heart-to-heart chat
about nothing in particular, when I made the biggest fool of myself I had made
in the years I had served Miss G.
Undoubtedly it was the Scotch. Bappie and I went down that bottle real
fast. At some point, Bappie said, “Rene, why don’t you whip up the ingredients
for that Spanish omelet. Ava’s bound to want one when she gets in.”
It was then that the thought, no doubt motivated by the Scotch, hit me. A
rebellion! I said, “Miss G’s not going to have a Spanish omelet tonight.”
“Why not?” said Bappie with interest.
“Because there isn’t anything with which to make a Spanish omelet.”
“Yes, there is,” protested Bappie. “I did the shopping today. All the
makings are out in the kitchen on the window sill.”
“I’ll go and look.” I said. A sly and naughty thought began to surface from
my Scotch-clouded brain. I went into the kitchen and saw the groceries on the
table. It was then that the urge consumed me. I opened the window. Outside
stretched a large, dark, open lot. The point of no return had been reached. I
picked up the potatoes one by one and hurled them into the darkness. Onion,
garlic, green peppers and a dozen eggs followed. Bappie could see me from the
living room. I went back and finished my Scotch.
I said, “You see Bappie, we don’t have anything with which to make an
omelet.”
Bappie raised her eyebrows, but made not the slightest effort to interfere or
say, “Stop that!” She just sat there like a brooding hen and finished her glass.
Then she stood up and said, “See you later, Rene.” Then she went off to bed.
I did the same thing. I got a couple of hours sleep before Miss G came
home. My head had cleared so I got up and chatted with her. Then Miss G said
that she was off to bed. I thought, ‘Thank God, I’ve gotten away with my damn
foolishness.’ But I hadn’t. At about two in the morning that little girl voice
called, “Rene, I’m hungry. How about cooking up the stuff for a Spanish omelet
and calling me when you have it ready.”
I thought, “Oh, my God, I’ve betrayed her.” I got up and banged about for
a couple of minutes and then went to her room and said, “Miss G we can’t have
a Spanish omelet tonight.”
Miss G opened her eyes. “We can’t? Why?”
“Because there is nothing with which to make an omelet.”
Miss G sat bolt upright. “Nothing to make one with? What has that sister
of mine doing? All she has to do is a little shopping! You go down there and get
her up and ask her what the hell’s going on?”
I knew I was caught in a cross-fire. I trailed back down the stairs with
doom in every footstep. Bappie had heard the noise, and as soon as I tapped on
the door her voice said, “Rene, don’t bring your ass in here. I didn’t tell you to
throw that stuff out.”
I appealed, “What am I going to do?”
The voice was unsympathetic. “You figure it out since you are so smart.”
I said, “Bappie, please!” I was desperate.
There was a long pause. Then Bappie said, “Your only hope is to ring the
manager next door and maybe he’s got the makings.”
I said anxiously, “Okay.” Then I thought about it and knew the manager
wouldn’t listen to me. “Will you call him for me?” I asked.
Bappie, bless her, answered, “Yes, I’ll call him, but Rene, if you ever pull
this trick again, you are on your own, understand?”
She called the young manager and woke him up. He’d been in purgatory
for weeks with the goings-on attached to his hotel. Yes, he had potatoes, onions,
garlic, green peppers, and eggs. Yes, if I came across, he would give them to
me. I hot-footed it across, and if looks could kill, I would have been dead. His
face was beet-red. I hurried back, chopped up the stuff, made the omelet and
went upstairs to tell Miss G that it was ready. She came down in her dressing
gown, sat down at the table and yawned. Then she looked at her omelet, yawned
again and said, “Rene, honey, it is just that I am so tired. I guess I am not as
hungry as I thought I was.”
Bappie and I had a big laugh about it for years afterwards, but we never
ever revealed to Miss G what we were laughing about. To maintain her own
sometimes fragile security, Miss G needed complete loyalty from her small
secure circle of friends. A Spanish omelet doesn’t sound like much of a test of
loyalty, but I knew that my rebellion, minor and silly though it was, would have
bruised that intangible trust.
When
On the Beach
started being filmed, one or two problems emerged
immediately. One of them was that Miss G kept fluffing her lines. It was a
recurrence which annoyed her intensely because after our personal rehearsals,
she was very good with her lines. It infuriated Stanley Kramer even more.
No one could tell him that it was all Stella’s fault. Stella was Stanley’s
wife. Stanley, like most other hard-working movie producers, went to bed very
early so that he could be on the set equally early the next morning. But Stella sat
around drinking and around midnight as we were climbing into bed, Stella
would arrive at our front door prepared to go on drinking and not prepared to go
home. She did this regularly.
We liked Stella. We liked drinking, but as we had to get up at five or six
and prepare for a hard day’s work, we could not do that sort of thing. That is
why Miss G was fluffing her lines. She was also yelling, “God Almighty, there
is Stanley giving me hell about fluffing my lines, and there’s Stella keeping me
awake all night. Can’t someone say to him, ‘If you could keep your wife at
home, we might finish the picture?’”
It got a bit tense. Someone got the word to Stella, and the movie was soon
finished. The atmosphere during that time between Miss G and Stanley arrived
at a point where people were saying Stanley was letting it be known that he
would never work with Miss G again. Untrue. Stanley and Miss G became the
best of friends. Indeed, he sent her one of the sweetest notes she ever got from a
director at the end of a film. Nevertheless, these activities were a bit trying as
Miss G’s love life was also being disturbed.
As I have already mentioned, Miss G was now having a happy love affair
with Henry, the tennis champ. In my mind this raised various problems because
there were now two suitors in the vicinity who thought they possessed privileges
in Miss G’s bed.
Frank still had a habit of showing up at unlikely moments, but he was far
away in California. So he wasn’t the one I was necessarily worried about. It was
Walter Chiari.
Australia had admitted tens of thousands of Italian immigrants since the
end of World War II. As Walter Chiari was a star in his own country, he had
managed to fix up a tour of his own to coincide with our stay in Melbourne.
Walter was an intermittent, if not all that popular, visitor to our apartment.
Walter was also very athletic, that is he was pretty good at clambering up drain
pipes and popping in through open windows.
These dangers meant that I had to double my surveillance duties and see
that escape routes were available in times of crisis. I had to see that windows
and doors could be opened at ground level as lovers got very agitated at the
thought of a three or four-story jump in the middle of the night.
Walter still cherished dreams of marrying Miss G even though Miss G had
never given him the slightest encouragement to support his notions. He was
aware, he admitted long after the fact, that he knew Miss G always thought he
was hanging on to her coattails in order to promote his own professional
standing and he was quite hurt at that assumption.
As I have already made clear, Miss G had shared an intimacy with Walter
since the years when
The Barefoot Contessa
,
The Little Hut
and
The Naked
Maja
were being made. Walter was handsome, sexy, and great fun. He was
always likely to overplay his prowess as an athlete. Miss G always smiled a little
ruefully at the memory of visiting Cuba on one occasion and taking Walter to
visit Papa Hemingway. She said, “I could see at first glance that Papa didn’t like
him much and that Papa was a bit feisty. After the first drinks, papa asked him
innocently, ‘Walter, I understand you are something of an athlete.’”
“‘Sure,’ said Walter glowing with pride.”
“’Boxing?’ asked Papa.”
“‘Sure,’ said Walter.”
“‘I’ve got some gloves,’ said Papa. ’Fancy a little sparring?’”
“Walter was quite eager. He was about middle weight and had dancing feet
to keep out of harm’s way. Papa was a grouchy, rough-house bruiser. He gave
Walter time to flick in a few lefts – that sort of thing—and then stepped in and
bam! He stood hard on one of Walter’s feet and held him solid. He knocked the
hell out of him. I had to call time pretty quickly or I’d have ended up carrying
Walter home on a stretcher.”
With Henry’s constant presence in Miss G’s life, I did mention to her the
remote possibility that her current three lovers, Henry, Frank and Walter, might
show up at the same time one night, each expecting to share her bed, and we
might be treated to a three-way boxing match. Miss G howled into convulsions
of laughter at the thought, and I eventually joined in her mirth.
I was not far from wrong. On various occasions in the past, Walter had
gained entry when doors and windows were closed. A locked door was no
obstacle to Walter. He loved the idea of appearing through a bedroom window,
and surprise, surprise, an Italian aria would be heard. Most of the time Miss G
accepted these forays with loving kindness, but sometimes you would hear the
roar, “Walter, if you don’t get out of this bedroom, I’ll kill you!” At this point,
though, Miss G was totally obsessed with Henry. Walter was moving into the
past memory brigade.
I woke one night in my bedroom which was one floor below Miss G’s. It
was hot, and my window was open. I heard a scratching and heavy breathing
and an Italian expletive as the climber impaled himself on some sharp edge.
Could it be? Was it Walter? Had he decided to pay a visit? My God, he had!