OF THE MANY directors I’ve known and worked with Jack Clayton turned out to be much the most fun. He let everyone know that he had been a commando in World War II, and he exhibited his commando instincts several times while I was working with him.
As an example he stayed by choice in the Watergate Hotel, then the source of recent scandal. Naturally Jack recorded every word of his many disputes with Mr. Merrick. Since he was living on the site associated with the most famous taping in history, he couldn’t resist getting his own record into history.
Jack was married to the famous Israeli movie star Haya Harareet, who had played the ingenue in Ben-Hur. Jack, perhaps justly, felt the world was out to get either Haya or him.
We spent our working days on Massacre at Fall Creek in the big room of our bookshop, and the kind of characters who happened to wander in struck Jack Clayton as deeply suspicious his first day there; often he’d get up and position himself behind them, carrying our heavy nineteenth-century milking stool—the only weaponlike instrument in the shop.
Clearly Jack Clayton had little notion of how very odd the denizens of the rare book world can be. Fortunately every customer was well behaved that day, and none of them got whacked with the milking stool, which we soon removed to the closet for the duration of my story conferences with Jack Clayton.
Unfortunately for the project David Merrick had a serious stroke and Massacre at Fall Creek sank out of sight.
I had one final discussion with Jack Clayton, about a book by James Kennaway, set in South Africa during a revolution—or, at least, a riot. A white man and a black man hide out together, but never speak. It’s a good novel, but silence is a nonstarter in the movie business. Jack’s version of Gatsby was not well received and I do not recall him having worked much since. Ephraim Katz’s great Film Encyclopedia mentions two of his wives but doesn’t mention Haya Harareet. Maybe she was one of the wives, perhaps even changed her name. I did see, not long ago, Jack’s fine adaptation of Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne: Brian Moore’s best work and perhaps Jack Clayton’s too.