by Lynn Haney
Calling on Veronique, Greg was welcomed into the Passani family. Veronique’s mother was divorced from her father. During the war, Madame Passani had been briefly married to an American with whom she had a son named Cornelius. When this second marriage ended, Monsieur Passani adopted Cornelius and gave him his last name. Although he didn’t remarry his ex-wife, Monsieur Passani dropped by the apartment each morning for coffee. In such an unconventional setup, a married suitor wasn’t out of place.
Veronique quickly became Greg’s life raft, his anchor, his savior. Here was someone to cling to at a time when he felt as if he was drowning. ‘She had huge, glowing eyes and a face brimming with vitality and intelligence and humor,’ he remembered. Verging on 21, she gave him hope and avid admiration. And she was a good reason not to lose himself in the heavy drinking bouts that had become his method of blotting out his troubles with Greta. Squiring Veronique around in his Porsche, he ventured around Paris and its environs looking for out-of-the-way restaurants and quiet cafés. The lovers devised imaginative stratagems to outwit the paparazzi in hot pursuit of a good story. It didn’t always work. Their pictures appeared in the papers.
In Los Angeles, Greta had her hands full. She was the stabilizing influence for the boys – Jonathan, nine, Stephen, six, and Carey, three – who missed their father terribly and were confused and traumatized by the separation. To make things even harder for Greta, the press wouldn’t leave her alone. They wanted to know why she had packed up in such haste when she was supposed to stay on the Continent with Greg for 18 months. Hoping to save her marriage, Greta replied to inquiries with credible excuses. Also, she cut Greg slack. Being older and in some ways wiser, she knew Greg was in too much emotional turmoil to know what he wanted.
Responding to Marsha Saunders, a particularly persistent reporter, she said: ‘The children and I came back to California, because it’s just too difficult to try to raise them abroad under Greg’s schedule. He’s in Italy for a few months, France for a few months, England for a few months. He likes to have his family with him, and we just can’t keep moving all the time.
‘It sounds very romantic, but how would it be dragging three small boys to India for a couple of months (a location considered for a future movie The Purple Plain), enrolling them in school, getting everything set up and then just when you’ve got your household organized, start packing and return to France?’ She went on to say: ‘Greg wanted us to remain with him.’
Saunders kept up the interrogation. How about reports of Greg being seen around Paris with a very young reporter? Greta didn’t rise to the bait: ‘When he is away, he’s entitled to a little companionship.’
Pressed even further, Greta turned starchy: ‘Greg and I are not separated. There will be no divorce. We are on the best terms, and if you don’t believe it, you can talk to him at the Hotel Lancaster in Paris.’
At the Lancaster, Greg blew his top when the reporter asked him if he contemplated dropping Greta in favor of some younger woman. ‘How in heaven’s name do these things get started?’ he exploded. ‘I’m not separated. I’m not getting a divorce, and I’m very happily married . . . Greta and I had a great time and I wanted her to stay, wanted her to stay very much, but she is a wonderful mother – she’s always thinking of the boys – and she figured they would be better off in California.’
In the spring of 1953, Greg rented a house in London near Buckingham Palace and invited Veronique to join him. He then began making deals with the British film industry, the first major American name with box-office clout to do so. His first was for a comedy called The Man with a Million (1954) for which he was paid $350,000. The English title, The Million Pound Note, follows the title of the Mark Twain story on which the movie is based. Greg plays a shabby young man who dines in a restaurant and then casually hands over a million-pound banknote, while murmuring, ‘I’m awfully sorry, but I don’t have anything smaller.’ The character, stranded in London with an authentic million-pound note, finds he cannot cash it, he can only flash it. Although ingratiating, it failed completely in the United States though it did better abroad. According to Variety, the picture was ‘too soft and mushy to reach a contemporary crowd.’
Very much in love, Veronique dropped her journalistic career and focused her talents on helping Greg by acting as his secretary, traveling companion and hostess. In her new life, her training as a reporter stood her in good stead. She knew the journalism game and she now used the tricks of the trade to make sure Greg presented himself in the best possible light.
The Man with a Million was shot in Hyde Park, in Belgrave Square and in Savile Row, all central London locations, which inevitably attracted crowds. Greg’s handling of the importunate fans was an object lesson in patience and concentration. He must have chuckled, though, when a spectator caroled: ‘How silly of them to use that man. He is nothing but an imitation Gregory Peck.’
Around this time, Greg engaged the public relations services of Johnny Kimberley, 4th Earl of Kimberley. The Earl was a jovial extrovert whose interests included shark fishing, UFOs and winter sports. Known as ‘a glorious failure,’ he was a godson of Winston Churchill and a cousin of the humorist P G Wodehouse. His checkered career also included serving in the Guards Armoured Division as an officer in the Second World War; competing as a member of Britain’s national bobsleigh team; holding his own as a championship tiddlywinks player; breeding prize pigs; and being an amateur steeplechase jockey. Kimberley was a free-spending, hard-driving member of London’s beau monde, taking weekends at Deauville, losing at all-night chemmy sessions and bedding as many women as he could. By the time Greg met him in the 1950s the clients on his successful public relations business included Robert Mitchum and ‘that bald bugger’ as he referred to Yul Brynner.
During that same spring, William Wyler needed Greg to overdub some dialogue and called him back to Rome from London. The actor and director had become fast friends; their relationship would turn into a business partnership as well. What’s more, Wyler’s wife Talli developed a rapport with Veronique.
In Rome, the paparazzi dogged their every move. ‘Veronique and I were a hot item for the tabloids,’ Greg said. ‘Willie and Talli were on our side. They loved her.’ To get away from the press, Wyler suggested the four of them slip away to Lake Como, near the Swiss border. After several days, believing they had made a safe escape, they took a motorboat to Coccina, a tiny island with Roman ruins, in the middle of the lake.
‘It was unbelievably picturesque,’ Greg recounted. ‘We were all having a great time at lunch. Suddenly Talli froze. Something caught her eye. We all turned around and a camera went click! from behind a tree. Willie and I jumped to our feet. We were the only customers in the restaurant. We thought we were the only people on the island. Willie and I started chasing this guy up the slope. I didn’t want to be photographed with Veronique for obvious reasons. It was an absolute comedy. Willie took a flying tackle and grabbed him from behind.’
The photographer proved too fleet of foot and escaped with his film. (William Wyler told the same story. However, he claimed it happened the previous summer during the filming of Roman Holiday.)
Greg next signed on to star in a cloak-and-dagger yarn called Night People (1954). Set in Berlin, it concerns the efforts of the US Army Intelligence Corps to get a young American soldier, who has been kidnapped, out of the Russian sector. Greg was cast as a US Intelligence Officer who knows how to deal with the Russians. They are ‘a methodical bunch of lice’ and ‘head-hunting cannibals.’ To be sure, the level of the film’s anti-Communism wasn’t too sophisticated.
The film’s screenwriter Nunnally Johnson insisted later that he didn’t set out to write a propaganda piece, he was aiming for a fast-paced thriller. In fact, he described the picture to Time magazine as ‘Dick Tracy in Berlin.’
Johnson had made his mark in Hollywood as an iconoclastic writer whose screen credits included The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Tobacco Road (1941), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), an
d The Gunfighter. An urbane former journalist from Georgia, few people could match his off-the-cuff wit. Foreign correspondent Alistair Cooke remembered: ‘Like many another Southerner, he maintained a surface courtesy and tact behind which glowed an owl-like skepticism about human motives, whether in Columbus, Georgia, or Beverly Hills, California . . . He had the luck of his inheritance and his gifts: a wry, uninhibited humor from his father, and a prose style of great clarity he developed on his own . . . [He adopted] a pose not very different from that with which two other small-town boys, Mark Twain and James Thurber, were able to cope with rich and complicated people and also to earn their applause.’ Cooke explained that Johnson adopted, as a second nature, the air of a bewildered mouse in a world of tigers and jaguars. Greg liked him and was in awe of his drollery.
Eager for a new challenge, Nunnally Johnson approached the film’s producer Darryl Zanuck and told him he wanted to direct Night People. Zanuck agreed as long as Greg went for the idea. Zanuck said, ‘Peck’s a big star, and he’s got a right to an okay on the director, and he certainly has the right to say he doesn’t want a man who’s never directed before.’ So Johnson took off for London to confer with Greg.
Since Johnson had written the script for The Gunfighter, Greg knew him; he respected his talents and appreciated his humor. Greg said, ‘Well, you wouldn’t be the first writer that turned director. It’s all right with me.’
While in London, Johnson ran into Henry Hathaway, who had directed The Desert Fox (1951) for which Johnson wrote the screenplay. Hathaway warned him he wouldn’t be any good as a director and when Johnson asked why, he replied: ‘Because you’re not a bastard. Look at the big directors, all of them bastards, John Ford, George Stevens, Fritz Lang, Willie Wyler.’
Before filming started, Greg leased an apartment in Paris to use as a base. Then he flew to Berlin for Night People and Veronique joined him. Once shooting got underway, Greg began to wonder, ‘Have I committed myself to a guy who may not know what the hell he’s doing the next minute?’ But, as the shooting continued, Greg went out of his way to help Johnson make the transition to director.
However, a rumor started that the two men were feuding. In early September 1953, a front-page article appeared in the Hollywood Reporter saying the two men were having difficulties; Greg was being temperamental and holding up production. Johnson said: ‘Peck’s a genuinely nice man. He’s stubborn. He’s very opinionated, and sometimes I thought he was rather slow witted, but he really isn’t. He just has to be convinced of the necessity of doing something before he’ll do it. It can become pretty exasperating because it takes up time, but he helped me on Night People in so many ways. He would make suggestions, but never try to impose his ideas.’
Johnson – a man who reached in the air and caught ideas on the fly – couldn’t get over Greg’s compulsive approach to acting. He noticed Greg kept a typed, bound script of the film with him at all times. It was filled with a strange conglomeration of hooks, curlicues, scribbled footnotes, and peculiar flourishes. Each little dot, dash, or doodle meant something.
Greg realized Johnson didn’t have any sort of noticeable, dazzling directorial brilliance, but he did have professional competence and Greg went out of his way to help him in his new line of work. Knowing he had gone the extra mile to get along with Johnson, Greg was furious about the articles, bristling at the suggestion he wasn’t a total professional about his work. Johnson, on the other hand, took the negative publicity in stride. Rather than being intimidated by the power of the press – particularly the gossip columnists – Johnson reveled in jousting with them.
Once he was asked by the editors of the Saturday Evening Post to rewrite an article about Louella Parsons because the original writer skewered the daylights out of ‘Lolly’ and her proctologist husband ‘Old Velvet Finger.’ Johnson’s rewrite was none too charitable and was supposed to be anonymous, but he admitted, ‘It was the worst kept secret in town.’
The day it hit the stands, Parsons appeared in Darryl Zanuck’s office, weeping and furious. ‘I expect you to fire him!’ she told Zanuck, who was his boss.
‘I can’t do that, he has a contract,’ said Zanuck.
Zanuck sent for Johnson. ‘Why did you get me mixed up in this?’ he asked. ‘Louella has a lot of power.’
‘What power?’ Johnson asked him. ‘She hates me more than anyone in town – and she can’t get me fired, can she?’
Harry Brand, who was the head of Fox’s publicity department, was in the meeting. ‘But, Nunnally,’ he said, ‘after all Louella’s done for you . . .’
‘What has she done for me?’ he demanded.
‘Well,’ said Brand, ‘when you were picked up for drunken driving, she didn’t print the item in her column, did she?’
‘She didn’t have to,’ Johnson retorted, ‘seeing as how her city editor had put it in headlines all over the front page!’
A few days later Parsons counterpunched. Johnson had just married Dorris Bowden, and he picked up the paper to read: ‘I saw Dorris Johnson the other day. Poor Dorris. Before her marriage, she looked so lovely . . .’
‘That,’ Johnson admitted with admiration, ‘was really shooting around a corner.’
Greg cared too much about his public image to ignore the criticism. He was already vulnerable to negative publicity on two fronts: living with Veronique and taking advantage of a tax loophole by residing abroad. Many Americans struggling to pay their taxes and stay square with Uncle Sam frowned on movie star breaks. Also, the unions in Hollywood objected vociferously to ‘runaway productions,’ i.e. movies made abroad. They singled out Peck for his role in taking money out of Hollywood.
Together in a foreign country, the bond between Greg and Veronique grew stronger. She was tolerant of his moods and weaknesses and she shared his sense of adventure about experiencing exotic places. In Berlin, she was a comforting presence in a city still scarred by war and seething with political unrest.
Working in Berlin in 1953 had its nerve-wracking moments. They filmed one scene near the Brandenburg Gate, which was heavily guarded on the Russian side. The scene involved a girl in a telephone booth, and as with all such sequences, the unit had its own portable telephone booth, which could be set up to get the best camera angle. As they tried out the booth in various locations, the top of the Brandenburg Gate began to fill up with Russian soldiers with binoculars, trying to figure out what sort of American trap this moveable phone booth was.
After the film wrapped, Greg gave a thumbs-up to the new technology employed: ‘The CinemaScope method of picture making gives the actor somewhat more range in his work. It is the closest thing that I have encountered to the stage, and yet we were able to avail ourselves movie-wise of all the natural advantages offered by the new locations in Germany.’
As summer rolled into fall, Greta finally admitted publicly that she and Greg were separated. Her comments carried none of the fury of a woman scorned. ‘He’s a wonderful father and he has always been very good to all of us,’ she bravely told reporters. ‘If he wants a divorce, I am going to let him have it.’ Then, with self-abnegation, she added: ‘I feel, however, that any announcement must come from Greg. He is the important one in my family.’
When the going got tough, Greta played fair. At the same time, she was a realist about money. She hired Jerry Geisler to handle the separation for her. ‘Get me Geisler!’ was a Hollywood joke line. ‘If you were in trouble, you knew whom to call,’ said Lana Turner. No one in Los Angeles could match Geisler’s skills before a jury. Not only did he handle many high-profile divorces, he also successfully defended Charlie Chaplin and Errol Flynn on rape charges. For his part, Greg hired Laurence Beilenson, who represented Ronald Reagan in his divorce from Jane Wyman.
As Christmas drew near, Greg arranged for Jonathan to join him in St Moritz for the holidays. There, he signed the boy up for ski lessons and also gave him the opportunity to get to know Veronique who had joined them. In this way father and son returned to th
e same resort they had visited the year before when the family was intact.
Greg’s next picture, The Purple Plain (1955) took him to Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). In this Second World War thriller, he plays a neurotic pilot, flying with his navigator and tentmate, who has to crash-land his plane in enemy territory. They make their way to safety, carrying the navigator, who is seriously injured. After several brutal days of trudging through the jungle, the tentmate shoots himself, but the navigator is eventually saved by the compulsive pilot.
Greg agreed to make the film, with two provisos. First, it had to be shot in Southeast Asia. Secondly, the role of Emma (the female lead) had to be played by an Asian woman. Over 200 females showed up to audition for the role; many just wanted to get a chance to see Greg up close. Director Robert Parrish selected Win Min Than for the part. Blessed with exotic, exquisite beauty, she had an unfortunate way of shaking her head back and forth; consequently, the production team had to devise a brace to remind her to keep her head still. She also possessed a wildly jealous husband who insisted she eat garlic before smooching with Greg. Another difficulty was location. Because of its proximity to the Chinese border, no company would insure Greg; Rank considered canceling the film but Robert Parrish prevailed.