by Lynn Haney
Greta flew back to Rome after the Olympics. Then she packed up and took Jonathan, Stephen and Carey to Paris, the city she and Greg had decided on as their European base, to get the two eldest enrolled in school. Emily Piipari, who had stayed on in Finland to visit with relatives, flew to Paris to join her. Happy to exercise her grandmother skills, she spent a month there and often took the children to school or accompanied them home.
Even with her mother’s help, it wasn’t easy for Greta to be a woman, without a husband, raising three children in a strange city. The Paris that greeted her in the autumn of 1952 was threadbare and full of arduous challenges. La Ville Lumière still had not recovered from the war. Neglected for years, public and private buildings needed repainting and other repairs. Antique buses plied the city streets. Otherwise the resourceful Parisians got around by bicycles, tricycles, horse carts, rickety trucks and dilapidated cars, propelled by kerosene or charcoal engines.
Back in Italy, Greg embarked on his own personal Roman Holiday. His companion in this adventure was June Dally-Watkins, an Australian beauty of 25, who was touring the world in a one-woman fashion show. A country girl from an isolated small town in New South Wales, Dally-Watkins had been born illegitimate and, like Greg, grew up outside the setting of the nuclear family. But she was lucky, just like him. God kissed her face – and he didn’t do a bad job with the rest of her. Endowed with classic features, a tall graceful frame and a zest for life, she went on to become Australia’s top model in the period following the Second World War.
In her memoir, The Secrets Behind My Smile, Dally-Watkins recalls her touring solo fashion show and the rigors of climbing into and out of 20 ensembles in record time. It was ‘as ambitious and as comical as a one-person band. As both compère and mannequin, I spoke to the audience about the next outfit I was to model, disappeared backstage to frantically change clothes, then reappeared trying not to look frazzled as I walked amongst the seated audience.’
In Rome, Dally-Watkins checked into a boutique hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps, directly opposite the exclusive Hotel Hassler where Greg was staying. As an Australian model, she was something of a novelty and invited everywhere. At the wind-up dinner for Roman Holiday, Dally-Watkins found herself seated next to Greg. Sparks flew in both directions.
Greg offered to show her the town. So for one week Dally Watkins played hooky from her fashion duties and let herself be swept off her feet. No, they didn’t gallivant on a Vespa. Instead, Greg escorted her in a sleek black Mercedes. And the week passed like a dream. Hand in hand they wandered through St Peter’s Square, tossed coins in the Trevi Fountain and idled for hours in sidewalk cafés. Just like Joe Bradley and Princess Anne in Roman Holiday, they strolled through the silent ruins of Rome’s once mighty Forum. Greg held her in his long arms and kissed her over and over again. Here’s where Princess Anne would have whispered: ‘If I were to die at this moment, I would die knowing I had always loved you.’
Dally-Watkins didn’t have a scriptwriter. Still, romantically speaking, it was a sublime moment. Greg urged her to join him in Paris. She really wanted to go. He certainly seemed sincere. What’s more, he was coming across like a man who wanted a serious relationship. He told her he was unhappily married and gave her the impression he was separated. Yet he didn’t appear traumatized by his domestic troubles. In fact, he was relaxed and ebullient.
‘My insecurity was very deep,’ explained Dally-Watkins about why she turned down his offer, ‘and I felt if I followed Greg to Paris I may be hurt. I could not believe a person like Greg would want me.’
Being a virgin, she was apprehensive about taking the relationship to the next stage. ‘I would not have known how to make love anyway,’ she writes in her memoirs. ‘There were no sealed sections in women’s magazines giving explicit instructions on the intricacies of sex and it was never discussed with girlfriends or my mother. All the while, Mother’s warnings surfaced from the back of my mind: “Don’t throw yourself at a man, he’ll take advantage of you. Don’t trust men. He will respect you more if you don’t sleep with him.”’
So Dally-Watkins returned to Australia. She continued her modeling career, developed a highly successful deportment and business school, married and raised a family. Like Audrey Hepburn, who became an ambassador for UNICEF, she volunteers and represents Crossroad International, a relief organization. Is she sorry she didn’t follow Greg to Paris? Oh, yes. ‘If I wanted to look at it romantically, I would say, Yes, I have big regrets! But it wasn’t meant to be. That’s the way real life goes; it can’t always be like a fairytale and I feel privileged to have known him for the time I did.’
Now that the filming was completed, Greta and her mother returned to Rome to join Greg. The three enjoyed the sun in Santa Margherita on the Italian Riviera before returning to Paris by automobile. As they wended their way back to Paris, Greg took them on innumerable sightseeing tours including the Casino at Monte Carlo.
If Emily Piipari was aware of the friction between Greta and Greg, she kept quiet about it. On the contrary, she was highly effusive in her praise of her famous son-in-law as a husband, father and celebrity. She said, ‘He’s so friendly with everybody.’
Having pounded the streets of Rome for four months, Greg was looking forward to a period of extended relaxation before starting another movie. He told a reporter he wanted to ‘study French, play golf, go to the horse races and stay up all night.’
At Greg’s suggestion, Greta had selected a French Norman house out of a realtor’s catalog. The place was located in St Germain, a highly sought-after suburb of Paris. ‘It had central heating and two fireplaces but he called it a miserable cold barn,’ Greta remembered bitterly. ‘He stayed away from home.’
Particularly hurtful to Greta was the night they were invited to the home of Dr and Mrs Jack Voskamp. ‘We went there an hour or so, and he decided to leave. He got his coat and hat and was going down the stairs. I followed him and asked if he wanted me to go along, and he said it really didn’t make any difference. I went back and I stayed the night. I saw him the next afternoon.’
Despite the practical limitations of post-war Paris, the American expatriate community was thriving. Though despondent at the state of his marriage, Greg was constantly out on the town with other members of the film and theater world.
Irwin Shaw, a master of the short story who had written Sons and Soldiers, which briefly stared Gregory Peck on Broadway, was now a fixture in the City of Light. He was part of a colorful band of expatriates, some of whom invited Greg to their parties. The expats included George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen who were launching The Paris Review; actors and directors such as Gene Kelly, Kirk Douglas, William Wyler, John Huston who arrived to make films as word got out about the tax loophole. The list goes on and on: James Jones, Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Allen Ginsberg, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, and even Julia Child, who taught cooking in Paris. It was a splendid time to be an American in Paris – particularly if you were tall, dark, handsome and famous.
One night, columnist Art Buchwald encountered Peck on the street and took him home to meet his wife – a very surprised Ann Buchwald. Buchwald recalled: ‘The city attracted every type of American after the war . . . Besides con men and Americans on the make, there were poets holed up on the Left Bank, writers hoping to finish a great novel, painters who planned to set the world on fire, and CIA agents who were infiltrating every organization they possibly could.’
This community of rakehell opportunists and verbally adroit sophisticates wasn’t Greta’s scene. She wasn’t focused on the latest music, art, literature and restaurants. Her domain was her home and her children. Yet for Veronique – though barely out of her teens – it was her natural milieu.
The daughter of a White Russian mother, whose family had lost their money in the Revolution, and a French aristocrat father, who worked as an architect in Paris, Veronique was une jeune fille bien élevée. At 18, she graduated from Marymount, a private school for g
irls located in Neuilly, with a working command of English. This gave her an edge in her chosen profession.
Veronique’s mother occasionally submitted articles and photographs to magazines which most likely gave the young girl the desire to storm the gates of tradition and work on a newspaper. Soon she was skipping all over Paris, interviewing such luminaries as producer Sam Goldwyn, Senator Estes Kefauver, Melina Mercouri and Jean-Paul Sartre. A resourceful journalist, she managed to get pictures of the interior of General Eisenhower’s home near Paris when it was off-limits to French papers. She got her scoop by hiding in a furniture van.
But once she interviewed Greg, her priorities changed. She confided to a friend, ‘I’m going to marry him.’
Very surprised, the friend blurted: ‘You must be crazy. Gregory Peck is in Paris with his wife and three sons.’
Veronique, then 20, smiled and reportedly said: ‘You will see.’
A tabloid article said Greg and Greta got into an argument at a housewarming party they were giving at their house; the cause was a woman and it was most likely Veronique.
But the Pecks were together for the holiday season of 1952. They spent Christmas to New Year’s week at the Hotel du Palais, a luxury hotel in St Moritz, Switzerland. The deposed King Farouk of Egypt and Queen Narriman were there as well as Fritz Mandl, the Austrian arms dealer, and columnist Art Buchwald.
At dinner each evening family groups would be relegated to a low walled-off section near the kitchen. ‘Families sat there,’ recalled Hollywood screenwriter Col. Barney Oldfield, who was vacationing with his wife Vada the same week as the Pecks, ‘and the kids made whooping noises and improvised slingshots with their spoons. One family tended to arrive late, and tried to be unnoticed. That’s quite difficult when the father was the great screen star, Gregory Peck. Art Buchwald, the then New York Herald Tribune columnist, was there and came by our table. He asked us to have an after dinner Coca Cola with him. We said we would.
‘What he didn’t mention was that Greta and Gregory Peck would be with us, too. Greta tried hard, but tears came now and then. Vada sensed something was wrong. And she was a good and sympathetic listener. Let us guys gab about movies – favorite this and thats. Greta chose to sit with Vada and tell her about her three sons, how proud of them she was. When the group broke up, Greta took Vada’s hand in hers and said she looked forward to their seeing each other again. “I mean that,” she said it with tears in her eyes.
‘En route to our room, I said, “You seem to have made a new friend.” When we were inside the room, Vada put her hands on her hips like an Irish washerwoman: “You don’t know the half of it. He’s going to divorce her. This is their last Christmas together as a family.”’
In Hollywood, Barney and Vada Oldfield always attended the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Awards, but in 1989 – the year Greg was to receive the award – Vada said she would prefer not to go. Ultimately she did attend. When Greg gave his acceptance speech and eulogized Veronique and ‘their children,’ Vada nudged Barney and suggested they leave. As they drove home, she said: ‘That was my vote for Greta. I know who his kids’ mother was. And who got him where he was tonight.’
On 13 January 1953 Greg drove Greta and his sons to Le Havre where they boarded the Ile-de-France and he watched them set sail for home. He wasn’t exactly sure when he’d see them again. Later, he recalled feeling ‘very Dostoyevskian, practically suicidal.’ Driving back to Paris, he stopped at a café and downed a row of double cognacs. By the time he reached his room at the Hotel Lancaster, he was pie-eyed. It was the onset of a deep and protracted depression, complicated by drinking binges.
Roman Holiday garnered ten Academy Award nominations – amazing for a comedy – with statuettes awarded to Audrey Hepburn for Best Actress, Edith Head for costumes, and Ian McLellan Hunter for the film’s story.
Eventually the world would learn Hunter wasn’t the real author of Roman Holiday. It was actually written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the infamous Hollywood Ten and, as a blacklisted writer, banned from work. ‘Dalton was flat broke,’ explained his wife Cleo. ‘He had just emerged from ten months in jail for refusing to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. His only solution was to write.’ So he penned Roman Holiday and asked his friend Hunter to front for him. But he never received credit for the movie until 1993. By then he was deceased, so the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented the award to Cleo Trumbo.
The movie made Audrey Hepburn an instant star. A week after the movie opened at Radio City Music Hall on 27 August 1953, Time put her on its cover. ‘Amid the rhinestone glitter of Roman Holiday’s make believe, Paramount’s new star sparkles and glows with the fire of a finely cut diamond. Impertinence, hauteur, sudden repentance, happiness, rebellion and fatigue supplant each other with lightning speed on her mobile face.’
Hepburn’s classic, chic style presented a wonderful contrast to other contemporary actresses who were more likely to be blonde, buxom, and sexy. Billy Wilder, who was slated to direct her in Sabrina (1954) marveled: ‘She’s like a salmon swimming upstream. She can do it with very small bozooms. Titism has taken over this country. This girl single-handed may make bozooms a thing of the past. The director will not have to invent shots where the girl leans way forward for a glass of Scotch and soda.’
Although the lively, cynical wit of Joe Bradley would have fit Cary Grant like a silk glove, Greg was actually perfect for the role. Greg, the model of all-American manhood, provided a fortuitous balance for Hepburn. His long, lean, Yankee look, the taciturnity and the mileage of years gave Hepburn something solid to play against.
Roman Holiday is still a popular movie. Why? Because for generations, films like this one have taught viewers the meaning of love. We learn how to court, romance, seduce and be seduced from watching how the stars do it. When Gregory Peck abandons his stuffy reserve and hops on a Vespa with Audrey Hepburn, our hearts leap and we write ourselves into the scene. ‘In every movie I have ever watched, starting with Roman Holiday, I was in love with Audrey Hepburn,’ confessed clothes designer Ralph Lauren. ‘I played every part. I was Gregory Peck a long time ago!’
,small>CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Wrestling with Demons
‘Peck’s name on our marquee is the best box-office insurance we can have. Thousands of women in this neighborhood, I guess and every neighborhood, feel that here is one guy who would sooner chop off his right arm than cheat on his wife.’
Los Angeles Theater Owner
‘I was like a bear in a log,’ Greg said. ‘I just felt awful about the boys.’ He remembered the dark time of January 1953 – the sudden break with his family that put them on one side of the Atlantic and himself on the other – as one of seclusion and retreat. He claimed not to have left the Hotel Lancaster for two weeks except to walk the streets of Paris at night. But unhappiness has a way of blurring memory.
In reality, professional obligations forced Greg into the spotlight. Two days after his family sailed from Le Havre, The Snows of Kilimanjaro opened at the Park Theater in Stockholm. Such a wild commotion! Greg’s arrival sparked a near riot. An estimated crowd of 3,000 people – a good many of them screaming teenagers – jammed the streets trying to glimpse the world-famous movie star.
A dozen mounted police and at least 20 foot patrolmen held the crowd at bay. Fans tried to tackle Greg as he made for the back door of the theater. Inside, Swedish actress Signe Hasso introduced him to the premiere’s audience of 400. Amazed at the melée outside, she said: ‘I’ve never seen scenes like these, even in the United States.’
In Copenhagen and Oslo, the reaction was much the same. But in Helsinki, the welcome was more personal. Greta was a Kukkonen (shortened in America to Konen) and this large family traced their genealogy back for hundreds of years. The descendents kept in touch with each other. In fact, many of her relatives welcomed Greg and threw a party for him in which they made him a present of five Scandinavian knives. When a reporter aske
d what his concept of the ideal woman was, he replied, ‘My perfect Finnish wife.’
Back in Paris, the ‘log’ or hotel where he ‘holed up’ wasn’t exactly Spartan. Just off the Champs Elysées on the Rue de Berri, the Hotel Lancaster was nicely situated in the heart of Paris – and conveniently located close to Veronique’s mother’s apartment on the Avenue Franklin D Roosevelt. It was run like a luxurious private home, filled with a fascinating collection of furniture, antique clocks, paintings, chandeliers, lamps, tapestries, velvets, silks and damasks, crystal and porcelain. Its courtyard, once the stables of a private house, was one of the prettiest in Paris.
Vigilant about its low profile, the hotel prided itself on being one of France’s best-kept secrets. The clientele of the Lancaster was international and highly select, its rooms serving as the Parisian home of Joseph Kennedy, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Alec Guinness, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and John Huston.
Any lonesome American could just wander across the street to the Herald Tribune building. From 11.30 p.m. to midnight, Americans congregated in front of the building to get their paper fresh off the press. They felt better just by reading an English-speaking paper to make sure everything – their stocks, the homeland – was all right.
It’s not clear at what point he reconnected with Veronique after seeing her in Rome the previous summer during the filming of Roman Holiday. William Wyler claimed the romance started in Rome during the filming of the movie. Because Greg was married, they concocted elaborate ruses to keep it out of the public eye. Some accounts put it in the fall of 1952. Greg claimed it was early 1953. He called her at the office of France Soir only to find out she had joined the staff of Paris Presse. When he invited her to Longchamps to the races, she hesitated. She had an appointment to interview Dr Albert Schweitzer at the apartment of Jean-Paul Sartre. When Schweitzer didn’t show up, she opted to go to the races with Greg. He quipped, ‘You made the right choice, kiddo.’ Years later, when she was asked what would have happened if she had kept the appointment, she laughed and said, ‘I might have been a missionary’s wife in the Congo.’