Gregory Peck- A Charmed Life

by Lynn Haney

  Lisa Krohn of Minneapolis developed a special friendship with Greg. It sprang up quickly when he blew through town with his one-man show in the mid 1990s. After his return to Los Angeles, they wrote to each other and sent each other Christmas cards and small gifts. When she traveled to the West Coast, he invited her into his home for an afternoon.

  As he showed her around the grounds of his 4-acre estate, he spoke eloquently about his trees and flowers in a slow, deliberate manner. ‘He had a kumquat tree near the house,’ said Krohn, ‘and took great delight in convincing me to try one and then watching my face curl up in a grimace with the tart taste. I’ll never forget that laugh and look of glee on his face after I bit into it.’

  Greg had difficulty walking and his stamina started to flag. Struggling with the steps on his terraced property, he confided to Krohn that Ava Gardner – afflicted with serious emphysema and unable to go far without her oxygen tank in the later stage of her life – taught him how to navigate stairs. ‘Step one, rest one,’ he uttered. ‘He seemed to like that and we laughed and went up the steps just that way.’

  ‘I’m lucky to have you as a friend,’ Greg said at the end of her visit. ‘I almost laughed,’ recalled Lisa, ‘but as I look back, that was the nicest thing he could have said to me.’

  On any given day, one or two, or all six of his grandchildren romped about. And he took great joy in participating vicariously in his children’s lives. Now in middle age, the four of them had each accomplished the difficult task of carving out their own identities.

  Stephen is a respected leader in US VETS, the largest organization in the country dedicated to helping homeless veterans. Once having given Greg so many sleepless nights during his tour of duty as a combat marine in Vietnam, he now directs a program for homeless veterans at March Air Force Base property in Long Beach, California. ‘There has always been a feeling among veterans, born out of battle, that we take care of those who fight side by side with us,’ said Stephen. Greg frequently attended Homeless Veterans Coalition events and lent his name to the cause. Asked about the wellspring of his altruism, Stephen said, ‘That certainly came right from Dad.’

  Carey, still casual and youthful, works in real estate in Los Angeles. His true passion, however, is skydiving. While Greg’s athletic accomplishment of sweep rowing is often cited as the ultimate team sport, Carey has probably done one better. He was the dive leader and choreographer of the ‘weed whacker’ formation that a group of skydivers – 24 cancer survivors from nine states – attempted to make in the sky. The purpose was to show that having cancer does not necessarily rule out strenuous activities. In Carey’s case, he has skin cancer. ‘It’s my repayment for my boyhood spent on the beach in California.’

  Tony successfully made the switch from acting to screenwriting. In 1998, he co-wrote the made-for-television comedy Free Money with Joseph Brutsman and acted as executive producer. It starred Charlie Sheen, Marlon Brando and Donald Sutherland. In 2001, he wrote Diary of a Sex Addict, starring Michael Des Barres, Rosanna Arquette and Natasha Kinski, of which he was the producer. Since his divorce from Cheryl Tiegs, he has forged a viable friendship with her as they partner in raising their son Zackery.

  On 8 September 2001 Greg finally had the honor of giving away his only daughter in marriage. Cecilia, 45, wed Daniel Voll in a ceremony performed at the Peck home. Guests arrived from as far away as Bali. Most of those who gathered were close friends of Cecilia and Daniel’s, but Greg’s old buddies included Lauren Bacall, Jennifer Jones, Barbara Sinatra, Felicia Farr Lemmon, Angie Dickinson and Pat and Larry Gelbart. The ring bearer was Cecilia and Daniel’s two-year-old son Harper (named for Harper Lee). Then on 2 April 2002 Ondine Alexandra Peck-Voll was born.

  At the beginning of 2003, Greg went into dramatic decline. His system was finally starting to break down. He suffered from a flare-up of his old back injury originally incurred by Martha Graham at the Neighborhood Playhouse and then exacerbated when he fell off a horse while preparing for his role in Yellow Sky. Now, hunched over, he needed help just to walk a few feet. In fact, according to Greta, he was bedridden much of the time.

  In contemplating his passage to eternity, Greg said: ‘The lead line for my obituary is sure to be ‘Academy Award Winner for To Kill a Mockingbird.’ In early June 2003, an announcement by the American Film Institute set the stage for lots of publicity on that score. In a poll they conducted, Atticus Finch was voted the most admired hero in American cinema. Imagine that. Gentle Atticus, not a slam-bang, fists-ready, guns-blazing action hero, but a thoroughly decent human being.

  In a welcome kindness of fate, Greg was alive to hear the news. A week after the media trumpeted Atticus’s title, and just days before Father’s Day, Greg neared the end. On the night of 12 June he told Veronique he didn’t feel well. So she sat with him and held his hand. What must have passed through her mind in these final hours? Here was a man who won the applause, devotion, admiration, and respect of the world. Yet, for all his renown, she knew him in his private moments. In fact, she played a large part in helping him to realize his remarkable depth and breadth as a human being. Now 71, she had been married to him for 48 years. And they had rarely been apart – even for a day at a time.

  ‘They leaned on each other,’ said Angie Dickinson, a close friend of the couple. ‘They helped each other. They worshipped each other.’ Added Harry Belafonte: ‘I’ve never seen a couple that was so persistently in a honeymoon . . . I thought it was fake for a while.’

  Around 4 a.m. Greg looked at Veronique, dozed off and died quietly.

  His life, as Shakespeare would say, was ‘rounded in a sleep.’ And, indeed, he was the stuff that dreams are made of. No particular cause of death was given. He had simply expired from old age.

  ‘He had such a remarkable career and life and had so many people who admired him,’ said James Woods, ‘and genuinely liked him, that if you have to go you couldn’t do better than to have been Gregory Peck for all those years.’

  Michael Jackson was one Greg’s steadfast friends. The day following Greg’s death, the pop star visited Veronique and helped her plan the memorial service. The two men had been close for 25 years. Surprising to some, Greg was an outspoken defender of Jackson as a parent.

  The bond was forged when ‘The Gloved One’ rang him up one day and asked to pay a visit. ‘He had actually memorized all the dialogue in To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Greg recalled, ‘and he was full of questions about it.’ As their friendship deepened, Greg accom - panied Jackson on horseback rides at Neverland, the superstar’s 2,600-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley.

  While Greg was all but canonized as a model parent, Jackson has drawn the world’s wrath as an accused child molester. When accusations against the singer surfaced several years ago, Greg and Veronique praised the star in an open letter carried on Jackson’s website.

  Telling of the happy times the Pecks had spent with Jackson as well as with Prince Michael I and Paris (from his three-year marriage to his dermatology nurse Debbie Rowe) and Prince Michael II (by a surrogate mother), the Pecks said: ‘We and our children, who are of your generation, have always admired you as a loving and caring father.’ Greg also gave a glowing video tribute to Jackson at the singer’s 30th Anniversary Celebration held at Madison Square Gardens in 2001.

  The news of Greg’s death shot round the world. It was greeted with sadness but also with recognition that Greg wouldn’t be replaced any time soon. Recalling the actor was one of those ‘people who come into a room and change the room,’ Larry King said he couldn’t think of anybody in Greg’s league. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘there’s some extraordinary actors today – Jack Nicholson and De Niro and Pacino. These are extraordinary figures, and they would have been major stars in the ’40s or ’50s or anywhere. But there’s no one quite – you know, Peck was one of those guys that you – he was unique.’

  Much of the sadness was the realization that America, and even the world, had lost a father figure. Greg and Atticus had
seemed to meld into one.

  To Kill a Mockingbird, the book and film, has been studied for so many years and has left such a deep impression that people now in their mid-20s, born long after Greg was in his acting prime, still felt a twinge of sadness when they heard about his passing.

  There was also an American everyman aspect to Greg that his fans would sorely miss. ‘We might have wanted to be Cary Grant or Clark Gable,’ wrote a reporter for the Washington Post, ‘but we knew we weren’t smooth enough. We might have wanted to be Burt Lancaster or Kirk Douglas but they were too flashy and athletic. Jimmy Stewart was a bit too aw shucks, and Charlton Heston too granite-jawed handsome. But Gregory Peck made us feel we were him. And when he made us into Atticus Finch he helped all of us see what was possible.’

  Greg’s passing unleashed a flood of memories from people out of the spotlight whose lives he touched. Like a Greek god who swooped down to earth for brief visits with a mortal, Greg extended himself in a way few stars do. An English woman remembered that as a gangly girl of 13 with her hair in plaits, she danced with Gregory Peck. It was at the Grand National ball at the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool. Greg had a horse running and he was taking part in the festivities.

  A man recalled that when he was a student, Greg presented him with a rowing medal and some sage advice. Another recalled how he stayed in the alumni tent at a Berkeley crew race because he didn’t want his celebrity to take away from the glory of the rowers.

  In the week following Greg’s death, television channels broadcast instant Gregory Peck film festivals, running one movie of his after another. With 53 films to his credit, they had a large selection to choose from. In life, Greg had often been called inscrutable. But anyone interested in plumbing his depths need only visit their local video store. As we know by now, he hid behind his roles. Yet in bringing his screen characters so vividly to life, he exposed his innermost self.

  In The Big Country, he displayed moral grit by refusing all manner of provocation, yet in The Paradine Case, he showed refreshing signs of moral frailty as a British barrister whose judgment is seriously flawed. In the original Cape Fear, he portrayed a peculiar masculine hysteria as a lawyer obliterating legal scruples to defend his family. In his scenery-chewing rendition of Josef Mengele in The Boys From Brazil, we see the normally inhibited Greg seizing the opportunity to bust loose. ‘The no-goods make things happen,’ said Greg who wished he had the opportunity to play more of them. ‘They make people react.’ In Yellow Sky, as the leader of a gang of robbers who are chased into a salt flat after robbing a bank, Greg prevails. Though tortured with fatigue and thirst, he remains every inch the man in charge.

  Greg captured the brilliant but insecure Horatio Hornblower and, in doing so, exposed his own vulnerability. In Duel in the Sun, we see Greg the sexy rascal, the leering and sardonic seducer of Jennifer Jones. As Joe Bradley in Roman Holiday, we get to know Greg at his breezy best as the wised-up, cosmopolitan reporter. In Twelve O’Clock High, he reveals some of his core personality as the commander of an American bomber unit who dithers traumatically when he is obliged to send crews to their deaths over Nazi Germany. More than most of his films, we see a great deal of Greg in General Douglas MacArthur. He not only looked and sounded like MacArthur, but the two men shared vanity, stubbornness and intransigence.

  In the course of his life, Greg sought out the company of eccentrics, law benders, chandelier swingers, midnight ramblers and misbegotten souls. It’s safe to assume there were elements of Greg in these incorrigible mischief-makers.

  Because he was such a meticulous planner, it is quite likely that Greg talked at some length with Veronique and his children about his funeral. What better setting for a Catholic who loved a good show than the new modernistic Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral situated in the heart of LA.

  But was Greg a practicing Catholic? Some years before, while Greg was attending a film festival in Tokyo, Andrew Urban of Weekend Australian, put the question to him. ‘I am a Roman Catholic,’ Greg answered. ‘Not a fanatic, but I practice enough to keep the franchise.’ He laughed. Then he became more serious. ‘I don’t always agree with the Pope . . . there are issues that concern me, like abortion, contraception, the ordination of women . . . and others. I think the Church should open up.’ Certainly, Greg’s unequivocal support of Gay Rights pitted him in direct opposition to the Pope. In 1997, as a presenter at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) awards ceremony, he said: ‘It just seems silly to me that something so right and simple has to be fought for at all.’

  Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral is the seat of the largest US Catholic diocese. It rests on an elevated section of downtown Los Angeles called Bunker Hill, where it can be seen by millions of people each year as they travel the busy Hollywood Freeway. In its size, proportions and beauty both within and without, it is exquisite. With a total of 27,000 square feet of windows, it is the biggest installation of its kind in America. Lita Albuquerque, Greg’s daughter-in-law who is married to Carey, designed the Gateway Pool and Water Wall on the grounds of the Cathedral.

  On Monday, 16 June 2003 Greg was laid to rest in a quiet family funeral in the crypt mausoleum beneath the Cathedral. Located across from St Vibiana’s Chapel, it contains 6,000 crypts and niches for burials.

  Crypts were believed to have been developed from the catacombs used by early Christians as hiding places from persecution, as shrines to saints and martyrs, as funeral memorials. Early churches often were constructed over the tombs of martyrs. At the entrance to the crypt mausoleum are two beautifully etched windows depicting guardian angels holding torches.

  Mourners for the public service held after his burial beheld huge black-and-white portraits of Greg as they approached the Cathedral, designed by Robert Graham, husband of Anjelica Huston. They then passed through the Great Bronze Doors. Church officials estimated almost 3,000 people attended. Seats were reserved for Greg’s friends, a sizeable number of whom were celebrities – they were instructed to whisper the secret password ‘Atticus’ to the red-coated ushers who escorted them to the reserved section – Harry Belafonte, Anjelica Huston, Michael York, Louise Fletcher, Tony Danza, Piper Laurie, Harrison Ford, Calista Flockhart. Michael Jackson, wearing a red jacket, caused a stir when he arrived 20 minutes late. Decked out in a bright blue pants suit and clutching a program with Greg’s picture on it, Greta, at 92, was present looking hale and hearty.

  Cardinal Roger Michael Mahoney, Archbishop of Los Angeles, presided over the service. The program included bible readings by Carey, Cecilia and Tony. Mahoney said: ‘He lived his life authentically, as God called and willed him and placed him in his room, with gifts and talents.’

  Seventy-five-year-old Brock Peters, who co-starred with Greg in Mockingbird delivered the eulogy. The film spawned a close friendship between Greg and Peters that lasted more than 40 years. ‘In art there is compassion,’ said Peters, ‘in compassion there is humanity, with humanity there is generosity and love. Gregory Peck gave us these attributes in full measure.’

  The crowd visibly warmed to a videotape performance of Greg featuring a lecture he gave several years before. In that rich baritone voice, which sounded like no other he said he hoped to be remembered first as a good husband, father and grandfather. Then, with quiet strength and unforgettable presence, he added: ‘I’d like to be thought of as a good storyteller.’ He will be. For many years to come. All in all, it was a glorious sendoff.

  Filmography

  1944

  Days of Glory

  Gregory Peck (Vladimir), Tamara Toumanova, Alan Reed, Maria Palmer, Lowell Gilmore, Hugo Haas, Dena Penn.

  RKO

  Producer: Casey Robinson.

  Director: Jacques Tourneur.

  Screenplay: Casey Robinson, from the story by Melchior Lengyel.

  Cinematography by Tony Gaudio.

  86 minutes. Black and white.

  1944

  The Keys of the Kingdom

  Gregory Peck (Father Franci
s Chisholm), Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, Rosa Stradner, Roddy McDowell, Edmund Gwenn, Sir Cedric Hardwicke.

  Twentieth Century Fox

  Producer: Joseph L Mankiewicz.

  Director: John M Stahl.

  Screenplay: Joseph L Mankiewicz and Nunnally Johnson, from the novel by A J Cronin. Cinematography by Arthur Miller.

  137 minutes. Black and white.

  1945

  The Valley of Decision

  Gregory Peck (Paul Scott), Greer Garson, Donald Crisp, Lionel Barrymore, Preston Foster, Gladys Cooper, Dean Stockwell, Jessica Tandy, Dan Duryea.

  MGM

  Producer: Edwin J Knopf.

  Director: Tay Garnett.

  Screenplay: John Meehan and Sonya Levien, from the novel by Marcia Davenport. Cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg.

  111 minutes. Black and white.

  1945

  Spellbound

  Gregory Peck (Dr Anthony Edwardes/John Ballantine), Ingrid Bergman, Leo G Carroll, Michael Chekhov, Rhonda Fleming, Donald Curtis.

  Selznick International/Vanguard Films/United Artists

  Producer: David O Selznick.

  Director: Alfred Hitchcock.

  Screenplay: Ben Hecht, from the novel The House of Dr. Edwardes by Francis Beeding. Cinematography by George Barnes. Dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí.

  111 minutes. Black and white.

  1946

  The Yearling

  Gregory Peck (Penny Baxter), Jane Wyman, Claude Jarman Jr, Chill Wills, Clem Bevans, Margaret Wycherly.

  MGM

  Producer: Sidney Franklin.

  Director: Clarence Brown.

  Screenplay: Paul Osborn, from the novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

  Cinematography by Charles Rosher, Leonard Smith, and Arnold Arling.

  134 minutes. Black and white.