“They Said We Had Nothing In Common But They Forgot About Love”—Jean Simmons & Stewart Granger

Tracy’s ponytail bobbed as she squatted down to pick a blue lupine. In the grass nearby, something moved sinuously, but neither Tracy nor her mother noticed it. Watching her fat and sassy two-year-old, Jean Simmons Granger enjoyed the warmth of the Arizona sun blazing in the deep blue overhead. In the winter, she tended to forget about the summer months, when the same sun might shoot the thermometer up to a merciless, bone-dry 105°. Now it sparkled benevolently on the lake and on the dazzling white Charolais herd that grazed along the margins.

These were cattle of a French breed, rare in the American West, and rancher Stewart Granger (once British gentleman James Stewart) was proud of them. With one of his cowhands, he was inspecting an unconcerned-looking cow. Jean heard the murmur of the men’s voices, then the reassuring slap of Stewart’s hand against the creature’s flank, as he straightened, grinning proudly at his helper.

She heard another sound, a faint rustling in the grass, and saw the snake. Lunging to catch up her child, she shrieked, “Jimmy! Jimmy!” He came on the run, but, after his eyes had followed her speechless pointing, he began to laugh. “That’s only a blacksnake. It’s perfectly harmless. They keep down the varmint population but they don’t attack people.”

More startled than scared, Tracy was crying. Jean patted the wet, sunburned cheek. “There, there. Daddy says it won’t hurt you. Tracy had no idea of what it was that wouldn’t hurt her; she hadn’t even seen the snake; and the soothing note in her mother’s voice turned off the tears.

Smiling tolerantly, Stewart shook his head and said, “Women!” Then he bent over, hoisted Tracy up in his arms, and kissed her tears away. “Salty,” he said, making a wry face, and his daughter laughed. He perched her on his left shoulder and with his free hand gently cupped Jean’s face, and then he kissed her.

“Women!” he repeated, as he set Tracy down again in the grass, and once more he shook his head. “We’ve got some fence-mending to do over there,” he said, pointing to a distant pasture, and started towards the cowhand. He took just a few steps and then turned around and came back. Again he kissed his wife gently on the forehead, and then broke away and strode off.

Jean watched her husband, tall and tanned, as he walked across the fields, watched him until he was just a tiny shadow fading into the rocks of the Canelo foothills.

She leaned back in the grass, closed her eyes, and felt the warm sun caress her face. Far away she could hear the lowing of cattle; near at hand she could hear the little movements Tracy was making. “And to think that it wasn’t so long ago I was asking: What am I doing here?” she said to herself.

And now she heard other sounds, a voice out of her past, and she remembered what the voice said, and how she’d answered, when she announced she was going to marry Stewart. . . .

“Dear, you have absolutely nothing in common with this man.”

“But you forget one thing. One little, important thing,” she had answered them. “We love one another.”

And here she was—a rancher’s wife. It was John Rothwell, their studio publicity man, who could take the credit. But, at the time, he was more intent on preventing publicity than getting it. “I know just the place for a quiet wedding,” Rothwell had said. “Tucson.”

Puzzled, she had asked, “But we’ve never even been there.”

Stewart had said, “Sounds interesting.”

“I’ll arrange everything,” Rothwell promised. And he did. The wedding went off beautifully, even though Cary and Betsy Grant finally decided not to come for fear of drawing newsmen. With Mike Wilding, Stewart’s friend for twenty years, as best man, the wedding party took off for Tucson in a private plane.

As the plane neared the Arizona city, both she and Stewart saw weird enchantment in the scenes below: the wide, tawny valleys, with curves of lush green marking the river courses; the horizons jagged with mountains. On this first visit, the ranch country remained just a picture framed in the plane windows, and in the car windows as they rushed to the courthouse to get their marriage license the moment before closing time, thereby eluding the press neatly. As they said their vows in a private home in the exclusive El Encanto residential district, the windows looked out on evening darkness.

Afterwards, they drove only a few blocks to the luxurious Arizona Inn, where they spent the first few days of their married life, then they drove off on a sight-seeing trip to Nogales, on the Mexican border, sixty-five miles south of Tucson. Ten miles from Nogales, she was leaning back in her seat, wordlessly happy. Her shoulder against Stewart’s, she could feel his muscles tense and relax as he guided the car along the road. She looked at his profile and thought for the hundredth time—but still with a sense of wonder—“This is my husband.” Around them now were the Canelo foothills, but neither of them knew the name. If Jean took her eyes off her husband, she admired the scenery with the detached outlook of a tourist. She had no idea that she was looking at her future home.

“Such wild country!” she said.

“Wonderful!” her husband agreed. Apparently, all this was just a lot of picturesque scenery to him, too. But, ’way in the back of his mind, it had a deeper meaning—as though something whispered, “This is home. Here I am—come home to me.

The idea stayed in the back of his mind—not to pop out till some five years later, suddenly but very casually, in the British style. She had just started wearing maternity clothes and she sat contentedly knitting in the living room of their Palm Springs house. At least, they had moved this close to the open country, but only to a resort town where desert and mountains were a decorative picture, to be glanced at through glass. Strolling into the room, lighting his pipe, the master of the house asked, keeping his voice casual, “Could you live on a ranch?”

“I never thought of it,” she answered, knitting away, “but I suppose I could. If you want to. . . .”

“Good!” Briskly, he strode out of the room.

Alone, she smiled to herself. Just a few weeks before, he’d talked enthusiastically about quitting this acting business. “It’s all nonsense.” He spoke of settling down on a tea plantation in Ceylon. Whatever had happened to that notion? she laughed to herself as Stewart talked on the phone in the next room. When he came back, he said, “I’m off!”

“For where?”

“New Mexico. I just managed to get a plane connection to Silver City and I can hire a car there and drive to Gila.”

“Heela?”

Patiently, he spelled the name. “As in Gila monster.”

“Oh,” she said. She thought, “Charming!” She had seen the horny, scaly, fatally poisonous creatures in westerns, and she didn’t care to get any closer.

But she raised not a word of objection when Stewart returned, flourishing the deed to 60,000 acres in New Mexico. “Magnificent!” he exulted. “Completely remote and unspoiled. Practically savage country. Of course, we’ll sell this place.”

Dismayed, she looked around at her lovingly decorated Palm Springs home. “Of course,” she said.

“And all the furniture, too. What we’ll need is this heavy Spanish stuff—antiques. Make a real hacienda of it.”

“I’d like to see the ranch,” she told her gay ranchero.

“Ummm . . . later. Better wait till after the baby comes. It’s a pretty rough trip out there.”

So she waited, knitting baby clothes, shopping occasionally for Spanish furniture. Meanwhile, Stewart was buying horses and making occasional treks to his property near Gila.

Even though she and Stewart brought Tracy home from the hospital to their penthouse apartment in Bel Air, she felt no sense of permanence there. For her, it has never been more than a place to stay while she or her husband works on a picture. Tucking the baby in one evening, she said thoughtfully to Stewart, “I wish we could bring her up in a country home. When am I going to see the ranch?”

“Well . . . I wouldn’t exactly call it a ‘country home’—not the sort of place one dashes off to for a weekend. Matter of fact . . . it’s next to impossible to get to. Impossible to live there. But it’s a splendid investment! Horses. Cattle.”

So there went another dream, gone with the tea plantation. She felt a little sorry for her husband, sensing his disappointment. For herself, she might have felt relief—but she knew by now that Stewart had really been bitten by the ranch bug. She made a pretty good guess at what lay ahead when he suggested one day, “Like to take a run down to Tucson?”

“Love it.” For her, just the name still carried an aura of honeymoon magic.

“I’ve got my eye on a piece of property south of there.”

And they were on the road to Nogales again. Stewart felt that she shared his excitement, though he didn’t know it was for a different reason. He began to look a little worried as the Canelo foothills came in sight. “Look—I don’t want you to be disappointed. That’s why I never let you see the New Mexico property. Afraid it’d sour you on ranch life forever. But this is no ‘country home,’ either. Right now, it’s a widow-woman ranch.”

“A what?”

“Neglected. You’ll see.”

She saw: shabby main building, tiles missing from the roof; ranch-hands’ straggling cottages covered with peeling paint; brown, burnt-dry grass all around. “It . . . has possibilities,” she finally managed to say.

He turned to her eagerly. “You see them, too? Great!” Heavy-hearted, she wished she actually did have the same hopeful picture in mind. “The Yerba Buena ranch, it’s called,” he went on. “Means ‘Green Mint.’ People around here say Father Kino named it. He was the priest who came up from Mexico in 1690 and founded the first mission in Arizona. Yep—our place goes all the way back, Jean, to the Spanish Land Grant days.”

She looked at her rancher husband. He wanted Yerba Buena; in his mind, it was already his. Again, she looked at the houses—and closed her eyes.

“Good rich farmland on the property,” Stewart said. “Seven lakes on the property. Let’s see—can you spot any of them from here? After all, it’s 10,000 acres. Maybe we can pipe water in and have a couple of artificial lakes nearer the house.”

Opening her eyes, Jean found the same sad bunch of buildings, same dry grass. But she suddenly felt happy as they jounced back toward the highway, along the dirt road. Stewart wanted to live here, so this would be her home. “You know,” he said, “I fell in love with Arizona first time I saw it.”

“That trip,” she said, “I think we both had stars in our eyes.”

“I knew we’d come back some day. We’re going to reorganize our whole lives!”

“Well, this air will be wonderful for the baby. But what about the children? We can’t have them going to school so far away from us.” Toward Stewart’s son and daughter by his first marriage, she felt a warm, big-sisterly devotion.

“Oh, I’ve looked into that, found two good boarding schools in Tucson. Jamie’ll go to the Southern Arizona School for Boys—a really good school—and there’s St. Joseph’s Academy for Lindsay. Weekends they’ll spend here with us.”

“When we’re here,” she said drily. “After all, we still have to make pictures.”

Stewart grunted. “We certainly do! Know what the asking price for Yerba Buena is? $400,000! We’ve got to pay for it before we really start enjoying it. So we’ll commute between here and Hollywood—and we’ll be working hard at both ends of the trip.”

That, Jean decided later, was the understatement of the year. For it did take a whole year to transform Yerba Buena into the ranch that Stewart demanded. This time, he was determined, there’d be no repetition of the New Mexico boner; this place was going to be easy to reach. When she saw the road-building equipment he’d assembled, she gasped, “What are we going to have here? A high-speed turnpike?”

“Don’t worry your pretty head about it,” Stewart said. “Just leave it to me. I’ve got another project in mind for that bulldozer.”

And presently Jean saw the bulldozer shoving down the mesquite trees around the ranch-house. She saw a growing hole gouged out of the earth, and she realized, “The lake—he really meant it!”

Then the first of Stewart’s Charolais herd arrived. As she watched the first of them come down the ramp from the truck she admitted, “They are beautiful.”

But then she learned the price of all this beauty: from $5,000 to $15,000 for each of the thirty heifers—and $50,000 for the prize bull Argus! Again, Stewart had a ready explanation: “I’ve got to think I have the finest Charolais bulls in the country, or I’d blow my brains out.”

“And you used to be a Londoner!”

“But my father had a farm in Cornwall—wonderful times I had there as a boy. Always loved animals.”

Her own big-city background made her very wary of four-footed critters. The cows looked mild enough; the bulls she regarded with sensible caution; but the horses just plain scared her. “No way around it,” Stewart finally said. “If you’re going to live here, you’ll have to learn to ride.”

She agreed to try a small paint horse, which stood with head lowered as she was helped aboard. Flapping the reins, she complained, “It won’t go!” Stewart slapped the pinto’s rump, and the horse promptly went into a diagonal dance step that had her slithering around the saddle and clutching at the pommel.

“Don’t let go of the reins!” Stewart commanded.

Obediently, she grabbed the reins and hauled on them. The pinto stopped dancing, but tossed its head irritably, then flattened its ears and turned a sinister, white-rimmed eye toward her. “It doesn’t like me,” she said, and Stewart helped her down.

“That one’s just a little balky. But I have an idea.” Stewart’s voice took on a mysterious tone. “Next week I’m going to Texas again. You can give it another try when I get back.”

Soon after his return, his “idea” arrived: a bay gelding, carefully selected especially for his wife on his tour of several Texas horse-breeding ranches. “It’s terribly handsome,” she said, giving the shining red-brown muzzle a cautious pat. She began to dodge away when the horse poked its head toward her; but it only rubbed its muzzle across her shoulder, and she relaxed, with a delightful smile. “This one likes me! Hello, Harry . . . For Harry Black,” she explained, naming the title character in a Granger movie.

Stewart grinned his approval. “Now can the three of us get to work? You and Harry and I.”

Her riding lessons weren’t as grueling as she’d expected; she’d always admired the easy way Stewart sat a horse and he taught her. And when, several months later, she went to Stockton, California, to location for “The Big Country,” Harry went with her and joined the cast of the picture.

Slowly, hardly realizing it, she was falling under the spell of Arizona. Though Stewart had been sold on the state from the beginning, he had to learn some of the local ways, too. On one of their first trips from the ranch into town—Tucson—they both sported dashing new western outfits. People seemed to be looking at them, she noticed. Nobody asked for autographs; Tucson has long been used to vacationing or locationing movie stars. Finally, she overheard two teenage girls whispering.

“Look at his yellow boots,” one girl said.

Said the other, eying Stewart’s profile and the famous touch of gray at the temples, “Who’s looking at his boots?”

Also glancing appreciatively at her husband, she began a sly smile, but it faded. Stewart’s face had reddened; he wasn’t amused. Suddenly, both of them felt self-conscious, conspicuous in their bright shirts and broad hats. Most of the passersby wore city clothes; the occasional pair of cowboy boots were well-worn, subdued in design and color. “Let’s get back to the ranch,” Stewart said.

After that, they dressed for town on their shopping trips. These jaunts were rare, because they spent every possible moment between pictures working at the ranch and overseeing the alterations. When they finally settled in, Tucson night life didn’t lure them; they did no more socializing than they’d done in Hollywood. Fourteen-year-old Jamie did persuade them to go to a parent-student dance at his school. And Saturday movies in Tucson soon became a regular treat for her, Jamie and twelve-year-old Lindsay.

On one of their excursions Lindsay insisted on sitting in the front row—because Elvis Presley was there on his last personal-appearance tour before his induction. And Elvis almost missed a beat when he looked down and saw Jean Simmons among his adoring fans. After the show, she told her husband, “You know, Jamie has eyes exactly like Elvis’. It’s marvelous.”

Jamie’s kid sister hooted at the idea. So did Jamie, but she had caught his sheepish smile the moment before.

Each time she was away from the ranch, she found herself more eager to return. For there had been quiet compromises. Stewart had his ranch, his prize herds—but she had her country home, too. Made of adobe brick, with a roof of rough shakes topped by many chimneys, the rambling, six-bedroom house fitted into the landscape. Yet it had somehow taken on the look of a one-level English manor house. Grass seed had been sprinkled, and a green lawn—the talk of the neighborhood—sloped down to the first of the two artificial lakes, which calmly reflected the giant cottonwood trees around it.

Most houses in the section had the heavy Spanish furniture that had once been Stewart’s ideal. But her own housewifely eye saw the intricately carved pieces as dandy dust-catchers. “We don’t want anything too modern, though,” she told her husband.

“None of those sugar-scoop chairs,” he agreed. “Just solid, comfortable stuff.”

So they furnished their house in an amiable variety of styles. Between pictures, she likes to do some of the light cleaning and takes care of Jamie herself; the only full-time house servant, they decided, would be a cook. On the cook’s day off, Stewart, who fancies himself as a master chef, volunteered to take over the small kitchen.

“Okay,” she said, never having claimed to be a good cook. “You cook, and I’ll do the dishes.” At times, she has regretted the deal. When Stewart tried out a curry recipe he’d gotten from an old India hand, she took one taste and rustled up some ham and eggs. Like most husbands, Stewart tends to use every pot and pan in the place and half the dishes when he cooks; evenings, while he’s watching TV, she can only run in for an occasional look, dish towel in hand.

She opened her eyes suddenly to find Tracy perched on her stomach. “Here, Mommy,” the little girl said, leaning forward and handing one of the blue flowers to her.

She laughed and stuck the flower in her hair. Then she cuddled the child in her arms.

Yes, it is wonderful country, she thought. Who cares about a few snakes? Taking little Tracy by the hand, she started up the hill, through the green grass. Hot in the summer? Yes, but the house is air-conditioned, and evenings are cool, with the incredible stars overhead—no city lights near enough to dim their glow. Now that it was winter there’d be logs burning in the big fireplaces this evening, as they had all through the holidays.

Stewart’s mother and her own had come over together for the Christmas season, and the two English ladies had enjoyed seeing the standard tourist attractions: Disneyland, Malibu, Marineland, Palm Springs. But the most wonderful part of their stay was bringing them home to Yerba Buena, to see New Year in at the Grangers’ own hearthside.

Home? It was home, Jean realized. The New Mexico property had been sold, back in November. And Hollywood was beginning to seem almost as remote.

She remembered her husband asking, “Could you live on a ranch?”

If he repeated that question, she wouldn’t even think twice about answering, from the bottom of her heart, “Yes, I could live on a ranch—for the rest of our lives.”

THE END

—BY IRENE REICH

CURRENTLY IN WARNERS’ “HOME BEFORE DARK,” JEAN WILL BE SEEN NEXT IN U-I’S “THIS EARTH IS MINE.” THEN JEAN AND STEWART COSTAR IN RANK’S “THE NIGHTCOMERS.”

 

It is a quote. PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 1959