by Lynn Haney
Greg promptly retrieved his hat from the political ring. He told the press in no uncertain terms: ‘I have had enough of the limelight to last a lifetime. I am not tempted by the idea of political power.’ He wasn’t playing coy. For a man as ferociously private as Greg, who recoiled from strangers invading his personal space and touching him, a man who insisted on controlling how he was perceived by the public, life in the White House fishbowl would have been pure hell.
At the same time, he was immensely drawn to power. While working on The President’s Country (1966), a documentary about Lyndon B Johnson, Greg had an opportunity to get close to the chief executive. The film focused on LBJ’s stomping ground, southwest Texas, showing the President’s attachment to this land and particularly to his ranch; he was born down the road on a farm that had originally been settled by his grandfather. (Produced at a cost of $87,612, The President’s Country was not shown in the United States. Copies of the film were sent to the USSR and to 97 other embassies.)
The Pecks were invited for weekends at the Johnsons’ Texas ranch and must have seen some eye-popping sights while hobnobbing in the Texas Hill Country down by the ‘Purd’nallis’ River. Stories were making the rounds in Washington of LBJ’s terrifying hell-for-leather drives in his Lincoln Continental over his ranch as a back seat full of white-knuckled foreign dignitaries sat frozen while the President tossed out beer cans and shouted his observations about the great American way of life. (Said his assistant Roger Wilkins, ‘Lyndon Johnson filled the air with his tongue.’) Or of Johnson telling a visiting official from India, ‘Hell, man, we don’t worship cows in this country, we eat ’em.’
Veronique and Lady Bird Johnson were natural allies – since they both had the same agenda. Mrs Johnson sought to protect the President from members of the press who might not view LBJ in the same affectionate light in which she saw him. He was cut off from anyone who might find him lacking in the standard niceties.
Greg and Johnson seemed like an odd match, but they appreciated each other. To the backwoods president, Greg represented elegance and dignity. LBJ desperately needed to be associated with both. The respectful awe given John Kennedy was not to be accorded LBJ. He seemed unable to catch the country’s imagination; there was little affection for his homespun personality. More than most presidents, he was the source of constant conjecture, appraisal, and gossip. Except as a political master, LBJ was a hard man to idolize. Perhaps he appeared too much the average person. Americans like in presidents the glamour and refinement that they may not have in themselves.
On Greg’s part, he got a backstage view of the Presidency and a chance to glimpse the troubled mind of the leader of the free world. LBJ was a Shakespearean character, vulgar, cynical, consumed by raw ambition. A good houseguest, Greg never commented on the fact that Johnson was devoid of cultural or literary curiosity and had no interest in filling in these gaps in his education. Philip Gevelin writes in Lyndon B. Johnson and the World that the President ‘cannot remember having read six books all the way through since college. ’Johnson was eternally restless, seldom able to sit through a movie, but instead turning constantly to talk to others in the audience. He liked to sit around the living room in the evening with some cronies, drinking Scotch and rehashing his legislative triumphs. If displeased, he was given to bullyragging, temper outbursts and cruel sarcasm. Since Greg hung out with Sinatra, such histrionics were old hat.
Besides, the two men had many interests in common. Although Johnson’s Great Society vision was being obscured by the frightening headlines about the war in Vietnam, Greg and LBJ were both ardent Democrats. They shared high hopes for the President’s sweeping civil rights, social security, education, and housing programs. It would have been interesting to have watched the two of them huddled in conversation: Greg, with his characteristic ironing-board stiffness and LBJ crowding in close to him. Russell Baker, then White House correspondent for the New York Times, recalled it was hard to keep a physical distance from press-the-flesh Johnson. ‘One of his favorite postures for conversation was leaning down over you and pressing his nose down toward yours until your spine was bent so far back that you couldn’t think of anything but your aching vertebrae.’
As the 1960s progressed, the country continued on its long, strange trip. The terror and madness of Charles Manson, the regret and bitterness of Vietnam sent out signals that the country was teetering on the edge of chaos. Johnson became the focus of tremendous hostility. From the Oval Office, the President only had to look out his window to see anti-war demonstrators with their fists raised in protest shouting: ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’
Amid rising personal unpopularity, and in the face of the lingering war and racial strife at home, LBJ removed himself from political life with words that stunned the nation and the world: ‘I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your president.’
On Johnson’s last day in office, he awarded 20 Americans – including Greg – the Medal of Freedom, the highest civil honor the chief executive can bestow. Medal of Freedom recipients must have made exceptionally meritorious contributions to the security of the national interest of the United States, through world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors. ‘He is a humanitarian to whom Americans are deeply indebted,’ the citation read.
Lyndon B Johnson lived for four years and two days after he left the White House. The Pecks returned to the Johnsons’ Texas ranch after the President left office. Greg was startled to see Johnson’s deterioration; he’d become a broken man. ‘I saw a Shakespearean tragedy enacted before my eyes with a man I knew so well,’ said Greg.
During this period of acclaim in the civic arena, Greg hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to his film career. After Arabesque, he was not seen on the screen again until 1969 and unfortunately the four films released that year did little to further his popularity: The Stalking Moon, MacKenna’s Gold, The Chairman and Marooned.
The Stalking Moon is the best of the three. It is a slow-paced, dark and moody Western, well directed by Robert Mulligan, who had worked so well with Greg on To Kill a Mockingbird. With the resurgence of old films through video, this film may garner new respect as time goes by. In critiquing it for Films in Review, Page Cook commented: ‘The role of the retiring Army scout is ideal for Gregory Peck, whose ability to project moral strength plus compassion is one of the most inspiring things today’s screen affords.’ But the New York Times was more cutting: ‘Peck is so grave and earnest it seems he must be thinking about his duties on the board of The American Film Institute, rather than on survival.’
In MacKenna’s Gold, an overblown and overproduced Western, starring Greg and Omar Sharif, Greg is cast as the marshal who knows where a fabulous fortune in gold is hidden, and Sharif is the villain who wants to get his hands on it. Critics leapt to attack the film, and Western film expert, Brian Garfield, labeled it, ‘The most expensive star-studded two-hour B-movie ever made, a gargantuan dud of absolutely stunning dreadfulness.’
The Chairman was a little far-fetched. Picture if you will Greg behind the Chinese bamboo curtain on a spy mission, with an explosive device sewn into his head ready to be detonated. Look was flat out exasperated with the star: ‘I don’t know what’s been getting into Gregory Peck, but I do know what Gregory Peck’s been getting into: MacKenna’s Gold and The Chairman, a pair of drowsy pictures . . . Will he please read the scripts before getting into more movies like these?’
Next came Marooned (1969), an adventure story about astronauts stuck in space. NASA lent ample assistance to the Marooned production, including location shooting at Houston and Cape Kennedy and a commendation to the producers for the accuracy of the film.
Variety’s preview cited the ‘hokum’ of the film’s ending as fakery that could ‘cool word of mouth enthusiasm.’ Another critic called the timely arrival of the Russian space craft, ‘deux-ex-space machina.’ Pauline Kael faulted the casting: ‘Who in his right
mind would cast the three leads with Gregory Peck, Richard Crenna, and David Janssen, when anybody can see they’re all the same man.’ British writer David Shipman made Greg sound much too dignified to ever be considered for a racy part. He said of Greg: ‘He seems to represent some sort of ethos, the sort of man you’d like as your bank manager or your kid’s tutor . . .’ The box-office was kinder. Marooned was ranked 33rd in earnings for 1970, with $4,100,000 qualifying it at the time as one of Greg’s all-time hits. On Thanksgiving Day 1992, HBO’s late-night ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ provided a comic commentary on Marooned, with jibes like, ‘Hey look they’re wearing jock straps on their heads’ and ‘Yeah and they double as flotation devices.’
Particularly biting was a jab from industry insider Stanley Chase of the Hollywood Reporter. Audiences had reached a saturation point according to Chase, fed up with seeing big names like Gregory Peck in all too repetitious formula roles. ‘There are stars, I believe, who will keep people away from the theater,’ maintained Chase. He claimed that in 1969 there were ‘increasing instances where big names not only failed to perform their ordained magic at the box-office, but where their presence in a film actually discourages people from buying tickets.’
Greg’s next two pictures added to the downward drift of his career: I Walk the Line (1970), in which he played a middle-aged sheriff hot for the body of a moonshiner’s lusty daughter, and Shootout (1971), a remake of the 1934 film The Lone Cowboy and an imitation of True Grit (1969). Reviewing I Walk the Line, Playboy magazine made the interesting comment: ‘Even though members of the Gregory Peck Fan Club may cavil at their hero’s new image as a horny old lawman with a penchant for young stuff, Peck hasn’t had so appealing and warm-blooded a role in years.’
There was no question in the minds of many. Hollywood’s number-one-concerned-citizen needed to lighten up. ‘Pompous!’ sniped Marlon Brando in commenting on his acting colleague. Hubris was the classic defect of doomed characters in Aeschylean drama and Greg always had to be aware of it.
Tuesday Weld, his nubile co-star in I Walk the Line recounted playing a love scene with Greg in which she was in bed wearing a see-through garment. Greg was too inhibited to see through. He sat on the mattress with her, but was careful to keep on his ‘businessman shoes’.
Years later, Rita Gam, Greg’s romantic co-star in Shootout, had drinks with him and kidded: ‘You remember when we were making Shootout and had to be in bed together all morning? We both leaped out of bed at the same time at the coffee break, and when my dresser handed me my bathrobe, you snorted, “A little diplomacy, please.” I always wanted to know if that was because you had seniority.’
With a deep chortle, Greg asked her, ‘Was I being pompous?’
Her reaction. No, just dear. In fact, despite his starchy side, she considered him one yummy hunk of masculinity. Gam came away from their meeting asking herself: ‘Why aren’t there more men like Gregory Peck?’
About this time, Greg was wondering why there weren’t more women around like Audrey Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman. The feminist movement was catching fire by the late 1960s and some of the adherents scared the daylights out of him. In principle, Greg agreed with the feminist agenda. He favored the right to abortion, equal pay and the option to live with a man without benefit of marriage. He just felt a real woman should primp before she wrote her manifestos and burned her bras. What ever happened to leg shaving, perfume dabbing and gardenias in the hair? And to tell the truth, Greg wasn’t much of a liberal when it came to dirty work. Pressed by Coronet magazine, he confessed: ‘I haven’t washed a dish since I was in college and I’m not planning on it, and I’ve never changed a diaper. I think it’s a bad part for a man.’
There was nothing he dreaded more than matching wits with a hardcore feminist. ‘Usually it’s at a cocktail party with a mixed bag of people, and usually it’s crowded and noisy and people don’t know each other well,’ explained Greg. ‘There’s usually a liberated female intellectual with horn-rimmed glasses. They usually have wrought-iron bracelets, and some sort of home-craft jewelry. They have a tendency to wear gunny sacks. They wear their hair very slick and parted in the middle. They usually graduated from one of the Eastern girls’ colleges, and I’ve found myself pinned in the corner by these liberated females and I tell you this terrifies me. But they want to get right to the point – no fooling around, no frills, no preliminaries, no small talk. They realize it’s a fleeting encounter and, by God, they’re going to get it out of you, what it is that makes you tick. Well, I never have told them, and I’m not about to. I don’t know whether they’re man-haters or whether man is the enemy with them, but it just isn’t a very friendly way to get to know somebody.’
Greg was given an opportunity to unbend. Jack Benny invited him to perform on his new variety show. There he was singing ‘Steamboat Whistles Blowing’ as one-third of a potential top-40 group called Two Bushels and a Peck and doing the old soft-shoe. A reporter for TV watched the dress rehearsal. He said: ‘I have never seen a performer so nervous. He seemed absolutely terrified of the studio audience, and finally relaxed only when he heard the audience laughing.’
On the home front, Jonathan was casting about trying to find a career that suited him. Stephen, next in line, was less of a perfectionist than Jonathan, more conciliatory, and more emotionally stable. A graduate of Northwestern University, Stephen had been a US Army artillery officer in Vietnam. ‘He was in combat the whole time,’ Greg said. ‘I was sleepless until he came back. I see no dichotomy in love for my son and the fact that I admire him for serving his country in Vietnam, and my philosophical objection to our whole policy there.’ Carey, popular and more relaxed than his father, studied government at Georgetown University. Following in Jonathan’s footsteps, Carey also joined the Peace Corps, going to Senegal and working on sewerage disposal projects. ‘He’s becoming,’ Greg joked, ‘one of the great latrine specialists of our time.’
To protect the two younger teenage children, Tony and Cecilia, from the shallow values of the Los Angeles movie set, Greg and Veronique enrolled them in Aiglon, a first-class British boarding school set high in Swiss Alps, 4,000 feet above the Rhone Valley. The lure for many globe-trotting families is the ‘portable diploma’ or International Baccalaureate (IB) which is well regarded by universities in most countries.
Greg explained that he and Veronique waited until the children were 14 because ‘we wanted to enjoy their childhood.’ ‘We shipped them off, with their consent, I must say,’ said Greg, ‘to get them out of Beverly Hills.’ He added: ‘I think we did the right thing. Aiglon has an English headmaster. It is a bit like Gordonstoun, though not quite so severe. They do have cold showers in the morning and plenty of outdoor sports. They also study very hard and learn French and German – international bunch of kids.’
‘They’re fine kids,’ Greg said of his brood, ‘but they don’t talk to me much about life.’ He might have given a clue why they avoided confiding in him when he said: ‘Money doesn’t mean anything to them.’ Or, at another time, ‘My kids didn’t have it as tough as I did when I was young.’
Of course they didn’t. The impact of the Depression is readily identifiable in those of Greg’s generation. They turn off unused lights, save pennies and nickels in a jar and avoid throwing food away. ‘I have a personal coming-of-age test,’ said Greg. ‘When my boys reach the age of 18, I give them each $50. It’s up to them to go as far away as they can for as long as possible to see if they can stand on their own feet. When I was 18, I got from California to New York City on $50. But so far, the long-distance record for my sons is California to Mexico. Maybe $50 doesn’t go as far as it used to.’
For one thing, the Peck children had perhaps heavier baggage than their old man. Stephen Humphrey Bogart, once wrote: ‘The heaviest thing I have ever had to carry is my father’s fame.’
Veteran actor Sam Jaffe noted: ‘I’ve lived with celebrities and with stars, great people, great directors, and I can tell you th
at the children always have to suffer. You just cannot live up to the reputation of a parent who becomes successful. To have to follow in those footsteps is a very big handicap.’
As the 1960s came to an end, Jonathan joined the speechwriting staff of John V Tunney of California who was making a run for the US Senate. A 36-year-old politician, Tunney cavorted with the Kennedys and was very much in their style. His father, prizefighter Gene Tunney, was a legend in the sport. And Tunney, like Jonathan, suffered by comparison. ‘The lightweight son of a heavyweight champ,’ he was called. Still, his family fame and his Kennedy connections made his campaign a hot draw for young people. Two women who would have a deep impact on Jonathan’s life also joined the staff. Their names were Nancy Stesin and Connie Farrow.
‘You’ll never guess who that guy is,’ Jamie Auchincloss, half-brother of Jackie Kennedy said to Nancy Stesin. Auchincloss was motioning to Jonathan who was sitting at a desk typing. ‘That’s Gregory Peck’s son.’ Auchincloss saw a kindred soul in Jonathan because they both struggled under the weight of a famous name. ‘You have to watch what you do,’ said Auchincloss. ‘For example, you’re careful not to have a couple of drinks and drive fast because if you’re picked up for speeding, your name gets in the papers and it reflects on the family.’
Nancy looked over at Jonathan and was immediately smitten. ‘He was gorgeous,’ she said. ‘I was just drooling.’ After they got to know each other, she fell hard for his dark sexy looks, deep voice and athletic body. Soon they were intimate. Because of his extraordinary resemblance to his father, she found the experience unsettling. She admitted: ‘It was hard to distinguish between loving Jonathan and not thinking about who his father was.’