Zachary Scott: Hollywood's Sophisticated Cad

Changing Partnersand Directions

CHAPTER 6 133 A few months after his parents returned to Texas from their visit to California in January 1949, Zach started work on Guilty Bystander for Film Classics, his fourth and final film with Faye Emerson. Scott had a financial investment in the movie, but Warner Bros. was not pleased that he planned to make the outside picture and considered it “an improper” request when the actor asked the studio for a three-month release from his services. To add to Warners’ irritation, Zach wanted an advance of five thousand dollars in the middle of his absence to take care of “certain personal matters.” Studio executives agreed when Scott consented to appear on a Lux Radio Theatre presentation of Mildred Pierce to help plug Flamingo Road, but forced him to extend his contract with the studio for another fifty-two weeks. In Guilty Bystander Zach gives a splendid performance as an alcoholic ex-policeman, reduced to living in a tawdry hotel, who searches desperately for his kidnapped son. Moody photography and solid supporting performances make the minor noir thriller a better-than-average program melodrama. Zach confronts smugglers, shady doctors, whores, and various Changing Partners and Directions thugs in the course of his pursuit in the movie, and he is outstanding in the scene where tension builds as he discovers who the real culprit is. Joseph Lerner directed the film, and some critics thought that Scott’s performance as the anguished father was his most telling since The Southerner. But Warner Bros. was growing increasingly weary of Zach’s requests for money, and he had infuriated the studio’s front office in 1948 when he plugged Ruthless in a radio interview with Radie Harris. The actor was told in no uncertain terms that his contract forbade his appearing “in connection with any radio program which shall directly or indirectly deal with motion pictures produced by another person, firm, or corporation other than Warner Bros.” Zach was not used to such dictates and tried to drown his frustration in liquor, which sometimes caused him not to show up for work. With attendance at motion picture theaters in 1949 15 to 20 percent below what it had been the year before, Hollywood studios were of no mind to pamper obstinate performers, much less tolerate repeated infractions of rules. In May 1949, as Zach was busy preparing for Guilty Bystander, Elaine drove up to the Monterey Peninsula with the Scotts’ friend actress Ann Sothern for the Memorial Day weekend. While there, she met Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck, whom Elaine liked and admired enormously. The writer was suffering intense emotional problems at the time, problems that went beyond a mere writer’s block. “I did not expect to survive,” Steinbeck said. “Every life force was shriveling. Work was non-existent. . . . The wounds were gangrenous and mostly I just didn’t give a damn.” During their visit Elaine lifted the author’s spirits and restored his self-confidence. The distinguished writer showed the two women Cannery Row, entertained them in his house in Pacific Grove, and took them to dinner on the first two nights of their stay. On the third evening Sothern called Steinbeck from the Pine Inn in Carmel and said, “I’m terribly sorry, I have to go out with some other friends for dinner tonight. Will you take care of Elaine?” As the weekend progressed, Elaine noticed that the writer seemed to be concentrating his attention on her in 134 CHANGING PARTNERS AND DIRECTIONS an amorous way. He took her to meet his sister and some of his friends and later to a roadhouse he had used as a setting in a couple of his books. After Elaine and Ann Sothern returned to Los Angeles, Steinbeck wrote the actress, “I kind of fell for the Scott girl.” Evidently the writer sensed that his romantic interest in Elaine was reciprocated, for he began writing to her on June 6. Perhaps she had confessed to him that all was not well in her marriage to Zach. Despite Steinbeck’s protests after two divorces that he would never again become deeply involved with a woman, his ardor for Elaine quickly turned to passion . She must have encouraged his interest because on June 20 the author wrote that she would “just have to be and become Belle Hamilton,” perhaps a reference to the extramarital romance between Lord...