Leading Man

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Three or four nights a week, he has an odd, recurring dream. He is an athlete in a jampacked, outsized stadium. He takes off for an efficient, unspectacular broad jump. But he suddenly soars past the pit and over the heads of the officials, zooms right on over the stadium wall in a long, majestic arc, and wakes before he lands.

Except for his good looks, which are considerably above average, Gregory Peck is an average young man who has made a fairly fast and dizzying jump to movie stardom. Since his arrival in Hollywood four years ago, he has carried a large part of the burden of an aggregate Hollywood investment of some $23 million, and has been instrumental in grossing a total of at least $50 million. With his ninth--and newest--picture, The Paradine Case (see below), he is in such demand that he has had to turn down starring roles in some 30 other pictures, most of them major productions.

During 1947, cinemaddicts watched him as a gentle back-country father in The Yearling, as a lady-killing hunter in The Macomber Affair, as Lascivious Lewt in Duel in the Sun, and as the crusading journalist in Gentleman's Agreement--performances which established him as an actor of solidity and range.

Peck, at 31, has moved up into a secure place on the list of the nation's top ten box-office draws. He can count on 5,000 fan letters a week. He has been respectfully mentioned four times as a candidate for the Academy Award; his performance in Gentleman's Agreement makes him a red-hot contender for the 1947 Oscar.

Like the average man that he is, Peck is nobody's fool. He knows that his talents, though real, are not extraordinary. He is acutely aware of the wide gap between his natural abilities and his smashing success. He knows pretty well how much of his spectacular rise he can credit to himself, how much to pure luck, how much to the peculiarities of the flying-trapeze world he works in. He fully expects to wake up one of these days and find himself in San Diego again, driving a truck.

Up in fhe Air. Peck's boyhood, like his current dreams, was up in the air. His parents were divorced when he was a small child, and he was split up and parceled out among relatives, as he was later to be divided among the studios. He felt something like security only with his father, a charming, easygoing ex-basketball star who had failed in business as a druggist and hoped his son might become a doctor. Although Gregory was a handsome boy, he tended to stand back and watch while the cheerleaders and backfield men made off with the only girls who interested him. When at last he got a girl of his own, he fell as much in love with her secure family life as with her. Hoping to get married, he threw over medicine and took a job driving an oil truck. He lost direction again when he lost the girl; and, with nothing better to do, began putting himself through the University of California by waiting on table.

He pulled an A in Elizabethan literature, but he wasn't much of a student. One thing he did enjoy was rowing. His crew was good enough to row at Poughkeepsie; but his career as an oarsman ended abruptly when he hurt his spine.

The injury was the shrewdest twist Fortune has given Peck's career. Because of it he took up acting, which he had never before considered. Because of it, he was draftproof at a time when the war brought Hollywood disastrously close to total emasculation.

With sports out of the question, Gregory landed a part as Starbuck in a college production of Moby Dick. In this first try at acting he was so terrible that self-respect forced him to try again. In the next plays, he was better. By the time he played Matt in the drama club's Anna Christie, he knew what he wanted. He could not even wait five days to pick up his diploma, he was in such a hurry to reach Broadway.

A-Thrill-a-Second. Broadway was less excited. He did get a job speaking lines, of a sort. They were spoken very sharply and very fast at a World's Fair ride called the Meteor Speedway. The lines began: "A-thrill-a-second-a-mile-a-minute-around-the-walls-of-an-upright-BOWL! . . . Come on, brother . . . defy the laws of gravity! . . ." Shortly before the venture folded, Peck took a job ushering tourists around Rockefeller Center, where his performances were no more outstanding. Until he learned better, he innocently assured other eager outlanders that Brooklyn was a part of New Jersey. He once fell asleep in a box while his charges outstayed (by an outrageous 20 minutes) their free glimpse of a Radio City show.

In 1939, he won a two-year scholarship at Manhattan's Neighborhood Playhouse. Broadway Producer Guthrie McClintic saw him and signed him for a last-act bit in the road tour of Katharine Cornell's The Doctor's Dilemma. On that tour, Peck met and later married Greta Konen, a tiny, bright-blonde Finnish girl who was Cornell's hairdresser.

After a dreary series of revivals, summer stock and out-of-town closings, McClintic gave him a role in a 1942 Broadway show, Emlyn Williams' The Morning Star. The show soon folded, but the critics had some nice things to say about a new juvenile named Gregory Peck.

The kind notices encouraged Peck and interested Hollywood enormously. The young actor earnestly wanted to become a good artist in a good Broadway play. But after three flops in a row, he began to feel that a little ready money, quickly made, would be very nice indeed--so long as it was clearly understood by everyone that after one picture he was going straight back to Broadway.

Pieces of Peck. Hollywood, a hard place to get into, is even harder to leave, once you're in. Peck's "one" picture, Days of Glory, was a rather pathetic Hollywood attempt to make a Russian-style "art" movie. It was not a box-office success; but before it was released and before most of Hollywood had even seen it, Peck was one of the most sought-after properties in town.

Louis B. Mayer was anxious to sign him up for a seven-year contract. Darryl Zanuck was eager to trust him with the leading role in a $3,000,000 production (Keys of the Kingdom), regardless of the fact that Peck was unknown and unwilling even to make a screen test. David Selznick, who now claims to have recognized Pecks talent from the first, was also in there nibbling (characteristically, Selznick eventually walked away with the lion's share). There is a touch of more than Hollywood's habitual fantasy in these frantic negotiations for the services of a promising, impoverished, idealistic, unknown young stage actor.

Peck himself was both obliging and obstinate. He obstinately asked for clauses permitting him, for instance, half-time on Broadway (something unheard-of for a movie beginner)--and he obligingly, in the long run, let himself in for enough commitments to keep him hopelessly busy in the studios for a solid seven years. When the moguls were through shuffling around their pieces of Mr. Peck, he was the most owned and least available leading man in Hollywood, and one of the most valuable.

At present, he is partitioned as follows: to M-G-M for two more pictures; to 20th Century-Fox for two; to David Oliver Selznick for three.

"Early American." In spite of Hollywood's bad reputation for misusing talent, studios normally try hard with anyone they regard as promising. With Peck, the moviemakers were inclined to outdo themselves. Each studio needed a major male star, and Peck looked like a good risk. Moreover, since no studio had been able to snare him outright, each was determined to sweat the best possible use out of him. Peck was inadvertently handed some bum pictures; but each one was a major production. And during his first years, he had the run of a virtually clear field. Since he ran it as seriously and efficiently as if the field were swarming with tacklers, he had established himself solidly by the time his competitors got back out of uniform.

Peck's fleeting resemblance to Gary Cooper was undoubtedly helpful, at the start. Neither moviemakers nor moviegoers take quickly, as a rule, to a wholly unprecedented face. But it was soon clear also that Peck was no carbon copy, but a distinct and engaging new personality. He has a face which Mary Morris of PM has aptly described as "early American." It can, of course, be dangerous to look enough like Abraham Lincoln to suffer by comparison or to seem to be plagiarizing. At certain unfortunate moments Peck looks merely like a pretty Lincoln; but he never looks like a silly one, a road-show impersonator, or a sandwich man for the Republican Party.

One of his gravest dangers as an actor may be his good looks, which invest any role he undertakes with a certain idealized, legendary quality. But his fine-featured face gives him enormous range as a movie hero: while remaining a virile 6 ft. 3 in., he can suggest, if the plot demands it, a man who is delicate, ill, or even morally weak. Peck appeals, as a very popular male star must, to both bobby-soxers and their mothers. He manages this feat without presenting himself as a big brother, as a cute, asexual nephew, or as a sophisticated porch climber. Men also immediately like him and wish him well; they feel that he is, in fact, an average human being--luckier, better looking and more gifted than they, but essentially one of themselves.

After-Hours. Caught neck-deep among Hollywood's peculiar blessings and obligations, Peck likes being regarded as a good actor. But he takes little pleasure in his fame, and none, apparently, in the standing, prestige or power he might have. He admits to some laziness, but adds, with proper self-respect: "I can be conscientious as hell under pressure."

His deepest interests are afterhours. They center in his home, his wife, and, above all, in his sons, 3 1/2-year-old Jonathan and Stephan, 1 1/2. The three-man romps, in which he hurls the youngsters against the softer pieces of furniture like a couple of shrieking medicine balls, give him the best moments of his day. Sociable, in a non-Hollywood way, he spends two or three evenings a week over a home dinner, whiskey, and talk with one or two of his handful of close friends (closest: Richard Conte). He actively dislikes nightclubs.

A friend has suggested that Peck virtually never goes out evenings because he is terrified at the possibility of running into some of the community's better-known Bright Boys. "I am short of the old I-am," he explains. "When I get mixed up with Nunnally Johnson or Herman Mankiewicz or Ben Hecht, I am struck dumb. I feel more comfortable in front of a camera." Actually, the very sound brain in his head doesn't run either to wit or to highbrow intellectual discussion. Alfred Hitchcock has said of him that he is probably the most anecdoteless man in Hollywood; it does not come natural to him either to tell anecdotes or to inspire them. David Selznick has called Peck the best-informed actor in Hollywood, which is probably an exaggeration. Selznick may have meant to say that Peck has one clear sign of a vigorous intelligence: an eagerness to keep on learning.

Like many actors, he is sanguine about a piece of work while he is at it, but he soon cools into a stern self-critic. During the filming of Duel in the Sun, he talked --jocosely, to be sure--about out-heeling Satan and out-Laurencing Olivier. Now he says of Duel: "I didn't do much acting. I rode horses, necked with Jennifer, and shot poor old Charley Bickford." Of Valley of Decision: "My agent wanted me to be seen with a big female star. Greer's audience, he said, will be a good thing for you. It was a very good maneuver. The movie? I didn't like it." Of Spellbound: "I was lousy." Of The Yearling: "I would have liked the picture better with its Walt Disney aspects pushed into the background. It was much too lushly done, and we have to take part of the rap."

The Short End. By Hollywood standards, Peck is shamefully underpaid. Up to last year, he was still at the mercy of his own commitments and of the studios to which he was committed. He still suffers from being an obliging man more interested in acting than in money. In order to get the part of the millowner's son in Valley of Decision, he had to sign for three additional pictures at $45,000, $55,000 and $65,000 respectively. One of these, The Yearling, has been made. At the time Peck made it he was worth at least $150,000 a picture (standard fee for topflight stars). Today, if he chose to operate that way, he might command and get $200,000 or more. But he will make two more pictures for M-G-M--at $55,000 and $65,000. His sensible attitude: "Every good picture lengthens your screen life."

In his first really profitable year, 1946, his income was $220,000, of which he kept $46,000. He recently bought a $50,000 house in the Thomas Mann-Joseph Cotten neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, and is putting whatever money he can salvage into a heavy annuity program.

Peck still clings doggedly to the notion of being a stage actor. It is not that he considers himself too good for movies (he doesn't think he is good enough), nor even that he thinks plays are better than pictures. But he still believes that the theater is the best place to learn how to act. He has been instrumental in organizing a Selznick-financed group of movie people (Cotten, Jennifer Jones, Dorothy McGuire, et al.) who do stage-acting in their spare time. But it will be a long time--three years at least--before he can hope to work again on Broadway. "The stage, yes," he now says with a hounded look, "when 1 get through with these commitments."

The Next 20 Years. In his new picture, Peck contends manfully with a role which only a virtuoso might have saved. But there is no good reason why either Peck or his admirers need worry about his future. For the camera's purposes, his lean, bony face is the sort that is practically indestructible. For the next 20 years, he is not likely to look enough older to damage him as a leading man. And his place in movies is already high, secure and respectably unique.

He is U.S. cinema's first male idol to resist typing: the first to devote himself successfully to the art of acting, rather than a stylized display of physique and personality. He has shown no signs of that depth of intuition which would suggest that he will ever become a great actor--as Olivier, for instance, may become. But he seldom fails to turn in a performance that is honorably beyond the line of movie duty. He is diligent, definitely if quietly talented, intelligent about his work; and he has an obvious capacity for study and for growth. Unless he succumbs to boredom, frustration, wealth, or the hideous difficulties of trying to be both a matinee idol and an honest artist, he is certain to become a thoroughly good actor.

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