by Lynn Haney
Pete Hamill held this position when he wrote a book about Greg’s close pal called: Why Sinatra Matters. ‘In the end, it is of minor interest that Lord Byron swam the Hellespont, that André Malraux flew in combat during the Spanish Civil War or that Ernest Hemingway shot lions in Africa. In the end, only the work matters. Sinatra’s finest work was making music.’
During the 1960s, Dominick Dunne was a successful television producer and also at the epicenter of Hollywood’s social scene. ‘I got caught up in all that Hollywood shit,’ said Dunne.
One night, while dining at a trendy Los Angeles eatery, he was tapped on the shoulder by the restaurant’s captain. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Dunne,’ said the man, ‘but Mr Sinatra made me do this.’ The captain decked him in front of the A-list crowd. Old Blue Eyes watched from a nearby table with a smirk on his face. He had paid the man $50 to squelch Dunne.
Over the next decade, thanks to alcohol and cocaine, Dunne bottomed out. Then, in 1979, he left town. ‘When you’re down and out, there’s no meaner place to live than Hollywood, said Dunne. ‘You can get away with your embezzlements and your lies and your murders, but you can never get away with failing.’
Back on his feet, Dunne returned to LA in 1995 to cover the O J Simpson trial. He soon became a darling of the dinner party circuit sharing his scoop on O J. One of those nights he was invited to Greg’s house where he was the center of attention – overshadowing a petulant, sulking old singer named Frank Sinatra.
‘They’re dying like flies in this town,’ Greg said with sadness. It seemed every month he was going to a funeral and often delivering the eulogy. The list kept growing: Frank Sinatra, Ruth Gordon, Rosalind Russell, Sanford Meisner, Stanley Kramer, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Lew Wasserman, Greer Garson, Jack Benny, Fred Astaire, Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and Ingrid Bergman. He was hit especially hard by the death of Audrey Hepburn who died of colon cancer. She had been a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF for six years and toured Somali refugee camps. He had put his generation to bed, as well as some older and some younger. He had somehow successfully managed to outlive them.
A death that particularly bothered him was Ava Gardner’s. She spent her last years mostly secluded in her sumptuous London flat tethered to an oxygen tank. In 1987, she came out of retirement briefly to appear on Knots Landing ‘for the loot, Honey, for the loot.’ She was strapped for money yet tried to keep up a brave front. Partially paralyzed as a legacy of her 1986 stroke, the woman with the mesmerizing looks and public life lived a harsh existence with her longtime housekeeper, Carmen Vargas, and her beloved Welsh corgi, Morgan. When her first husband, Mickey Rooney, arrived in London in the late 1980s with his smash hit musical Sugar Babies, he was riding high. He rang up Gardner at her flat. She told him she had had two strokes and rasped: ‘Don’t be surprised if someday soon you’ll hear that I’ve blown my fuckin’ brains out.’ She died of natural causes on 25 January 1990.
Her graveside ceremony in a modest cemetery in Smithtown, North Carolina, mirrored the final scene of The Barefoot Contessa (1954): a driving rain falling on a vast canopy of umbrellas, with nearly 4,000 people showing up to say farewell. (Greg did not attend. In fact, no one from Hollywood did.)
In May 1992 Greg’s mother died. He delivered the eulogy at the Cypress Lawn Chapel in San Francisco. At 97 she had really given life a run for its money. While she hadn’t been a hands-on mom with Greg, Bunny was a favorite with her grandchildren. ‘The one who brings us all together is my mother,’ Greg said a few years before her demise. ‘She’s 92 and still wonderfully pretty and spirited. She goes to the races and bets like a sailor on colors and birthdays and names – and she wins!’ Indeed, Bunny knew how to grab at life with both hands. That was a powerful legacy to bequeath to him.
By now, Greg wanted to make all the exciting people who had cavorted through his life live again. But how? He could write a book. Back in the 1970s, Swifty Lazar offered him a million dollars to write his memoirs. But Lazar offered every famous person he met a million dollars for their story. It was his way of saying hello.
Greg had jotted down anecdotes over the years with the idea of writing a book like David Niven’s wildly popular The Moon’s a Balloon. Like Niven, Greg had an ear for piquancy, an eye for the amusing and the absurd and the poignant, but unlike the English actor, he came up short on clear-eyed candor and refreshing frankness. He could laugh at himself, but his perfectionism acted as inner critic. It forced him to edit out unattractive aspects of himself, his friends and his family. In his desire to pretty up the picture, he missed things. And, as Hemingway said, a good writer needs a ‘built-in shockproof shit detector.’ If Greg had one, he kept it well hidden.
Like the words on the sundial, he was determined to count ‘none but the sunny hours’ – he wanted to recollect his best moments and weave them into a show. He hungered for a live audience. But he had told the same stories over and over again like lines in a play that has run too long. He knew he would have to muster his best skills as a raconteur to make it all fresh. And, he reasoned, the public in its heart of hearts loves a success story. He’d give them that. He wanted to take his production on the road getting the feel of the sawdust trail just as he did on his first tour of the United States with Katharine Cornell back in the early 1940s.
At the same time, he had his apprehensions. Appearing on stage in a one-man show is exciting because it is scary. You feel very naked up there because it is just you, telling your story, with nothing else to mediate between you and other people.
But in 1995 off he went to Calgary, Anchorage, Hartford, Atlanta, Seattle and many more cities and towns with A Conversation with Gregory Peck. He spent two years visiting local theaters in a kind of farewell tour to an extraordinary career. He showed clips of some of his most famous roles, paid homage to starlets and swashbucklers and evoked poignant memories of an era long gone.
‘Cary Grant gave me the idea,’ he admitted. (Maybe it wasn’t one of Grant’s best, at least not for him, since he died while trouping through the provinces on one of these gigs.)
In Greg’s case, the finished product was very much Greg’s own. It proved that finally, after all these years, he had expelled the stone inside him that weighed him down. Gone was the ‘wooden plank’ actor, the ‘cigar store Indian.’ There was buoyancy, a dry wit and a happy heart. And when he’d tell a story and his eyes were smiling, it took your heart away. There’s no substitute for Gaelic wit and the sense of the absurd.
Through his palaver, he let his audience meet the ravishing women and fascinating screwballs who peppered his Hollywood life. He focused on his successful movies, and the others faded into the background. He rejoiced in talking about his comedies and Westerns. His self-deprecating humor endeared him to the adoring crowds. His intelligence was fierce, assured; he always sounded smart and intellectually composed. ‘I hope that my main contribution has been to entertain people over the years,’ Greg reflected, ‘to give them enjoyment, some pleasure, some excitement, some romance, something to think about. Something to carry away from the theater with them so that they think of me as an old friend.’
Watching her father’s show, Cecilia Peck wanted to capture it on film. As it happened she was working with Barbara Kopple who is widely considered one of the finest living documentary filmmakers. She received Academy Awards for directing Harland County, USA (1976), about the effects of a labor strike on 180 coal-mining families, and American Dream (1990) about a Hormel plant strike that changed the labor movement forever.
So Cecilia asked Kopple to film Greg’s one-man stage show. Kopple said: ‘Well, as a gift to your dad, we’ll all just go film. We’ll do one show, and just give it as a gift.’ But one thing led to another and Kopple and crew found they couldn’t stop. So what started out as a gift, became the film A Conversation with Gregory Peck (1999).
Kopple traveled with Greg, capturing several of his delightful, informal talks around the country, intercut with home movies, footage of the Pecks’ hom
e life and generous clips from his films (most notably, To Kill a Mockingbird). Cecilia, who was pregnant at the time, co-produced, which probably accounts for how easygoing and playful Greg sometimes is.
The film version reveals the actor as a family man. He loves and argues with his daughter. He roots for his favorite basketball team with his sons. The film captures Greg’s high points – as well as his darker moments, when he discusses the suicide of Jonathan. It somewhat, but not completely, catches the aura of Greg. The spiritual aspect he projected in age was more evident in person. He is frail and walks with a cane with difficulty. Yet, one senses the Lord is at his elbow. When someone asked Kopple if Greg manifested any of his famous temper during the filming of the documentary, she said ‘No, never.’ However, he was sensitive about his feeble gait. ‘He’s a tall man,’ explained Kopple, ‘and he was touchy about us filming him and trying to get somewhere.’
He was both modest and touching: ‘I’m not as wise as I’d hoped to be. There’s obviously more to remember them to look forward to. But I suppose in the end, I am a family man. I like having a 20 month-old grandchild. I like thinking about him. I like thinking about all my grandchildren. In the long term, family is what counts. The fame and the awards and the nonsense that goes with them fades away. You are left with a good family and maybe some good works.’
The continuing popularity of Greg’s films on video and the success of the documentary have kept his image alive as an idol. Just as the women shrieked and swooned at the sight of him back in 1944, Greg’s followers continued to be fiercely emotional about him. For example, in 1998 Rina Pertusi accompanied her husband to the play The Beauty Queen of Leanne in New York. As the lights dimmed, she looked down her row and spotted Greg. ‘When at last the curtain fell for the intermission,’ Pertusi recounted, ‘I sprang out of my seat, and not caring whose kneecaps I’d be breaking, practically charged over to Mr Peck. There was a vacancy to his left and he was standing to let other people pass. I said, “Mr Peck, may I say a few words to you?” And he told me I could, and then invited me to sit beside him.’
For some of his public, Greg’s advancing age put him out of the running. Columnist Meg Wood confided to her readers: ‘. . . I need to stress that I only love the young Gregory Peck. I mean, well, that sounds cruel, doesn’t it? But he just doesn’t do anything for me now. I think it’s the white hair; it’s a shock. Actually I think the weirdest part is that his face and body still look pretty much unchanged. But that hair! It is, well, it’s a slap in the face! . . . the young Gregory – hubba hubba.’
According to a young lady who goes by the name Helen on the Internet, there’s real live hope for fans dreaming of a younger Greg. Helen reports another gorgeous Peck is in the pipeline. Herewith her message: ‘Gregory Peck may be nothing but an old crusty man now, but his grandson Ethan, who is in the grade below me in high school, looks just like his grandpa. Which means, in 10 years or so, you’ll have a whole new Peck to drool over. Or, if you’re my age, one to drool over right now. Just imagine a 16-year-old Atticus Finch in a rock band. Mmm.’
As the years added up, Greg continued paring down and shaping his life to include only those things that gave him a sense of emotional fulfillment. In the mornings, he often had thoughts of death and this motivated him to get out of bed and get rolling. He loved sitting in his garden where he grew large, juicy tomatoes. He liked devoting time to projects that meant something to him, such as the La Jolla Playhouse which he and his acting friends founded more than 50 years ago. ‘He’s had a huge impact on the performing arts in San Diego,’ said La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff, ‘and we at the Playhouse owe him our existence.’ Greg also stayed involved with the Motion Picture and Television Fund that looks after old and sick actors, and the film department of University College in Dublin. He also produced six readings a year for the Central Los Angeles Library.
Starting in 1995, Greg asked his friends – it doesn’t hurt when your friends include Morgan Freeman, Beau Bridges, James Woods, Richard Dreyfuss, Lynn Redgrave, Sally Fields, Charlton Heston and Patrick Stewart – to participate in a reading series at the central library’s Mark Taper Auditorium. The events proved to be hugely popular, drawing capacity turnouts of patrons who paid $250 or more for exclusive invitations to attend.
Greg personally recruited the actors for each of the six meetings per year. He admitted: ‘When I call people, mostly they say yes. Once in a while I have to go through a buffer person, or PR person.’ These occasional ego bruisings didn’t deter him.
With gallantry and guts, he continued to champion the cause of gun control legislation. In 1999, he accepted the Marian Anderson prize, named for the Philadelphia-born singer who broke the race barrier at the Metropolitan Opera and who advanced social progress in her humanitarian work.
However, his chumminess with America’s most famous gun slinger opened him to criticism. Charlton Heston, president of the National Rifle Association, is a zealot about an American’s right to bear arms. When James Brady pinned him down about Heston, Greg didn’t shilly-shally. ‘We’re colleagues, rather than friends,’ Greg said. ‘We’re civil to each other when we meet. I, of course, disagree vehemently with him on gun control.’
As a board member of Handgun Control Inc. (along with Martin Sheen and Susan Sarandon), Greg was well versed on the issue. Since the 1960s, the number of guns in America has leapt from 75 million to 230 million. Still, would Greg have helped his cause more by giving Heston the treatment he’d given Robert Bork?
Perhaps. But firearms are a (forgive the pun) loaded issue in Hollywood. Why are so many celebrities reluctant to speak out? Is it because many of them pack heat themselves (Sean Penn recently reported two guns stolen from his car) or is it because they don’t want to alienate their pro-gun friends? Michael Beard, president of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, has a quick answer: Charlton Heston. ‘He has a lot of friends and a lot of respect in Hollywood,’ Beard says. ‘He and [wife] Lydia are liked personally.’ According to Beard, even Greg kept a relatively low profile to avoid butting heads with the NRA’s most outspoken point man. ‘They are friends, and he doesn’t want to take on that.’
Out of the public arena, Greg could drop the heavy weight of his gravitas. In his tight circle, he could let his gray lion’s-mane hair down. Roger Moore provided a glimpse of the more relaxed Greg when he talked about him to a dinner of Great Britain’s Variety on 24 July 2001. ‘This was from my great friend Gregory Peck, who said to me one day, and you know the way Gregory Peck speaks, you don’t really think of him as being long on humor – Frank Sinatra used to say about Gregory he is like Mount Rushmore, every time he laughs dust comes out. Anyway, Greg said [Moore put on a very sincere voice]: When things go wrong, and they usually will, when your daily role seems all up hill, when your funds are low and your debts are high, when you would like to laugh but you can only cry, when you really feel you will have to quit, don’t come to me. I don’t give a shit.’
One of Greg’s favorite drinks was Guinness stout – Ireland’s mother’s milk. This preference came to the attention of his cousin Thomas Ashe, a direct descendent of Greg’s ancestral hero whose photograph hung on the wall of his study. Realizing his cousin’s fondness for a pint of plain, Ashe used his contacts in Guinness to make a dream of Peck’s come true. ‘We were having a few pints one night and he mentioned that he would love to have a tap back in his place in California. I got in contact with Guinness in Dublin and they got on to their reps in California and the tap was installed. He was delighted. His neighbors, Jack Nicholson and Frank Sinatra’s wife, would meet in Peck’s house regularly to play cards and drink pints, they all loved the stuff, he told me.’ Greg’s other poker buddies included Angie Dickinson, Larry Gelbart, who wrote M*A*S*H*, and Jack Lemmon, who was a lousy player but liked to sit at the piano and toss in some rollicking tunes while his more adventurous friends won and lost money. Beats playing bingo at the Beverly Hills senior citizen center.
As Greg moved up in his 80s, he looked thin and frail. He quipped: ‘I’m on a first-name basis with three or four doctors.’
With the loss of weight and the resultant definition of his features, he bore a resemblance to the lean and bony young man he was when he played Father Chisholm in The Keys of the Kingdom back in 1944.There was also the same spiritual aspect that he exhibited in that film of an ecclesiastical father. Kathleen Murphy in Film Comment in 1992 wrote that he represented a ‘father for all seasons. His visage, voice and frame came to signal home ground, to shelter whole litters of lost sons and daughters, and to foster faith in just, though sometimes controversial, causes.’
In public, Greg leaned on a cane. Sometimes that wasn’t enough and he relied on Veronique or Cecilia to support him. His memory was failing. But offered a part, and he was up and at ’em. In 1998, he played Orson Welles’ role of Father Mapple in Moby Dick, a made-for-TV version also starring Patrick Stewart. Though it was only one day’s work, it garnered him a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Miniseries or Movie Made for Television.
‘It all started in Berkeley with Moby Dick,’ Greg reminisced with his agent Monroe Friedman. ‘Then I came to Hollywood and it was Moby Dick. And now I’m retiring and I’m in Moby Dick again.’
Most of the time, Greg stayed on the grounds of his home on Carolwood Drive, sheltered from the world. Just beyond the double wrought-iron gates, the squat tour-buses, stuffed with avid fans, clutching their ‘Map to the Stars’ Homes,’ craned their necks to get a glimpse of him. At the same time, he welcomed the precious few visitors fortunate enough to penetrate his private world.