Gregory Peck- A Charmed Life Read online

  GREGORY PECK

  A Charmed Life

  LYNN HANEY

  CARROLL & GRAF PUBLISHERS

  NEW YORK

  GREGORY PECK

  A Charmed Life

  Carroll & Graf Publishers

  An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Inc.

  245 West 17th Street

  11th Floor

  New York, NY 10011

  Copyright © 2003 by Lynn Haney

  First Carroll & Graf edition 2004

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN: 0-7867-1473-5 eBook ISBN: 9780786737819

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  For John

  CHAPTER ONE

  Rising Star

  ‘Success so big and so speedy never happened to anybody anywhere, not even in Hollywood, not even to Garbo and Gable.’

  Colliers Magazine, December 1945

  ‘Who the hell is Gregory Peck?’ Leland Hayward barked into the telephone. The hottest talent agent in Hollywood was pressing his New York office for a quick rundown on a rising Broadway actor. The year was 1942 and talent scouts had been circling the young man.

  Hayward could see the name Gregory Peck listed in his company’s roster of 150 performers and writers, but who the devil was he? He needed an answer fast. Ordinarily, Hayward was too busy making million-dollar deals for his high-flying clients, such as Henry Fonda, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, to bother about newcomers. But in the case of Peck, he was making an exception. An excitement was building about the actor. In fact, at that moment, Sam Goldwyn was holding on another of Hayward’s phone lines. The movie titan wanted to sign Peck to a seven year contract. Leland decided to wing it until he got all the facts.

  ‘I’m willing to go to $1,000 a week,’ Goldwyn offered.

  ‘Make it $3,000,’ Hayward blithely retorted.

  Both men excelled at the art of bluffing, but Hayward had the edge. Known far and wide as ‘The Toscanini of the Telephone,’ he cajoled, charmed and manipulated whoever happened to be on the other end of the conversation. His daughter Brooke Hayward reminisced in Haywire, a memoir of her magical but doomed family: ‘He was happiest when he was conducting business on his office sofa with three or four telephones at hand, his head deep in a cushion at one end and his feet comfortably crossed at the other.’

  Samuel Goldwyn (originally Schmuel Gelbfisz – his name meant Goldfish but when he merged with the Selwyn Brothers to create the Goldwyn studio, he kept the name for himself) was Hollywood’s major independent producer. Besides earning fame as a filmmaker, he was known for his memorable sayings: ‘It’s more than magnificent, it’s mediocre’; ‘You’ve got to take the bull by the teeth’; and ‘God makes stars. It’s up to the producers to find them.’

  When Hayward heard back from New York about Peck, he became even more curious. The actor was described as 27 years old, almost 6 foot 3 inches, 170 pounds and darkly handsome. His gaunt physique and bushy eyebrows suggested a young Abe Lincoln – only sexier. And what a voice! Deep, resonant and compelling, it could reach all the way to the back row of the orchestra and the rear row of the balcony. Talent? Nothing earth-shattering. Still, he was clearly intelligent and ambitious. Plus, he possessed charisma – that elusive star quality.

  Then came the choicest morsel of all. Gregory Peck had a bad sacroiliac. The actor was 4-F – a term for unfit for combat – which disqualified him from military service.

  Now there was bait Hayward could dangle in front of the studio bosses. With the Second World War raging, the moguls were in a tight squeeze. The best of Hollywood’s male stars were heeding the call to fight. Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Robert Montgomery, Robert Taylor and Douglas Fairbanks Jr were all climbing into uniforms. So the studio heads were desperate to find any reasonable-looking young man with a decent profile who knew a thing or two about acting.

  Scour the provinces! The producers exhorted their talent scouts. Haunt summer stock companies. Suffer through high school plays. Above all, lay siege to Broadway. Take a seat up front. If a performer shows promise, then inquire about his draft status. If he happens to be 4-F, throw a net over him and haul him back alive. Or at least get the name of his agent.

  To find out more about the promising Mr Peck, Leland Hayward telephoned the actor directly. ‘The studios want to get a look at you,’ he rasped, in a voice filled with intensity. ‘So come on out. I’ll front you the money for the trip.’

  Greg didn’t jump at the offer. For one thing he was a ruminator, given to chewing over decisions. Also, he was shy. The prospect of parading himself in front of the power princes of Hollywood made him extremely nervous. But there was more to it. To get a clearer idea of his state of mind at this point in time, let’s take a brief look back at where he came from and where he thought he was going.

  To begin with, Greg wasn’t born to the limelight. In fact he sort of stumbled into acting. He started out in La Jolla, California, an exquisite seaside community on the outskirts of San Diego. While today La Jolla is known as an affluent town populated by entrepreneurs, scientists and retirees, back then it was unsophisticated, slightly bohemian and quite remote. The feel of the place was much like Macomb, Alabama, which was the fictional hometown of his signature character, Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

  In La Jolla, the rich knew the poor, the young knew the old and everybody knew everybody else’s business. Springing as Greg did from what used to be called a ‘broken home,’ he emerged emotionally battered, but also freed from the constraints of hovering parents. He learned early to fend for himself. But his horizons were woefully limited. For a while he thought he’d like to be a truck driver. In fact, he showed a real knack for careening a red Union oilrig about town. Then – as would happen many times in his remarkable life – a woman gave him a push at just the right time. In this case, his girlfriend Betty Clardy urged him to knuckle down and study. So he traveled up north to Berkeley and majored in English. There, he caught the acting bug. Gripped by the fever, he finished his last exam and hightailed it for New York.

  ‘Luck’ is a word Greg often used in describing what happened next. He liked to portray himself as fortune’s darling. Perhaps it was his way of making up for the embarrassments and economic setbacks he weathered growing up. Or maybe he wanted to propitiate the gods. In any case, when he came East, he not only was lucky but he showed a talent for creating luck, plunking himself down in auspicious circumstances.

  In this respect, he was not alone. As New Yorker writer E B White noted in an essay about the city:

  The residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

  In Manhattan, he landed a two-year scholarship to the prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse. So his tuition was covered. The rest was up to him. Schooled by adversity, he proved adept at the hand-to mouth existence of the
aspiring actor. He sold his blood, ate at the Automat (later claiming it served ‘the best eggs and bacon in New York’), and even occasionally camped out in Central Park. In those long ago years before terrorism and heightened security, a man of modest means could store his belongings in a locker at Grand Central Station and join the hobos snoozing under the stars.

  ‘But it didn’t seem like a hardship because it was such an adventure,’ Greg recalled. ‘We didn’t have the money to attend the plays and would wait until people came out to smoke a cigarette after the first act. We would mingle with them, then go into the theater and look for empty seats, so I saw the second and third act of practically everything on Broadway.’ Years later, he told journalist Pete Hamill: ‘I was never hungrier and maybe never happier.’

  The intoxication of the thespian life made it all worthwhile. At the Neighborhood Playhouse, he found himself smack dab in the middle of tremendous theatrical energy and ideas, talent and glamour. Sanford Meisner, the school’s director, came out of the Group Theater, which revolutionized American acting in the 1930s with psychologically truthful performances in which the characters’ inner lives resonated underneath the dialogue, creating an emotional realism that electrified critics and audiences. Greg’s classmates included Tony Randall, Eli Wallach and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. Meisner subsequently trained Joanne Woodward, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall and Grace Kelly.

  Three times a week, he took movement class from Martha Graham. She was 45 years old and at the peak of her career as a pioneer of modern dance. ‘In the prime of her prime,’ Greg remembered years later, still awed by her. ‘Her discipline was unyielding,’ said Greg. ‘With her somewhat vague concept of true art, you could never fully understand what she was talking about.’ A monstre sacré, a geyser of emotions, she was not a woman to cross. If angered, she was known to rip a phone off the wall. ‘The first thing you noticed was the face,’ wrote Terry Teachout in Time magazine, ‘a dead white mask of anguish with black holes for eyes, a curt slash of red for a mouth and cheekbones as high as the sky.’

  Part of Graham’s class involved rigorous stretching exercises. Though wooden in movement even then, Greg was nonetheless eager to please. An excruciating exercise for him was to put his legs together straight out in front of him and then put his head on his knees. He looked around and saw the girls in the class were stretching like rubber bands while the boys were more rigid. Graham stuck her knee in his back and said: ‘Come on, Gregory, you can do it.’ There was a loud snap.

  The following morning he was in such agony he couldn’t move. A doctor’s examination revealed he had a slipped disc. Greg spent weeks undergoing various forms of therapy and treatment by osteopaths and other spinal specialists until he got back on his feet. But the sacroiliac problem was chronic.

  Although he never saw battle, Greg’s life was no picnic. Heroes went to war. Any guy who was 4-F was either scorned or pitied. To earn his stripes as an actor, he submitted himself to a tough apprenticeship treading the boards in summer stock and in touring companies. The whole time he was learning, learning. One can’t ignore the role dedication played in his fate. What Greg lacked in depth of talent, he made up for in tenacity. Veteran actor Helen Hayes maintained: ‘Only a true actor with a deep-seated compulsion is going to stick out the struggle that goes with being in the theater. It’s brutal, it’s worse than a Marine boot camp.’

  Still, the road got to him. Long train rides, cast iron sandwiches and battery acid coffee. He was lonely, riddled with insecurity about his future and often at a loose end. Enter Greta Konen. She was the hairdresser to Katharine Cornell, star of Guthrie McClintic’s touring theater company. Some biographers have upgraded her position to secretary to Cornell, but ‘That’s wrong,’ said Greg. ‘She was her hairdresser and a darn good hairdresser, too. She could even produce those complicated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hair-dos.’ Vivacious, optimistic, divorced, and five years older than Greg, she contrasted sharply with him in looks and personality. True to her Finnish heritage, she possessed cornsilk blonde hair, light skin, and wide cheekbones. A tiny woman, she stood only as high as the top button of his jacket. Although he towered over her – both physically and intellectually – it was little Greta (‘cute as a Christmas tree ornament’ people said) who shored up his shaky self-confidence and teased him out of his black Irish moods. When the touring company landed in San Francisco and the city went dark with a wartime blackout on 8 December 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on the 7th, Greg proposed to Greta.

  Her steadfast belief in his acting ability proved to be a lifeline for him. When Greg landed the lead in Emlyn Williams’ play The Morning Star in 1942, a critic of the Philadelphia tryout carped: ‘Mr Peck looks more like a wax dummy in a tailor shop than an actor headed for Broadway.’ Crushed, Greg clung to Greta. She rehearsed his eight lines with him over and over again until, she admitted, ‘I thought I’d scream.’ But when he opened on the Great White Way – as Broadway became known for the street’s bright lights – he received reviews so full of praise the talent scouts came courting.

  Morning Star didn’t fare as well as Greg. The play opened on 14 September 1942 and folded in October 1942. Finding himself ‘between engagements’ as they say in show business, Greg decided to throw his customary caution to the winds and go ahead with the wedding. ‘Comes a time when a man just has to get married,’ he explained. Another spur to tying the knot was Greta’s refusal to sleep with Greg – even though she’d been married before – until after they made their relationship legal. While in New York she was staying in her brother Paul’s $14-a-month small walk-up on East 39th Street that had two bedrooms and a shared kitchen with another apartment. Paul allowed Greg to stay at the apartment but Greta refused to share her bedroom until they were married.

  Years later, Greg said he wed Greta simply because they were thrown together. True, propinquity played its part. But the fact remained that Greg was determined to stabilize their relationship. As with many of his generation, the Great Depression and the uncertainties of the Second World War created a deep yearning for security. Marriage offered a shelter from what Franklin D Roosevelt called ‘the winds of change and the hurricane of disaster’.

  Greta came from a loving family of Finns. ‘My parents had a country house and a city house,’ Greta said, explaining the dramatic circumstance of her birth in Finland. On a frigid day on 25 January 1911, during her mother’s eighth month of pregnancy, Mrs Kukkonen (later Americanized to Konen) went into labor while returning by train from their country place to Helsinki. Greta was born in the railroad station. Marveled Greta, ‘It was as cold as it could get and I was naked.’

  Her parents emigrated from Helsinki when she was two years old. They settled in Jersey City, where her father, a watchmaker, worked for Tiffany’s. After his death, her mother remarried and they now lived on a large farm in the Halsey Valley, located in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. To a young man from a bitterly split family, Greta’s home ties represented wholesomeness. Besides, they wouldn’t starve. Greta brought home a steady paycheck of $60 a week with her hairdressing job.

  Even by the wartime standards of the early 1940s, the nuptials were extremely impromptu. Greg and Greta invited a ragtag group of friends to a Yankees game, the 1942 World Series, New York Yankees vs the St Louis Cardinals. (The Cardinals, Greg’s mother’s hometown team, were young, hungry and daring. They ran every grounder, dove for every ball, and took every extra base on their way to victory. They also won the Series.) Following the game, the gang repaired to the Palm restaurant on Third Avenue and feasted on $5 steaks. Wildly expensive. ‘Ah, but what steak,’ Greg recalled with relish. Then they paid a visit to Christ Church United Methodist on 61st Street and Park Avenue. There, a casually dressed minister named J Gordon Chamberlain, agreed to perform the service at short notice. (Now 89 and still writing articles and occasionally teaching, Reverend Chamberlain says, ‘I was just four years out of the seminary and much was new to m
e.’) The vows were exchanged at 9.20 p.m. in the men’s lounge that was located in the path to the WC. Greg recalled: ‘It was in the lounge where the men’s club meets. We wanted it informal, not in the church. The minister was one of those regular guys – didn’t wear his collar backwards or anything.’ (Greg was raised as a Catholic but since Greta was divorced, getting married in the Catholic Church was out of the question.) Although the only relative who attended was Greta’s brother Paul, her mother sent them a lace tablecloth she made herself.

  The newlyweds remained with Paul for a spell in his apartment. Then, when Greg started getting $200-a-week paychecks for performing in his next play, The Willow and I, which opened on Broadway on 10 December 1942, they rented a one-bedroom, one-sitting room apartment at The Townhouse on Lexington Avenue for $200 a month. When Willow folded after a brief run, the bills started piling up. Peck hated being in debt. Growing up with a father who lost his pharmacy business to bankruptcy, the actor knew what that kind of defeat did to a man.

  Of all the people sending him late notices, none extended credit with more graciousness than Dr J Y Pokress – ‘dentist to the stars.’ He sawed, hacked, chopped and whittled some of the best teeth on Broadway. Greg owed him $1,400 for sprucing up his smile. Shy, stagestuck and an ardent theater-goer, Pokress was said to be the inspiration for Ben Stark, the timid dentist who develops a reckless desire for his receptionist during one steamy New York summer in Clifford Odets’ Depression era tale Rocket to the Moon.

  Around this time, Leland Hayward contacted Greg urging him to come West. Greg wasn’t sure what to do. Hollywood was barracuda country! And given Filmland’s obsession with appearances, he might be just another handsome face. While in New York, he was hitting his stride, developing solid theater credentials. He wanted to stay long enough to prove his talent, make his place, and achieve something. He figured it was just a matter of time before he would be getting parts in plays with longer runs.