by Lynn Haney
Jonathan lived in a guest room in a wing of Greg’s house in Brentwood. Although he had a separate entrance to his quarters, it struck Nancy as odd that a man in his mid-20s wouldn’t want to strike out on his own. At the same time, she enjoyed her visits to the Peck household and observing the relationship of Greg and Veronique. ‘They did their dance,’ said Nancy, in describing a couple very caught up with each other. ‘Greg could be cold to Jonathan and his other children. His loyalty was to Veronique. She ruled the roost.’
Nancy called any mistakes Greg might have made with Jonathan ‘benign neglect’; he was too focused on his busy life to stand back for a while and let his son take center stage. But the closer she became to Jonathan, the more she realized how difficult his life was. ‘He was a C+ or B person in an A+ world,’ said Nancy. ‘Not that he wasn’t intelligent. He just didn’t have the goal direction of the hard chargers.’ For example, some years before, Veronique’s half-brother, Cornelius, had moved in with the Pecks along with Veronique’s mother. Cornelius went to Beverly Hills high school, then to Harvard. Now he was studying to become an orthopedic surgeon. Nancy sensed that although Jonathan liked Cornelius, he felt he was the kind of high-achieving son his father wanted. Although Greg had floundered in science classes while at Berkeley, he always liked the idea of being a doctor. ‘He couldn’t take it,’ Nancy said of the unspoken comparison. ‘I don’t think Greg meant any harm to Jonathan, but a lot of harm was done.’
Although Nancy loved Jonathan and wanted to marry him, she gradually realized he was emotionally immature for someone in his mid-twenties and ‘didn’t know boundaries as far as women were concerned.’ At work one day, he told her he had a crush on the campaign manager’s wife. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Nancy told him. ‘She’s not available.’ Then she found out Jonathan was sleeping with Connie Farrow, an intensely bright Berkeley graduate who also worked on the campaign. But what really caused an upheaval in their relationship was when Jonathan knocked on the door of Nancy’s apartment one Friday night. When she didn’t answer right away, he walked across the courtyard and rang the bell of a young woman who was a friend of hers. After a brief conversation, he said: ‘Would you like to have dinner with me? Then, maybe, we could spend the weekend together.’
‘You know I’m Nancy’s friend,’ the girl said outraged, slamming the door.
After Nancy’s anger subsided, she decided she would simply have to be a loving friend to Jonathan rather than look upon him as a potential husband. In contemplating the incident with her neighbor in the courtyard, she said: ‘As mad as I was with him, I still understood. He was very, very lonely. It was heartbreaking. He was so alone.’ Now that their relationship was on another level, Jonathan told Nancy about a woman he dated whom he used to bring back to the Peck house when nobody was there. The woman insisted on making love in Greg’s bed.
Nancy’s role as ‘loving friend’ came quickly into play when Tunney campaign worker Connie Farrow committed suicide. A deeply disturbed Jonathan came to Nancy for solace. But there was little she could do. He told her: ‘Connie called me the night she killed herself but she couldn’t reach me.’
As the months went by, Jonathan persisted in his state of emotional upheaval. ‘His reaction to her death was one of absolute devastation,’ said Nancy. ‘I don’t think he ever got over it.’ Nancy voiced her concerns to Madame Passani, Veronique’s mother. Madame Passani was a straight shooter who smoked Gauloise cigarettes and took a genuine interest in Jonathan. Looking for a solution, the two women visited Nancy’s psychiatrist. His questions only pointed up the severity of the situation. Nancy concluded Jonathan was ‘an accident waiting to happen.’
Shortly thereafter, Jonathan settled on a career direction. ‘Politics was exciting,’ he said of the Tunney campaign, ‘but what I found more to my liking was working with the press.’ He added enthusiastically, ‘I made up my mind to get a job as a news man.’ So he moved to New York and worked for United Press International in New York for 18 months.
During this time, Greg decided to produce, rather than act in, a modest movie about nine anti-war resisters who staged one of the era’s most dramatic protests, dousing a bonfire of draft records with homemade napalm at a Selective Service Center in Catonsville, Maryland, burning 387 files of potential draftees. The play The Catonsville Nine was written by ex-Jesuit Daniel Berrigan who with his brother Philip, also a former priest, helped inspire a generation of anti-war dissenters.
As a writer as well as a protester, Daniel Berrigan saw the dramatic possibilities inherent in the situation: ‘The air of the court was charged with grandeur, with damnation, with bathos,’ he wrote of the trial. ‘Spite, blindness, danger, gentleness, the interplay of wit and dim wit, an overriding sense that here, in one place almost against our will, by choices that bore us headlong, the tragic ingredients of the war were being pressed into a single concentrate. Was it named hemlock?’
In Greg’s eyes the Berrigan brothers, the nuns and teachers involved in the 1968 destruction of draft files in Catonsville, MD, were patriots and firebrands cut from the same cloth as early American colonists. ‘The sanctity of human lives, both Vietnamese and American, is more sacred to them than the laws they broke,’ he said.
Greg’s production of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1972) was replete with human ironies and odd coincidences. The play was originally produced for the New York stage by Leland Hayward, Greg’s first agent. Assisting on the film was Greg’s son, Stephen, a 25-year-old combat veteran by this time, then studying at the University of Southern California. Greg noted: ‘He came back safely, thank God. But he said it was the most dehumanizing experience of his life and we didn’t belong over there.’
Greg wanted a quality movie. He had no intention of making popular entertainment, and he set a low budget of $300,000, half of his own money, the rest donated by friends. Preserving the drama format, the movie was shot in just eight days at the old David O Selznick studio. Sneak previews in college settings such as Berkeley and Santa Barbara, California, provided encouragement, but in Covina, California, 200 people walked out, some muttering obscenities.
Greg recalled he was almost literally carrying cans of film around town, looking for distribution. ‘I thought to take it to Robert Evans and Frank Yablans, because they had two enormous hits, The Godfather and Love Story. They agreed to see it. Bob Evans was ecstatic. He said: “This is shameful, this is a blunder of historic proportions. Everyone must see this picture,” and Yablans said, “Not with my Godfather money.” ’ Finally Don Rugoff’s Cinema V distributed the film for a few screenings in only five cities, after which it folded.
Greg noted wryly: ‘As Sam Goldwyn said, if people don’t come to the box-office, you can’t stop them.’
Greg never regretted making it: ‘You see, I’ve come to love the process of putting a film together, because as a producer I meddle and take part and contribute and have more to do with the whole operation than obviously I could have as only an actor.’
The film had mixed reviews. Said New York magazine: ‘The Trial of the Catonsville Nine works on many levels, as a courtroom drama, as a contemporary document, as a statement of conscience, and as a challenge to your own courage.’ TV Guide said: ‘The play itself doesn’t hold up well on screen, with the actors seeming to do more preaching than acting.’
Soon after making the film, Greg learned that his public opposition to the war had earned him a place on Nixon’s infamous ‘enemies list,’ along with Jane Fonda, Paul Newman and other Liberals. A previous grudge could also have helped put Greg on the list. The President might have remembered Greg’s vocal support of Helen Gahagan Douglas, wife of actor Melvyn Douglas and a tireless New Deal Democrat, who ran unsuccessfully against Nixon in 1950 for the US Senate. In one of the nastiest campaigns on record, Nixon characterized Douglas as ‘soft on Communism.’ In fact, he accused her of being a conduit through which decisions made by Josef Stalin in the Kremlin flowed to the US Congress. In any case, th
e distinction of making the ‘enemies list’ caused wary backers of Greg’s projects in Hollywood to renege on a handshake agreement to make three films.
In Europe the film was well received, and many cities praised the free atmosphere in America which allowed the film to be made without censorship.
Daniel Berrigan, who was in the audience at Cannes when it showed there, received a standing ovation. ‘I’d screened the film for Dan Berrigan the week he got out of jail,’ reflected Peck. ‘It was an experience to show a man a film that he’s written, that’s about himself, that is going to make him and his views known perhaps to the whole world. I wanted him to like it and he did, thank God!’
At this point, Jonathan had returned to Los Angeles and found a job at KNX radio, a CBS affiliate. ‘I’m 28, single, have a small apartment and I’m delighted to be working at KNX,’ he told reporter Hal Evans. ‘Someday I hope to do on-the-air work as a field reporter and anchorman.’
Nancy Stesin ran into Jonathan one night at a Baskin Robbins in West Hollywood. He invited her for a hamburger and told her about his apartment. ‘He was so proud of it,’ Nancy said. ‘And boasted it had a waterbed.’ They returned to his place and made love. The spark between them was still there.
Once they started seeing each other again, however, Nancy realized Jonathan’s problems had deepened. He didn’t drink excessively or do drugs; nonetheless, he was a lost soul. ‘It wasn’t hubris. It was a lack of ego,’ she said. ‘He had no self-confidence.’ Plus, he was still tormented by the suicide of Connie Farrow.
Almost three years separate Shootout and Greg’s subsequent feature Billy Two Hats (1973), also a Western but considerably more interesting, although not destined to do much better business. It was made entirely in Israel, where the rugged landscapes easily pass for the Wild West, and it presents Greg in his first real non-glamorous character acting – as a bewhiskered old bandit of Scottish birth and brogue.
Panned by the critics, Billy Two Hats quickly disappeared from view. Greg worried. ‘I made four or five turkeys in a row before I realized that all I was accomplishing was going downhill with pictures like Shootout and Billy Two Hats, Marooned and MacKenna’s Gold.’ Now 58, he tried to stay upbeat, hoping that his career hadn’t permanently tanked: ‘People remember us for our best work, thankfully,’ mused Greg. ‘No one comes up and says, “I hated you in I Walk the Line.”’
For his next entry as a producer, Greg chose to make a film of Robin Lee Graham’s adventures sailing a 23-foot sloop around the world. The Californian was a teenager when he undertook the voyage and later put it into book form. The celluloid result, The Dove (1974) is a beautiful travelogue, thanks largely to the superb Swedish cinematographer Sen Nykvist – but it is short of excitement. Although it didn’t do well on its American release, it broke house records in South Africa and Japan and some other parts of the world.
Nancy Stesin was working at the Israeli consulate. Since Billy Two Hats was the first American Western made in Israel, Greg was in and out of the consulate for meetings related to the film. Greg and Nancy talked on several occasions. She showed him a screenplay treatment she’d written about herself, Jonathan and Connie Farrow. The story revolved around three young idealists working on a political campaign and one of them commits suicide. The character based on Jonathan was a very unhappy person. Greg became intensely interested and asked to read it. ‘I knew it was amateurish,’ said Nancy. ‘And I realized Greg didn’t have a professional interest in the project. But I could see he was worried about Jonathan and his reason for reading it was to try and figure out what was bothering him.’
Increasingly troubled, Jonathan moved back in with Greg and Veronique in Brentwood. At 30, he didn’t have a spouse, a child, a house or a realistic career plan – and it bothered him. His goal was to be a television news anchorman but he was getting started late in the game. He lacked the sterling journalistic credentials as well as the hard-charger mindset required to land a top spot in television. Large numbers of journalists constantly angled for these prestigious and big salaried jobs. His brother Stephen concluded: ‘Jonathan’s greatest problem was that he set goals which were too high. Part of the reason he set such high goals was that he was the son of a famous man.’
At this point, Jonathan started seeing Micki Rosten (now Katz). Like Nancy, she was impressed by his extraordinary good looks. Micki also appreciated his exquisite clothes and manners. ‘My mother loved him,’ she said, adding he projected the air of someone ‘to the manor born.’ But he also seemed sad and he gave her the impression that his father couldn’t communicate with him very well and treated him like a lackey. Upon reflection today, Rosten realizes that Jonathan was depressed at the time. It wasn’t that he wasn’t loved. ‘He had a disease,’ she said by way of explanation. When Jonathan started seeing a recently divorced woman with two small children, Micki ended their relationship.
Jonathan landed a job at KCOY, a television station in Santa Maria, a small town about 100 miles north of the coastal city of Santa Barbara. He was a rookie on-air news reporter. His ‘beat’ was the entire city of Santa Barbara. In Santa Maria, he rented a $150-a-month apartment. He was frequently strapped for cash. Sometimes Greg helped him out. In fact, Greg offered to pay for psychiatric sessions. Jonathan went a few times and let it drop.
KCOY was a small station that made big demands on its reporters. ‘I just heard this,’ a local news manager at a station like KCOY would say. ‘Are you on your way?’ If it’s a fire, ‘Did you get any big flames?’ Jonathan was required to turn in three stories a day. ‘No story? Well write it as best you can.’ The pressure was incredible. He had first to line up the stories – build up contacts with police, the town’s clergymen, the hospital and the University of California and at the same time keep his finger on the pulse of the Santa Barbara social and artistic set. Bloody crimes, fires and accidents, teary-eyed victims, cute kids and animals, street protests, whatever, he was expected to be on the spot ahead of the competition. Then he had to set up his camera and tripod and report and film. Come hell or high water, he had to be sure the three stories were on the Santa Maria bus at 1 p.m. every day. It’s not a bad job if you have tremendous energy and thrive on pressure.
Incapacitated by depression and anxiety, Jonathan was sinking fast. On top of that, his father didn’t fully understand his situation. A stringer is a low man on the totem pole. He has to justify his existence every day.
‘Can’t you tell them you need some help,’ asked Greg, ‘that they must find you a legman? That they should get someone to write for you, scrounge for you, or just work the camera?’
‘No,’ said Jonathan. ‘They won’t. This is small station on a budget.’
By the summer of 1975, Greg was long overdue for an extended period of leisure. As was the custom of Greg and Veronique, the couple flew to Cap Ferrat for the summer. Here Greg embraced the good life at its most sublime: Mediterranean food, bouquets of flowers, the sun on his back, swimming, taking strolls and listening to music
Greg also kept up his heavy schedule of compulsive fast reading, delving into Dostoyevsky and Trollope and devouring reams of newspapers. Veronique believed Greg could keep so many interests going because he ‘has intense concentration. He can focus totally on one thing, then shut it off and go to something else.’ The difficulty with children – even grown ones – is that they need a parent’s attention when they need it, not necessarily when the parent has time.
Then came the nightmare phone call. Jonathan had shot himself in the head with a .44 rifle. The news ripped Greg’s heart in two. His 31-year-old son was gone. There was no note.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Picking up the Pieces
‘It’s just the worst thing that can happen to anyone. It’s on your mind every day. You never get over a thing like that. Something will remind you that he ought to be here, and he isn’t, that he impulsively took the wrong way out.’
Gregory Peck on Jonathan’s death
&nb
sp; Greg and Greta buried Jonathan in a private ceremony at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills. After 21 years apart, they were now united in profound grief. Veronique and the four surviving children shared their anguish.
Although there was no indication of foul play, Greta never believed Jonathan committed suicide. ‘She thought it was an accident,’ said John Bell. Years later, she confided to Tommy Hinkkanen that she suspected he had been murdered. After all, Jonathan bought groceries the day he died, she reasoned. Why would he do that if he were planning to leave this world? And the absence of a note. Didn’t that say something?
Greg accepted the county coroner’s report. Death occurred at 3.30 in the afternoon. It was the result of a massive skull fracture. A .44 caliber revolver lay close to the body. When Jonathan failed to submit his news stories to KCOY-TV, a co-worker came by his apartment and discovered the bloody scene.
Every suicide is a mystery. Jonathan left many people wondering why such a decent, kind, handsome, and fortunate young man would kill himself.
Somebody likened his departure to the Richard Cory poem by Edward Arlington Robinson.
Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
We people of the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
‘Good morning’ and glittered when he walked.
The poem goes on to say: ‘we thought he was everything to make us wish we were in his place.’ And then: ‘Richard Cory, one calm summer night, / Went home and put a bullet through his head.’
In cases of death by accident, illness, old age, alcoholism, and homicide, the family knows what killed the deceased. They have something specific on which to focus their feelings of guilt or anger. With suicide, however, loved ones often become preoccupied with wondering how the suicide could have happened. In large part, Greg blamed himself. All those years of striving, the separations from the children while he was in Europe, now yielded bitter fruit. Echoing the situation of many movie star parents, he admitted: ‘When you’re working you have to get out at five in the morning. When you come home at the end of the day you are too tired to talk to your children. You can’t give them the time they need and all you really have to give them is time. If not you lose them.’