Gregory Peck- A Charmed Life

by Lynn Haney

  Over lunch at a café, Greg asked Bell about his plans following the trip to Germany. Bell recalled: ‘My ambition was to travel through Europe all the way back to New Zealand by bike except in those places where I was required to travel over water. But with all the turmoil in the Middle East, countries like Israel and Palestine presented a problem.’

  ‘You should talk to the New Zealand ambassador,’ said Greg.

  Bell thought, ‘Yeah. Here I am, 17 years old. What chance have I got of meeting the New Zealand ambassador?’

  Returning from lunch, Greg rang up the New Zealand Embassy and arranged for Bell to meet with the ambassador that afternoon. Veronique accompanied Bell to the meeting. The ambassador graciously explained to Bell his plan was dangerous.

  ‘Being a stupid, naive teenager,’ Bell recalled, ‘I said something to the effect: “Well, what’s the use of having an embassy here if you can’t help citizens like me?”’

  That evening, Veronique told Greg what happened. ‘He dressed me down like he would any of his sons,’ said Bell. ‘He said, “I set this up for you and my wife tells me you were rude to the New Zealand ambassador. You shouldn’t do that sort of thing.” He corrected me in a very gentlemanly yet fatherly manner. He put me in my place. I was embarrassed as hell. I apologized profusely.’

  Then Greg asked Bell if he had an alternate plan to biking to New Zealand. To which Bell replied: ‘I think I’d like to hang around Paris and work.’

  Greg called a studio in Paris and made inquiries about a job for Bell. He was told it was very difficult for foreigners to find employment because a French working card was required.

  Bell never forgot Greg’s kindness. ‘He tried to help me even after I abused the New Zealand ambassador,’ marveled Bell, comparing Greg’s behavior to Atticus Finch. Like the fictional character, Greg was firm, authoritative and forgiving.

  In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus says: ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . Till you climb inside his skin and walk around in it.’

  It’s unclear how much Greg knew about what was going on inside the mind and heart of his oldest son. To all appearances, Jonathan looked like a promising, polite young man not given to reckless behavior. Beneath his reticent manner, however, he was growing increasingly troubled by his role as offspring to a world-famous father. His struggle to become a person in his own right would ultimately prove tragic. But back when he was a teenager and Greg was becoming even more prominent as a leader and a symbol, chances are he didn’t comprehend the depth of Jonathan’s inner turmoil.

  John Bell didn’t pick up on his friend’s angst for some time. The two boys met when Jonathan – a high school middle-distance runner – traveled to Auckland, New Zealand, in the summer of 1962 to train with Arthur Lydiard, a fabled name in the sport. Lydiard was the country’s top marathon runner in the 1950s who went on to become an internationally respected track coach for middle-distance runners. Lydiard-trained athletes such as Peter Snell and Murray Halberg had competed successfully at the Olympics.

  At 17 years old, Jonathan was 6 feet 1 inch, weighed 165 pounds, was good-looking and soft-spoken, yet awkward and shy with braces on his teeth. He was also the spitting image of his dad – the black hair and brown eyes, the strong classic features, the baritone voice, prominent ears and the long lean frame with the distinctive walk.

  Like Greg, he kept his feelings wrapped tightly inside himself. But his father could escape his inner torments by playacting in a movie role. Jonathan wasn’t so lucky. ‘Dad and I both think one actor in the family’s enough,’ he said, following some unsuccessful theatrical attempts at Harvard school where he was a C+ student. ‘I’m not star material.’

  When Jonathan landed in New Zealand, his arrival was trumpeted in the newspapers. In the early 1960s the country was still isolated from the rest of the world. ‘Jonathan would have made the papers even if he hadn’t been Gregory Peck’s son,’ explained Bell. ‘It was very exciting to have an American in our midst. People wanted to meet him just so they could listen to his accent.’

  It soon became obvious that Jonathan was a good kid. Kind and unspoiled, his joy was running, not drinking or drugs as one might expect from a Hollywood visitor. And he never traded on his father’s name. ‘Jonathan wanted to make it on his own,’ recalled Bell, who became one of Jonathan’s closest buddies. ‘That’s the distinct impression I got after the first few days I met him. And I maintained that impression throughout our friendship. He never gloated or bloated about his famous father.’

  When it came time for Jonathan to return to America, the coaches and athletes threw a farewell party for him. They toasted him, giving speeches, telling jokes, reliving the good times he brought to the summer running camp.

  Jonathan was so overjoyed to receive accolades for an identity he had clearly established in this group on their terms – dedicated runners and good sportsmen – he ran outside with Bell following him. Said Bell: ‘He had himself a good bawl. He bawled his eyes out.’

  The next summer, after Bell’s stay at the Pecks’ apartment, the two boys traveled to Germany to visit their Karins. Then Bell returned to New Zealand and Jonathan started Occidental, a liberal arts college located in the Eagle Rock section of Los Angeles (later to appear in the television series Beverly Hills 90210). Jonathan chose the school because they had a strong track team, and he was determined to continue his excellent track record from high school and thus achieve an identity independent of his father.

  He could not escape being the great man’s son. Not only was his father a stellar character both professionally and personally, he also felt a deep need to project the image of perfection to the public. This can be very tough on a young person trying to find himself. Here was Jonathan, who inherited Greg’s facial features, his height, voice, gestures and athletic build. But these physical endowments, which had provided Greg with a passport to fame and fortune, were visited upon Jonathan like a curse. People couldn’t look at him without thinking of his father.

  To compound the problem, Jonathan only knew his father as a success. Lost in the mist of time was the gawky Greg who stumbled through high school riddled with mediocre grades, no girlfriend, minor athletic achievements and no accomplishments as an actor. Nor did most strangers know Greg as anything but Hollywood royalty. So it was not unusual for people to look Jonathan over and think: ‘Does he have the old man’s brains and charisma?’

  Throughout Jonathan’s school days and into his working life, Greg’s fame brought him attention he didn’t want and deprived him of the attention he did want. ‘Poor Jonathan,’ remembered his friend Nancy Stesin. ‘He was always the son of Gregory Peck. When people introduced him they didn’t even say his first name.’

  Greg knew it wouldn’t be easy. ‘I foresaw that possibility. Which is why I didn’t name any of my kids Gregory Peck Jr. I was very careful not to do that.’ (Jonathan was christened Jonathan Gregory Peck.)

  At Occidental, a friend on the track team recalled a telling incident. One day Jonathan won a race. Greg was in the crowd cheering for him and Jonathan could look up and see him in the stands. It was a moment to savor. Afterwards, in the locker room, Jonathan burst into tears. They were tears of joy, remembered his friend. His father was applauding him – instead of the other way round.

  Perhaps it was this race day that an interviewer heard about when he visited the Peck household about that time. In his account of an exchange between father and son, we see how these happy family moments are played out for an observer, so they became as much a tribute to Greg as a model parent as they are to his son’s accomplishment.

  Wrote the reporter: ‘The day before my visit, Peck’s son Jonathan, a freshman at Occidental College – he wants to be a diplomat – had just won the half-mile race against the UCLA frosh, and Peck had spent the afternoon watching that race, and also the final leg of the mile relay, both of which the boy won for his team. When Jon Peck came into the house, h
e was in his black-and-orange sweat suit, standing tall and straight like his dad in his youth. It was a warmly moving scene, to an outsider, to see Peck shake his son’s hand and clap him on the shoulder gruffly, in congratulation.

  ‘“Well done, Jon,” said father Peck. “Congratulations. I’m proud of you.” It could have come from one of his pictures. And Peck, playing Peck, was never better.’

  At Occidental, Jonathan corresponded with John Bell in New Zealand. Said Bell: ‘He’d write things like “Life’s a bitch.” It sort of went out of the top of my head. We were teenagers. And life’s always a bitch then. But it cropped up often in his letters. I began to realize he wasn’t happy.’

  In a letter dated 7 March 1964, Jonathan wrote: ‘Believe me there’s nothing I’d rather do than come down this summer (your winter) to help you and your dad cut down those trees in Orewa [a beach community near Auckland]. Nothing like a little work to make a man feel like a man.’

  Then Jonathan complained school was driving him nuts. He added, ‘We learn about great men and how they did this and that but we never get a chance to do anything great or big ourselves. Everything is served up on a silver platter – it’s enough to make anybody go crazy.’

  Ever on the alert for interesting new projects, Greg heard from a friend of his named Sy Lamont, who was a professional reader. Lamont suggested Greg’s production company, Brentwood Productions, make a movie out of a current best-selling novel Captain Newman, M.D. Enthusiastic about the idea, Greg hired husband-and-wife team Henry and Phoebe Ephron to develop the screenplay, pacing it with the kind of humor they wrote for Desk Set (1957) and Take Her She’s Mine (1963).

  Newman is an interesting drama of an Air Force psychiatrist whose duty is to his patients first, the military brass second. The resulting film links comedy and combat in a way that was not unusual in traditional war films, but the hospital setting, the emphasis on war-induced diseases, and the barracks humor anticipated the more contemporary style of Catch-22 and MASH.

  Captain Newman, M.D. (1963) was an instant hit. The movie depicted the struggle of a humane doctor to repair the shattered psyches of three battle-weary soldiers. Greg, fresh from his Academy Award-winning performance as Atticus Finch, was the cinematic paragon of decency and virtue. He was the ideal actor to embody Hollywood’s exaltation of the psychiatrist as a caring, courageous sage.

  Greg assembled a cast that included Angie Dickinson and Tony Curtis as well as pop singer Bobby Darin. Dickinson and Curtis were members of Frank Sinatra’s celebrated Rat Pack, the mainstays of which were Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr and Joey Bishop. More sporadic participants included Shirley MacLaine, Juliet Prowse and Tony Curtis’s wife, Janet Leigh. Also known as ‘The Clan,’ the group became the focus of inordinate public attention in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Rat Pack ‘broad,’ Angie Dickinson was hot copy for gossip columnists because she had reputedly been a mistress of President Kennedy.

  After some forgettable roles in mostly B-movies, she managed to jettison her contract with Warner Brothers in favor of a similar pact with Universal Studios. The carrot was an opportunity to co-star with Greg. She next starred as the deceitful ‘Sheila Farr’ in the 1964 remake of The Killers, co-starring John Cassavetes, and in his last screen role (and his first as a heavy), the future President, Ronald Reagan.

  Dickinson was thrilled to be cast opposite Greg. ‘Universal said I had to sign a long-term contract if I wanted to play Fran. I thought, ‘What could be worth that chunk of my life? Then I thought Gregory Peck. And I said, “Oh hell – what’s seven years anyway?”

  For his part, Greg was intrigued by Tony Curtis’s comic antics and conjuring tricks. Christened Bernard Schwartz, Curtis was the son of an immigrant tailor and grew up in poverty in a tough section of the Bronx. By age 11, he was a member of a notorious street gang. He began his acting career with a stock company that toured the Catskill Mountain ‘Borscht Circuit’, then appeared briefly on Broadway. Though Hollywood built Curtis up as a star based on his pretty-boy looks, he proved to have more range. In 1957, he surprised critics with his nervously energetic performance in The Sweet Smell of Success as the unprincipled press agent Sidney Falco. Another successful performance in the Roaring Twenties comedy Some Like it Hot (1959) led to many light roles in films of the 1960s including Captain Newman, M.D.

  After the film wrapped, Greg phoned Curtis and suggested that they team up as a comedy duo in future movies. Curtis was polite but later confessed in his memoirs he found the idea of playing a comedy with the stalwart Greg, well, laughable: ‘. . . he wasn’t exactly a comedian,’ Curtis wrote, ‘and people came down hard on him about being stiff and kind of wooden in that film. Gregory either didn’t know or didn’t give a shit what they thought.’

  The tepid reviews by critics did not enhance Greg’s chances of being seen by the public as a vibrant star for the Aquarian Age. In its critique on 23 October 1963, Variety said: ‘Peck’s portrayal of the title figure is characteristically restrained and intelligent. Perhaps his best scene . . . is the one in which he quietly but expressively reacts to Darin’s high-powered histrionics.’ Although some critics perceived the film as being not focused enough, it earned $3,325,000 at the box-office.

  Greg next co-produced and starred in Behold a Pale Horse (1964) a movie about an anti-Fascist hero in the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. The cast included Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif and was directed by Fred Zinnemann. Greg’s interest in the Spanish Civil War dated from his Berkeley days when he was caught up in the fervor of the war and even considered signing up with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. When the movie did poorly, Greg admitted: ‘Yes, that didn’t come off – I think, because we didn’t commit ourselves. We followed the current fashion of posing a question instead of taking a moral stand.’

  Zinnemann added: ‘Behold a Pale Horse was a big flop everywhere in the world except Lebanon. It was a smash hit there because Omar Sharif was born there. My mistake on that picture was assuming that people remembered and still cared about the Spanish Civil War. Apparently they don’t because nobody cared about the picture.’

  Fortunately for Greg’s career, he managed to garner some upbeat reviews. Said the New York Daily News: ‘Greg and Quinn, and other members of the cast, play their roles with complete conviction. Peck’s characterization . . . tops his prize-winning performance in . . . Mockingbird . . .’ Variety concluded: ‘Peck is a worn-out, untidy, broken man who once again surges with force and energy in a characterization that ranks among the better in his long and respected career.’

  Greg next chose Mirage (1965), a diverting thriller. In it, he played a man who believes he has amnesia and starts to retrace his past, and subsequently becomes involved in a murder plot. Walter Matthau (he claimed his name was originally Walter Matuschanskayasky but it could have been one of his tall tales), played a detective hired to unravel the mystery. The film employed the trappings of The Twilight Zone and the villainy of Mission Impossible. Greatly in its favor is the stylish direction of Edward Dmytryk and his use of New York City as a setting.

  Perplexing and never quite believable, Greg sometimes drew a blank when asked about Mirage: He admits: ‘I forget what the hell it was about.’ Critic Leonard Maltin had much the same reaction, calling it ‘An utterly confusing yarn.’

  Despite Mirage’s ho-hum reception, Greg prided himself on sticking to his policy of hiring only top-notch people rather than choosing lesser talents whom he could easily outshine. He was acutely aware his value as a contender depended upon his ability to ‘bounce off ’ his performance against the best. He often cited the tremendous lift given the careers of the actors who played in From Here to Eternity (1953): Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed and Ernest Borgnine.

  With regard to Mirage, Greg said: ‘I think my main contribution to the film was that I hired Walter and virtually launched him on his screen career.’ Indeed, Matthau’s rapid rise was helped in no small way by the beautiful par
t of the detective he had in Mirage. However, Greg exaggerated his role in Matthau’s ascent.

  Matthau, whose gravelly voice and lugubrious bloodhound face is now famous the world over, was an actor whose career could have gone way up or down. He was a chronic smoker, an eccentric eater and a gambler; he claimed to have lost over $5 million through gambling by the time he reached middle age, and once, in the course of one or two weeks, had lost $83,000 just betting on spring training baseball games. His wife Carole Matthau took it all in her stride – except when he paid attention to other women. Once overhearing him ask an upwardly nubile young female what her age might be, Carol cut in: ‘Why don’t you chop off her legs and count the rings?’

  Matthau seemed destined to become one of those character actors like William Demarest and Sydney Greenstreet who are in constant demand, helping to populate Hollywood’s special world, yet never taking center stage. But when Billy Wilder finally recognized his great talent for comedy, he turned in an unbroken string of truly memorable performances in The Fortune Cookie (1966), A Guide for the Married Man (1967) and The Odd Couple (1968).

  In Mirage he played a crafty New York private eye who gets bumped off by the military-industrial establishment for assisting Greg. Someone on the set of Mirage congratulated Matthau on a particularly well-played scene, assuring the struggling actor: ‘You should have a great career in films. You can be a top character actor.’ ‘Character actor, Hell!’ snorted Matthau. ‘I’m going to be a top leading man.’ And lo and behold, he surprised everyone but himself by becoming the first character actor to successfully make the transition to playing the romantic lead.

  For his part, Greg found producing no bed of roses. Having been brought along by a gaggle of flamboyant, extravagant moguls who seemed to value good stories more than the bottom line, he was finding himself bogged down in accounting duties and chronic worry about potential failure. Two pet projects of Greg’s which had to be jettisoned for practical reasons were The Martian Chronicles, again with Robert Mulligan and Alan Pakula, which could have been the Star Wars of 1966 and The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-Ling-a-Ling, a drama about First World War aircraft crews. Ting-a-Ling got as far as a whole film production staff starting to work on location in Switzerland. Costumes were designed, made and fitted. Aircraft of 1917 vintage were adapted and, in some cases, manufactured specifically for the film. Greg and the rest of the company assembled in Switzerland ready for the takeoff – but it never came. After 25 days of solid rain and three weeks of mist, which obscured everything that needed to be photographed, the picture was abandoned.