by Lynn Haney
Greg never griped about Bergman’s fickleness. He saw the relationship for what it was – a romance of the moment. The important thing for him was to preserve their friendship. On his way up, he needed to forge lasting bonds with his more successful colleagues. So he portrayed his intimacy with Bergman – physical or psychological – as the beginning of a lifelong bond. Over the years, he tossed his ‘Swedish rose’ bouquets of admiration and she responded with complimentary statements praising his skills as an actor and his worth as a man. From a career standpoint, it was a smart strategy. Domestically, it probably didn’t play so well.
Selznick, with his genius for ballyhoo, ran adverts for Spellbound hinting at both horror and sex: ‘Will he kiss me or kill me?’ ‘Irresistible their love! Inescapable their fears.’ One graphic poster showed Greg with his arms wrapped around Bergman but with a straight razor in one hand. Spellbound’s box-office success was staggering. In the first week at New York’s Astor Theater, for example, it grossed $60,000, breaking all records – even those of Gone With the Wind.
Selznick was floored by the reaction to Greg. ‘We could not keep the audience quiet from the time his name came on the screen until we had ‘shushed’ them through three or four sequels, and stopped all the dames from oohing and aahing and gurgling.’
Now Greg’s face was familiar to millions. Every fan publication either featured him on its cover, or ran a special article about him, or both. His mail averaged 3,000 letters a week. Men wanted to go out and have a couple of drinks with the star. Mothers and daughters fantasized about Gregory Peck making love to them. The mother of Venezuelan athlete Iginia Boccalandro saw Greg skiing in Spellbound and insisted her daughter take up the sport. Iginia competed in cross-country skiing, switched to the luge, and at 37 became Venezuela’s first Winter Olympian. Jazz musician Mike Melvoin remembers that when he was a boy in the 1940s, his mother became so infatuated with Greg she announced to her son: ‘I’m going to change your middle name to Gregory.’ He pleaded: ‘Don’t do it Ma! Then I’ll be MGM.’
This kind of adulation was so new to him that Greg hadn’t yet built up his trademark shield of dignified reserve. In later years, he became fiercely protective of his private life, adopting Humphrey Bogart’s position that ‘All you owe the public is a good performance.’ But in the 1940s, he didn’t have a public front. He was who he was – a rough diamond. When he was asked to pose for a picture, he said to the photographer: ‘Just tell me which pose you want. I’ve got two. You want me frownin’ and gloomin’, or laughin’ and scratchin’?’
Similarly, when a journalist questioned him about his income, he didn’t dodge the question. ‘Why, sure I’ll tell,’ he replied, like a kid queried about his allowance. ‘I made $125,000 last year, and we’ve got $8,000 left.’
Callow though he was, Greg was learning fast. One of his smartest moves was to endear himself to the gossip columnists. To all intents and purposes, they ran the town. Greg understood their power and handled them with kid gloves. It showed the lengths he would go to further his career.
‘Today, it’s hard to understand the power of these two women in Hollywood,’ said Celeste Holm, who won an Oscar for her appearance in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) with Gregory Peck. ‘At one time Louella invited me for lunch at Romanoff’s, and before we left, every star, producer, director and agent had come to our table and verbally kissed her rear end.’
The majority of stars played the humiliating game of flattery with Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, figuring it was far less troublesome having them with them than against. Greg followed this path, but he did so in his inimitable fashion. He beguiled the viper-tongued women with his simplicity, humor and normalcy. (In a hotbed of neuroses like Hollywood, normal is exotic.)
Like a loyal nephew, he treated each woman as though she was his favorite auntie in whom he was confiding the exciting details of his private life and the films in which he was involved. By playing this role, he brought out their gallant and softhearted sides. They responded by protecting his reputation – for the most part. Of the two, Greg favored Parsons.
Parsons wrote a daily column for the newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst (the apparent inspiration for Orson Welles’ classic 1941 movie, Citizen Kane). Her flagship was the Los Angeles Examiner. She also produced movie reviews and Sunday supplement features, and hosted a successful radio show called Hollywood Hotel on which Greg appeared as a guest star.
Parsons was short, dumpy and doughty with large brown eyes and a carefully cultivated scatterbrained style that proved very useful as she flitted from celebrity to celebrity. She never forgot a thing and never forgave anyone who crossed her. ‘Louella Parsons is stronger than Samson,’ claimed Sam Goldwyn. ‘He needed two columns to bring the house down. Louella can do it with one.’
Fortunately for Parsons, she was married to a fun-loving Irishman named Harry ‘Docky’ Martin. He was a popular Beverly Hills proctologist – whom the stars affectionately nicknamed ‘Old Velvet Finger’. The studios relied on him for treating venereal diseases and performing abortions. In a community renowned for fornication, he was in high demand. Through Docky, Parsons had a line to all the testing laboratories in town and could tell if an actress or an actor’s wife was expecting (she twice announced Greta was pregnant before Greg had been given the word).
Now, it’s one thing to beguile a news hen and it’s something else entirely to work them up into a frenzy. Unwittingly – or wittingly – Greg had just such an effect on a slightly less well-known Hollywood columnist named Sheilah Graham. She was a pretty British chorus girl turned reporter who had been the mistress of F Scott Fitzgerald in the late 1930s. Fitzgerald, a not-so-recovering alcoholic was out in Hollywood doing screenwriting to pay for his wife Zelda’s confinement to a mental hospital and his daughter Scottie’s Vassar tuition. Graham truly loved Fitzgerald and even wrote a book about their tender and tortured romance called Beloved Infidel. It eventually became a movie starring Deborah Kerr and – who else? – Gregory Peck. But Fitzgerald wasn’t much of a lover. In fact, Graham admitted she never saw him naked. He died in 1940 and, though she grieved many years for him, she was, well, horny. So when Greg hit town, her fantasy life kicked into overdrive.
In her lusty memoir, A State of Heat, she writes: ‘. . . now, driving to the studios, driving back home, when I read the trade papers, when I ate, all of the time, I thought about sex, mainly imagining myself in the arms of Gregory Peck, who always flirted with me. He narrowed his eyes and looked meaningfully at me through the slits while I asked him questions. I became confused and forgot what I was saying. I would almost have an orgasm. Just imagining Gregory Peck making love to me was enough to turn my loins into warm liquid.’
The Pecks were now able to afford a house on Mulholland Drive, high above the golden pastures of Hollywood. On a clear day, Greg could see Santa Catalina Island where he used to camp out in a tent with his father. They had arrived. ‘Mulholland is a phenomenon of Los Angeles,’ wrote David Thompson in his essay about the celebrated road, ‘both an idealized spectacle and a place from which to survey the classic city of visibility. Even as you drive, the panorama turns into a model for grace and dread.’ He added: ‘The road is like a location in a film, chosen and dressed for its magnificent vantage and for the juxtaposition of inane civilization and a dangerous wilderness.’
The Pecks’ home was situated atop a steep ridge above Mulholland. In those days, the ridges and canyons off the drive were sparsely inhabited with film folk; yet alive with rattlesnakes, deer and coyote. The air was balmy, but the light raw and cruel; a light for young people.
Driving back from the studio, Greg would grip the wheel of his second-hand jalopy (the Second World War meant there were few new cars), fixing his eyes straight ahead. Mulholland was so serpentine and strewn with crumbling rock and chaparral at every curve that sometimes cars skidded off the road and toppled over the edge. Just like the hardboiled bosses at the dream factories, the cliffs were not fo
rgiving to people on the way down.
Once in the door, Greg liked nothing better than to duck into the nursery and wrap his long arms around baby Jonathan. Then he’d take a romp with another beloved member of his family – Perry, a 150-pound white Alsatian police dog. He took delight in teaching Perry tricks and the dog proved a quick learner. He slept outside, making the perfect watchdog.
Having never had a real home growing up, Greg considered the little gray Mulholland house a landmark. Though modest by Filmland standards, it nonetheless provided the fan magazines with a bucolic backdrop in which to present Greg and Greta as one of Hollywood’s happiest couples. Hand in hand they cavorted about their property in supposedly casual photographs. Of course, the magazine layouts were carefully staged. One picture shows the Pecks on top of their house supposedly cleaning the roof. Greta is wearing a fetching romper outfit and her hair looks like it’s just been set at the beauty parlor. In another, she’s sporting high heels to skip across the grass. Still, there was a glow about them. They seemed like two kids tickled no end by all the good things coming their way.
What the pictures didn’t capture was the changing balance in their relationship. Greg and Greta had started out on an equal footing. He was a struggling actor and she was the pretty hairdresser to the star of the company. Now, Greg’s name blazed across the marquees of theaters from sea to shining sea and as far away as Europe, Asia and Australia. Greta, whose support had been so crucial to him when he was practically an unknown, was receding into the role of an admiring fan holding on to his coattails as his star rose higher and higher.
Home was the one place where Greg had privacy. Nobody was watching him. He sought sanctuary in gardening, playing the piano (badly, he admitted) and reading, little by little adding to his collection of books about his hero Abraham Lincoln. Like Honest Abe, Greg could project an image of simplicity, but he was actually a complex man. Just as Greg had to make his Faustian bargains in order to survive in Hollywood, Lincoln had to undergo inner struggles of conscience to get elected. As Greg said, ‘. . . no purely innocent country bumpkin becomes president of the United States.’
In a poignant interview with a Washington journalist named Frederick C Orthman, Greg confessed: ‘My wife and I just sit and stare at each other. It happened to us, and here we are with this income. Fabulous, I think, is the word – and we don’t know exactly what to do about it. The thing that really gets us is the fact that I never really did amount to much on the stage . . . then this happened to us. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but needless to say, I’m grateful. I might also add that I am stunned.’
Greg’s early days in Hollywood were indeed remarkable. More astonishing still, the mid-1940s marked only the beginning of a film career that would span over half a century and comprise more than 50 movies. Where did this bashful, gangly boy from La Jolla get the drive to keep going for so long? How did he manage to keep his head straight while living amidst the hedonistic denizens of modern day Sodom and Gomorrah? What was his secret? For clues, let’s journey back to his childhood.
CHAPTER TWO
Early Days
‘In those days, La Jolla was a kind of paradise by the sea for kids . . . but my folks were divorced when I was very young and instead of growing up in this idyllic little town, I was bounced around quite a bit.’
Gregory Peck
On 5 April 1916, a strapping 10-pound baby boy struggled out of the womb of a terribly frightened young woman. It was a home birth and the mother of the infant was built too small to expel him without enduring enormous pain. Such was the entrance of Gregory Peck on to the stage of life.
After the torturous labor, his mother Bernice, a dazzling beauty of 21, vowed to her 29-year-old husband: ‘I never want to have a child again!’ And true to her resolute nature, she didn’t. Greg was her only offspring.
Being ‘a foolish young girl’ as she described herself, Bernice – known as Bunny – was determined that her one child would be special. First off, he must have a name that would set him apart from the Johns, Toms, Harrys or Michaels of this world. And because she had trained as a telephone operator, she consulted the phone book. Out leapt ‘Eldred’.
To Greg, the name was an albatross he was forced to carry through childhood and adolescence. He loathed being called Eldred. There wasn’t even a nickname for it. So he used it at school and in other situations where it was required. Otherwise, he let people know, in his clear and distinct voice, that he preferred to be called by his middle name, Gregory, or Greg for short. Years later, Greg lamented to social critic Cleveland Amory: ‘I kept that damn name Eldred until I was 21. Now, that’s what I call filial piety.’
Gregory suited him fine. It was his father’s name, one of many bonds he would share with his tall, dark-haired, athletic dad. From Gregory Sr the boy also acquired a sly sense of humor and an immutable code of decency – backed up by good old Irish Catholic guilt. Another legacy from his father was the Celtic relish for engaging in lively chat and spinning yarns. As Oscar Wilde said of his fellow countrymen: ‘We are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.’
Although Greg’s bond with his mother was less strong, he had her to thank for his imaginative energy, his love of beauty and his charisma. Bunny had the magic. She was giddy, attractive and slightly unconventional. With her slim figure, ideally suited for the post-First World War woman, she could carry off the short skirts, rolled-down stockings, and short ‘bobbed’ hair then coming into style. And, who knows? If the cards had fallen differently, with her pizzazz, she might have been a success in show business.
Gregory Peck Sr came from Rochester, New York. His mother was an Irish immigrant and his father was of English descent. He cherished his Irish ancestry and would pass this appreciation on to his son Greg. The pride of the family lineage was Gregory Sr’s first cousin, Thomas Ashe, a hero of the Irish Rebellion of 1916.
A schoolteacher in County Kerry, Thomas Ashe became active in the Irish Republican Brotherhood. During the 1916 Easter Rising Ashe commanded the Fingal Battalion of Volunteers who took Ashbourne, County Meath. The Ashbourne ambush was the only Republican military success during the Easter Rising. The Fingal Battalion demolished a railway bridge, and captured Swords, Donabate and Garristown. They also took the Royal Irish Constabulary barracks in Ashbourne for six hours, during which 11 RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary) men were killed and more than 20 were wounded. The Fingal Battalion only lost two men, with five wounded.
The following year Ashe was arrested and sentenced to a court martial. While detained, he joined a hunger strike. The prison guards retaliated by taking away the prisoners’ bedding and shoes. All requests to Ashe to end the hunger strike were met with a firm resolve. ‘No! They have branded me a criminal. Even though I do die, I die in good cause.’
Then the authorities began forcible feeding. On 23 September 1917, while the feeding tube was being inserted it pierced Ashe’s lung and he collapsed. He died of heart and lung failure on 25 September in the Mater Hospital. Playwright Sean O’Casey wrote a poem for the fallen patriot titled, ‘Lament for Tom Ashe.’ It begins: ‘The wild mountain glens are now silent . . . ’
Without a doubt, Greg’s Irish stock was strong. In 1884, at the age of 20, his grandmother Catherine Ashe emigrated from Ireland, settled with relatives in Rochester, New York, and then married Samuel Peck. Catherine gave birth to Gregory Peck Sr on 3 August 1886. When the baby was 11 months old, Samuel died of diphtheria. Catherine returned with her son to Ireland, traveling in steerage. Family members met the boat in Cork and escorted them to Aniscaul, near Dingle in County Kerry – home of the Ashe clan. They remained there for ten years, long enough for the son to develop a lifelong Irish brogue. He hurled out words with a superfluous quantity of breath, saying broadher, widher, stor-rum, far-um, and ladders for letters.
The two returned to the United States. The resilient Mrs Peck became a traveling saleswoman of ladies’ corsets and bloomers, succeeding well enough to buy a 16-flat apar
tment building in San Diego, California, and put her son through the University of Michigan where he earned a degree in pharmacology. (Almost a century later Greg established a scholarship for aspiring pharmacists at the University in his father’s name.) She married a second time to a man named James Gilpen.
Gregory Sr moved to La Jolla, a suburb of San Diego. There, he worked for a year at H L Setchel’s Drug Store on Girard Avenue. Then, in 1910 Catherine gave him $10,000 to buy the business.
Gregory became known to the residents of the seaside town of La Jolla, California, simply as ‘Doc’ Peck. His drugstore featured ‘pure chemical compounds’ and an ‘up-to-date’ soda fountain. If a man got drunk and embroiled in a fight leaving him with a black eye, he could count on Doc Peck to apply leeches to the wound. The pharmacist kept the leeches on a shelf where they would fascinate the town’s children. The creepy bloodsuckers had three jaws, each with about a hundred teeth.
La Jolla was set like a jewel on the California coast. Legally it was just the northwest corner of San Diego, but it developed in peaceful isolation as a compact village because the northwest passage from San Diego was long and devious around La Jolla’s commanding Soledad Mountain.
The cliffs at La Jolla rose from more than 350 feet at Black’s Beach on the north to 40-foot gentle bluffs at the sheltered Cove near the center of town. Residents loved the sound of the sea, breaking against the cliffs, surging up the beaches and swirling in the caves. ‘Sometimes it was merely a faintly heard presence,’ recalled Greg’s contemporary, Norma Newman Hacker, ‘but when there was a storm and the waves crashed against the coastline, everyone would bundle up against the cold and go down to stand and watch the spray as it flew up from the face of the cliffs and flung itself back on the land.’