Less than 24 hours later, Zanuck told me over lunch that Quint's moviehouse scene was out. "Gregory Peck objected to our using Moby Dick — he really despised his performance in that film," explained Zanuck. Still, Quint seems headed on a collision course with Ahab, and Jaws on a collision course of its own.
For the full-time Vineyard residents that may be the biggest social "do" they've ever had. Gossipy local papers applaud the locals who got bit speaking parts (29 so far) and an estimated 800 extras will have been used for 'atmosphere' before Jaws winds up in July. "Films are the great equalizer," declared Al Ebner, Jaws' publicity director. "Yesterday, I saw one of the Biddles, the Philadelphia Biddles, playing an extra on the dock alongside the Edgartown garbage-collector lady. Both for $2.25 an hour."
But not quite everybody's been equalized; certainly not Leonard Vanderhoop, Chief of the Wampanoggin Indians in Gay Head. He's made his hunting grounds off-limits for these Hollywood honchos. Reread your Moby Dick; remember Tashtego, Captain Ahab's 2nd harpooner? "An unmixed Indian from Gay Head," wrote Melville, "where there still exists the last remnant of a village of Red men, which has long supplied the island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooners." That was 1870 — and still a few hundred of Tashtego's tribe survive here on the most westerly promontory of Martha's Vineyard, selling fried clams and Apache turquoise jewelry to tourists who stop to admire the view over Gay Head Cliffs. Coffee-brown, with the aristocratic bearing of a Virginia planter, Chief Vanderhoop explained in a gentlemanly drawl why he had told Universal to keep clear of Gay Head.
"They came to me and said, 'It's too rough for us to have a girl eaten by our shark at Katama Beach, so can we do it here?' I asked them how did this profit Gay Head. I didn't want them to trample on the dune grass and climb about on the Cliffs, because the clay is crumbling now. Then I heard that they set up hot dog stands when they worked. So I didn't see the good of it."
The Wamapanoggin Chief stands alone in his refusal to welcome Hollywood to his crumbling clay cliffs and the anamatronic [sic] shark to his waters. The night before I left the Vineyard, I passed the Edgartown warehouse. Some technicians were lowering a grey quilted object with protruding fins onto a flatbed trailer. It looked like a Nike missile, but it was one of the sharks. Reliable rumors predict a launching soon, at Chappaquidick [sic]. Meanwhile a 24-hour guard's been placed on Universal's two remaining Great White Sharks. That's advisable, for considering Jaws' threadbare plot, these mechanized maulers may constitute Dick Zanuck's only Great White Hope of success.
