Gregory Peck- A Charmed Life

by Lynn Haney

  On 3 May 1962, the film wrapped eight days behind schedule. The editing process went relatively smoothly. ‘I remember seeing a rough cut,’ said Greg. ‘I usually have lots of suggestions and I like to write suggestions. I can badger a director or producer, and have many times, with suggestions for rewrites and certain suggestions for editing. So I trot in there with my yellow legal pad and I watched about 15 minutes and I just waved the pad in the air. I didn’t want to make any notes. Bob and Alan laughed.’

  Greg yearned for the respect of his peers – and he sure got it. ‘After the preview of Mockingbird the other night, a number of actors whom I admire and respect – Shirley Booth, Karl Malden and Paul Newman, among others – told me they thought I had done a good job.’

  Sissy Spacek was raised in a small East Texas town. As a child she saw To Kill a Mockingbird which floored her because it evoked so many feelings and images from her small town. ‘I thought it was a children’s movie when I first saw it,’ she said. ‘And I was overwhelmed with the familiarity of the world that they lived in. Not until later, when I saw it as an adult, did I understand the deeper dimensions of it. It’s so rare to have a film hold up over so many years, and to have seen it from two such different perspectives, yet to have it work for you on both levels so deeply.’

  Harper Lee’s father died while the movie was being filmed. A year later, Greg lost his own father. Greg said: ‘I’m sorry the two of them couldn’t have lived to see the picture. I think they would have been pleased.’ Lee gave Greg her father’s gold watch. It became his good luck talisman.

  Asked if he thought any human being could be as noble and idealistic as Atticus, Greg said, ‘I’ve met two in my lifetime – my own father and Harper Lee’s.’

  Although many wonderful things happened to Harper Lee after writing To Kill a Mockingbird, it appears it brought her bad luck in terms of her progress as a writer. She had such high hopes for herself when she was young. But a great success with one’s first book can be stifling. Back in 1964, she said: ‘I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better . . . In other words all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama . . .’ Lee hasn’t published any books since Mockingbird.

  Released in time for the 1962 Academy Awards, the film elicited rapturous reviews and Oscar nominations in eight categories. Greg dashed off a note: ‘Dear Harper, Congratulations on your eight nominations for the Academy Awards.’ He also took the precaution of wearing her father’s pocket watch on the night of the Oscars.

  When he went to the Santa Monica Auditorium that night, he fully expected to lose. After all, he’d been through 19 years, 34 pictures and 5 Oscar nominations. He was so certain Jack Lemmon would win for The Days of Wine and Roses that he wasn’t even nervous. In fact, his approach to the event was totally out of character. Normally a firm believer that the best impromptu speeches are written well in advance, he had prepared nothing.

  ‘I had sat in the audience before and I had lost,’ said Greg. ‘I had already accepted the fact that I would lose again. Then, when Sophia Loren read my name, it was as if I’d been struck on the head or suddenly drugged. A peculiar feeling about reality came over me. I’d never quite had a physical sensation like it before. It was numbing.’ On his way up to the stage, he touched Jack Lemmon gently on the shoulder. Once in the spotlight, he had no speech to give. His ‘thank you’ was brief, emotional, and sincere.

  Success is so sweet. Greg didn’t temper his unalloyed delight in getting the Oscar. When asked how it felt to win, he blurted: ‘I was damned pleased to get it. My heart was ready to jump out of my chest. I managed to keep my emotions under control. But I really was damned pleased to get it. It meant the approval of my fellow actors and technicians and artists. I was in my forties and the middle of my career. I thought, well, I’ve got a long way to go. It was kind of a punctuation in my life, which is definitely worth having.’

  Greg particularly enjoyed gadding about with his new identity. ‘I think Atticus Finch was a popular man,’ he jested. ‘I’m a very busy fellow on the freeways, waving back to well-wishers, all the while speeding along at 50 miles per hour. At red lights, other motorists grin at me, and I grin right back!’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Antiheroes

  ‘Kennedy after all has lots of glamour – Gregory Peck with an atom bomb in his holster.’

  William F Buckley Jr

  Kennedy was dead. That cruel November day in Dallas changed the fabric of American life forever. Greg – who knew and admired JFK, and had just received an invitation to the White House – took his two youngest children, Tony and Cecilia, to morning mass to pray for the President. Later, he honored Kennedy by narrating a United States Information Agency (USIA) film, Years of Lightning; Days of Drums. With his soul-stirring voice – called ‘one of the world’s great musical instruments’ by violinist Isaac Stern – Greg told of the major programs put forward by Kennedy: the Peace Corps, Alliance for Progress, Civil Rights and the Space Program.

  ‘The times they are a-changin’’ went the song. The 1960s had arrived; exciting, revolutionary and turbulent. New forms, new energies, new values were bursting into national consciousness. The martini hour was ending, replaced by pot and LSD. Spreading his psychedelic gospel, Timothy Leary exhorted the youth of America to ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out.’ Moneyed people dressed in hobo chic and poor people turned raucous and highly vocal about their discontents. Men tossed out three-piece gray flannel suits and grew straggly beards. Women stopped wearing bras and started swearing like Marine sergeants. It was a tough time to be a gentleman actor. One sign of the times; the new Hollywood stars had strange names like Rip, Rory, Tab and Rock.

  Greg wasn’t sure how his career was going to fit into the altered landscape. The young warned, don’t trust anybody over 30. He was pushing 50. Producers were casting about for an antihero, not a stalwart leader with a strong arm and a heart of gold. In place of John Wayne, Burt Lancaster and Gregory Peck, they were discovering Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman and Richard Dreyfuss. A new wave of directors commanded the public’s attention: Sydney Pollack, Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn and Stuart Rosenberg. Their films centered on characters of ambiguous values, while the males Greg played belonged to a simpler age when the difference between right and wrong was more clear-cut. Critic Judith Crist put it very well: ‘They had faces then, the men who took over the still-silver screen during and after World War II, providing proper role models for the boys and romance for the girls and in some cases, satisfying performances and rewarding, even enduring, portraits and perceptions for grown-ups.’

  Greg was indeed the epitome of honor as the reporter who exposes anti-Semitism in Gentleman’s Agreement, the lawyer who fights racism in To Kill a Mockingbird, the heroic Captain Horatio Hornblower, the Air Force general pulling together a demoralized bomber group in Twelve O’Clock High, and the captain of an atomic submarine facing a dying world in On the Beach. What’s more, he prided himself on his ‘man who delivers’ reputation. He claimed: ‘You don’t want an anti-hero to perform brain surgery.’

  What were actors of Greg’s generation to make of the scripts being written in the 1960s? Movie stars who had made their names under the antediluvian Hays Office rules, which dictated that even married couples had to be filmed in separate beds, were astounded by the new freedom. Quipped Bob Hope: ‘They are doing things on the screen now that I wouldn’t do in bed. If I could.’

  Only a handful of stars from the 1930s and 1940s endured. Greg was one of them – but his future was uncertain. From his point of view, it seemed as if nothing recedes faster than success. After winning an Oscar, Greg had every reason to expect an avalanche of great scripts and movie offers. This didn’t happen. It didn’t help that some of the new upstart critics took condescending pokes at him.

  The 1960s and early 1970s were heady moments for reviewers. Invested with more cultural authority than in previous decade
s, reviewers fully exercised their power in deciding the success or failure of a film. Two favorites with young people were Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice and Pauline Kael of The New Yorker. Commenting on his rival, Sarris compared Kael’s bullying but often on-target movie reviews to papal pronouncements of infallibility.

  Provocation was the name of the game. Sarris recalled when he started writing for the Village Voice in 1960, ‘I got so much angry mail that the editors were very impressed with me. At that time people who could arouse controversy were very valuable.’ When Mockingbird came out, Sarris refused to join the collective hosannas. Instead, he wrote: ‘To Kill a Mockingbird relates the Cult of Childhood to the Negro Problem with disastrous results. Before the intellectual confusion of the project is considered, it should be noted that this is not much of a movie even by purely formal standards.’

  Taking pleasure in skewering establishment actors, Kael aided and abetted the impression in the public mind that Greg was a self-righteous, wooden and over-the-hill actor. Her basic philosophy was that movies were like sex – some good, some bad – and that what mattered was what turned her on. Underwhelmed by To Kill a Mockingbird, she carped: ‘When Gregory Peck got the Academy Award for best actor for his performance as an upstanding widower practicing in a small Alabama town in the early 30s, there was a fair amount of derision throughout the country: Peck was better than usual, but in that same virtuously dull way. (There was the suspicion that Peck was being rewarded because the Lincolnesque lawyer shot a rabid dog and defended an innocent black man accused of raping a white woman.)’

  Stella Bruzzi, a more recent authority on films and currently writing Bringing up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Postwar Hollywood, asserts Greg took himself out of the running for a number of roles because he played in three movies as the head of a family. According to Bruzzi, becoming a father is a masculine renunciation. Despite fatherhood functioning as proof of his virility, the man now forsakes his right not only to beauty and vanity but sex as well.

  ‘There are diverse reasons for Hollywood’s reluctance to permit a man to be both erotic and a father,’ Bruzzi explains, ‘Freud’s theories of seduction being but one. The sexual father transgresses psychological and symbolic boundaries and the appearance of Gregory Peck and other notable Hollywood fathers in gray suits, woolen cardigans, drab trousers and glasses testifies to their castration.’ The author contends Greg went from being one of the most heavily promoted of Hollywood’s pin-ups in the 1940s and 1950s, to someone trapped in his repressing, desexing wardrobe. ‘Not only are the daddy’s clothes notably un-alluring, but you never see his flesh. The father’s body has been subsumed into his social, paternal role – and it certainly isn’t used for fun and games.’

  Off screen, Greg reveled in the role of father. He regarded his children as the most rewarding part of his life. In raising his three boys by his first marriage, he had a supportive partner in Greta. Back when they were together, he had said to her: ‘I think we’d be better friends if we weren’t married.’ And that turned out to be the case. Greta valued Greg: ‘He gave me three wonderful sons.’ Plus, he had been her magic carpet to Hollywood glamour.

  On the wall next to the steps leading to the second floor of her home, Greta hung photos of herself and Greg in the 1940s attending celebrity events. She took the boys to see Greg’s movies and she’d travel with them to San Francisco to visit Greg’s mother and stepfather, Bunny and Joe Maysuch.

  Greta visited Greg at his house in Brentwood and she welcomed him at her home. But after Tony and Cecilia were born, Veronique cooled to the open-door policy. Greta told Tommy Hinkkanen, a Finn now living in Los Angeles: ‘She didn’t really like having me around. She didn’t want me seeing him.’ So Greta and Greg limited their contacts to events related to their children’s activities.

  Years later, an Armenian reporter submitted a list of questions to Greg’s publicist for review. The journalist included a query about Greta’s whereabouts and the publicist scratched it out and cautioned the reporter that under no circumstances would Greg discuss Greta. Why? Out of respect for Veronique, the reporter was told. First wives don’t fit neatly into fairytales. Nor, sometimes, do the children from the first union. Carey Peck’s second wife, Lita Albuquerque, told Bonnie Clearwater: ‘. . . he’s not completely accepted by his stepmother.’

  One area where Greg and Greta didn’t agree was the boys’ schooling. He balked when she insisted on sending Jonathan, Stephen and Carey to the conservative Harvard School (no relation to the University; presently called Harvard-Westlake). It was an academically competitive old-line preparatory school where the boys wore military uniforms. Greta even bought a house at 908 N. Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills because it was closer to Harvard School.

  She reasoned since the boys had such a peripatetic father, they needed roots and connection to community and friends. (By Greg’s own estimate, he was only in Los Angeles half the year.)

  For his part, Greg didn’t want his children exposed to Hollywood values. ‘They have everything there is and they’re surrounded by affluence,’ Greg said of the local youth. ‘They lose their ambition. And they lose their desire to study, to accept a set of rules to live by, and they just become useless appendages of their parents.’

  In 1962, Greg became one of the vast numbers of Hollywood stars to be given a part in the extravagant epic about the taming of the frontier called How the West Was Won (1963). The film was presented in segments, linked by the narration of Spencer Tracy. It was directed by John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall. Along with Greg, the cast included John Wayne, James Stewart, Debbie Reynolds, Raymond Massey as Lincoln, and Henry Fonda, in a walrus mustache, as a buffalo hunter. Throughout the production, the operative word was ‘big.’ According to the How the West Was Won publicity book, the star-studded cast was supported by 12,617 extras, among them 350 Native Americans from five different tribes.

  If the circumstances had been more auspicious, Greg would have rejoiced in his role as a charming rogue. He usually welcomed a chance to play against his type. But How the West Was Won was shot in Cinerama – a ridiculous huge-screen process contrived as a vain attempt to defeat television – and Greg hated it. He lamented: ‘I found it impossible to act realistically in front of the giant machine with three lenses.’

  Greg’s real problem, however, was Henry Hathaway. The director for his segment of the movie viewed him with contempt. Hathaway was an ornery character who had been in the business of making Westerns a long time, and had gained the reputation of being a skilled craftsman who handled his material straightforwardly with few complications and pretensions. Several years later, when Hathaway was required to direct Greg in a Western called Shoot Out (1971), he snorted Greg was ‘the worst son of a bitch in the world for this picture. He is a cold, indifferent actor. He had no love in him.’ Another time he railed at Greg’s impenetrable reserve: ‘The bastard wouldn’t let me in.’

  Greg found Hathaway ‘a charming fellow at dinner,’ but hell on wheels on the set. ‘He just yelled and screamed and foamed at the mouth and chewed cigars all day long,’ recalled Greg. ‘The terrible tempered Mr Hathaway.’ While Hathaway’s indictment of Greg was harsh, there was no doubt Greg had undergone subtle changes since picking up his Oscar. For one thing, he voiced his opinions more freely. There was an element of braggadocio in his comments. When it was suggested to him that movie acting is a lightweight enterprise compared to the demands of live theater, he scowled: ‘I’ve seen them all, Olivier and Burton and Gielgud and the rest. Most of them are simply vocalizing. It’s fancy speaking and declaiming. To me, it is a highly developed parlor trick, learned in schools of recitation, just as schoolboys learned to recite. Eventually, as with Burton, if practiced long enough, it becomes a kind of acting.

  ‘But I believe it goes no deeper than the vocal cords. It is like opera. Playacting. These actors fail to differentiate between life and acting. The old sock-and-buskin school is what it is. But performa
nces have little or nothing to do with reality. When I see them emoting on a stage, I feel their minds are wondering, perhaps worrying whether the laundry has been returned on time.’

  Though some critics saw How the West Was Won as a saga of dimwitted bunglers who couldn’t do anything right, the public loved it. The film was one of the most popular to hit the screens in 1963 and eventually earned over $50 million.

  When he wasn’t making a movie, Greg continued to enjoy relaxing at his villa in Cap Ferrat, and hanging out with the ‘horsey’ set in England. (‘We have many friends in the English racing crowd,’ he explained. ‘They don’t know about movies and could care less. I like that.’) Greg also enjoyed gathering with his family at their sumptuous apartment on Avenue Foch in Paris near the Arc de Triumphe. Sophia Loren was a neighbor.

  Designed by Baron Haussmann during the nineteenth century so that rich people could easily reach the new and fashionable Bois de Boulogne, Avenue Foch is one of the most prestigious residential addresses in the world.

  In the summer of 1963, John Bell – a friend of Greg’s eldest son, Jonathan, from New Zealand – showed up at the Pecks’ Avenue Foch apartment. He was supposed to meet Jonathan there. The two friends had planned to travel to Germany where they each had girlfriends named Karin. (Jonathan’s girl, Karin Ruhle Von Lilienstern, had worked as a maid for Greta in Beverly Hills.) But when Bell arrived, he learned Jonathan was still in the south of France visiting ‘a princess somebody or other.’

  Although Greg and Veronique had never set eyes on Bell, they welcomed him like a member of their family. ‘I obeyed their rules and what not,’ he recalled, and made himself useful playing with Anthony, seven, and Cecilia, five.