by Lynn Haney
In calmer weather, seals could be heard barking and seen sporting themselves. Even whales passed by each year on their migration to Baja, California, and its protected bays and estuaries. Sometimes in the summer one could stand at the top of the cliff and see a spotted leopard shark playing in the transparent shallows below.
The streets in La Jolla began at the sea or followed the contours of the shore. After dinner, people walked the streets – whole families of them. The smells of La Jolla at night were unforgettable: all the garden flower odors were released upon the evening breeze. They mingled with the aroma of sage and low-growing chaparral from Mt Soledad. One could ride horseback up La Jolla Canyon on to the mesa above, and in and around the eucalyptus trees near the ‘Bughouse,’ as the locals called the newly created Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
In 1915, Greg’s mother Bernice Ayres, age 20, traveled from her hometown of St Louis, Missouri to La Jolla for the wedding of her sister Myrtle to Charlie Rannells, the Railway Express agent. Her mother, Kate, was already there, having moved in with Myrtle after her own husband, John Dagget Ayres, died on 9 February 1912. John had worked on and off as a railroad detective and as keeper of the boats at Creve Coeur Lake in St Louis.
Charlie Rannells introduced Doc Peck to ‘Bunny’, proclaiming he was ‘the most eligible bachelor in town.’ And, indeed, he was quite a catch. A handsome, tautly muscular man of 28, he had coal black hair, an aquiline nose and a generous mouth. He was popular with his clients, captained the local basketball team and played in the town band.
For a genial but non-adventurous man such as Doc, Bunny Ayres represented excitement. She radiated a glow that pulled all eyes toward her and made her stand out in a crowd. Her face was fine featured; eyes glinting with mischief, her small head surrounded by an aureole of curly blond hair. Bunny bubbled with life and with stories from the boisterous, rowdy city of St Louis. It was the birthplace of Ragtime – among the happiest and most infectious music the world has ever heard. Bunny and Doc began courting. However, it later proved to be a case of opposites attracting with a romantic setting triumphing over good judgment. As Greg’s cousin, Bernice Rannells, explained: ‘There wasn’t much else to do in La Jolla, so she married Gregory Peck.’
To please her fiancé, Bunny converted to Catholicism and their wedding took place on 4 June 1915 in the splendid setting of St Louis Catholic Cathedral. The Cathedral’s unique design combined a Romanesque architecture exterior with a wondrous Byzantine style in the interior. In 1912 masons began installing mosaics depicting key figures in Judeo-Christian history. The project grew to become the largest mosaic collection in the world.
On the night the couple returned to La Jolla, Doc brought his bride to the bungalow he had built for her for $4,000. It was a red wood, board and batten house, the dominant style of California architecture in the area. There weren’t any street addresses at the time. Houses had identifying names such as Sans Souci, Green Dragon and Bide-A-Wee, Silver Palm and Hardbiscuit Heaven. Theirs was called La-Lo-O-Mi.
As darkness fell, he looked out the window to see a rowdy group of locals, led by Bunny’s brother-in-law Charlie Rannells, banging on pots, pans and washboards while pistols were shot in the air and firecrackers set off. Doc quickly realized they were the victims of a small-town initiation process called a ‘Charivari’ or ‘belling of the bride.’ It was a boisterous, mock-serenade to newlyweds designed to welcome them to the community and add excitement to their wedding night. The dignified pharmacist pleaded with them to go home. Instead, the revelers kidnapped and bundled Bunny and Doc into separate cars and took them for joy rides. It was not an auspicious beginning to their life together in La Jolla.
The new Mrs Peck found it difficult establishing a place for herself in such a sweetly simple community with a population of less than 2,000. The La Jolla Journal, the town’s first newspaper, had just started printing two years before she arrived. Electricity had come to town in 1911. But the locals had a low regard for progress. Many of the good citizens of La Jolla wanted to keep with gas kerosene and candles, but too many people were having stove blowups. When the gas company tried to run a line down Columbus Street, people fought it with picks and shovels – but the gas company won.
In June 1917, an ordinance was passed making it unlawful for anyone over ten years of age to appear on the street, except in the vicinity of the Cove, without covering for the entire body except the hands, feet and head. It was not vigorously enforced, but it was one of those aspects of small-town life that made it very different from Bunny’s native St Louis.
She also had to deal with the fact that there was just one of everything: grocery, grain store, hardware store, notions boutique and sweet shop. As for the one drugstore, owned by Doc Peck, it was in deep trouble.
Doc proved to be an inept manager of the store’s finances. He never sent bills. Most of his customers were ‘on the tab’, and he was too easygoing and softhearted to pursue them or check on an accountant when money was missing. The accountant embezzled $10,000. Years later, Greg asked his father: ‘Why didn’t you go to a bank and ask for a loan?’ Chagrined, Doc admitted he was too ashamed and embarrassed. These traits became ingrained in Greg’s character. At the same time, his dad’s experience made him resolve to be shrewd about money. After conquering Hollywood and seeing money roll in, Greg sought out the best advisors and invested his fortune wisely.
The demise of the Pecks’ marriage was messy and full of bitter disclosures on Bunny’s part. In filing for divorce on 3 February 1921, Bunny accused her husband of hurling profanities at her and hitting her on two occasions. She alleged he frequently threatened little Greg, saying he would ‘knock the hell out of him.’ Bunny further claimed that in October 1917 she suffered from an attack of appendicitis, but Doc refused to send for a doctor until two days later when the appendix burst.
Hearing the complaints, Superior Court judge C N Andrews issued a restraining order against her husband. Then, after Doc pleaded with her to take him back, she withdrew the petition for divorce. The reconciliation lasted until 19 July and the couple were divorced on 30 July 1921.
Greg never went into the specifics of his parents’ divorce except to say that money and the differences in their ages was the reason the marriage didn’t work. Of course, he was too young to have known what actually transpired. Even if he may have learned more facts at a later date, he chose not to disclose them. When Gary Fishgall was in the process of writing a biography of Greg, he wrote to the actor (Fishgall never met with Greg, nor did he talk with him on the phone) and asked him specifically about the recorded legal accusations of Gregory Sr abusing his spouse and son. Greg responded in a letter to Fishgall: ‘Nothing like that ever happened.’ It was ‘impossible. If you knew my dad, it is impossible.’
The court ordered Doc to pay $30 per month in alimony and $20 per month in child support. In 1922, Bunny moved back to St Louis and found work as a telephone operator. Six-year-old Greg followed on after her. His father took him to the train station in San Diego and tipped the Pullman porter $10 to look after him.
Cast a glance at any six-year-old nearby and imagine the anguish experienced by Greg when he said farewell to his father. He didn’t know when he would see him again. The youngster boarded the train, and traveled two and a half days alone. He crossed half the continental United States, sleeping two nights without a familiar face to read him a goodnight story or soothe his anxieties. In St Louis, his mother was waiting at the train station.
Years later, when Cosmopolitan magazine interviewed Greg, he said: ‘I don’t care to talk about my childhood because it was so sad.’ His cousin Bernice Rannells, who grew up with Greg and whose family looked after him, took umbrage at that remark. ‘He had the most wonderful childhood,’ she insisted. Certainly, he didn’t grow up in abject poverty, nor was he raised by non-family members. Yet, one is left with the impression that the trauma he experienced at the time of his parents’ divorce and the upheaval that followed tr
iggered a longstanding depression – which never left him. A picture of Greg in 1922 shows a frightened child in a sailor suit, his hands gripped tightly around his knees as his father gently holds him.
Bunny took Greg to a shabby boarding house at 4715A Washington Street. He recalled the place as ‘straight out of Tennessee Williams’, with a wild assortment of down-at-the-heel characters. ‘I remember the landlady had red hair,’ said Greg who compared her to Tallulah Bankhead.
Some landlady! Tallulah Bankhead was a supremely gifted actress of the 1920s and 1930s who during the course of her career appeared in more than 50 plays and 20 movies. However, her most entertaining and spectacular role was herself. She drank too much and talked too much and turned cartwheels when the whim seized her. As Brendan Gill noted in Tallulah (1972), his pictorial biography of the star: ‘The violent scatological energy of her speech and the celebrated speed and frequency with which she shucked off her clothes and prowled about naked, long after her body had grown ugly with age, were intended to convey an impression of untrammeled emotional freedom . . .’
For the twice-a-week poker nights at the boarding house, Greg swooshed gin in the bathtub. Then he mixed it with lemonade and sold it to the residents at a nickel a glass. He also shined their shoes. During the day, he joined the landlady’s son, who was just a little older than he, in selling newspapers on the street corner half a block away, where the trolley cars stopped.
In the early 1920s St Louis was a rowdy wonderland, a magnet for the hard-muscled dockworkers who labored on steamboats and for pleasure-starved salesmen in town on business. The decade was starting to roar with jazz, flappers, flasks, rumble seats, and raccoon coats. Streets such as Chestnut and Market were honeycombed with barrel houses – called honky-tonks – serving 10¢ shots of liquor, gambling joints, and brothels boasting beautiful women of mixed blood, making St Louis an inland rival of New York’s Tenderloin and San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. There was an almost wholesome air about the place. Girls solicited on bicycles, riding the streets in broad daylight, advertising their charms by letting the wind sweep up their skirts.
Despite the local color, Greg was in a vulnerable position for a six-year-old boy who has been taken away from his father and out of school. But the manner in which he chose to recall those times indicates that he was a survivor early on. He had the ability to adapt to the ramshackle lifestyle, developing spunk and the beginnings of a work ethic. He also got material for a good story that he told and retold once he became famous. Maybe the St Louis chapter of his childhood didn’t happen exactly as he remembered it, but he showed he could stand back and extract humor from the situation. Also, he was with his mother who possessed guts and a zest for life. It rubbed off.
After about six months in St Louis, Bunny took Greg for a brief stay in San Francisco where her brother Ben, who worked as a trolley car motorman, lived. Once again, she found it too tough to raise her son alone on her meager income. So she returned to La Jolla where she rented a redwood bungalow at 7453 High Avenue for her mother, Greg and herself. Bunny worked briefly as a waitress in a tearoom earning $25 a month. She enrolled young Greg in the La Jolla Elementary School, and tried unsuccessfully to reconcile her differences with Doc Peck.
Alas, La Jolla still appeared backward to Bunny. Most of the roads weren’t paved and during the rainy season the wide expanse of mud was so formidable that children such as her son were asked to wade to school in their bare feet, carrying their shoes, stockings, books and a towel. The first few minutes of the school day were spent cleaning up.
When the first sidewalks were laid, a faction of the villagers refused to walk on them. They said they made their bare feet sore, and prophesied they would ruin the town. But change was in the air, and the protests were overruled. Bunny’s niece and namesake, Bernice Rannells remembered: ‘About once a week, my mother gave me a nickel and I would go down and walk across the street when they were paving Girard Avenue, and I couldn’t get across the street because all the cement was being poured, so I stayed on the corner and just yelled, “Mr Tetless.” He came across and brought me an ice cream cone.’
Not being suited for full-time motherhood and sorely missing the big-city lights, Bunny left young Greg in the care of her mother and moved to Los Angeles. There she worked as a telephone operator for an advertising agency. At this point, Doc was working nights in San Diego as a pharmacist for Ferris and Ferris. He didn’t have the time to look after a young child. However, he faithfully visited every Thursday.
Grandmother Kate Ayres was a gentle widow who had once been quite pretty, but now looked older than her years. Although she was not physically active enough to play with young Greg, she had a great deal of love in her heart and he remembered her with the utmost tenderness. More important, Charlie and Myrtle Rannells lived nearby with their children Warren (whom they called Stretch), Catherine, Bernice and Myrtle Adele. Greg could enjoy the company of relatives close to his age.
Greg’s three years with Grandmother Kate represented the happiest in his childhood. ‘I actually lived in a house when I was little which was called the Silver Pine, for the obvious reason that we have a silver pine tree in the yard . . . I have such wonderful memories of La Jolla as a kid. It was a wonderful combination of bohemian West Coast artistic little enclave and some very practical, pragmatic people who ran the stores and brought produce into town . . . I had an uncle, through marriage, Nathan Rannells, who was the postmaster whenever there was a Democrat in the White House. And when there was not, he was not.’
On Sundays, Grandmother Kate and Greg joined Myrtle and Charlie Rannells and their family for Sunday service at St James Episcopal Church. The group would then make their way back to the Rannells’ house to prepare for Sunday dinner. Uncle Charlie, who had been a silver-miner in his youth and was an earthy man, would doff his Sunday best suit and head for the chicken coop. He’d grab a bird by the neck and swing it around and around until its head popped off.
The scene was not lost on Greg. ‘I was lucky to have seen and experienced just that bit of the Old West,’ he later said. ‘It gave me a connection with those rougher, self-reliant, hearty characters I was later to play in Western film.’ (Charlie’s son Stretch became Greg’s model for the lubricious rascal Lewt in Duel in the Sun (1947).)
Kate Ayres did not keep close tabs on her charge. This meant Greg was free to experience the joys of small-town life. It was sweet compensation for being the child of absent parents. ‘I don’t think it hindered my growth or gave me complexes,’ Greg said, reflecting on the years from seven to ten he spent with his grandmother. ‘Instead, it was the best possible way to grow up, something like Tom Sawyer and his Aunt Polly. My grandmother was a lot more lenient than my parents would have been.’
It wasn’t the best way to go through childhood, but Greg chose to see it that way. He never wanted to be considered a victim. Yet, perhaps as a reaction to being bounced around by his parents, he grew up to be controlling about situations – anticipating the worst became second nature – and persnickety about his possessions. He insisted on a fixed spot where he could keep familiar and loved things.
Greg had little money living with his grandmother, but neither did most of the other kids. There was always something to do if you just used a little imagination. ‘I knew everybody,’ said Greg. ‘I’d go on my bike anywhere in town and be among friends and feel perfectly safe. We played games with home base under the corner street lamp and Run Sheep Run. We built tree houses and we’d climb into spare tires and roll down the street. It was just like To Kill a Mockingbird.’
Halloween was always a special occasion. The adults built big bonfires; the children paraded in their costumes, and competed for prizes. But Fourth of July was best of all, particularly 4 July 1924. It was the celebration of the arrival of the electric railway complete with luxurious glassed-in cars. The La Jolla Journal reported 25,000 people came for the ‘smoothly run’ event. There were picnickers galore and little trains were bus
ily puffing in and out for hours bringing visitors. In the afternoon, there was a real cakewalk at the pavilion. And at night, there were fireworks on the raft down by the Cove and a few that twinkled along the shoreline.
Greg loved watching his father march with the band and the Civil War veterans in the Fourth of July parade. Among the white-haired veterans shaking with infirmities was Grandfather Rannells, the father of Greg’s Uncle Charlie and Uncle Nathan. He was a lean, leathery, clear-eyed old man whom Greg remembered as ‘a solid nineteenth-century character who had led a very exciting life.’
‘I’m very grateful for the contacts I had with him and had with others of that era,’ Greg said. ‘They gave me a great respect for the past and they made me realize how close the past really is. Because of them history has never seemed remote to me.’
The Civil War – America’s greatest, deadliest, bloodiest drama – was ‘a fairly recent memory then,’ said Greg, and seeing the old men proudly marching fuelled his interest in his hero Abraham Lincoln. Even before growing up to resemble Lincoln, he identified with him. By age twelve, Greg had memorized the Gettysburg Address. Here was an ordinary man who went from a log cabin to the White House; here was the representative man, transformed into the extraordinary by both his belief in principle and the demands of history. ‘Lincoln is the ideal American,’ Greg said years later. ‘A native genius, cast up out of a very ordinary heritage . . . the great American saga and legend from start to finish.’
Though he was a voracious reader who took out his first library card at the age of six Greg was a middling student. He did not form close bonds with his teachers and he kept himself aloof from his classmates. He explained: ‘I was alone a lot as a kid and a kid who spends a lot of time on his own simply has no habit of having fun or of conversation at home, of doing things together.’
Greg was a pleaser. When his grandmother gave him a pair of high-button shoes, he was mortified because none of the other children sported anything so old-fashioned, but he suffered in silence. ‘I used to hide my feet as much as possible, and the only thing I noticed about a schoolmate was his footwear. My grandmother had meant to please me, so I couldn’t let on how much I hated those shoes. I wore them for what seemed years – until they were completely worn out.’ He was learning also that if your place in the family is not secure, it’s best to express gratitude.