The Newport shoot wrapped before her baby bump blossomed fully into Fletcher Previn. Then, what Redford once, semi-sarcastically, termed “the big money, above-the-line” personnel, and the British camera crew and one minor Paramount executive made their various way to London and established themselves at Pinewood Studios for the remaining filming.
Rumor was that Mia’s no-longer-a-mere-rumor pregnancy caused Theoni Aldredge to have a nervous breakdown, but there is no such thing as a nervous breakdown. And, besides, Theoni wouldn’t have put up with one. Maybe some screaming was overheard. Probably some screaming. But immediately, Theoni launched a wardrobe rebuild of Daisy’s enchanting slim sheathes, camouflaging wherever she could with scarves, which expanded in volume as the shooting proceded.
Still, the schedule had to be reworked to accommodate Mia’s pregnancy. That made some people grumpy. Hank Moonjean finagled, always needing to take into consideration the vagaries of British weather, since we did have some exterior shooting in England.
Our excessively polite British production manager, Peter — who kept calling Hank “Mr. Moonjean,” while Hank kept saying, “Peter, I’m Hank” — had a connection with someone who had a connection with an English farmer who was a sort of clairvoyant: supposedly he could predict the weather a couple of days in advance.
Hank took this in with Hank poise. He and I were living in rentals in London, so he and his driver would pick me up each morning for the drive to Pinewood. We’d pass farm fields with grazing cows and Hank would inspect the cows because, “If they’re standing up, tomorrow will be a dry day, if they’re sitting down, it’ll be rain. Or the opposite.” And I’d always burst out in giggles.
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic–their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
Aside from the exterior shooting, the rest of Gatsby would be shot on a series of exquisite sets created by John Box and constructed by his British crew. The shimmering ersatz marble swimming pool (it was wood) in which Gatsby died. The “Eyes of T.J. Eckleberg, Occulist,” gazing down upon Wilson’s garage, and me…
Uh, oh another agita incident over that faded sign behind me. Please look up at the previous paragraph to see how I spelled Eckleberg’s speciality. Which was the spelling on the sign, but somewhat different from the proper way Fitzgerald spelled it — “some wild wag of an oculist.”
How do things like this happen?
Before I landed in London and onto that sound boom, Hank and Jack Clayton were inspecting the Wilson garage set which fronted on the train tracks leading into the distance, to “New York City.” (The RR tracks were a particular marvel of trompe l’oeil: sitting where I was above, if I turned to my right, I’d see those tracks running into infinity, i.e., “New York City,” but when I walked along the tracks, they narrowed and narrowed until they were perhaps a foot apart.)
Oh dear. I keep wandering off the track. Back to Hank and Jack in Wilson’s garage. Jack had turned toward the sign and gazed upon it for an unusually long time. “Hank,” Jack said in an ominous tone, “how is ‘occulist’ spelled?”
Now is the time to tell you about Jack’s temper and concomittant proclivity for throwing and breaking things. Mirrors, window panes, glassware. Once, in Newport, Jack threw something at a window in Hank’s office. Hank said to me, “The only thing I’m getting on this film is pneumonia.”
Something got broken that day when Jack realized his long-time secretary had typed a revision of the scene and had misspelled Doctor T.J. Eckleburg’s profession. The pages had been given to the crew, who dutifully replicated the spelling on that full-scale, $25,000 sign.
Neither the money for rebuilding the sign nor the time for doing so was in the budget, never mind the already discomposed schedule, so there the sign stayed. “Occulist.”
That’s how these things happen.