John Huston by Jeffrey Meyers

Author:Jeffrey Meyers [Meyers, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59069-5
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

• III •

Romain Gary’s The Roots of Heaven had won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in France. As an ecological African Queen or Out of Africa, it could have been an important and successful film. It had a gorgeous setting, an adventurous story and an idealistic hero (played by Trevor Howard), passionately committed to protecting endangered elephants from poachers and freeing the Africans from colonial oppression. Darryl Zanuck produced the film because his current girlfriend, Juliette Gréco, an enormously popular French singer, wanted him to give her the starring role. She also persuaded him that the center of French Equatorial Africa would be a cheaper place to shoot the film and a more authentic locale than the healthier but more touristic Kenya. The French colonial authorities eagerly offered their help.

On March 2, 1958, the cast flew from Paris to Fort Lamy (now in western Chad) and from there traveled southeast to Fort Archambault in the southern part of the country. They then moved northwest to Maroua (now in northern Cameroon, south of Lake Chad) and, moving southeast, finally wound up in Bangui, a river town (now on the southern border of the Central African Republic). After making The African Queen in the Belgian Congo and Uganda, Huston liked the idea of a new hardship post in Africa—though the big-game hunting was better in British than in French territory. He loved adversity and never took the easy route, but the choice of Equatorial Africa was a terrible mistake. Food and bottled water had to be flown in from France; cast and crew lived in a kind of grass-hut hotel and ate in a communal dining room. Gréco’s French biographer described what he called the Dantesque conditions: aggressive insects, astonishing reptiles and dust that penetrated everywhere. Soon after they arrived the medical problems and repatriations multiplied, and like casualties in a losing war, the sick or wounded technicians had to be replaced by new arrivals. The numerous problems were both comic and pathetic, with alcoholic shipwrecks, amorous heartbreaks and wounded egos.

The heat was so intense and so many people passed out that it was impossible to work between 11 A.M. and 4 P.M. Nearly everyone suffered from sunstroke, heat exhaustion, viral infections, blood diseases, malaria or other mysterious symptoms. Juliette Gréco was sick for weeks at a time. Zanuck was particularly upset when Gréco’s tame mongoose ate a box of his precious cigars. Several people cracked up. Eddie Albert walked out in the midday sun, conversed with witch doctors and “went absolutely bananas”; one crew member saw a threatening hurricane in the clear blue skies; a second thought he was directing traffic in Piccadilly Circus; a third stripped stark naked and disappeared without telling anyone. Resigned to failure, Huston summarized the savage conditions: “The location was one of the most difficult I have ever been on. Temperatures were killing; the thermometer got up to 125° during the day, and seldom fell below 100° at night. People started dropping right and left.”

Their compound, called

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