Gregory Peck- A Charmed Life

by Lynn Haney

  Though dapper and lighthearted on screen, Cary Grant had never been truly happy. Hungry for love, he had romanced, married and broken up with a notable number of women – plus a few men. (He was reputed to have had liaisons with Howard Hughes and Randolph Scott.) Now he needed a safe harbor. So Greg took great pride in helping play cupid to Grant and his last wife, Barbara Harris.

  One evening in Nice, the Pecks and the Sinatras were having dinner with Grant at the Chaumier restaurant. Grant, who was staying at the Monaco Palace with Prince Rainier said: ‘I’ve never had such a good time, although I’m kind of lonely, seeing you four . . . ’

  Greg replied, ‘You’re Cary Grant, and you don’t have a girlfriend?’

  Grant said: ‘Well, no, I don’t.’

  ‘Isn’t there anybody?’

  ‘Well,’ sighed Grant. ‘There’s a woman in London. She does public relations for one of the leading hotels. I like her, but I don’t know whether she likes me. I’ve taken her to dinner twice.’

  À la General MacArthur, Greg insisted he fetch the woman forthwith. ‘Get her down here,’ Greg commanded. ‘We’ll come back here tomorrow night.’ Grant followed orders and dispatched the plane Fabergé loaned him to fetch her. The next night Grant arrived at the Chaumier with Barbara Harris in tow. A Londoner in her 20s, she was slender and athletic, with beautifully chiseled features and intelligent, sharp eyes. The couple spent two days at the Pecks’ villa in Cap Ferrat, then moved into the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo.

  Waiving their 47-year age difference, Grant and Harris let nature take its course. They were married in 1981. Greg said: ‘I think Cary’s last seven or eight years were his happiest.’

  Greg’s friendship with Sinatra ripened in their autumn years. When Sinatra was tight with the Kennedys and raising hell with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr, Greg didn’t see that much of him. One day Variety columnist Amery Archerd ventured to ask Greg why he didn’t become a member of the Rat Pack. Greg laughed, ‘Bad casting!’

  In actuality, the Las Vegas based clan kept round-the-clock hours as they cavorted with hookers, tossed punches at reporters, gambled excessively and knocked back booze. It was not a good scene for a middle-aged man who liked gardening and reading and was determined to stay faithful to his wife.

  But as Sinatra mellowed and settled into a stable marriage with Barbara Marx (ex-wife of Zeppo Marx, the straight man in the Marx Brothers team), he began seeing himself as a humanitarian and a statesman. Although he endeared himself in many quarters by his phenomenal bequests of money, Sinatra couldn’t shake his blue-collar roots. ‘When he spoke to you, it was like a New Yorker did – dese, dem and dose,’ said radio and TV personality Joe Franklin, a longtime Sinatra acquaintance. ‘His speaking was entirely different from his singing. When he sang, it was absolute poetry.’

  To compound his difficulties, there was the gangster factor. He enjoyed rubbing elbows with John Gotti’s mentor, Aniello Dellacroce and Jimmy ‘The Weasel’ Fratinanno. Surveying the crowd at his best friend Jilly Rizzo’s saloon on West 52nd Street in Manhattan, Sinatra cracked: ‘There’s about 43 indictments right at the bar!’

  When confronted with Mafia photographs such as the one of him standing near Paul Castellano with his arm around Carlo Gambino, Sinatra acted as if he was just being a good sport with some fans. By producing pictures of himself with a congressman, with the Prime Minister of Israel, with the President of Egypt or with Gregory Peck, he balanced out the unsavory impression.

  And, in 1981 when Frank faced the five-member Gaming Control Commission, which has the final say on all casino licensing matters in Nevada, Greg stood up for him. How could somebody be a friend of pillar-of-integrity Gregory Peck and cavort with the Mafia at the same time? His support prompted Tonight Show host, Johnny Carson, to crack wise: ‘I just got word Gregory Peck was nominated for an Oscar for his performance at the Frank Sinatra hearing.’

  Syndicate men looking to chill out gravitated to Frank Sinatra’s compound in Palm Springs. Headline grabbers such as Mickey Cohen, Sam Giancana, Joe Fischetti, Johnny Roselli, Johnny Formosa, Skinny D’Amato and Doc Stacher swam and played gin rummy at Sinatra’s compound. The Pecks and other members of the Hollywood elite were also houseguests. Did the two crowds mesh? Imagine the small talk. Peck to Giancana: ‘Sam, where’d you get those snazzy spats?’

  One also wonders what Greg and Veronique thought of Sinatra’s nightclub performances, which were filled with crude racial jokes and bigotry. Appearing with Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald one night, Sinatra tried to amuse his audience: ‘The Polacks are deboning the colored people and using them for wet suits.’ Looking at Basie’s all black band, he said, ‘I’d publicly like to thank the NAACP for this chess set they gave me.’ He called Johnny Mathis the ‘African Queen’, and used to complain about Sammy Davis Jr leaving watermelon rinds in his dressing room.

  Introducing the sledgehammer set into the privileged lives of his show business friends and charity organizers was a Sinatra specialty. He brought the Establishment a touch of notoriety, a hint of the sinister. Although ordinarily they saw only the good Frank, who lavished presents upon them, sang at their benefits, and championed their causes, they occasionally glimpsed the loutish Frank.

  Bruce Fessier, a journalist with the Desert Sun in Las Vegas, kept an eye on the two entertainers. ‘Peck didn’t own a home here, but he stayed often with the Sinatras, and I recall that influenced my opinion of Frank Sinatra when I moved here.

  ‘I had heard the Kitty Kelly-type stories about Sinatra and they made me wary. But when I learned Atticus Finch, Peck’s character in To Kill a Mockingbird, was one of Sinatra’s best friends, I gained respect for him. Peck later told me he considered Sinatra a great humanitarian. And I admired Peck’s devotion to humanitarian causes.

  ‘I’ll never forget attending a film tribute to Sinatra at the Palm Springs Desert Museum. Frank and Barbara were sitting with Peck and his wife, Veronique, at dinner. Then Peck stood up and people began to clap. Soon it grew into a standing ovation and Peck looked bewildered. But he composed himself and, with pure theatrical class, took a bow and made an exit. To the bathroom.’

  Greg was in awe of Sinatra’s talent. And of course, the two men went way back. An old friend is, by definition, irreplaceable. One year apart in age, they started out in New York about the same time. Then they both fell in love with Ava Gardner – each in his own way. But most of all, Greg liked Sinatra because he was fun. In the rarefied world in which they moved, spontaneity was hard to come by. Everything was planned. With Old Blue Eyes, you never knew what was going to happen. Greg recalled Sinatra once met his train at a deserted station near Monte Carlo and lugged his bags.

  As Father Peck, pastoral counselor to the stars, Greg offered Sinatra advice. Some he didn’t take. Such as when Sinatra got hopping mad at the Kennedys after they dropped him because of his mob affiliations and he started supporting Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Greg did his best to bring him back to the Liberal fold.

  Their relationship mystified Kirk Douglas who had known Sinatra for 40 years and felt he hardly knew him at all. At an 80th birthday party for Sinatra, hosted by George and Joleen Schlatter, Douglas recalled that as the small group sat sipping before-dinner drinks, he watched Sinatra and Greg in intense conversation. ‘I don’t ever remember talking with Frank for more than a minute or two at a time. Maybe Greg really knows Frank, I thought. I don’t.’

  Socializing with Sinatra was not without its liabilities. For example, in June 1978 Greg and Veronique and Frank and Barbara joined the star-studded guests for the wedding of Princess Caroline of Monaco to Phillippe Junot.

  The bride wore white. The groom was nervous. The press corps of 200 reporters and photographers was kept at a considerable distance from the ceremony outside the security-tight palace. During the festive wedding week, the paparazzi made nuisances of themselves bribing taxi drivers, bartenders, shopkeepers, barbers, managers, hotel concierges, and anyone else who might be a
ble to tell them anything at all about the wedding.

  Grace’s old friend Rupert Allen described Grace the night before preparing for ‘the luncheon of the century in that part of the world.’ She was up until 4 a.m. trying to figure out how to seat everybody at the celebration. There were Royals and there were heads of state and protocol was a nightmare. Tables were set up under the trees on the square and in front of the palace. The whole area had, of course, been roped off from the general public.

  After the ceremony, before going to lunch, Allen was standing under the palace portico next to the Pecks and the Sinatras while Old Blue Eyes’s bodyguard was dispatched to make certain that the coast was clear of photographers. When he came back to report that all was not good, Frank and Barbara decided they would not stay for lunch. So Greg and Veronique decided they wouldn’t stay either. They had already attended a pre-wedding luncheon for the couple thrown by David Niven.

  Allen was incensed. ‘Sinatra’s bodyguard gave him the wrong advice. That didn’t excuse anything but it explains why he didn’t stay. But how could Gregory Peck and his wife leave also? I can’t understand anyone doing that to someone like Grace. How did they do that to Grace?’

  It is highly unlikely Greg would want to offend Princess Grace. He bristled at the way the powers that be in Monaco treated her. From his summer home in Cap Ferrat, Greg had had an insider’s view. He felt the Academy Award winning actress had too much talent to spend her days standing in reception lines shaking hands like the Princess in Roman Holiday.

  What really rankled for him occurred later in the early 1980s when he decided to produce and star in a new movie version of Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth. It had already been written as a play and movie by Sidney Howard and filmed by William Wyler back in 1936 starring Greg’s idol Walter Huston. The story concerns a middle-aged automobile manufacturer traveling in Europe in the 1920s who falls in love with a Bohemian woman living above the harbor in Naples. ‘It’s a glorious part,’ said Greg. ‘One of the few I’m not too old to play.’ His dream was to have Princess Grace play opposite him.

  In negotiating for the rights, Greg invested time, money, heart and soul. ‘It was terribly complicated,’ said Greg at the time, ‘because both Sinclair Lewis and Sidney Howard have many heirs and that meant getting involved with several sets of lawyers. It took a full year just to settle the legal rights.’

  In 1982, when both Greg and Princess Grace were in New York at the same time, he ran the original film for her. ‘She loved it and had a little cry,’ he said. ‘If she were interested, I had in mind to offer a million dollars to her Monaco Red Cross to help her justify it. But she said she didn’t feel the people of Monaco would understand if she made the film.’ He realized her life was not her own.

  Often seeing Princess Grace socially on the Riviera, Greg knew how miserable she was confined to her gilded cage. And he realized after screening Dodsworth for her she was not about to break the bars. After her fatal car accident, he recalled her as a sad woman, ‘who got taken in by those slickers in Monaco and used.’

  While the Dodsworth movie didn’t materialize, another project came to fruition that pleased him immensely. In his first dramatic TV role, which aired in 1982, he played Abraham Lincoln in The Blue and the Gray. By now his collection of books on Lincoln had grown to over 1,000 and his appreciation of Lincoln had not diminished. Said Greg, ‘I always wanted to play him and I finally got the chance.’

  At 63, he was ten years older than Lincoln when the President was assassinated. And now that the moment had come to play him, he was determined to give the role his all: ‘I must have recited the Gettysburg Address 500 times outside on the lawn, among the trees, and to anyone who would listen,’ he said, laughing.

  Few people looked more presidential than Greg with his silver hair, horn-rimmed glasses and courtly air, so it is understandable that at the ripe age of 71, he would again play the Chief of State. Titled Amazing Grace and Chuck (1987), the film is an antinuclear fable, the story of a young boy’s crusade against atomic weapons. When producer/writer David Field and director Mike Newell approached Greg to do the low-budget film to be made for a mere $5 million, he was persuaded because the anti-nuclear theme fit with his liberal, activist politics. He swore: ‘I would give up everything I do and everything I have if I could make a significant difference in getting the nuclear arms race reversed. It is the number one priority in my life. My work was the main thing in my life for a long time; now I’m beginning to think a little more about what the future will hold and what kind of world my kids will live in.’

  Greg found the script of Amazing Grace and Chuck quite touching, yet refreshingly unsentimental. ‘I choked up a little at many of those scenes.’ In developing his part as the President, he decided to make him pretty much like himself. He’s a Californian, he went to Berkeley, but instead of going to New York to become an actor, he runs for office. ‘I thought a lot about it,’ he said. ‘I thought about Johnson, I thought about Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, Ford. And I threw ’em all out. To try to determine what kind of a fellow I wanted, I began to do what I almost always do – to sketch in a biography.’

  Greg might just as well be speaking of himself as of the character he plays when he says: ‘I knew he had some amount of steel and his backbone to get there. I knew that he had to play some politics to get that job. I knew he didn’t get there by preaching disarmament constantly. I knew that he was a fellow used to authority. Didn’t have to raise his voice very often to get things done.’

  While most reviewers thought Greg played the US President with force and dignity, they panned the film. Variety went so far as to call it ‘the camp classic of anti-nuke genre.’

  To help the struggling picture, Greg beat the bushes – and the freeways. When a Los Angeles theater owner was shipped a defective print, Greg jumped in his 1963 Bentley, picked up a copy of the film he had loaned to his neighbor, Michael Jackson, and delivered it personally to the amazed exhibitor. On the Tonight Show the actor got a roaring ovation. ‘It’s like being with a rock star,’ said one bemused reporter. ‘What has this old Jasper got?’

  Commanding presence. That’s what. Seventy-one years old with impressive height, silver hair, broad shoulders and the stride of a born leader, Greg looked like the American ideal of the President. He dazzled the crowds in a Denver suburb when he got out of a long gray limousine. They acted as if they’d seen a ghost and then burst into startled shouts. Here was one of the last, great male stars of the Hollywood studio system, back in the limelight. As he waded through the throng, the famous smile whisking like a beacon from face to face, hands reached out to touch him. ‘Oh my God, it’s really him!’ squealed a white-haired woman. ‘I’ve loved him all my life!’ A teenage girl gushed: ‘Wow, he is really beautiful! Dumb me, I thought he was dead!’

  In 1987, Greg was among the cultural and scientific luminaries invited to Moscow for then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s forum ‘For a Nuclear-Free World and the Survival of Mankind.’ He was criticized for taking part in the gathering, which included Yoko Ono, Kris Kristofferson and Graham Greene as well as numerous Nobel Prize winners. In a secret dispatch, US diplomats dismissed the gathering as a stunt which ‘produced little of lasting interest or value.’

  While conservatives scoffed at Greg’s activist activities, some Americans thought the world would be improved considerably if Greg replaced Reagan in the White House. But the problem with stars turning presidential is that they are judged by their movies. (Think of Reagan playing opposite a chimp in Bedtime for Bonzo, 1951.) Addressing the subject in a letter to the Los Angeles Times Examiner, Bob Nicholson of Northridge, California, wrote: ‘March 1983 it is time to seriously consider what man in our nation is best qualified to be our next president.’ He then went on to analyze Greg’s role in The Chairman (1969). ‘He exemplified perfect statesmanship, he displayed a commanding manner, blended with humility, the highest mental and athletic ability in carrying on a complex, high-level debate
with the Chinese leader, while playing championship level ping pong with one hand. I kept saying to my wife, “that’s our man! That’s our man!”

  ‘Paul Newman is her choice. She thinks Gregory should only be vice president. She has a weakness for blue eyes. I could go for Paul too, except that Tennessee Williams once sullied his image. Every time I have seen Gregory, he has been a good guy. Paul has a latent tendency toward ne’er-do-wellness. Even in The Verdict he was a reformed alcoholic. He can’t get away from his past. Paul could probably best Gregory on a racetrack, but Gregory would wipe him out in ping pong.’

  In imagining a competition between Charlton Heston and Greg, a columnist for Nation magazine decided: ‘Peck has nothing to compare with Heston’s Moses, although his portrayal of Douglas MacArthur cannot be taken lightly. As a negative, Peck has portrayed two certifiable lunatics: Dr Josef Mengele in The Boys From Brazil and Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. Even playing good guys, Peck shows tendencies towards mental problems, which could make some voters think he might crack in a nuclear crisis. In Spellbound, for example, he suffered from traumatic anxiety and amnesia and needed the help of two psychiatrists to pull him through. And in Twelve O’Clock High, he went to pieces under the strain of sending bombers on dangerous missions. On the other hand, moviegoers would see Peck is no patsy in the role of president. What’s more, he would certainly have the black vote wrapped up with To Kill a Mockingbird. Gentleman’s Agreement would win him the Jewish vote were it not for Charlton Heston who portrayed Moses with quite a bit of conviction. However, Heston is not without political liabilities. He not only failed to do as well as he might have against a group of monkeys (Planet of the Apes) but in the same movie bared his rear end. Nudity does not go down well with the folks from Sioux Falls.’

  Bob Hope took the professional view: ‘So many actors are running for president that they may put a marquee on the White House with “Now Playing” on it.’