Deborah Kerr Acts Up & Out . . .
She Rules in Three New Films

" Count Your Blessings " ~ 1959

" The Journey " ~ 1959

" Beloved Infidel " ~ 1959

Now. it's one thing to beguile a nws hen and it's something else entirely to work them up into a frenzy. Unwittingly - or wittingly - Gregory Peck had just such an effect on a slightly less well-known Hollywood columnist named Sheilah Graham. She was a pretty British chorus girl turned reporter who had been the mistress of F.Scott Fitzgerald in the late 1930s. Fitzgerald, a not-so-recovering alcoholic was out in Hollywood doing screenwriting to pay for his wife Zelda's confinement to a mental hospital and his daughter Scottie's Vassar tuition. Sheilah truly loved Scott and even wrote a book about their tender and tortured romance called BELOVED INFIDEL. It eventually became a motion picture starring Deborah Kerr and - who else? - Gregory Peck. But Fitzgerald wasn't much of a lover. In fact, Graham admitted she never saw him naked. He died in 1940 and, though she grieved many years for him, she was, well, horny. So when Gregory hit town, her fantasy life kicked into overdrive.
In her lusty memoir, A STATE OF HEAT, she writes: ' . . . now, driving to the studios, driving back home, when I read the trade papers, when I ate, all of the ime, I thought about sex, mainly imagining myself in the arms of Gregory Peck, who always flirted with me. He narrowed his eyes and looked meaningfully at me through the slits while I asked him Questions. I became confused and forgot what I was saying. I would almost have an orgasm. Just imagining Gregory Peck making love to me was enough to turn my loins into warm liquid.'

Now we come to one of Gregory's 'turkeys.' In "Beloved Infidel," he found himself absurdly miscast as the frail, alcoholic writer, F.Scott Fitzgerald. Although Mr. Peck was proud of his raucous drinking scene in the movie, it was always one he preferred to forget. "Every film is a risk, artistically and financially,' Gregory 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 Sir Laurence Olivier, 'unreasonably chaste.'
As with many projects that are better skipped, Mr. Peck 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.' ( Deborah was a top name in the late 1950s, demonstrated by her 1959 Golden Globe as the world's most popular female star. )

Gregory Peck dismissed the Graham-Gerald 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 Gregory and Deborah 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."'

Too many cooks stirring the script made it exceedingly difficult not only for Greg but also for Deborah. ' 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.'
' 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. 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 the 20th of 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.
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 Deborah 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 have 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! '