Gregory Peck- A Charmed Life

by Lynn Haney

  Mitchum’s approach to acting could not have been more different from Greg’s. While Greg labored prodigiously to master every aspect of his craft, Mitchum had a cynical disregard for acting. He didn’t care much about his ‘image,’ which led him to appear in films that ran the gamut from classic to barely watchable. He just couldn’t take movies or himself too seriously. And in the process he created some of the more honestly amazing characters to light the screen. Critic Pauline Kael described him as ‘almost a lawless actor. He does it all out of himself. He doesn’t use the tricks and stratagems of clever, trained actors.’

  Perhaps he sensed that Greg had moved on and considered Mitchum too unpolished for his new life. For whatever reason, Mitchum had a chip on his shoulder vis-à-vis Greg during the shooting of Cape Fear. He told the press: ‘I show up at nine and punch out at six. That’s all I do.’ And he added: ‘The picture belongs to the other guys and I don’t care too much.’

  The movie was undeniably disturbing. In fact, the original trailers promised moviegoers they were going to ‘feel fear!’ The film derived much of its frisson from Cady’s antisocial attack on the goody-goody culture of the 1950s. Here was Greg in his best pillarof-rectitude manner with a wholesome wife and a sweet daughter. Then Cady appears in town. He is furtive and unscrupulous and has what Terence Rafferty described as ‘the unnerving quick-strike elusiveness of a guerrilla fighter – the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t quality that can give human malevolence the aura of the demonic.’ Upon seeing Cape Fear, novelist Barry Gifford called Mitchum ‘the angel of death with pain, put on earth to give men pause.’

  After filming, Mitchum claimed he had acted Greg off the screen. ‘I had given him the role and had paid him a terrific amount of money,’ said Greg. ‘It was obvious he had the better role. I thought he would understand that, but he apparently thought he acted me off the screen. I didn’t think highly of him for that.’

  Several critics didn’t think highly of Greg for producing the movie. New Yorker reviewer, Brendan Gill saw it as ‘a repellent attempt to make a great deal of money out of a clumsy plunge into sexual pathology,’ and asked, ‘what on earth is Gregory Peck doing in such a movie?’

  ‘If Cape Fear doesn’t turn out to be box-office I’m through as a producer,’ Greg said, voicing his frustration. ‘I’ll be a freelance actor again.’ And indeed, Cape Fear bombed at the box-office. Grossing somewhere between $1.6 and $1.9 million against a cost of $2.6 million, the picture brought an end to Melville Productions.

  Thirty years later, Greg was rewarded substantially. In 1991 Martin Scorsese remade the film for Universal with Nick Nolte as Sam Bowden and Robert De Niro as Max Cady. It was a big financial success. From distribution of television and home video rentals, the owner of the story rights, Gregory Peck, was doing very nicely on his initial investment.

  At this point in time, Greg could have rested on his laurels. Lunching with writer Lyn Tornabene at the Colony Restaurant in New York, he confessed: ‘I’m a semi recluse. I’m only in Hollywood when I have to be: lately, about six months out of the year.’ When he said in Hollywood, he didn’t work there. He said he wouldn’t. ‘I would have three homes: an apartment in Paris, a house in England or Ireland, and ranch in Southern California. Maybe four places . . . I’d like a plantation in Mississippi. I anticipated the picture, Cape Fear, in Georgia, and though I have the same objections to some Southern attitudes you probably have, I grew fond of the people and the landscape.’

  Sitting in his office one day, he paused to reflect with Joe Hyams, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Greg complained it was next to impossible to get out from under the paraphernalia of being a movie star. When Hyams pressed him to explain ‘the paraphernalia’ of Hollywood stardom, Greg replied: ‘Look at it this way . . . If you’re established in a $3,000,000 a picture or up level and you suddenly decided to do a film for next to nothing, what you’re doing is putting an established commodity on the block cheap. That commodity is likely to come out shopworn and shoddy when the picture is finished.’

  At the beginning of 1961, producers Alan Pakula and Robert Mulligan sent Greg a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Written by first-time novelist Harper Lee, the story centered on racial prejudice in a small Southern town of the 1930s. ‘It had been on the bestseller list for months,’ said Pakula, ‘but Hollywood had not nibbled at it yet. There was a kind of rule of thumb that pictures about kids were successful if they were made by Disney.’ Pakula and his partner, Mulligan, envisioned Greg in the lead role of Atticus Finch, a widowed lawyer trying to raise two school-age children during the Great Depression.

  After dinner, Greg picked up the book and started reading it and he didn’t put it down until he had gone all the way through to the last page. By then he knew he had found what he had always been looking for: ‘. . . in twenty years of making movies, I never had a part that came close to being the real me until Atticus Finch.’

  The gentleness of Atticus Finch’s philosophy pervades the novel. He is the sort of man who symbolizes humanity at its best. He loves and nurtures his children, Scout and Jem. He treats all those around him with respect and consideration. He renounces violence but stands up for what he believes in.

  Greg identified completely with the character. Here he was, the father of five children, trying to be exactly the kind of father in the novel – a sophisticated Atticus Finch – stern but fair, compassionate and concerned, always the traditional father figure.

  To Kill a Mockingbird relates the story of tomboy Scout, growing up in an Alabama town, ‘where there’s no hurry, there’s nowhere to go.’ But, as in a child’s world, marvelous, unexpected things happen just the same. Like Scout, we watch her quiet, widowed father, Atticus Finch, attack dangers that can destroy everybody’s peace: a mad dog on the loose; and racial prejudice that pours over into another kind of madness. The tranquil world is set astir by the winds of change and shattered by terrors both real and imagined. The real terror stems from Atticus’s defense of the Negro who has been unjustly charged with the rape of a white girl, and from the stigma and violence this brings upon the family.

  Reading the book reminded Greg of his boyhood in the sleepy town of La Jolla where he ran barefoot, climbed trees, and, like Scout, would curl up in a tire and roll down the streets. Yet the innocence was balanced by an equally forceful memory recalled by Greg in a letter to Klanwatch: ‘. . . the burning cross in front of a house rented by a black family . . . it was in the early 1920s, when I was about five years old, but I remember it well.’

  The novel gets its title from a warning Finch makes to Jem and Scout on the use of guns. ‘I’d rather you shoot at tin cans in the backyard,’ he says to his children, ‘but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the Blue Jays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, and they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.’

  The novel also deals with changes in the lives of the children and a growing awareness in them, and also with prejudices, mainly racial, of the older people around them. It’s a story about loss of innocence, people’s first contact with evil, the tragic quality of life and how people learn to deal with it. It represents the fantasy childhood we all wanted. Here are these two children who have their first experience with evil, and they are taken through that experience by this fantasy father, the father all of us have dreamt of having.

  ‘I finished at about midnight,’ Greg said of reading the novel given him by Pakula and Mulligan, ‘and wanted to call them immediately, but I managed to wait until morning to tell them that I would give almost anything to play Atticus.’

  Alan Pakula came to the movies from the world of 1950s live television, and To Kill a Mockingbird has something of the feel of the urgent, naturalistic black-and-white dramas of that period. He began his film career as a producer, teaming with director Robert Mull
igan to create the 1957 film Fear Strikes Out, about the breakdowns and subsequent recovery of the baseball legend, Jimmy Piersail. The two went on to make six more films. Mulligan had considered becoming a priest before joining the Navy and later entering the entertainment world through television.

  A deal was set up in which To Kill a Mockingbird was to be distributed by Universal and produced by two independent film companies, Pakula–Mulligan and Brentwood Productions, with Brentwood co-owned by Greg.

  Pakula was heartened to discover the real Gregory Peck was the same as the reel actor. ‘It’s very tough to go through the Hollywood mill – the excesses, the vulnerabilities, hysteria of huge star success – and not come out of it corrupted or scarred. You’re almost encouraged to remain an infantile narcissist by the way people treat you. That didn’t happen to Greg.’

  In January 1961, Greg and Veronique made a trip to Monroeville (population 7,000) in southwest Alabama to see the place upon which the novel was based and to meet the author, Nelle Harper Lee. They stayed at the LaSalle Hotel and ate at the Wee Diner.

  With Lee as his guide, Greg moseyed around downtown and spent time in the old courthouse (which was replicated exactly for the film).

  ‘All the women dressed up and painted up and put on earrings and came to town to see him,’ said George Thomas Jones, a retired Monroeville businessman. ‘But he was real low key and down to earth, no fanfare at all. He just wanted to get the feel of the town.’

  Monroeville shaped Harper Lee and her writing. After dropping out of law school, she moved to New York and worked as an Eastern airline reservations clerk. Determined to tell her story, she quit her job and moved into a cold-water apartment and subsisted on tuna fish sandwiches. When Mockingbird hit, she divided her time between New York and Monroeville.

  ‘You see, I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give it encouragement. Public encouragement.’

  Giving Greg the once-over, Harper Lee wasn’t sure he was right for the part. He appeared too young and handsome. Greg won her over just by sitting and chatting with her. It was a coup de foudre between the two of them – although strictly platonic.

  ‘You have to consider who we Southerners are,’ Lee said in explaining what makes her tick. ‘We run hard to Celtic blood in influence. We are mostly Irish, Scottish, English, Welsh. We grew up in a society that was primarily agricultural. It was not industrial, although it is becoming so, for better or for worse. I think we are a region of natural storytellers, just from tribal instinct.’

  The author introduced Greg to her father, A C Lee, the model for Atticus Finch. A tall man, who dressed like Atticus, A C Lee’s legal defense of an African-American in 1923 formed the basis of the novel. ‘He was a fine old gentleman of 82,’ recalled Greg, ‘truly sophisticated, although he had never traveled farther than a few miles from that small Southern town. I studied him intently and when he became aware of it, he said, “You’re taking a very close look at me, aren’t you?”’ What struck Greg was the resemblance in character between Mr Lee and his own father.

  The next challenge for Pakula and Mulligan was to have the novel turned into a screenplay with all its values intact. Horton Foote was drafted for the job. In the 1950s Foote wrote for the prestigious Playhouse 90 and the Philco-Goodyear Playhouse among other shows – serious television work from the early years of that medium. Much to the joy and relief of all concerned, his screenplay was faithful to the letter and spirit of Lee’s novel. ‘There was a marvelous rapport between Horton Foote and Harper Lee,’ said Greg. ‘They were in complete accord as to how the story should be told on the screen.’

  After scouting various locations, Mulligan settled on the backlot of Universal and, on 15 acres, created an authentic-looking Macomb. The buildings in the vintage early Depression town did double duty off-camera serving as dressing rooms for the actors, plus a schoolroom for the children in the cast.

  Brock Peters, who made his film debut as Sergeant Brown in Carmen Jones (1954) with Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte and Diahann Carroll, was chosen to play accused rapist Tom Robinson.

  Peters recounted how, shortly before he was to start filming, he was awakened early on a Sunday morning by a phone call from Greg welcoming him to the production. ‘I was surprised and stunned,’ said Peters. ‘This was an idol of mine, both as an actor and a person. I’d only just been cast to play Tom Robinson and suddenly found myself ear-to-ear, voice-to-voice with Gregory Peck – and I dropped the phone.’

  Harper Lee visited the Mockingbird set in February 1962. Greg was in the midst of doing wardrobe tests for the film. He needed to stand in front of the camera to see if his costume looked right. The test was taking place on a little street where the set had been erected. Lee’s first glimpse of him was when he came out of the dressing room in his Atticus suit. There was no attempt to disguise his incipient double chin. His hair was half-groomed and his handsomeness was partly concealed by glasses. ‘It was the most amazing transformation I had ever seen,’ recalled Lee. ‘A middle-aged man came out. He looked bigger; he looked thicker through the middle. He didn’t have an ounce of make-up, just a 1933-type suit with collar, and a vest and a watch on a chain. The minute I saw him I knew everything was bound to be all right because he was Atticus.’

  For the whole of the first day on the set, Robert Mulligan recalled watching Greg pacing the porch of the Finch home, entering its doors then reemerging as the completely realized Atticus Finch. ‘You could feel him putting on the clothes in the skin.’

  In the film’s first take, the children run to meet their father, and Greg remembered Harper Lee standing nearby; there was a glistening on her cheek. Anticipating a comment about the power of his performance, Greg was dismayed and delighted by her comment.

  ‘Oh, Gregory,’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ve got a little potbelly just like my daddy.’

  ‘That’s great acting,’ he quipped.

  The music-box-type sounds in Mockingbird – bells, harps, single note flutes – suggested a child’s world. For composer Elmer Bernstein it wasn’t easily arrived at: ‘. . . it took me weeks and weeks,’ he confessed. ‘After the longest period of time, it came to me that what was going on here were a series of real-world adult problems seen through the eyes of children.’

  Of the many distinguished aspects of Mockingbird, one of the most remarkable is the acting of its children. Mary Badham, who plays the role of Scout Finch, has a comradeship with a neigh borhood chum, played by John Megna (based on Harper Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote), that is as believable as a backyard fence. She and Philip Alford, who plays her older brother Jem, were amateurs from Birmingham, Alabama, chosen from some 2,000 applicants in seven Southern States.

  Encouraging these youngsters to play games and make-believe and initially keeping the camera at a distance, Mulligan gradually reduced their self-consciousness while retaining their authentic characterization. After running through a disturbing scene, Mary Badham cuddled up to Greg for comfort. Off camera, he was her foster father in Hollywood, and on weekends she came up to play with his own children in Brentwood.

  Greg moved through the film with astonishing ease. ‘I just put everything I had into it – all my feelings and everything I’ve learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children. And my feelings about racial justice and equality and opportunity.’

  He had finally found his quintessential role. ‘It was relatively easy to do because I had emotional involvement, and when you have that . . . Well, I read not long ago an interview with Henry Fonda, and he talked about Mr. Roberts, and he said that every night it was such a joy to play, and that they were on a kind of emotional wave that carried them through, and the thing took off every single night with a different audience.’

  One can’
t ignore the role discipline and training played in Greg’s performance. The voice, the body, timing and movement were the result of techniques developed over the years. According to Greg: ‘. . . every single facial expression, every movement of the body, even to the crooking of my little finger, was a total effort to bring Atticus Finch to life. Every move and every voice inflection were the result of hours of trial and error, of use and discarding.’

  The courtroom scene is the high point of the movie. Ordered by their father to stay home on the day of the trial, Finch’s children go secretly to the courtroom, determined not to ‘miss the most excitin’ thing that ever happened in this town.’

  ‘The thing that I remember most,’ recalled Greg, ‘was when I was questioning the accused man, Brock Peters, on the witness stand. It was a very dramatic scene, and all of a sudden Brock started crying. I was so moved that I myself starting choking up. I had to stop myself. We couldn’t have both the defendant and the lawyer blubbering all over the courtroom.’

  As the trial develops, lawyer Finch reveals that the accuser, a lonely, backcountry girl, actually made a sexual pass at the accused. Discovered on the spot, she was beaten by her father, who then cynically pinned the ‘unspeakable crime’ on Tom Robinson.

  The truth doesn’t matter to the jury: the accused is pronounced guilty. But not before some of the most eloquent words ever uttered in film for the basic rights of Negroes are said by Finch in defense of ‘this quiet, respectable Negro who has had to put his word against two white people.’

  One of the most affecting moments is that in which, following the verdict, the Negroes sitting in the balcony rise to their feet in respect for Atticus, who is leaving the courtroom. The Finch children are up there with them, having been smuggled in. Old Reverend Sykes whispers to Scout: ‘Stand up. Your father’s passin’.’