Of Mockingbirds and Maniacs: Gregory Peck
August 1981
By David Fantle & Tom Johnson
Gregory Peck was out stumping for "unpopular" liberal causes long before Screen Actors Guild president Ed Asner became vocal about rebels in El Salvador. Unlike his contemporaries Ronald Reagan and Senator George Murphy, Peck has never used his elected positions in the entertainment business as an entrance to the national political arena -- a curiously popular enticement for movie and television stars these days.
I've been called the Hollywood equivalent of John F. Kennedy because of my devotion to liberal politics," Peck told us during an interview at his Bel-Air home. "Naturally, I am flattered, but I'm afraid the comparison ends more or less where it began."
Dressed in khaki shorts and an old dress shirt rolled up at the sleeves, Peck asked if we'd like something to drink. Momentarily, a houseboy appeared with a tray of flavored teas and coffees from which to choose. The late afternoon sun was beginning to slant so we moved out to an upstairs terrace and watched as Peck's son, Tony, tossed a football back and forth to a friend. From our plush vantage point (tantamount to the owner's box at, Anaheim Stadium, probably), Tony looked to have the bionic arm of Joe Namath; bulleting 50-yard passes with ease.
"He's putting together a rock band right now," Peck said with the bemused detachment of a parent used to his children's fevered -- and ever-changing -- enthusiasms. "We'll see," he said dolefully.
For eight years, from 1966-68 and 1970-76, Peck served on the embryonic National Endowment for the Arts Commission (NEA) with such luminaries as John Steinbeck, Agnes DeMille, Isaac Stern and Leonard Bernstein. Following the passage of the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, the NEA was afforded a whopping $4 million annually in scholarship and grant subsidies. The money was intended to blanket the cultural needs of the entire United States.
"We would meet six times a year and quarrel for hours over which writer, regional theater, or ballet company best deserved a $2,000 grant," Peck said. "I think we got pretty good results, but I do remember a certain politician from Iowa who used to eternally wail to his colleagues on the floor of Congress, 'Tax money for toe-dancers over my dead body!'"
The confounded reality that in 1966, a city the size of Hamburg, Germany gave $7 million to their local opera company alone while the entire U.S. muddled through with a mere $4 million in cultural subsidies made Peck's social consciousness crawl.
"The total amount has grown now to $160 million in the United States, which is still not much," he said. "Most of the performing arts don't pay their way back at the box office with the cost of production and other expenses."
Wouldn't it be hard for the Reagan administration to justify increased spending on cultural programs at the expense of cutbacks in social welfare?
"I know it's hard for many people to accept. They feel that cultural groups should pay their own way," Peck said. "But if we want our young people to expand their horizons and personalities and to reach their highest aspirations, then the arts must be nationally subsidized. The private corporate sector has already taken up most of the slack."
"On The Beach," "Gentleman's Agreement," and "To Kill a Mockingbird," for which Peck won an Oscar, were entertaining films that crusaded for timely social issues. They were Peck's dream movies, killing two birds with one stone.
"'Gentleman's Agreement' was a cause celebre around Hollywood because it was the first movie to deal directly with anti-Semitism," Peck said. "When Darryl Zanuck decided to do it, people advised him not to rock the boat. 'Business is great,' they said. 'Why deal with such a controversial subject?' Zanuck replied that it was a very good dramatic story that also made observations about racial prejudice. We all felt we ere pioneering in a small way. Nowadays it would be nothing, but in 1948, it mattered."
The era of movie producers like Zanuck, who were passionately interested in every line in the scripts of their movies, has given way to a generation of movie mogul conglomerates who look only as far as their profit margins.
"I don't know any studio heads today and I don't want to know them, because they probably won't be here next year," Peck said. "They all seem to be a page in Gulf and Western's portfolio. That fellow in the tall building in Columbus Circle in New York, Charles Bluhdorn, he turns the pages, and if a company like Paramount didn't do well last year, he'll throw the rascals out and get some new rascals in. They are essentially crapshooters. Zanuck was a walking computer. You could call him from the set if you had trouble with a line and he'd rewrite the line with you right there on the telephone. If you call one of those fellows today, chances are they won't know what the hell you're talking about."
In 1962, Peck portrayed Atticus Finch, the morally courageous lawyer who defended a black man accused of rape in "To Kill a Mockingbird." The character is strongly reminiscent of the quiet determination of Frank Capra's everyman idealist of the 1930s and '40s. It is Peck's favorite role, and was one of the most challenging of his career.
"I think one of the hardest things to do as an actor is to make a good man interesting, because they can be awfully dull. If a man is predictably nice, he can put audiences to sleep," Peck said. "Atticus was a good man if anybody anywhere was ever good. We managed to make him compelling. Today when I'm with my wife and we walk down Fifth Avenue in New York, people will come up to me and say how much 'To Kill a Mockingbird' meant to them. One young man even said that his decision to become a lawyer was formulated at the age of 14 after he saw the film."
"The Boys from Brazil," in which Peck played the part of Dr. Mengele, the diabolical Nazi death-camp experimenter, was a world away from his restrained performance as Atticus Finch, but didn't require flexing too many acting muscles.
"To play Mengele, a raving lunatic, was not difficult," Peck said. "I got down the German accent, blackened my hair, shaved the hair-line back a couple of inches, and affected a kind of laboratory pallor. It has been said that the greatest role an actor could play would be a dipsomaniac dope fiend being dragged to the electric chair. You can climb the walls and claim it's great acting."
Peck can be considered dogmatic in more than just a political sense. He was chewed to pieces by salivating canines in the finales of two of his more recent films, "The Omen" and "The Boys From Brazil." But apparently he holds no grudges. "I don't want to make a career as dog food," he said. "The only thing my German Shepherd, Roger, has a fondness for teething on is old Hawaiian Tropic Suntan Oil bottles." (The dog was busily engaged perforating one during the course of our interview.)
One of the "old guard" Hollywood directors Peck remembers fondly is William Wyler, a master of light comedy best known for "Ben Hur," "The Best Years of Our Lives" and "Funny Girl." His economical direction would give any Stanislavskian pause to rethink his method.
"Wyler's direction was considered to be death on wheels to method actors," Peck said. "When I was working on 'Roman Holiday' with Audrey Hepburn, he'd say, 'Audrey, get mad; you have to cry in this scene.' She had to produce tears without analysis. On the contrary, method actors might say, 'Grandma hurt my feelings when I was five, and if I can recall that, I can cry for you.' It's kind of like dry fly fishing. You drop the fly in the water and when the trout grabs it, you set the hook. There are directors who wouldn't recognize a valuable nuance if you hit them in the face with it. But Wyler was omniscient. He'd wait until a scene was right if it took three days."
Peck will make a rare foray into network television later this year, starring as Abraham Lincoln in "The Blue and The Gray," an eight-hour CBS mini-series based on the Civil War writing of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bruce Catton.
"Television is more meticulous now because networks have more money to spend," Peck said. "They aren't scrambling to shoot 20 pages a day whether it's good, bad, or indifferent. Historical drama can be very good on TV and still be a pleasant change from sophomoric comedy and escapism, which someone once said was just a euphemism for junk."
If he's lucky, Peck's Lincoln might even harken back to the quality of his old movies -- four-score and seven years ago. …
August 1981
