by Lynn Haney
Like any actor, Greg vividly recalls the first time he faced a live audience. It was the La Jolla Elementary School’s fifth-grade production of the ancient legend of Pandora’s Box. ‘As I recall, I was resplendent in a green velvet vest. I was the one who opened the box.’ What he remembered most about the production, however, were his co-stars: ‘They were three of the most beautiful girls I’d ever seen. I wanted to marry all of them.’
From the beginning, acting was his therapy. ‘I suppose part of my fondness for it was that I could be someone else. My real personality had always been held back. Who knows why? I didn’t have a very warm childhood, I guess.’
Fortunately Grandmother Kate shared Greg’s love of books and drama. In the evenings before he went to bed, she would take out the family Bible, a repository of the births, deaths, marriages and baptisms in the Ayres clan. She’d read to him and he was fascinated ‘. . . not so much with the lessons in doctrines, but with the wonderful stories and tales of adventure and mayhem.’ He credits the Bible with giving him a good sense of theatrics. ‘It fed my love of storytelling and legends and drama and sacrifice and suffering and exultation. The Bible is full of strong emotions, and you have to bring strong emotions into storytelling, to be able to use them as needed.’
One day Greg was walking home from school and a black and brown mongrel with a bit of Airedale in its blood appeared beside him. ‘I happened to have a left-over sandwich in my lunch pail,’ remembered the actor. ‘He looked hungry. And after I fed him, he followed me home. Never did find out where he came from.’ He named him Bud and loved him with all his heart.
Whenever his father came to visit, Greg would persuade him to take Bud with them to the country. When they came upon a deserted strip of road, Bud would be allowed to race his father’s car going ‘30 miles an hour’ and often winning.
Like other La Jolla youngsters, Greg lived for the summers. His Uncle Charlie operated a feed and grain store and owned a big barn, built sometime in the 1880s. Along with his cousins, Greg whiled away many an afternoon talking and dreaming under its sprawling roof. ‘There was a big hayloft and it was cool and dark, a great place to hide away from everyone.’
With La Jolla’s superb Mediterranean climate, life revolved around the beach. The Cove was protected from the waves by rock formations and an outstretched arm (Alligator Head) of land on the southern edge. Here is where the children often took their brown bag lunches and passed the day. Greg and his friends would swim out to the raft and sit, letting their legs dangle into the cool water, or they would swim to ‘the reef,’ a slab of rough rock, pitted by chitins and smoothed by the feet of generations of bathers, that rose from the bottom to within 4 or 5 feet from the surface, depending on the tide. The boys liked to wrench abs (abalones) with a tire iron from the underwater reefs out between the Cove and the Caves. They would also spend hours exploring the beautiful tidal pools (now almost extinct) and learning about marine life.
‘The kids I played with were like myself,’ recalled Greg, ‘interested in sailing.’ One summer he built a boat with his next door neighbor Johnny Buchanan. They bought a blueprint and warped their own lumber, carefully shaping and fitting each piece. The project appealed to Greg’s dogged persistence and his attention to detail. He was willing to work endlessly on the undertaking, making sure everything was perfect. ‘The result turned out to be quite a boat, and for some time I could think of no occupation so absorbing as boat-building.’
Like Jem and Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird, Greg was discovering there was an undercurrent of evil amidst the quotidian joys of La Jolla. It was a white Anglo-Saxon community that Greg remembered as ‘unthinking.’ People who looked different, such as the colorful gypsies who wandered through town and told people’s fortunes and the Chinese and Mexicans who built the houses, were marginalized. The term ‘nigger’ was commonly used. In 1923, when a black family rented a house on the outskirts of town, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on Mt Soledad.
‘None of us youngsters knew what it was all about,’ said Greg. ‘But even with the sheets we could recognize some of the hot bloods of the town. They made quite an impression on us.
‘I was told later they were trying to impress a family of colored folks. They were domestics, and I expect they wanted to be closer to their work. I don’t know if they were frightened. But I know I was. The scene has stuck in my memory ever since.’
Started after the Civil War, the KKK experienced resurgence in the 1920s. Members of the terrorist KKK presented themselves as defenders of the white against the black, of Gentile against Jew, and of Protestant against Catholic. They thus traded on the newly inflamed fears of credulous small-towners in places like La Jolla. Their message appealed to ordinary men with an infantile love of hocus-pocus and a lust for secret adventure. By setting a cross ablaze in the night, they aroused fears of burning houses, beatings and sometimes lynching.
When Greg grew older he was able to appreciate the immense power of movies as propaganda. As Darryl Zanuck liked to say: ‘The movies are the greatest political fact in the world today.’ In the case of the KKK, the organization benefited greatly from D W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). This controversial, explicitly racist movie set up a major censorship battle over its vicious, extremist depiction of African Americans. Nonetheless, the film was a huge box-office moneymaker, raking in $18 million by the start of the talkies. It was the most profitable film for over two decades, until Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
What made this astonishing success possible? Several factors. A wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe troubled ‘old stock’ Americans. Then there was the experience of the First World War, in which ‘100 per cent Americanism’ was enforced by vigilante groups and by the government, armed with the Espionage and Sedition Act. Following that, the Bolshevik Revolution inaugurated a Red scare that brought a frantic search for ‘agitators’ to arrest or deport. These tensions were felt in La Jolla. With the opening of two movie houses, the residents were being given the opportunity to see popular films such as The Birth of a Nation and some sympathized with its message.
When Greg turned eight, he lost some of his innocence. Eight ‘was a bad year for me,’ the actor noted. ‘I discovered there was no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny and Bud was kidnapped.’
Greg learned of the disappearance of his dog after spending a blissful vacation with his father camping on Santa Catalina Island off the California coast. They took the steamer over to the 21-mile long island and roughed it for a week. A gathering spot for the privileged few who fled by yacht from the urban sprawl, the island was a forest sanctuary where buffalo roamed the interior. It was also open to campers who didn’t mind living without running water. Greg and his father climbed the mountain trails overlooking the Pacific and fished for hours from the beach.
When they returned to La Jolla, Grandmother Kate told Greg that Bud had been kidnapped. In actuality, Bud was disposed of because his barking riled the neighbors. Since Doc could not face telling his son that Bud had to go, he arranged with Kate to have the dog disappear. Greg never found out if the dog was put to sleep or given away. It was a deeply hurtful experience. Reflecting on the incident he said: ‘For the next 40 years I always took a second look at every black and brown mongrel I saw.’
The charms of La Jolla was not lost on the early filmmakers. One day Greg stood behind a rope at the Cove and watched a crew shooting silent movie actors as they cavorted in the sand. He remembered: ‘They all had orange paint on their faces and black lips and black eye shadow – certainly they weren’t like any people I’d ever met in La Jolla.’ The star, Lew Cody, had made his mark as a suave, roguish leading man, with a few villain roles on the side. Sporting white flannels and a panama hat, he brandished a long cigarette holder, occasionally darting it playfully under the skirts of bathing beauties in the cast.
The Granada Theater, seating 712, was opened on 25 March 1925. Grandmother Kate saw to it th
at Greg received a solid film education. ‘We went to the picture show two or three times a week,’ said Greg. ‘We didn’t care what was showing.’ They even increased the church attendance in several denominations because sometimes there was a movie after the service.
Although films were still silent, cinematography in particular had reached a level of exquisite sophistication, bestowing an artistic patina on even the most banal of plots and exaggerated pantomime. Movie stars (a designation coined in the previous decade) were becoming increasingly popular. In watching the ‘flickers’, Greg was allowing the films and the stars to shape his imagination, give him some glimpse of adulthood and a sense of worlds beyond small-town La Jolla. Radio did not come close to having the power over people’s lives that the movies did.
One night Kate took Greg to see Lon Chaney, the legendary chameleon known as ‘the man of a thousand faces’, in The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Chaney was a master who crafted some of the most grotesque physical portrayals of human misery on film. The actor was already a superstar at the time, like John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks and Harold Lloyd, much of his success due to his title role in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). Chaney became an artist through direct contact with disability; both parents were deaf, causing him to develop a repertoire of facial and body tics and gestures to communicate with them. This experience led him to create compelling performances in a number of scary roles in which he was required to be legless, armless or otherwise deformed.
In The Phantom of the Opera Chaney managed to be repulsive and sympathetic at the same time. The story takes place in Paris in the late nineteenth century and concerns a young opera singer who hears the voice of a mysterious man in her dressing room. He promises to make her a famous opera star provided she never removes his mask.
The movie maintains a creepy atmosphere throughout, leading up to the famous unmasking of the phantom. At this point, Chaney created a pantomime closely akin to dance. He moved with singular grace. He put down his heels and swiveled around facing the heroine.
‘She snatched his mask off,’ remembered Greg, ‘and he turned his head to a close-up. He had no face, practically. God, my hair stood on end! I think my grandmother’s hair stood on end, too. I was positively stunned. After the picture we walked home, and I held my grandmother’s hand all the way. It wasn’t until we got halfway home that I realized she was as frightened as I was. We walked right down the middle of the street, which had eucalyptus trees on each side. We were terrified of the dark sidewalks.’ Kate let him sleep in her bed that night.
By 1926, Bunny had remarried and moved to San Francisco. Her new husband was a traveling salesman named Joseph Maysuch, formerly Masucci. She did not invite her son to live with them; she wanted to travel with her husband. ‘Since she hadn’t stuck with the first husband, she was doubly determined to stick with her second,’ Greg said, adding, ‘Italian men seem to need a lot of looking after.’ But then, so do boys. In any case, it was presented to Greg as a fait accompli. ‘There wasn’t much communication in my family,’ Greg recalled. ‘I can’t remember ever sitting around the table discussing things.’ Now he was about to be taken away from his beloved La Jolla and required to live at a school he would later describe as run by ‘tough Irish nuns and ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) drill instructors.’
CHAPTER THREE
Growing Up
‘If anybody was least likely to succeed Greg was definitely it. He would be the last person I would’ve thought would make it.’
Richard Lustig, Gregory Peck’s classmate,
San Diego High School, 1933
After romping about barefoot in La Jolla, Greg had a hard time adjusting to the confinement of St John’s Military School, where he was sent in 1927. Fronting on noisy West Washington Boulevard in a drab section of Los Angeles, the three-story main building – formerly an orphanage – was a forbidding affair that reeked with the smell of wax.
Under the watchful eyes of the stern but kind Sisters of Mercy and the iron-jawed First World War veterans they hired to turn the boys into fit cadets, Greg was leading a highly structured life. Reveille woke him at 6 a.m. Then he was expected to rise and stand at attention. The boys shined their shoes every day, ‘like little robots,’ Greg remembered. They prayed before and after meals, before and after classes. Dinner was at 6.30 p.m.; taps at 9 p.m. ‘We were marching and praying all day long,’ he recalled, ‘from the time we woke up until the time we went to bed at night, they had us hemmed in.’
Cadets were permitted off the grounds on Sundays and one weekend per month. For the two-night furloughs, Greg caught the trolley to Los Angeles’ Union Station, then traveled south by train to San Diego. At his father’s place, he was to witness a sad spectacle. Doc Peck was caring for his terminally ill mother. The invincible Catherine Ashe, who had raised Doc alone by selling ladies’ undergarments, was now dying of uterine cancer.
Greg, who was 11, sat by her bedside – a helpless witness to her suffering, unable to ease her pain and powerless to heal her. He saw and smelled it all, the bouts of nausea and the peculiar odor emitted by terminal cancer patients, the wasted countenance and the weakened voice emitting pitiful groans. Catherine died on 19 May 1928, but the memory of her excruciating last days never left Greg. ‘I remember strength and an almost stoic way of dying,’ he said years later, ‘except for the groaning which I can hear to this day.’ In the 1960s he honored her through his tireless work for the American Cancer Society.
When he wasn’t staying with his father, Greg spent his furlough weekend in La Jolla where he camped on Uncle Charlie and Aunt Myrtle’s living-room couch. Their daughter, Bernice, three years younger than Greg, recalled, ‘He’d come in real cute in his military suit and say, “I’ve got to get out of these things.” Then he’d go swimming and zoom around town.’
St John’s provided a sense of order to Greg’s chaotic childhood, yet he deeply resented being placed there. He remembered the institution as largely attended by the children of divorced parents who, ‘out of guilt and uncertainty,’ sent their offspring there for discipline. In reality, Doc and Bunny may well have felt they were giving their son a leg up in life. St John’s had opened two years before Greg’s arrival and its mission was to provide an excellent education for pre-adolescent boys from working-class, often troubled families. The school maintained a selective admissions policy and took only bright boys with promise.
Dramatics weren’t stressed at St John’s; still, the school nurtured Greg’s thespian instincts. An actor lives off what he has stored up in the way of impressions and experiences. And what could be more dramatic than daily mass – particularly when it was recited in Latin – and students such as Greg had a chance to be altar boys. ‘I got very thoroughly indoctrinated,’ Greg said later. Three days a week, he went to the sacristy, laid out the priest’s garments and poured the sacramental wine. Then he would put on his black altar-boy robe with white lace and assist the priest during the service. Greg memorized the entire Latin mass. ‘I knew the whole routine by heart,’ he said, ‘when to ring the bells, when to swing the incense burner, and somehow I took to that.’
Producer Martin Scorsese, a friend of Greg’s, has drawn heavily on his Catholic boyhood for film inspiration. He notes: ‘The church and the movie house both are places for people to come together and share a common experience. I believe there is spirituality in films, even if it’s not one that can supplant faith. I have found over the years that many films address themselves to the spiritual side of man’s nature, from Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) to John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) to Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) and so many more . . . It’s as if movies answer an ancient quest for the common unconscious. To fulfill a spiritual need that people have to share a common memory.’
The indelible mark of Catholicism was being pressed into Greg’s mind and heart. Prior to enrolling in St John’s, he hadn’t given much thought to sin. Now, he was learning the fine poi
nts of mortal and venial transgressions. Sin produced blemishes on the soul that could keep him out of Heaven, put him in Purgatory for years, or, God forbid, hurl him into Hell forever. Prayer was a safeguard against sin. In fact, the nuns commanded memorization of prayers under pain of humiliation at the business end of a ruler. Plus, they expected their charges to be brave, charitable, obedient, respectful, and pure in thought, word and deed.
He longed for his chums in La Jolla. They didn’t have to polish their shoes or worry about sin; they could lark around shooting spitballs, passing notes, making fun of teachers, and generally having a good time. Yet it is characteristic of Greg that he didn’t rebel at St John’s. Instead, he suppressed his disappointment at being parked there by his family and made the most of it. He began to idolize his spiritual advisor, Father Timothy Crowley, and even considered becoming a priest.
Perhaps without realizing it, Greg absorbed the activist philosophy of the Sisters of Mercy. While these nuns were academically narrow, they were fiercely committed to social justice. The order, established in Dublin in 1831, had a history of caring for the less fortunate – and they infused their students with this fervor. (One huge stain blots their record on human rights. Sisters of Mercy ran at least three of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene Laundries. In these barbaric institutions, which were under the auspicious of several Catholic religious orders, the mentally infirm, victims of rape or incest, or girls who were potentially promiscuous were locked away and forced to atone for their sins by washing the dirty linen of the Catholic clergy.) The Sisters of Mercy’s founder, Catherine McAuley, was a stylish, cultured woman whose personality and adventures were the stuff of Hollywood. (Her life would have made a great movie starring Greer Garson.) An Irish artist of the time described McAuley as ‘remarkably well made, attentive to good grooming and conservative in her dress.’ She ‘lived in what is usually called good style . . . went into society.’