Gregory Peck- A Charmed Life

by Lynn Haney

  During the shoot Greg gave Parrish a terrible fright. On the first day of shooting in the jungle, the crew finished two hours before sundown, had a delicious native-cooked meal and were warned not to go outside after dark ‘because of the kraits.’ Parrish thought the kraits might be some hostile, head-hunting savages, but they turned out to be extremely venomous nocturnal snakes. They were about the size of a pencil and usually lay in wait on low-hanging branches of trees.

  Parrish shared a tent with Greg and knew that – with Veronique in Ceylon and Greta in Los Angeles – the star was preoccupied with personal problems. The director recalled most nights Greg would crawl on to his mosquito-netted cot, turn on his flashlight and read. Some nights he would lie there on his back staring at the ceiling of the tent. Parrish would usually flop on his cot, say, ‘See you tomorrow,’ and sink into a dreamless sleep. From time to time, he would wake up at some odd hour and look over at Greg. He was always reading or staring.

  ‘One morning,’ wrote Parrish in his memoirs Hollywood Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, ‘at about 2, an ungodly scream woke me up. I saw Greg jump out of his cot, knock the center tent pole down, and disappear through the flaps of the front entrance, his mosquito net flowing behind him. I fought my way out of my mosquito net and the collapsed canvas and chased after him. He was screaming like a wounded $250,000-per-picture banshee and heading, barefooted, for the jungle, the kraits, and the end of a $2-million British American co-production. I ran faster and yelled, “Greg!” a couple of times, but that seemed to speed him up even more. He tripped on the mosquito netting, got up, and plunged on.

  ‘At the edge of the compound I caught up with him and tackled him. I tackled Gregory Peck, one of the most famous movie stars in the world.

  ‘“Are you all right?” I asked. He stared at me, dead-eyed, then put both hands over his face and gasped for breath.

  ‘“Are you all right, Greg?” I asked again.

  ‘After what seemed like a very long time, he took his hands away from his face and said quietly, “I’m fine.”

  ‘“Well,” I said, “would you like to come back and help me rebuild our tent so we can get some sleep before we start shooting four hours from now?”

  ‘He nodded his handsome head and said, “I’d like that very much.”

  ‘I helped him to his bare feet and led him back to our tent. We put the tent pole up and crawled on to our cots. Greg said, “Some kind of nightmare, I guess,” and went right to sleep. I lay there, wide awake, thinking. When our breakfast arrived at 5, I went over and shook Greg awake.

  ‘“How do you feel?” I said.

  ‘“Fine,” said Greg. “Why?”

  ‘“Do you remember what went on here last night?” I asked.

  ‘“More or less,” he said, and smiled his shy, expensive smile.

  ‘“Do you mind if we use it for the opening scene in the picture?” I said.

  ‘“Be my guest,” said our gracious star, still smiling.

  ‘Two nights later we shot the scene. They got it all in one take.’ Parrish concluded: ‘I guess that’s because Greg and I had rehearsed it so well.’

  Perhaps what troubled Greg most was his voluntary absence from his children’s lives. He knew he didn’t need to make movies half way around the world. He was missing his kids’ birthday parties, their appearances in school plays, and even Father’s Day. Years later, when he looked back and thought about how many celebrations and special moments he excluded himself from because he was striving in his career, he had deep regrets.

  There were, however, lighter moments. While driving into the mountains during his time in Ceylon Greg spotted a sign into a tiny village. It read: ‘Gregory Peck. Fine gentleman’s tailoring.’

  ‘I couldn’t resist,’ Greg said. ‘I went and there was a little man sitting cross-legged with a needle and thread, sewing a jacket. His jaw dropped when he realized I was really Gregory Peck. I said, “Why? Why do you want to do this?” He said, “To attract the public.”’ Greg relished the absurdity of the situation.

  Alas! The paparazzi surfaced in Ceylon. They hounded Greg about Veronique. ‘She’s just a girl I met in Paris,’ Greg said non-commitally. ‘Nothing serious, I see her once in a while – just like an old friend.’ But what was she doing in Ceylon? ‘I think she came out here to buy some tea for her mother.’

  When Greg and Veronique stepped off the plane at Orly airport in Paris from Ceylon in 1954, they were exhausted from the flight. Walking toward the immigration office to have their passports checked, Veronique removed her dark glasses. A photographer dashed out, clicked his shutter and disappeared just as quickly.

  Veronique had developed tricks for outwitting the press. She disguised her appearance and traveled under various names. But after a couple years of tracking her in London, Paris, the French Riviera and Ceylon, the press was able to recognize her. One photographer said, ‘No girl can go around with Gregory Peck and hide behind sunglasses forever!’

  Veronique did her best to keep the reporters at bay: ‘Gregory Peck is a good friend and I am a journaliste and this is my own private business and I will answer no questions about it.’ In the meantime, a friend of hers said, ‘Veronique is a shrewd girl and she expects that Greg will divorce his wife eventually and marry her.’

  There’s such a thing as too much Irish charm. Greg wasn’t aware of this when John Huston sidled up to him at a London cocktail party with a tempting offer. The director was a lean, rangy man, 6 feet 2 inches, with pitch-black hair that he wore slicked down with water, although some of the front strands fell raffishly over his forehead. His eyes looked watchful and belied the hardiness of his manner. He was trying to get his production of Moby Dick (1956) up and running and he needed a star of Greg’s stature to get financing. Greg’s slice of the pie was generous: $250,000 for the picture and a percentage of the film’s takings.

  Originally published in 1851, Moby Dick is Herman Melville’s adventure classic of the feud between a whaling skipper and the great white whale that caused the loss of his leg. Consumed by an insane rage, Captain Ahab has but one purpose in life – revenge on Moby Dick. As the skipper of a whaling boat, The Pequod, Ahab uses his command to sail the high seas in an unrelenting search for his prey.

  John Huston, son of one of the great film actors of his generation (Walter) and the father of one of the great actresses of her generation (Anjelica), had been captivated since boyhood by Ahab’s obsession. ‘In pursuit of one whale he is committing a sin,’ said Huston. ‘This was really the heart of the matter. Ahab saw Moby Dick as the embodiment of evil, and he sees God. This is, of course, in Melville: “When will the judge himself be tried before the bar?” He is assaulting the Almighty, it is his naked fist against the deity.’

  With such classics as The Maltese Falcon (1941), Key Largo (1948), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and The African Queen (1951), under his belt, Huston was case-hardened about the treachery involved in turning a good story into a finished movie. One of the most admired, rebellious, and shadowy figures in the world of motion pictures, he once said: ‘It’s a jungle. A close knit, tight, frantically inbred, and frantically competitive jungle. And the rules of the jungle are predatory and fascinating and tough.’

  Huston had a theatrical way of punctuating his speech with melodramatic intensity and the smooth patois of a snake-oil salesman. Lauren Bacall characterized him as ‘daring, unpredictable, maddening, mystefying and probably the most charming man on earth.’ He talked Greg into playing Ahab in his movie version of Melville’s classic novel. When he first conceived the project, he planned to use his father Walter Huston, but the veteran actor had died.

  The maverick director once told New Yorker writer Lillian Ross: ‘I’ve been around actors all my life, and I like them, and yet I never had an actor as a friend. Except Dad. And Dad never saw himself as an actor. But the best actor I ever worked with was Dad.’

  With his star in place, Huston put an enormo
us amount of time into research for the film. Locations were scouted, and the director settled on Youghal, a port town on the South Irish Coast, as the film’s New Bedford. The film would be shot on the Irish Sea, in the Canary Islands, and in the studio in London.

  Huston chose science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, author of The Martian Chronicles, to co-write the screenplay. A child of ‘pop’ culture, Bradbury credited his success as a creative artist to his early exposure to the horror movie, the carnival, the circus and the comic. When Huston called him about writing the screenplay for Moby Dick, he confessed he had tried it once but couldn’t get through it. Huston pressed on: ‘Read as much as you can and tell me tomorrow if we can kill the white whale.’

  Second time’s the charm. According to Bradbury: ‘Melville and I had the same midwives: the Bible, Shakespeare. Melville had poor eyesight. He couldn’t read Shakespeare because the print was too small. Then he found a large-type edition, threw out his whaling equipment and wrote Moby Dick in a few months.’

  Max Wilk, a collector of Hollywood anecdotes, recalled that at the halfway point in the writing of the script, John Huston came in one afternoon looking grave. He handed writer Ray Bradbury a telegram, which read: CANNOT PROCEED WITH FILM UNLESS SEXY FEMALE ROLE ADDED. It was signed: JACK WARNER.

  ‘Has this man gone insane?’ Bradbury shouted. ‘This is terrible! We can’t stick a woman on board! My God, he can’t be serious!’

  Huston shook his head. ‘That’s Hollywood, Ray. Warners is paying the bill, and if they want love interest, we’ll just have to get it in somehow. Maybe Ahab could have an affair with Gina Lollobrigida as a disguised stowaway.’

  Furious, Bradbury crumpled up the telegram and threw it to the floor. Then he looked over at Huston. ‘John was doubled up on the couch, laughing like a big monkey,’ he says. ‘That’s when I knew he’d sent the thing. I was so relieved I couldn’t get sore.’

  As for Greg, he dove into the project with gusto. ‘I’m as excited about it as if I’d never made a picture before,’ he admitted. ‘Ahab is the best part I’ve ever had. Ray Bradbury and John Huston wrote the script, and it’s the finest – poetic, big, and suspenseful. It will be shot as an allegory and not an adventure yarn, and all the qualities of the book have been retained in the script.’

  He let his hair grow and sprouted whiskers. ‘I’m getting grizzled by the minute.’ And he eagerly looked forward to navigating on a wooden leg. ‘What a stickler for realism this man is!’ Greg said in admiration of Huston when they were still in the honeymoon phase of their relationship. ‘We were all set on a “chelsea peg” that’s the old seafaring artificial leg. It looks like a cup into which the knee fits with a wooden peg from there to the ground. But that didn’t satisfy John. He said that Captain Ahab lost his leg in the South Pacific and that the ship’s carpenter made one out of whalebone. So he wanted a leg to look like it’d been made under those conditions.’

  In July 1954, Greg flew home to Los Angeles for a two-week visit. Greta and the boys greeted him at the airport with enthusiastic hugs. He was thrilled to see Jonathan, Stephen and Carey who looked to him as if they’d each grown a foot. He said later he wanted to see Greta one more time to see if there was any spark, any kindling of feeling to save the marriage. There wasn’t. After a week he took the boys camping.

  Off in the woods and around the campfire, he drew on his Moby Dick stories, regaling the boys with scary tales of the sea. Stephen Peck recollected in the American Film Institute’s Gregory Peck Tribute Book: ‘He wore a full beard and a conspicuous slash of gray in his hair, and often Captain Ahab would emerge without warning. One eyebrow would raise, and he would fix my brothers and me with an intense, slightly crazed look.

  ‘“Well now men, and who are we after?”

  ‘“Moby Dick,” cried the three little sailors.

  ‘“And what do ye say about this Moby Dick?”

  ‘“A dead whale or a stove boat!” we shouted.

  ‘“Aye lads, that’s it!”

  ‘He had drawn us into his make-believe world for a moment. I could hear the sound of the creaking ship and see the giant white whale as Dad described it for us, for he described it not as a movie, but as real life.’

  It was a time to treasure. Something good to reflect about in the weeks that followed when newspapers ran headlines about his split with Greta.

  Greg returned to Europe with his impersonation of lunatic Ahab hunting down his quarry. Angelica Huston, the director’s young daughter, took to him straight away. ‘I remember seeing him at four-years-old in Fishguard, Wales, with a peg leg and a big top hat. And that was the beginning of my love affair with Gregory Peck.’

  ‘This was probably the most difficult picture I’ve ever done,’ John Huston recalled in his memoirs. ‘The imponderables were so great. A lot of mistakes were made, shortcuts were taken that we paid for. Some of them that had been made I wasn’t even aware of. The weather turned out to be the biggest antagonist in getting the film shot. It was a record-setting stormy season on the seas where they filmed. Lifeboats were capsized. I don’t mean our boats, but the coastal lifeboats that went out to vessels in distress. Ships were blown on the rocks. We lost masts three times. Once there was no question in my mind we were heading for the bottom and were just saved by a miracle of seamanship.’

  Huston counted it as a miracle they didn’t lose any lives. ‘We did lose whales, however,’ he wrote. ‘The reason we’d lose whales was that there would come that moment of choice: should we save the people in the boats or should we save the whales we made. Being humans ourselves, our sympathy went towards these men rather than these plastic fabrications. Then we would have to build another whale. These whales were some 90 feet long, constructions of steel, covered in latex – big, expensive articles. It would sometimes take three weeks, and we would have to shoot something else while we were waiting for another whale to be made.’

  Off the coast of Ireland, Greg had an encounter with a rogue wave that almost proved fatal. Location shooting in 12-foot seas off the coast of Western Ireland, he floated off into the fog clinging to the huge rubber model of Moby Dick. He feared for his life. Still, he kept piercing the whale with his harpoon and cursing him. ‘It got very choppy,’ he recollected, ‘and I felt if I slipped into the water, I’d be a goner. I didn’t know which way to swim. Should I swim towards Ireland or Wales, the South Pole or the North Pole? I was completely disoriented so I began to shout “Ahoy there!” and “Help!” Eventually the camera boat found me and I was glad to slide off the rubber whale.’ Safely rescued, he denied the newspapers the headline ‘Actor Lost on Rubber Whale.’

  Although Youghal was selected as the town that most closely resembled New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1841, the construction crews had to place special wooden shells over the front of the stores to make it look more authentic. The transformation was so dramatic the locals had a hard time finding a way around. The only thing remaining was Paddy Linihan’s pub, the Moby Dick saloon. One drawback was the harbor wasn’t dug out deeply enough, so that instead of having several hours a day shooting they shot only at high tide. All these things affected the picture and its budget.

  Meanwhile, back at Warner Brothers, the company that was bankrolling the production, the executives were apoplectic about the wildly escalating production costs. They wondered if they might have a flop on their hands. At lunch one day, H M Warner began to confide in George Axelrod (a screenwriter who hit the jackpot with his feverishly witty 1955 satire The Seven Year Itch): ‘I’ve just spoken to Huston,’ he said. ‘John is a very headstrong, difficult man. I tried to explain to him, we had World War I, World War II, and the Korean War – everywhere in America, in practically every home, there’s some family with a veteran who was wounded – so I asked John, why does Gregory Peck have to have one leg?’

  Herald Tribune columnist Art Buchwald went to Youghal to report on the production. He dropped by a pub where the cast hung out, mainly because the brother of one of th
e local production assistants owned it. The bar was jammed with horse fanciers. All they talked about was horses, until Huston and Greg walked in. Then the patrons broke into song with ‘Did Your Mother Come From Ireland’ or ‘My Wild Irish Rose.’ Huston and Greg were suckers for that sort of malarkey.

  The day before shooting began, Buchwald noticed a man with a wooden leg standing at the bar. His name was Paddy Ryan, and he was being treated as a hero by the townspeople. Word had gotten out that Gregory Peck would need a stand-in for the Captain Ahab long shots, and Paddy was the only one in the county with a wooden leg.

  ‘Does he have the job?’ Buchwald asked.

  ‘No. He’s going over the casting in a few minutes,’ came the reply.

  It sounded like a good story, so Buchwald accompanied Paddy over to the casting office. He said cockily, ‘I hear you need someone with a wooden leg.’

  The casting director leaned over the table and said, ‘Wrong leg.’

  Though giving it his best shot, Greg couldn’t get over the feeling Ahab was just an old crackpot. However, he didn’t cross him off as an ordinary nut. In analyzing him, Greg concluded: ‘Ahab was a one-man rebellion against fate – a slightly insane, crude champion of humanity. He wanted to find out a little more about the mystery of life, the mystery we live in. To him, his personal existence meant nothing.’

  Down the years, Greg was asked how he would play Ahab differently. ‘Better, I think. I should’ve been more ferocious in pursuit of the whale, more cruel to the crew, and I think I’d have a better grasp now of what Melville was talking about. He was trying to find an answer to the eternal mysteries. Ahab focused all his energies on pitting himself against the whale, but he was trying to penetrate the mystery of why we are here at all, why there is anything. I wasn’t mad enough, not crazy enough, not obsessive enough. I should’ve done more.’ Greg took a long breath: ‘At the time, I didn’t have more in me.’

  Huston was neither a high-strung auteur like Orson Welles nor a despot like Erich von Stroheim. He was, rather, a man who believed in facilitating the gifts of others. He believed in giving his actors as much room to find their own performances as possible, which is why he managed to get such marvelous performances out of less gifted actors. What’s more, he believed in adhering to the elements that made great novels in the first place.