by Lynn Haney
And then it happened. Everything changed. Greg was standing near the receptionist’s desk when a call came through from Guthrie McClintic for the director of the school. ‘It’s about you,’ whispered the receptionist who overheard part of the conversation.
‘And that’s all I needed to know,’ said Greg, recalling the event years later. ‘I took off – I knew where his office was – I took off, ran down four flights, ran half a block across 46th Street to Sixth Avenue. I ran four blocks up Sixth Avenue to 50th Street, plunged into the RKO building. There was an open elevator, pushed the button for the eighth floor, rocketed up there, walked through the door.’
McClintic was still talking on the phone to Meisner. Seeing the speedy and now breathless Greg, the producer launched into a fit of laughing and coughing, finally sliding off the chair, on to the floor and gasped, ‘You’ve got the job.’
Greg found himself staring at a man of medium height, with a light complexion, a well-shaped head and a fine brow; he had the friendliest eyes in the world.
With that, Greg signed a contract to appear in the road company of a George Bernard Shaw comedy, The Doctor’s Dilemma, which was just closing its run on Broadway. Since the tour would not start until the fall, Greg turned to summer stock.
Sanford Meisner was co-director at the Suffern County Theater just north of New York and gave Greg a part in The Male Animal, written by James Thurber and Elliot Nugent in 1939, as ‘Nutsy’ Miller, the bandleader. For $25 per week, Greg was acting with Uta Hagen and José Ferrer. In August 1941, Greg appeared with Diana Barrymore in the musical comedy Captain Jinks at the White Plains Theater. Like a good trouper, he also ‘croaked out a couple of songs.’ He received good reviews, bad reviews and so-so reviews.
Greg made the most of his straw-hat summer. He was laying the groundwork for a Broadway career by building friendships and seeing that his name got around. So it wasn’t surprising when Maynard Morris of the prestigious Leland Hayward agency approached him with an offer of representation. He assumed that since Morris worked in the New York office of the firm, he would find him roles in Manhattan theaters. As it happened, Morris put Greg’s name down on the agency’s client roster and that list was being studied not just by New York theater people but also by producers and talent scouts stalking the hinterlands for new leading men to fill in for screen actors who had joined the forces fighting in the Second World War.
In September 1941, The Doctor’s Dilemma, a light satire on the medical profession, opened at the Foster Theater on Walnut Street in Philadelphia. Oh, how Greg loved the City of Brotherly Love! While he would describe the good thing that happened to him there as a stroke of luck, it was also an occasion where preparation met opportunity.
Greg’s job amounted to eight lines in the third act. He played the role of Mr Danby, an art gallery attendant. Understandably, he was nervous and thrilled to be sharing the stage with Katharine Cornell. Anyone who came close to her was electrified by her presence. French actor Jean Pierre Aumont and playwright Henri Bernstein, both of who came into her life shortly after Greg did, found her remarkable. Remembered Aumont: ‘At 40 there was more of the peasant about her than of the actress. Nothing affected or artificial; but something warm and robust, like the scent of hay. Her handshake was solid, she had a clear and hearty laugh, and she looked you straight in the eye when she talked.’ Bernstein rhapsodized: ‘She’s merely the greatest actress in America, that’s all. You can tell Sarah Bernhardt and Helen Hayes to start packing. She can play anything. She has the brow of an intellectual, the eyes of a saint, and the mouth of a whore . . . ’
The show’s opening coincided with the 25th wedding anniversary of Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic. The Lunts, Dorothy Gish, Joan Fontaine, Diana Barrymore and other stage luminaries came down from New York, and some pre-curtain champagne flowed, at least enough so that Cornell ‘dried’ at the beginning of the last act.
The star made her entrance, walked directly to Greg, opened her mouth and said nothing. ‘Her eyes seemed to start spinning,’ said Greg. ‘She had forgotten her lines. I turned my head upstage and whispered her first two or three words. It just happened instinctively; she picked them up immediately. At the party afterwards, she kissed me and introduced me to everyone as the man who saved her life.’
Philadelphia provided the setting for another dramatic moment in Greg’s life. It was there, on 8 September 1941, he met Greta Konen. She was Katharine Cornell’s hairdresser, a former art student, who had also attended cosmetology school. Pert and blond, Greta seemed to burst with life and vitality.
Actually, Greta spotted Greg from the wings, a vantage point she was destined to hold throughout their relationship. Recalled Greta: ‘The first time I saw him, backstage in Philadelphia, I sneaked a look at the call board to see who he was. Gregory Peck – hmm, he certainly picked a fine stage name for himself, I thought – but somehow it seemed to fit him. I never knew it was his own until I met his parents some months later and found out he wasn’t a full-blooded Indian as he told me the first time I went out with him.’
When the tour hit Boston, Greg took Greta to the Merry Go Round Bar. There he pretended to be a palm reader so he could hold her hand. And of course he got away with it. As well as the sexual attraction, they were drawn to each other for other reasons. Greta was divorced after a five-year marriage to businessman Charles Rice whom she married at 18. She saw in Greg, a few years her junior, someone who wasn’t cynical about romance and love. He had the right values. He’d make a good father.
For Greg, Greta was his good magic, his talisman for success. She penetrated his shy shell. She coaxed and eased him up and out of his solitary hole. All she had to do was look at him and he knew she believed in his worth. She pledged herself to his cause from the beginning. ‘I just knew he was going to make it,’ she said.
As The Doctor’s Dilemma touring company zigzagged across the country playing in cities and towns, Greg and Greta became increasingly infatuated with each other. They plunged quickly, eagerly into an intimate relationship. Their bond was cemented by the confinement of the tour and their positions near the bottom of the company’s hierarchy. While the important actors were put up in top hotels, they had to make do with standard rooms.
The road as it existed then was a hard, grueling life for actors. The body, the mind, the nerves had to be able to take punishment. Small-town inns with creaking doors and sheets gray with age; the sense of termites eating away the very floors under their feet. The towns start to look alike. In most instances, the actor’s path restricts itself to three points – the station, the hotel, the theater.
Greg remembered: ‘Well, like anything else, if the people are fun you have a good time – you become a little family, you eat together and you have your little jokes. But this company was full of English actors. So Greta and I had a proletariat club with a wonderful guy named Lester Ampolsk, the comedian whose job at the moment was selling souvenir booklets in the lobby. We stayed in hotels –– Greta earned $60 week, I got $50 and Lester had about $35. Our entertainment after a performance was to chip in on a bottle and go back to one of the rooms and play rummy.’
In San Francisco, Bunny and Joe Maysuch welcomed them with open arms. The San Francisco Chronicle sang hosannas about the Berkeley boy hobnobbing with Katharine Cornell. The Rannells cousins from La Jolla boarded a Greyhound and arrived at the Curran Theater where Greg had left passes for them to see The Doctor’s Dilemma. Afterwards, he took his cousins to the Brown Derby. The young people stayed up until 2 a.m. eating scrambled eggs and bacon. ‘I loved him with all my heart,’ recalled his cousin Bernice 50 years later. ‘He was so good.’ And when exquisitely beautiful San Francisco went dark that December night in a blackout, Greg proposed to Greta. Could life be any better?
The play closed in San Francisco, but the company stayed there, because Cornell wanted to rehearse her next vehicle in the city. This was Rose Burke, a translation of a French play by Henri Bernstein that had be
en playing with success on the Champs Elysées before the Nazis moved in. Although there was no part for Greg, McClintic kept him employed as assistant stage manager for the touring company. He also used him as understudy to two actors in the cast, Jean Pierre Aument and Philip Merival. It was in this capacity that Peck received what he considered to be his best theatrical experience.
Cornell preferred props when rehearsing. Though dressed in street clothes, should the part require a hoop skirt, a train, or some article of clothing to which she was unaccustomed, she had the equivalent constructed for rehearsals, attaching it over her street clothes.
The long stretches rehearsing opposite Katharine Cornell confirmed for him that he indeed belonged on the same stage with distinguished professionals. And being in close proximity to her, he was surprised to learn she was shy, and had never fully conquered stage fright. ‘I used to see her backstage, before her entrances, keyed up and trembling, and then sweep on stage and take command, projecting self-assurance, grace, nobility.’
In early 1942, Rose Burke played Portland, Seattle, Toronto and Detroit but stopped short of Broadway. Back in New York, Greg went through another road tour show taking the juvenile lead in Punch and Julia by George Baston which ran for two weeks in May in 1942, starring Jane Cowl. When it flopped, he decided to seriously set his sights on Broadway. But no offers were forth coming, so he did summer stock at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts.
The brainchild of Californian Raymond Moore, the Cape Playhouse was housed in a nineteenth-century former Unitarian Meeting House fronting on Old Kings Highway. His vision was to have a smart, sophisticated summer theater, which would bring Broadway to Cape Cod. To this day the original pews, now with cushions, serve as seats. Over the years, Moore attracted big-name stars such as Bette Davis (who first worked as an usher), Gertrude Lawrence, Lana Turner, Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart, Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Julie Harris and Paulette Goddard.
Greg played in The Circle with Daren Morley; Rebound with Ruth Chatterton; You Can’t Take It With You with Fred Stone and The Duenna with Jimmy Savo. Guthrie McClintic had a house nearby in Martha’s Vineyard and one day in mid-summer of 1942 he sent for Greg.
Nestled among the dunes, the McClintic house was situated beyond the two headwaters, West Chop and East Chop. Thus McClintic and Cornell called their beach house Chip Chop. A Chop means a point of land with a light on it and that is what Chip Chop was – a point of land from which, out at sea, could be seen the light of the McClintic summer home.
Arriving, Greg approached a frame house (really three houses strung together), with broad and conspicuous white stone chimneys. Walking inside, he found airy rooms, uncrowded and spacious. One room, the room with the grand piano, contained two fireplaces, a ping pong table and a real Bavarian tile stove. Chip Chop had every convenience except a telephone.
McClintic had a great surprise – the script of The Morning Star, a big hit in London running ten months there with writer Emlyn Williams as the star. Would Greg be interested in playing the lead on Broadway? Would he! Later he called Greta. This would make him rich enough to get married. ‘Do you hear wedding bells?’ asked Greg. ‘I do.’
The action of The Morning Star was set in London during the Nazi bombings of the city. Greg’s part was that of a ‘sensitive’ young medical student who has a breakdown, and, unable to continue his studies, takes up with a prostitute (to be played by Wendy Barrie in her stage debut). Greg and Barrie would be the only Americans in an otherwise all-British cast, which included Gladys Cooper, Rhys Williams, Brenda Forbes, Jill Esmond and Nicolas Joy. During rehearsals, McClintic focused on Greg’s voice, helping him to master theatrical projection.
McClintic’s direction was poised, kindly, quiet. No swearing, pacing back and forth, ranting, whipping the actors with sarcasm. Wearing a sweater and smoking incessantly, he sat at a table to the left of the stage giving directions.
Greg’s classmate, Tony Randall also worked with McClintic on several productions. He said: ‘McClintic wasn’t an exceptionally good director but it didn’t matter. He loved actors and the theater. He was stage-struck – more than anyone I’ve ever known. He was there at every performance, unlike most directors, whom you never see again after opening night. Guthrie would sit backstage on the floor just listening to the play, often weeping, and in between the matinée and the evening performance he’d often go to sleep right there. Many actors gave their career-best performance for him simply because he loved them so much.’
The Morning Star was scheduled to open on Broadway on 14 September 1942. The preview in Philadelphia had gone badly with one critic comparing Greg’s acting skills to that of a waxwork dummy. As a result, Greg frantically rehearsed with Greta. She loosened him up and helped him to stop being so solemn. Still, as the performance approached, Greg developed a case of the shakes. There was no escape unless the theater burned down. If he blew his Broadway debut, then what would become of him?
In the wings of the Morosco Theater, he stood rooted to the spot, paralyzed with fear. ‘The critics then – Wolcott Gibbs of the New Yorker, George Jean Nathan, Brooks Atkinson, Richard Watts Jr – were called Murderer’s Row. There were seven daily papers in New York then. Boy, did I ever want to burrow through the cement in my dressing room and head for Mexico.’
Another time he reflected, ‘You can die up there and say, “Call it all off, give ’em their money back and let ’em go home,” or you can collect yourself and do it. The instinct for self-preservation takes over.’
Once he made his entrance, heaven was on his side. The feared reviewers panned the play, but praised Greg. Said the New Yorker: ‘[The Morning Star] is another account of the behavior of London civilians under the bombs, and, like its several predecessors, it is a dismal mélange of too casual heroism, inflated rhetoric, and invincibly pawky humor.’ John Mason Brown of The World Telegram detected shades of Gary Cooper in Greg: ‘a remarkable young actor, sensitive, intelligent, and expert, and an uncommon type.’ And the New York Times concurred: ‘As her wayward son, Gregory Peck plays with considerable skill.’
The play closed after 24 performances. Greg and Greta got married. Then Greg spent two futile months looking for work. In the meantime, his father kept urging him to get a real job. Finally, he landed the lead in The Willow and I. Barbara O’Neil and Martha Scott were his leading ladies. The production itself met with mixed notices, but New York critics continued to praise him. The New York Daily Mirror chimed: ‘Gregory Peck, New York’s new matinée idol, is excellent as Dr Todd and his son, Kirkland Todd. Young Peck is good-looking and he’s a first-rate actor. That’s quite a combination.’ The New York News agreed: ‘[Peck] is by way of becoming, I strongly believe, one of our most popular leading men both here and on the coast. He has poise, good looks, a splendid voice, and a compelling sympathy.’ Though the play only lasted 28 performances, Greg was well on his way to becoming a star.
So there it was. He had achieved his dream – a quintessentially American dream. In only three years, Gregory Peck had gone from a nobody to a headliner on Broadway with his name in lights. Frequently wracked with terror and despair, often hungry, often broke, he stuck to his rifles. He survived through determination and a protean ability to grow with each new experience. His success was all the sweeter for the ordeals he suffered in achieving it. Even the announcement that The Morning Star was closing after only a month hadn’t stopped him from running out and buying a marriage license.
The finger of fate beckoned him to Hollywood. Talent scouts had seen The Morning Star and The Willow and I. In short order, in early 1943, Leyland Hayward whisked Greg out to Los Angeles where he fought off the advances of the big studio bosses such as Louis B Mayer. If he committed to a seven year contract, he could be locked into B-movies and still required to pay Leland Hayward ten per cent of his earnings.
Greg felt torn. Broadway was the world he loved. He believed in the healing power of the theater, a place to come together and tak
e refuge. It was his second-chance family. Plus, it had a vitality the movies could never match. ‘The most distinctive characteristic of the theater is simply that it’s alive,’ said noted composer Richard Rodgers. ‘A play can’t be put into a can like a movie to be taken out and shown without change. Theater exists only when there are real people on both sides of the footlights, with audiences and actors providing mutual stimulation. No two performances or audiences are exactly alike; it is this unpredictability that makes the stage a unique art form.’
One producer wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Casey Robinson was after Peck to sign for his movie Days of Glory (1944). A highly respected screenwriter, he now had plans to set up his own independent production company – an animal that, like independent actors, was a rare species in 1942.
Their relationship began when Greg debuted on Broadway with Morning Star. Robinson came to Greg’s dressing room. Accompanying Robinson was Hal Wallace, with whom Robinson had been working at Warner Brothers. Wallace had previously offered Greg a deal but – like the others – it had been an exclusive contract for seven years’ labor for Warner Brothers. Greg had rejected it just as firmly as the others.
Robinson’s offer was different: four pictures in four years, and since he reckoned it would only take ten weeks to make a picture, Greg could do what he liked in the other 42 weeks of the year. He could go back to Broadway or, if the Hollywood madness took root, he could make pictures for other people. The offer seemed not just tempting, but realistic. It was also a way to pay the overdue rent on his apartment. So Greg closed the deal with Robinson. However, before relocating to the West Coast, he insisted on accepting the lead in an Irwin Shaw play called Sons and Soldiers. The cast included Geraldine Fitzgerald and Karl Malden.
Shaw was a crackerjack storyteller. Excelling at the short story with the skill to create unforgettable characters, he produced such literary gems as Girls in Their Summer Dresses and The Eighty Yard Run. These earned him a place up with John Cheever, John O’Hara and J D Salinger as a master of the form. His first play, Bury the Dead, an anti-war story in which six soldiers killed in battle rise up, was produced in 1936 as his screenplay The Big Game. He worked constantly in the late 1930s producing books and magazine articles, but when the Second World War aroused his patriotic ardor, he took off for Africa to drive an ambulance à la Hemingway. In his wake, he left his play Sons and Soldiers, which badly needed to be shaped and trimmed.