Gregory Peck- A Charmed Life

by Lynn Haney

  Outfitted in a three-button, single-breasted suit he would wear in the film, Greg prepared for his role as ‘the gunfighter of Madison Avenue’ by visiting advertising agencies, walking along Madison Avenue and taking trips on the New York City commuter train. Camouflaged by his gray flannel suit, he quietly observed the behavior of the men sitting in the commuter cars reading their copies of the Times. Few people recognized him.

  Such is the life of an actor. In Sweden, three years before, teenagers shrieked with delight at the sight of ‘the handsomest man in the world.’ Now, he blended seamlessly into the faceless army of organization men.

  Having acted under Nunnally Johnson while making Night People in Berlin, Greg knew him to be competent but lacking in the extra depth of insight to qualify as top notch. Johnson enjoyed the idea of being a director and he certainly appreciated a percentage of the profits, but the job itself didn’t light his fire.

  Greg figured: ‘It may be that if he heard his own words played back in a lively way he thought, “That’s as good as they can do it.” It may be that if he’d gone on a little more, he could have gotten more of a personal contribution from the actors, to shed a little more light on his lines.’ Others said: ‘He only directed to protect his lines.’ Though Johnson wrote, produced and directed eight pictures, he was, first and last, always a writer, a compulsive, dedicated storyteller. Nothing else – professionally or personally – interested him as much, and producing and directing were afterthoughts.

  Both Greg and Johnson found Jennifer Jones’s on-set behavior disturbing. When Greg had played opposite her in Duel in the Sun, there was an ambiguous, intense, edgy quality to her acting that made her compelling. Since then she had married David O Selznick (in 1949), and her ex-husband, Robert Walker, had died (in 1952). Now, her personal life was getting in the way of her professionalism. Selznick still kept a very tight rein on her career. Although he had no part in the production of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, he tried to dictate to Johnson the manner in which Jones was to be dressed, made up, and filmed. Johnson passed the missives on to Zanuck who responded: ‘Listen, you fucker, keep your fingers out of my film.’

  Jones’s neurosis set her up to give a disturbed performance. Johnson recalled, ‘Her eyes were rather out of focus, I couldn’t tell whether she was hearing me or not.’ One scene was close to catastrophic. Shooting on the lawn of a house rented for the purpose on Long Island, Jones was supposed to run out of the house after a fight with Greg, who then catches her and kisses her as they fall on the ground.

  ‘She came out like an impala,’ Johnson explained. ‘God, she’s a big, leggy girl, you know, and Greg has a limp anyway, so she forgot all about that spot [actor’s marker on the ground] and was leading him by about eight lengths when she passed it. I said, “Cut.” I said, “You must have forgotten, Honey, we’ve got to get you in the camera.” She said, “Well, I thought I was supposed to be real.” ’

  The next take seemed to be going perfectly, except that Jones started to lose it. ‘She just opened up my face,’ said Greg. ‘There were big claw marks there.’

  Johnson recalled: ‘By this time, eight doctors and nine make-up men were surrounding him. He said, “I don’t call that acting. I call it personal. Can’t you get her to do the scene right?” I said, “I don’t know. You worked with her in Duel in the Sun. I thought you’d know how to cope with this particular thing.”’

  They had to do it again, for a close shot, and ‘This time,’ Johnson remembered, ‘she butted him. You never saw a madder actor. He said, “Have we got to do it again?” I said, “Well, if we do it again, you wear your cup, because I don’t know what’s going to happen.” I talked to her . . . what do you say to a woman who is fighting savagely when you’re supposed to be make-believe? She listened to me, looking past me, and then walked back to her dressing room. She didn’t answer . . . One time she did a kind of emotional scene, and much to everybody’s astonishment she suddenly made a gesture and knocked everything off the dressing table. It looked right, so it stayed in.’

  The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was worth the aggravation, for the picture proved a financial success. The promotion of the film was tied in with the garment industry. Look magazine carried fashion spreads showing a wife waiting at the train station for the return of her husband, both garbed in the very practical gray flannel slacks and suit with the tag line: ‘Gray flannel is in the limelight from Hollywood to the Eastern suburbs.’ Comedian Bob Peck even parodied the film with a popular song titled ‘The Moth in the Gray Flannel Suit.’

  ‘Togetherness’ was a catchword of the 1950s celebrating the kind of domesticity portrayed in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Women’s magazines such as McCall’s and Ladies Home Journal overused it to the point of nausea. Chez Peck, togetherness was taking place on a much more lavish level.

  Veronique had furnished the couple’s sprawling ranch house in Brentwood – then a sleepy if luxurious suburb – with an eye to comfort. Everywhere there were casual corners where Greg could relax for reading or conversation. Occasionally he chose a sunny corner of the garden as a place to study scripts for possible production, or retired to his pleasantly cluttered study. The room was filled with mementos from his films, including a saddle from a long-forgotten Western, small Greek marble horses and life-sized wooden santos from Spain ‘because you can work better if you are surrounded with beautiful things.’

  Veronique wore simple yet expensive clothes, drove Greg to work in the morning, cooked him fine French meals and treated him as the master of the house. She had to adjust to having stepchildren around and vice versa. She was only a decade older than the boys; the period of adjustment took time.

  Greg’s youngest son Carey remembered: ‘My parents had a custody agreement they stuck in a drawer somewhere and forgot about.’ The boys moved freely between the two houses. In fact, they could hop on their bikes and cut across a polo field to their father’s house in Brentwood.

  Soon Veronique learned she was pregnant. When she reached the second trimester, she dialed Louella Parsons. ‘You think any other woman in Hollywood was able to keep the secret of the stork’s coming visit four months?’ she crowed. ‘How did it happen you didn’t find out!’ Although said in a playful manner, the message was clear. The Peck household was now under new – and very smart – management.

  In the meantime, Greg was looking for laughs. After slogging through Moby Dick and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, he was itching to do a lively light part, but was he up to the challenge? There’s a telling line by Edmund Gwenn, who played Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), that’s also been ascribed to Edmund Kean, Edwin Booth, David Garrick, William Holden, Groucho Marx, Marcel Marceau, Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde. In any case, according to Peter Hay in Movie Anecdotes, as Gwenn lay dying, Jack Lemmon visited him and asked about dying. The heaven-bound actor replied, ‘Oh, it’s hard, very hard indeed. But not as hard as doing comedy.’ For Greg, the hard part was getting a shot at performing in a comedic role. After Roman Holiday, he expected to be deluged with offers. It didn’t happen. So, when an amusing, sophisticated screenplay blew his way, he leapt at it.

  Designing Woman (1957) is a charming tale about a sports reporter (Peck) who marries a dress designer (Lauren Bacall) in haste and they soon suspect they have nothing in common. Marilla and Mike Hagen are both from New York, but they meet in southern California, and their brief romantic courtship is not intruded upon by the disparate realities of their respective worlds at home. Once they arrive back in New York as man and wife, however, she is dismayed by his prosaic apartment and he is intimidated by the elegance and spaciousness of hers. Bowing to practicality, Mike moves in with Marilla. The two are then introduced to each other’s friends and milieus. Much of the humor derives from the convergence of four separate worlds: fashion, news reporting, the theater, and the underworld. Marilla is sickened by the sight of blood at a prize fight, and Mike is contemptuous of the ceremonious gentility of a fas
hion show. Complicating matters further, both Mike and Marilla must resolve their previous romantic involvements. The story was suggested by famed costume designer Helen Rose who ultimately created 132 outfits for Lauren Bacall to wear in the movie.

  Dore Schary, MGM’s production chief, originally wanted James Stewart and Grace Kelly for the film’s leads. Kelly stalled, first having to complete two other films, High Society (1956) and The Swan (1956). Then she accepted Prince Rainier’s proposal of marriage and got caught up planning the wedding. The delays caused Stewart to back out. So Greg was offered the male lead. When director Joshua Logan also retreated, Schary asked Vincente Minnelli to direct the movie. Then he turned to George Wells to develop the screenplay; the script would win an Oscar.

  Although Minnelli had experience directing comedy with Father of the Bride (1950) and had just completed filming the Broadway drama Tea and Sympathy (1956), he was best known for his splendid musicals: Meet Me in St Louis (1944), An American in Paris (1951), Bandwagon (1953) and Brigadoon (1954).

  Greg let Minnelli know how much he looked forward to getting started on Designing Woman. ‘Greg, the king of the underplayers, was raring to go, like a banker at an American Legion Convention,’ recalled Minnelli. Greg was also gung-ho about Lauren Bacall playing opposite him. Having known her from her days as a 17year-old usherette and photographers’ model, he had watched her rise from obscurity like a rocket from a silo. He said: ‘No one else has her looks, her style, the way of moving and wearing clothes, the sharp mind.’

  Lauren Bacall, independent, self-aware, represented the best of the new kind of mysterious woman. Allegedly she was discovered by director Howard Hawks’ wife, Slim, who spotted Bacall’s picture in a fashion magazine. Coached by Hawks himself, who every day for a year had her work out in an empty lot, shouting until she was hoarse in order to lower the register of her voice, Betty, as she was called, magnetically modernized the screen with her odd mixture of gossamer and lemon. Tall, rangy, she was, according to Marjorie Rosen, author of Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream, the only screen female since Marlene Dietrich who had the resources, or chutzpah, to look as if she might be mentally undressing every male with her gaze.

  But the charismatic pairing of Bacall with Humphrey Bogart in such winners as To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946) early in her career stunted her growth. Without Bogart she floundered. Alone, she was acid, just a little too brittle and serpentine. This worked against sustained stardom, especially if the vehicles were unsuitable, and in the early 1950s her luminosity would seem diminished – or misused – in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Woman’s World (1954), and even the highly successful and romantic Written on the Wind (1956). But the script of Designing Woman offered her material witty and stylish enough to engage her attractively. So she jumped at the chance to appear in the film.

  There was another personal reason she campaigned to play Marilla Hagen. Humphrey Bogart had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Although she proved stalwart throughout her husband’s illness (‘That’s the way you tell the women from the broads in this town,’ he said admiringly), she desperately needed a release from the sickroom atmosphere of her home. Yet nobody would consider her for a role. ‘My career had come to a dead stop,’ she confessed. ‘No one offered me anything – I was caring for Bogie.’

  When she heard about the part in Designing Woman, she called Dore Schary, told him she could play it, wanted to, and when she cut her salary in half, he finally said yes. ‘I swallowed pride and everything else that got in the way to get that part. For some reason, a test was not mentioned, but Gregory Peck, the leading man, had the right to approve his leading lady, which he did, thank heaven.’

  The news that Bogart had cancer of the esophagus deeply saddened Greg as it did many people in Hollywood. He didn’t know Bogart well, but he admired his ability to become king of Hollywood in the 1950s and still hold on to his essential character.

  ‘Bogie was a curious mixture,’ wrote Bacall. ‘He wasn’t cynical. He didn’t expect too much, he never realized he would leave the kind of mark he has left. He never tried to impress anyone. I’ve never known anybody who was so completely his own man. He could not be led in any direction unless it was the direction he chose to go.’

  Before Bogart’s illness, Greg used to run into the couple at Romanoff ’s, the chichi restaurant run by a fake nobleman that served as a hangout for the film elite. There, Bogart always occupied the second booth on the left off the entryway. When Bacall joined him, she could be depended upon to arrive in a smashing outfit. Led by the maître d’ or by Mike Romanoff himself, Bogie and Betty would step royally through the archway and down three steps into the main dining room. With a roomful of eyes riveted upon them, they sat down but rarely dined alone. On a given day, they might be joined by any of the following: Nunnally Johnson, Holmby Hills neighbors Judy Garland and her husband Sid Luft, Bogart’s agent, Irving (Swifty) Lazar, writer Nathaniel Benchley, composer Jimmy van Heusen or Frank Sinatra.

  Greg was a great appreciator of Bogart’s antics. ‘He was feisty,’ recalled Greg. ‘He’d tackle somebody on religion or on politics or on their opinions about most anything, and he’d get somebody else to contradict them, and he’d sit back and laugh.’

  Following his cancer diagnosis, Bogart was on the operating table for eight hours, undergoing surgery that one doctor called ‘the worst a human being can undergo.’ His stomach was raised 12 inches. Two inches of his esophagus were removed, and one rib was discarded. The public was told that the operation had been a success, but Bogart lost 34 pounds. Radiation treatment at the Los Angeles Tumor Institute followed, but the prognosis wasn’t good. Despite his condition, Bogart encouraged Bacall as she went off to the set of Designing Woman each day.

  Greg never worked with a director quite like Vincente Minnelli. He was unusual in that he could visualize the finished product long before it was even put on paper. This is a rarity. What’s more, the sets had to conform to his preconceived idea, his whole photographic conception and his cutting and editing of them long before he started a picture. The man knew what he was after. He knew what he wanted to see on the screen. This meant serious demands: more money, more time, more effort. Some people resented it. Some people went along with it. But never did he ever let up with his one feeling of this was going to be the kind of picture he wanted it to be. And generally his films turned out beautiful. Designing Woman was a prime example. With a generous budget of nearly $2 million, Minnelli gave the film the polish of his musicals, starting with the opening scenes set at the exclusive Beverly Hills Hotel.

  Greg was heartened to see Bogart join Bacall for the first day’s shoot at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Accompanied by his children, Steve and Leslie, Bogart stayed off to the side and quietly observed the action. And for the sailboat sequences in the movie, he felt well enough to take out his own yacht Santana. During their lunch break, Bacall and Greg boarded his boat, but there was no getting around the fact that Bogart’s days were numbered.

  Bacall continued to regard Designing Woman as a godsend. ‘Greg and I played characters very much in love, working in different worlds, fighting a lot. In one scene I was leaving him after a fight, running on a cobblestone street in spike-heeled shoes – and of course proceeded to fall and sprain my ankle. It was a romantic movie and I seemed to be constantly running toward Greg or away from him, so I had emotional and physical release to compensate for keeping everything inside at home.’ And it didn’t hurt that she regarded her co-star as gorgeous. ‘He was probably the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen,’ said Bacall. ‘And when he looks at you, he sees you, he connects with you completely.’

  The high point of Designing Woman is the pasta scene. Greg takes Dolores Gray (Lori Shannon) to a top restaurant to tell her that he is going to marry Bacall. Their conversation is calm and civilized and she seemingly accepts his long-winded explanation without emotion. Quietly she reaches over and tips a la
rge plate of ravioli into his lap. He makes no reaction and continues as if nothing has happened, and they bid each other goodbye. Greg loved the scene, especially when George Burns complimented him. Greg boasted: ‘George told me that he thought my “take-it” was one of the best he had ever seen, and to be told that I could make him laugh was as good as getting an Oscar.’

  On the home front, Greg and Veronique looked forward to the birth of their first child. A month before Veronique’s due date, her mother, Alexandra Passani and half-brother, Cornelius, who was ten years old, arrived from Paris. Greg arranged for Cornelius to be enrolled in Beverly Hills public school and he taught his mother-in-law to drive.

  When Greg signed the contract for Designing Woman with MGM, he insisted upon a clause allowing him 24 hours off when the baby was born. When he got the call, he paced the corridor at Santa Monica Hospital. On 24 October 1956 Veronique gave birth to a 7-pound 14-ounce boy. Mindful that Louella Parsons’ memory for slight would have done justice to an elephant, Greg phoned her with the news before she heard it from anybody else. He told her about his new son, Anthony, adding he was returning to work even though he had been up all night. A big fashion number was scheduled and he didn’t want to disappoint the company. Greg was 40 when Anthony was born and Veronique was 24.

  After Designing Woman wrapped, Greg continued keeping in touch with the Bogarts. In November, Bogie was readmitted to the Good Samaritan Hospital for treatment of nerve pressure caused by the growth of scar tissue on his throat. He was sent home after the operation, but never recovered.