by Lynn Haney
For many people, Greg as Atticus Finch represented a model of parenting that is almost unattainable. Brewster Ely, headmaster of the Town School in San Francisco put it this way: ‘There are few of us, man or woman, who have not at one time or another fantasized about having the wisdom of Atticus Finch, and the reassuring tones of Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus in the Hollywood adaptation of the book serves only to underscore the character’s appeal. What is splendid about Atticus, whether in print, or celluloid, or in our imagination, is that he is believable; this paragon of virtue is actually achievable. I have asked the middle school and upper school students what they think of Atticus Finch, and they respond with words like “awesome.” I must add that when I tried to slip into Atticus’s skin and walk around in my own home, there must be a few extra wrinkles, for I don’t see my children, my Scout or Jem, regarding me with the Solomonesque stature accorded Atticus by his. He is, nevertheless, as fine a moral compass as we could model for navigation of our children’s lives.’
In his own life, Greg had grown in relation to his children. He had deepened since the tragic death of Jonathan. He was less self-righteous, more considerate and alert to the feelings of others. He laughed easily at himself, joked now and then and did what he could to share in their lives. He realized they faced pressures that were totally alien to him growing up. ‘Beverly Hills is devastating for children,’ said Greg. ‘There’s so much peer pressure there, and so much of the talk is about nothing but movies. Our children did grow up in an atmosphere of affluence. I’m not denying that or apologizing for it. But we tried to balance it by emphasizing education.’
He thought he had all the bases covered. Pa Baxter, the character he played in The Yearling, uttered words of paternal love, a heart-wrenching, bone-deep anguish that Greg must have felt personally at some point. Pa Baxter tells his son: ‘Every man wants life to be a fine thing, and easy. Well, it’s fine, son, powerful fine, but it ain’t easy . . . A man’s heart aches seeing his young ’uns face the world knowing they got to have their insides tore out the way his was tore.’
In collaboration with his son Stephen, Greg produced and narrated a cassette recording of the New Testament. ‘The work brought us closer,’ Stephen said.
They chose to use the King James version of the Bible, as the actor says, because ‘the language is the most fulsome and poetic and rich – excepting the fact that some of the passages are difficult to understand and others are full of redundancy. As an actor you find yourself at times wanting to do some editing. We didn’t fool around; it’s word for word.’
Carey Peck was helping to build the rapid transit system for Los Angeles. ‘He’s trying to get rid of the air pollution and get people around quicker,’ boasted Greg. ‘It’ll take 20 to 25 years, but it will change LA for the better.’
In 1988, Carey got married again. This time to painter and sculptor Lita Albuquerque, California’s leading female artist working in the public art arena. She developed a respect and affection for Greg. ‘When I was a little girl, I was completely in love with him, of course.’ Lita had two daughters from a previous marriage. Then she and Carey had a son, Christopher Jonathan Peck.
One regular on the awards circuit Greg kept bumping into was his old friend Lauren Bacall. They first met when she was a 17-year-old usher in a theater where he played on Broadway. Later they made Designing Woman. Now they were being given a chance to work together again. In 1993, Greg and Bacall teamed up to star in a television movie called The Portrait. They give an amiable loving spin to the tale of an aging couple, still very much in love, and their petulant adult daughter (well played by Greg’s daughter Cecilia), who comes home to paint their portrait. It was an opened-up adaptation by Lynn Roth of Tina Howe’s 1983 Off-Broadway play Painting Churches. Greg was the film’s co-executive producer and Robert Greenwald was the producer. They completed the production in 22 days. ‘It can be done,’ Greg assured. Greg organized a week’s rehearsal in his house in Los Angeles before they headed south to cover 16 locations around the Duke University campus in Raleigh, North Carolina.
In the movie, Greg is required to scull. The plot even alludes to rowers of the class of ’39, his own from the University of California, Berkeley. With refresher lessons from UCLA’s crew coach and after a few plunges into the drink, the 75-year-old Greg mastered the single shell and looks relaxed in the opening scene of the film. He also felt at home in his actor’s skin. ‘Some critics overlook actors who appear to be natural,’ he said confidently. ‘They never realize that it took a great deal of work to be that natural.’
Greg found playing opposite his daughter, ‘a total unmitigated joy. She is absolutely wonderful and totally natural.’ Whenever anyone asked about her, his face would beam with pleasure. (Cecilia won a Golden Globe for her supporting role.) Cecilia – who won the genetic lottery with knockout features from both parents – had already made several movies including Wall Street (1987), an Oliver Stone film.
Tony was also pursuing an acting career. He was blessed with the comic gift Greg yearned to have, and was cast opposite Brooke Shields in Brenda Star (1989). A few years before, when he played in the movie Pirates (1986) Greg advised him: ‘Be bold. And if you can’t be bold, act bold.’
Greg was Tony’s best cheerleader, but being a son and not a daughter, comparisons were made. Tony was an actor. Greg said their styles were as different as their looks. Tony looks more like his mother. ‘If he adopted all my characteristics and attitudes without branching off in his own direction, then I’d have be worried. We’ve been up to see him a couple of times and he’s really talented. He’s got a wonderful sense of comedy and moves like a rocket.’
Tony, the youngest of the boys, lost several years of his life through alcoholism. Like his half-brother Jonathan, he could not get out from under the burden of being Gregory Peck’s son. And though Greg tried to give him a chance to develop his own identity by sending him to prep school abroad, four years at Aiglon in Switzerland wasn’t enough, nor were the next four years at Amherst. He sought solace in alcohol. ‘At first, I really liked to drink,’ explained Tony. ‘At the beginning, it was great, and at the end it was awful. Then, too, I guess that I was trying to hide from a life that gave me too many opportunities. I thought I was undeserving. I was given so much and didn’t have to work for it.’
Tony struggled as an actor. Like Jonathan, there existed a chasm between where he was with his life and where he wanted to be. Not only was his father talented and accomplished, but so were his friends. ‘I loved and revered Frank Sinatra,’ explained Tony by way of example, ‘who was a friend of dad’s going back to the ’30s when they were both struggling young enter tainers. For a time, I had a musical act in Vegas called the Tony Peck Trio and wanted to swing just like Frank.’ He laughed and added, ‘but whenever I was going to watch Frank in concert, I would be painfully reminded that there was a big gap between his talent and mine.’
Could it have been the world he was exposed to through his parents? Supermodel Tara Shannon, a sometime girlfriend of Tony’s, told an interviewer: ‘I’m going out to dinner with Gregory Peck’s friends, Frank Sinatra, Roger Moore, Jimmy Stewart, Billy Wilder. Gregory was a great guy, a very humble guy. I knew that I didn’t like Tony, but I was digging hanging out with all these people that all the other girls were wanting to be with. That was the surprising thing for me. I got to the other side of the tracks, and I looked at these people, and they had no values, and it was bizarre. I started seeing stars, rich people, how they treated their wives. I started hearing the gossip. How this producer’s wife was a hooker, and I just got very disillusioned.’
As the 1980s progressed, Tony became a familiar sight to celebrity watchers as the companion of Cheryl Tiegs, the blonde and blue-eyed cover girl turned cosmetics guru.
Their backgrounds were markedly different. Born on her family’s isolated farm in the frozen north of Minnesota, Tiegs developed grit early. There was no running water or plumbing, and she had
only her older sister for a play. ‘We had one pair of shoes,’ she said, ‘and they were for winter.’
Tiegs got a jumpstart on success because of her looks and took it from there. She was the ubiquitous cover girl for Glamour magazine and Sports Illustrated; the annual swimsuit issue was basically created as a showcase for her. She signed record-breaking deals with Sears Roebuck, Clairol and Cover Girl Cosmetics for $15 million.
In her early 20s, she married Hollywood film director, Stan Dragoti. But the relationship ended soon after he was arrested for cocaine possession and entered re-hab. Her second husband was the Kenyan wildlife photographer and adventurer Peter Beard, a scion of the East Coast establishment, who had dropped out to live in the African bush. For three years Tiegs seemed happy with him. But Beard proved to be decadent and narcissistic.
When Tony and Cheryl met, she was at the height of her fame. He took one look at her and fell in love. After a long courtship, they were married at Frank Sinatra’s compound in Palm Springs. Mom and dad did not attend. Greg was filming Other People’s Money in New England and Veronique stayed with him. Cecilia represented the family. But marriage, and the birth of his son Zackery, only exacerbated Tony’s sense of unworthiness. He continued his downward spiral. It was the crackup of his marriage that made him realize he had to change. It took a while, but he did it.
There was a great fear in the Peck family that they could lose Tony as they lost Jonathan. Greg stayed close to him while he got sober and tried to make a new life for himself. He invited his son to move back home into the log cabin he had erected on the property in homage to Lincoln. He also worked with his son on a remake of Ingmar Bergman’s classic Wild Strawberries (1957). ‘My father never let me down,’ Tony told Michael Sheldon of the Telegraph. ‘I let myself down. With Dad, what you see is what you get. He is totally like the lawyer he plays in To Kill a Mockingbird. Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch.’ And although the Wild Strawberries project didn’t pan out, Tony did write a movie called Diary of a Sex Addict which is now available on television.
How tempus fugit! Before he knew it, Greg had reached the tribute stage. Just when his career was developing late life momentum, his film colleagues wanted to treat him as though he was dead and gone. Attending an awards ceremony held in your behalf is a bit like being present at your own funeral. It may be an honor but you’d just as soon put it off for another 50 years. It’s particularly irksome if you are ‘between engagements’ and hoping for work. There was truth in jest when Greg quipped on his 80th birthday: ‘If a great role comes along, I’ll come charging out of the barn, snorting!’ He wanted to go on acting and acting and acting because he belonged to these people of the theater and the movies and the make-believe world they created.
Still, Greg was an icon and attention must be paid. To become a legend you have to be better than your competition. Your successes have to outweigh your failures, and you have to have endurance. Greg was the stuff of legends.
Ironically, of the scores of movies Greg made, there wasn’t much he really liked: The Gunfighter, Twelve O’Clock High, Roman Holiday, The Guns of Navarone and To Kill a Mockingbird. According to Harry Belafonte, Greg ‘always bemoaned the fact that he never thought he quite lived up to all he expected of himself in the films he did . . . He always felt that there was someplace else he could have gone and more he could have done.’
The general feeling about Greg among his peers is that while he may not have been a great actor, he was a fine one and solidly professional. Tom Hanks, the youngest person to ever receive the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award, referred to Greg in a way that must have warmed the cockles of the veteran actor’s heart. ‘It’s too soon to tell if I will be a success or not,’ said Hanks. ‘To me, success is constantly getting better at your craft and performing at a high level for an extended period of time. Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck – those are people who have been successful. Fame is different than success. Fame does something to your head from which you may never recover.’
Starting in 1989 when he received the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award, Greg was on a roll. In the following years he was fêted by the Kennedy Center and the Lincoln Center Film Society as well as receiving other accolades such as the Emmy, Golden Globe, the International Jewish Film Festival Award and the Marian Anderson Humanitarian Award. He was also honored in France – his adopted homeland thanks to Veronique – when he was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur under President Mitterand and a Commandeur under President Chirac. Of all the honors he received over his lifetime, perhaps the one that did him the most good was the Oscar. Crazy as it sounds, a study of Oscar recipients found they live an average of four years longer than those who are nominated but don’t win.
While it’s no fun to be treated like a Golden Oldie, awards nights are great occasions to get together with eminent friends and listen to them say wonderful things about you. At the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Gala, Audrey Hepburn confided to a packed house: ‘The biggest disappointment of my life in making Roman Holiday with Greg was I didn’t get to end up with him at the finish of the movie.’ But she added warmly, ‘What I did get out of Roman Holiday was 40 years of remarkable friendship.’
Isaac Stern recalled ‘the time when we were together in the South of France, drinking a great deal, being rowdy, throwing plates in a restaurant and breaking them.’ At that, Jane Fonda clutched her hand to her chest in awe. ‘He’s done it all. By God, he’s even broken plates with Isaac Stern!’
Better than that, Greg had the singular distinction of becoming the subject of a zany, Marx Brothers sketch comedy titled Hooray for Gregory Peck’s Ass! Jon Wiley, one of the troupe’s principals, decided to send him a copy of their script for comments. ‘We looked up his address on one of those maps of Hollywood stars’ homes,’ recollected Wiley.
‘What can I say,’ Greg replied. ‘Other honors and accolades pale by comparison. Hooray for Gregory Peck’s Ass! is the solacement of my later years.’
Now that he had achieved elder statesman status, Greg used his lofty position to act as a guide and moral touchstone to his prodigal flock. He decried the dishonest, bullying, thieving mentality of many Hollywood players. ‘People don’t know what to believe in, in this period of unrest and changing values, but heroic qualities – trustworthiness, courage, bravery, truthfulness, reliability – don’t seem to be on the list,’ he lamented. ‘Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump had them all, but they couldn’t play them straight – he had to be retarded.’
He sneered at ‘The breast pocket executives now running the store. The old boys – Louis B Mayer, Darryl Zanuck, Jack Warner, they were dragons, but they had passion and creativity . . . I’d like to hear some glamorous talk about the quality of work,’ he said. ‘Imagination is the priceless resource, and it’s greatly undervalued.’ Another time he scoffed: ‘The top production jobs at the major studios are filled by a succession of executives who skip from company to company as if they were playing musical chairs.’ And still another time: ‘I’m not excited by cartoon violence in outer space.’
In accepting the American Film Institute’s Award, Greg gave a speech that was interrupted by applause more than a half a dozen times. In it, he questioned what movies have become. ‘There has been a lot of glamorous financial news in the papers lately,’ the actor said. ‘Multi-media conglomerates . . . It may be that, in a few years, all pictures and all television will be made by two or three of these behemoths who happen also to own magazines, newspapers and cable stations, and to manufacture and distribute video cassettes.
‘If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles, with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, wi
th one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more.’
For himself, he just wanted to get back to work as an actor. ‘I don’t want any more money, awards, fame or parties. My pride, if I have my vanity – and I do – is to do a good job. So I can respect myself and be respected by those actors and directors who know what acting is really all about.’
Greg’s opinion counted for a lot when a heated controversy arose in the film industry over the matter of whether or not to give an award to Elia Kazan at the Oscar ceremonies. No one denied Kazan’s body of work was impressive. He won Best Director Oscars for Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) starring Greg and On The Waterfront (1954) starring Marlon Brando. It was a matter of the McCarthy hearings. ‘Gadge’ named names during the anti Communist ‘witch hunts’. He informed on eight friends who had been Communist Party members. Although more than 40 years had gone by since the hearings, Kazan’s collaboration was fresh in many minds.
Walter Bernstein, a blacklisted screenwriter said of the Oscar: ‘It is being given to a man who disgraced the industry. He hurt the industry and the people in it. It’s being given as a lifetime achievement award. One of his achievements was that he cooperated with an infamous committee, and I don’t think he should be given an award for that. Forgive him, OK – forgive him. Just don’t give him an award.’
Greg held to the position that it’s important to separate a man’s character and actions from his creative works – otherwise you run the risk of traveling down a very slippery slope. Kazan was unquestionably one of the major influences in motion pictures in the twentieth century. So Greg felt he should be given the award. ‘He’s made a great contribution to American film,’ asserted Greg, ‘politics aside, as an artist he made a great contribution, he deserves an award.’