On His Life, Career and the Long, Winding Journey to Playing Film’s Most Revered Hero
“You have to dream, you have to have a vision, and you have to set a goal for yourself that might even scare you a little because sometimes that seems far beyond your reach. Then I think you have to develop a kind of resistance to rejection, and to the disappointments that are sure to come your way.“
— Gregory Peck
By Gregory N. Joseph
GREGORY PECK, who died in 2003 at the age of 87, established his place in the Hollywood firmament when he won an Academy Award as Best Actor for playing the lead character Atticus Finch in the 1962 movie adaptation of Harper Lee’s beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird.”
His performance was voted the greatest screen hero of all time by the American Film Institute only two weeks before Peck’s death (beating out Indiana Jones, who placed second, and James Bond, who came in third).
In many ways, as I was to learn during a 1984 visit with Peck at his estate in the uber-exclusive Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles for a profile I was writing about him, Peck was Finch and Finch was Peck. He in fact readily admitted the character was closest to who he really was more than any of his other portrayals.
Our meeting, which included taping an oral history segment for the San Diego Film Society, was originally intended to illuminate the recent revival of the La Jolla Playhouse, which he had co-founded in 1947 with fellow actors Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer. The idea behind the playhouse had been to provide a safe haven for actors to stretch while avoiding the kind of “murderers’ row” of New York stage critics Peck recalled having faced early in his own career.
As with many actors, Peck’s path to acting followed a circuitous path.
He was born in the upscale La Jolla section of San Diego to Bernice Mae “Bunny” (Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, a New York-born chemist and pharmacist. She converted to her husband’s religion, Catholicism, and young Peck was raised in the faith, which became a profound influence on his life.
The couple divorced when Peck was five, and he was raised by his maternal grandmother, who sent him to a Catholic military school in Los Angeles when he was 10.
But he was around his grandmother enough for the experience to shape the rest of his life. She loved movies and would take the child to the cinema every week. The seed had been planted.
Although she died when Peck was 14, and he moved back to San Diego to live with his father, his interest in movies flourished.
After graduating from high school in San Diego, he attended classes for a year at San Diego State Teacher’s College (the forerunner of San Diego State University), where he took his first theater courses. Thinking he might like to become a doctor, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley as an English major and pre-medical student. But after taking a public speaking course there, his interest in performing grew. His handsome appearance and resonant voice drew the attention of an acting coach at the school, who encouraged him to participate in its theater program. He took part in a series of plays, and was hooked. He left the university just shy of graduating and moved to New York City, where he studied with the legendary acting guru Sanford Meisner.
Sometimes so broke he had to resort to sleeping in Central Park, the handsome young man with the big dreams sustained himself through a series of odd jobs, from working as a barker at the 1939 World’s Fair to serving as a tour guide for NBC television, even at one point doing some modeling to put food on the table.
His acting aspirations took a huge step forward in 1941 with a role in a Katharine Cornell stage production of George Bernard Shaw play “The Doctor’s Dilemma.” It opened in San Francisco — one week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the start of World War II.
Exempted from military service because of a back injury, he was available when many others weren’t, and made the most of the opportunities. He appeared in 50 plays, a handful of road tours, and summer theater.
Peck made his Broadway debut as the lead in “The Morning Star” in 1942, followed the same year by another Broadway production, “The Willow and I.”
The stage work led to his first film role, a starring turn in the 1944 war romance “Days of Glory” directed by Jacques Tourneur, as the leader of a band of Russian guerrillas resisting the Germans when they come across a beautiful Russian dancer who had been sent to entertain the Russians (the dancer was played by real-life Russian-born ballerina Tamara Toumanova).
Although the film was a critical and box-office disappointment, it gave Peck a boost. His screen presence was obvious and attracted the attention of movie producers who were anxious to capitalize on his potential.
But Peck, rather than follow the usual course of going with a single studio in the era of big-studio dominance, instead chose to become a freelance artist so that he might have more freedom in choosing his roles, signing non-exclusive contracts with four studios and an unusual dual agreement with 20th Century Fox and “Gone With the Wind” producer David O. Selznick.
The move, though risky, soon bore fruit — beyond even a young, aspiring actor’s wildest dreams.
His second film, 1944’s “The Keys of the Kingdom,” which has him aging from his 20s to his 80s as a Catholic priest looking back on his life as a missionary in China, earned four Academy Award nominations, including one for him as Best Actor.
At the age of 28, Peck was now a bona fide movie star.
Over the course of his career, he earned five Best Actor Academy Award nominations. After “The Keys of the Kingdom” nomination came nods for his performances in“The Yearling” (1946), “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947) (described as Hollywood first major attack on antisemitism; confided Peck, “My agent told me not to take the role — ‘They’ll think you’re a Jew’”), “Twelve O’Clock High” (1949), and “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962), the latter a courtroom drama centered on racism released at the height of the Civil Rights movement that finally brought him the Oscar.
In all, he appeared in more than 50 films over nearly six decades, from 1941 to 2000.
Interestingly, Peck confided to me that in retrospect he wished he had spiced up some of his earlier roles “with a little pepper and gravy.”
Unlike many of his contemporaries, his star didn’t fade. When I met with him 40 years later, he was still a Hollywood force.
In the 1980s, still very much in demand, he moved to occasional roles in television movies and miniseries, the one-time taboo of working in TV detracting from a screen star’s luster no longer a truism. His work in that medium included “The Blue and the Gray,” in which he played Abraham Lincoln, “The Scarlet and the Black,” in which he portrayed Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, a real-life Catholic priest in the Vatican who smuggled Jews and others away from the Nazis during World War II, and “Moby Dick,” a TV adaptation of the Herman Melville novel in which he played Father Mapple after having starred in a 1956 big-screen version as Captain Ahab.
In his last years, Peck’s popularity and draw were no more evident than in his tour of the U.S. and abroad with a one-man show about his life and career, where he spoke, showed clips from his films, and answered questions from a still-enamored audience. “Go ahead — ask me anything you want,” he told the crowd at one such event, and they did. He didn’t hesitate, and answered in kind. The love affair between audience and star had endured.
His fixed place in the Hollywood pantheon was a tribute both to his star quality and the image he had carefully crafted offscreen as a solid citizen, which reinforced his film persona as a man of strength and dignity.
The AFI named him the 12th-greatest male star of classic Hollywood in 1999 even as he continued offscreen as an industry leader. For its part, Hollywood was thrilled. He could be counted on to represent the industry as it wished to be perceived by the moviegoing public, the best “the business” had to offer.
He was a member of the National Council on the Arts from 1964 to 1966, national chairman of the American Cancer Society in 1966, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1967, chairman of the board of trustees of the American Film Institute from 1967 to 1969, and chairman of the Motion Picture and Television Relief Fund in 1971.
The numerous honors he received over the course of his career included the Motion Picture Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1967, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1971 (I was there at the Hollywood Palladium when he accepted it from SAG president Charlton Heston — left section, front row, aisle seat), and the AFI’s Life Achievement Award in 1989.
Peck, never one to shy away from risks as when he elected to freelance at the start of his film career, managed the difficult trick of being universally liked even as he was politically outspoken.
He challenged in writing the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigation of alleged Communists in 1947 at a time when many in Hollywood were being blacklisted for much less, urged a worldwide ban of nuclear weapons, was an advocate of gun control, opposed the Vietnam War (even though he remained supportive of his son, Stephen, who fought there, he produced the film version of Daniel Berrigan’s play “The Catonsville Nine” about the prosecution of Vietnam protestors), and appeared in very effective television national commercials opposing President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the United States Supreme Court (the Bork nomination was defeated). Not suprisingly, Peck was on President Richard Nixon’s “enemies” list. (Although Peck eschewed running for political office himself despite being urged to do so, his activism inspired his son, Carey Peck, to enter the political fray; the younger Peck ran twice for the U.S. House of Representatives, narrowly losing both times to Bob Dornan, a right-wing Republican former actor.)
Peck was 68 years old when I visited him, his six-foot-foot-three frame now thicker and his black mane turned a dark gray. But he still had a star’s swagger and gait, and he was blessed with still having his looks, the classic square-jawed features still readily recognizable.
As Peck discussed the vicissitudes of growing older in Hollywood, I found myself blurting, “You still look the same!” in one of those who’s-saying- that? moments, the knee-jerk response of a fan rather than the objective journalist I was supposed to be. “I do not,” Peck responded in a deep voice, chin on chest, a suddenly avuncular presence a little embarrassed at my outburst but suprisingly appreciative of the sentiment.
Yet he really was the same, it was no exaggeration, just the way I had remembered him in those unforgettable moments when I emerged from his movies as him, the character up there on the screen he had brought to life: the dashing, on-the-edge Brigadier General Frank Savage leading perilous daylight bombing raids on Germany and Occupied France during World War II in “Twelve O’Clock High” (1949); the damaged but principled World War II veteran Tom Rath who accepts a job as a publicity man for a television network as he struggles to readjust to his past and society in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1956); the dark, determined Lt. Joe Clemmons leading his platoon against the Chinese and North Koreans in the Korean War drama “Pork Chop Hill” (1959); the rough, relentless, vengeful Old West rancher Jim Douglass chasing the four thugs he believes killed his wife in “The Bravados” (1958); the rock-steady former sea captain James McKay who’s gone West to ranch and beats rowdies at their own game in “The Big Country” (1958); Captain Keith Mallory leading an Allied commando unit as they set out to destroy a seemingly impregnable German fortress overlooking the Aegean Sea in the World War II action adventure “The Guns of Navarone” (1961).
All of those screen personas, whom I had watched and identified with, were sitting there in front of me across the table, a whole crowd of characters — and memories.
“Inside of all the makeup and the character, it’s you, and I think that’s what the audience is really interested in — you,” Peck once explained, “how you’re going to cope with the situation, the obstacles, the troubles that the writer put in front of you.”
Film director James Cameron dramatically alluded to Peck’s appeal and effectiveness on the screen during an interview in which he discussed casting Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead in his Academy Award-winning 1997 historical epic “Titanic.” Dicaprio wanted to add some idiocyncracies to his portrayal, but Cameron was having none of it, telling him: “When you can do what you know Jimmy Stewart did or Gregory Peck did, they just stood there. They didn’t have a limp or a lisp or whatever, then you’ll be ready for this. But I’m thinking you’re not ready, ‘cause what I’m talking about is actually much harder. Those things are easier, those are props, those are crutches. What I’m talking about is much harder and you’re probably not quite ready for it.” Cameron’s speech clicked with DiCaprio, who eventually won the role, playing it the way the director wanted to great success.
As for my interview with Peck, there was only one requirement.
His son Jonathan had been found dead in his home on June 26, 1975, in what police believed was a suicide, and when I called Peck’s secretary to finalize our interview, she made clear the subject was off-limits. It was a request that I assured her was unnecessary to make, but it served as a sad reminder that even the biggest, most successful and beloved movie stars are human after all and can’t escape the often crushing vagaries of life.
Jonathan was one of three sons, along with Stephen and Carey, from Peck’s marriage to Finnish-born Greta Kukkonen. After 13 up and down years of marriage, they divorced, and on New Year’s Eve 1955, the day after the dissolution was final, he married Veronique Passani, a Paris reporter who had interviewed him in 1952 before he left for Italy to film the romantic comedy “Roman Holiday,” in which, appropriately enough, he played a reporter who falls for the princess he is covering. He asked her on a date six months later, and she accepted, in so doing passing up a chance to interview physician and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, a recent winner of the Nobel Prize, at a lunch hosted by a future Nobel Prize winner, the writer and activist Jean-Paul Sartre (“You made the right decision, kiddo,” Peck later quipped).
Peck and Veronique had two children of their own, a son Anthony and a daughter, Cecilia, and remained together until his death almost a half-century later. (Peck had grandchildren from both unions, one of whom is actor Ethan Peck.)
During our visit, Peck spoke openly about his upbringing, his journey as an actor, and the state of movies at the time.
He rued having given the 1966 film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” a pass to use raw language and sexually explicit situations saying the move “opened the floodgates for much lesser productions to do the same,” defended having played the lead in the 1976 horror film “The Omen” (“Oh, c’mon now! It was a great, big put-on!”), and said how much he enjoyed for a change playing a bad guy (in this case one of the worst ever, the Nazi “Angel of Death” Dr. Josef Mengele, opposite Laurence Olivier in the 1978 science-fiction thriller “The Boys from Brazil”).
But it was when “To Kill a Mockingbird” was mentioned that Peck really came alive and warmed, tracing the story’s core elements to his own youth. He was well aware that his performance in that picture as embattled attorney Atticus Finch facing down racism against all odds would be his greatest legacy, even as varied and resoundingly successful as his career had been (and still was) on and off the screen.
Of that film and his role in it he later said, “I put everything I had into it — all my feelings and everything I’d learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children. And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity.”
“Mockingbird” is a fictional tale set in the Deep South during the Great Depression, from 1933 to 1935, about a sincere, upright middle-aged attorney who is appointed to defend a black man wrongly accused of raping a young white woman. The attorney is widowed, and the story is recalled through the eyes of his six-year-old daughter, whom he is raising with her older brother with the help of a black cook who has been with the family for many years. They children are joined by a boy who spends summers with his aunt in their town each summer, and the three provide a framework of innocence as they witness the ugliness of the racist goings-on and the attorney’s staunch morality in the midst of it all even as their imaginations run wild, especially about a neighbor, a quiet, reclusive, backward young man.
The black man is convicted depite his innocence and is shot and killed while trying to escape from prison. A racist man who lied in testimony about him has been humiliated before the town and vows vengeance against the attorney and his family, finally attacking the children as they walk home one night after a Halloweeen pageant, with the little girl suffering a broken arm. Suddenly someone emerges from the darkness to rescue them and carries the girl home. They realize it is their mysetrious neighbor.
When the racist is found stabbed to death, the attorney jumps to the conclusion that his daughter has done it, but the sheriff, a principled man and friend of the attorney’s, believes otherwise, that it was really the reclusive neighbor. To protect him, and seeking a modicum of justice, the sheriff reports that the racist fell on his knife, accidentally killing himself. The children wind up walking the quiet neightbor home, saying goodbye to him at his front door, never seeing him again and trying to see life from his perspective.
“Some scenes from ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’” Peck mused almost to himself on this hot summer afternoon as he sipped what he called a “libation,” chilled iced water in a mason-jar glass, “were right out of my own childhood when I was growing up in La Jolla.”
Then he squinted with a faraway gaze, a gaze not one that he used on movie screens, shook his head gently from side to side, and gave a deep, personal sigh, as he peered silently down from the elegant round, wrought-iron glass table where we lazed on the carefully maintained red-bricked rear terrace that overlooked the vast, verdant back yard and large swimming pool behind his estate, a setting and view that in so many ways reflected the heights scaled by one of Hollywood’s most respected actors and industry leaders. In spirit, Gregory Peck the movie star was no longer there, replaced instead by the boy he had been, and he was back in the dusty hometown of his youth. He missed that time in his life. Palpably.
“When the child is rolling down the street inside the tire,” he was saying as his right index finger rimmed the edge of his glass of water, “well, that was me and my friends. We did that! That was us! The streets — why, back then they were dirt in my hometown, which was very small and undeveloped at the time. It all looked just the same as that town in the movie.”
He was clearly moved, and a bit surprised at what he had initially dismissed as “a trip down memory lane.”
Peck laughed. He recalled noticing author Lee standing near the camera with a tear in her eye as he filmed one particular scene in “Mockingbird.”
“When I finished, I went over to her and she said, ‘You remind me of my father. You have the same paunch.’ To which I replied, ‘That, my dear, is great acting.’”
Although Lee has always refrained from calling “Mockingbird” an autobiography, she clearly borrowed strains of it from her own childhood. The little girl, Scout, for instance, the daughter of Atticus, is Lee as a child. The character is portrayed onscreen by Mary Badham (who would stay in touch with Peck throughout his life) while an older version of the character serves as the film’s narrator (this portion is voiced by actress Kim Stanley).
Scout’s playmate Dill, who in the book’s plot is supposed to be visiting Scout’s neighborhood, is based on Lee’s own childhood friend, the author Truman Capote, whom she helped research his own landmark book, the nonfiction novel, “In Cold Blood.” As children, they were both avid readers and began writing on an old Underwood typewriter supplied by her father, Amasa Coleman Lee.
Atticus, in turn, is drawn from Amasa, who in real life was an attorney who in 1919 defended two black men accused of murder (they were convicted, hanged and mutilated — and Lee never tried another case again; he would go on to become publisher and editor of a local newspaper). Furthermore, the story is set in Macomb, Alabama. Lee grew up in Monroeville, Alabama.
As for Peck and Finch, it was difficult to see where the actor’s personality left off and that of the righteous, unwavering character in the book began. There was the sense the character spilled into Peck’s own personality, and even into some of his other screen characterizations.
Peck confided with a self-effacing nudge and shrug that he purchased this palatial Los Angeles home of his whilst on a lunch break from playing the title role of General Douglas MacArthur in the movie “MacArthur.” The mansion had been suggested by a realtor to him and Veronique.
As he told the story, embellished with a flourish suggesting it was a favorite, oft-repeated tale shared with visitors to the place, he came home from the studio for lunch one day while still in the General MacArthur character (and garb), marching around like the grand old soldier he was portraying, issuing orders — but unfortunately not really paying attention to the reality of the commitment he was on the cusp of making. “I’ll take it,” he recalled saying in a way the legendary Army general might have delivered the line. “And so,” Peck concluded, looking around with a wide sweep of his arm, “we wound up with this house.”
Peck’s stately French chateau-style home was located at 375 North Carolwood Drive in the storied Holmby Hills neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles. Holmby Hills, Bel Air and Beverly Hills form the “Platinum Triangle” of Los Angeles, and although Holmby Hills is the smallest of the three, it is the most exclusive, boasting some of the most historic and expensive estates in the entirely of Los Angeles whose one-time residents included Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall, Gary Cooper, Fanny Brice (“Funny Girl”), Bing Crosby, Jack Benny, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Jayne Mansfield, Barbara Stanwyck and her then-husband Robert Taylor, Walt Disney, Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand. Michael Jackson was renting a mansion on North Carolwood Drive when he died in 2009. Hollywood history hangs over Holmby Hills like an invisible marquee. You knew that Gregory Peck belonged.
In the foyer of Peck’s home, resting on a long cabinet in the hallway, there were only two objects: a tennis racket and a gleaming, silver-framed photo of Peck with Pope John Paul II. (Despite its opulence, this was an estate that was used and enjoyed: a station wagon sat at a hastily-parked angle in the driveway in front of an open garage with a lamp shade on the floor.) Peck, a devout Catholic who had once considered becoming a priest, called the pope the finest man he ever met but allowed he didn’t always agree with him on issues like abortion, contraception and the ordination of women. “I am a Roman Catholic,” he said, practicing the faith not fanatically but “enough to keep the franchise.”
This great square-jawed actor known for his serious demeanor, stentorian voice, Mount-Rushmore screen presence, and enough awards to fill a warehouse, had a rarely-seen puckish side.
As I arrived, one of his grandchildren was just bidding goodbye and heading out the door.
“When you’re a grandparent,” Peck said, an eyebrow arched mischievously as he pulled up a chair and watched his grandson disappear with a tiny wave around the corner, “you have the best of both worlds. You get to play with the children when they’re fresh and lively, then when they get fidgety, as all children do, you pick up the phone and call their parents, saying, ‘I think little Johnny is tired and would like to come home.’”
We made small talk as we shook hands and began to sit down, and I seized the opportunity to finally thank Peck (whom my parents had named me after) for a rare gift he generously provided me during my early days as a young actor in Hollywood, a coveted $500 ticket to a much-ballyhooed benefit concert of Sinatra’s — billed as his farewell performance — at the Los Angeles Center on Sunday, June 13, 1971, that had been passed on to me through a mutual friend who was in the show.
My ticket was for an upper-level seat in the Music Center’s Ahmanson Theatre next to a gaggle of surprisingly sedate people from Dean Martin’s popular television variety show, and directly behind the leonine-maned actor Clint Eastwood, whose foray into spaghetti Westerns abroad had paid off big-time and made him one of Hollywood’s top box-office draws (appropriately enough, he was clad in a formal brown Western-cut suit and wearing shiny, matching brown cowboy boots). Legendary comedian Bob Hope, still hanging on to broad, multigenerational appeal thanks in large part to his perennial twin draws of hosting the Academy Awards and fashioning Christmas TV specials out of his tours entertaining military personnel enmeshed in the Vietnam War, eased quietly through the door just behind us now and again to see how things were going onstage (and playing with the audience).
The lavish multi-paged booklet for the evening’s entertainment (which I still have) explained that “for the first time, all of the facilities of the magnificent Los Angeles Music Center are being utilized simultaneously for one event: the Motion Picture and Television Relief Fund’s Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration … This spectacular occasion is indeed a tribute to the spirit of the the industry … “
Sinatra would give “identical performances” in the Music Center’s Ahmanson Theatre and Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, after which there would be a gala in the Music Center Plaza and Mark Taper Forum.
Listed on the booklet’s opening page as patroness was “HSH Princess Grace of Monaco.” Among those appearing onstage were Hope, Jimmy Durante, Sammy Davis Jr., David Niven, Jack Lemmon, Rock Hudson, Pearl Bailey, The 5th Dimension, Mitzi Gaynor, Don Rickles, Joe Namath, Ali MacGraw, Ryan O’Neal, Barbra Streisand, Jack Benny, Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant, James Stewart — and Princess Grace.
The audience was a who’s who of the day’s well-known, too, including the polarizing and soon-to-be disgraced out of office vice president of the United States, one Spiro T. Agnew, the aformentioned Mr. Nixon’s running mate (and alas, a pal of Sinatra’s), with his loyal Secret Service entourage in tow.
In short, it was a very big deal indeed. However, as Peck would remind me, it really wasn’t the mercurial Mr. Sinatra’s final public performance, after all.
“You mean the concert when Frank ‘retired’?” smiled Peck, a close friend of the singer who had produced the extravagant program, which had been lavishly publicized as Sinatra’s swan song (see the splashy June 25, 1971, cover of Life magazine with a full-page photo of the iconic old crooner in mid-song under the headline “Sinatra Says Goodby and Amen”). Peck registered faux irritation, pointing out that Sinatra “unretired” just two years later. It was a practiced sarcasm suggesting the two had enjoyed needling each other about it in the intervening years.
Peck, who vividly remembered supplying me with the ticket (“You’re welcome!” he intoned with that famous finely clipped elocution), possessed what one might describe as an elite sense of humor, someone accustomed to operating in powerful circles with the skill set to use a deft, playful jab without breaking the thin skins of those otherwise unaccustomed to being jabbed.
That day at Peck’s house was the first of our several interviews, and he became a loyal and reliable source, never hesitating to speak his mind with unusual clarity and strength of character whenever I called. Atticus Finch was present always, never far away.
Eldred Gregory Peck passed away at age 87 at home in his sleep from bronchopneumonia on June 12, 2003, with Veronique at his side.
He was entombed in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels mausoleum in Los Angeles under the moniker “Gregory Peck” (he abhorred the name “Eldred,” jettisoning it in theatrical listings early on, and noticeably eschewed using it on his one last, eternal billing). Veronique, upon her death nine years later at the age of 80, was laid to rest beside him.
The words “Together Forever” bridge the simple adjoining marble tablets marking their graves, one of the most acclaimed actors of his time and the former Paris reporter who interviewed, fell in love with, and ultimately married him.
“I’m not a do-gooder,” he once insisted. “It embarrasses me to be classified as a humanitarian. I simply take part in activities that I believe in.”
And so Gregory Peck did. Utterly.
