Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1949)

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Because, then, if there was still any growth left in me, it would never come out.” THE San Diego where Greg Peck grew up was a quiet little city, asleep in the sun, stirring to wakefulness only when the fleet came to anchor. Greg roamed the streets, dove for abalones in the quiet coves near La Jolla, and wandered alone along the sandy beaches. Something nagged at him, kept worrying at his thoughts. He didn’t know what it was but he was always trying to find out. He spent his energy building sailboats and venturing farther out into the harbor than was considered safe; he dove off the highest ledges of rock into deep pools and roared around town in what must have been the earliest version of the modern hot-rod. But nothing helped much. His. father, sensing the boy’s restlessness, urged him to enroll at the San Diego State College. Greg complied, and wasted a year in futilely reaching for something always just beyond his grasp. At the end of that time he quit and found a job working for the Union Oil Company. There, for a time, he was content because he had his eye fixed on something definite, a big, ten-wheel gas truck which, he was told, could be aspired to only by older heads in the service. Greg began working overtime, hanging around the company garage after the other employees had gone home. He practiced the intricate gearshifts on the mighty trucks until he could go through them with the smoothness of an expert. One proud day, he found himself on the seat of a great red Juggernaut/ a fully accredited driver. The feeling of fulfillment lasted for a while. There was a little blonde elf who lived on the outskirts of San Diego who tossed her head and cut her green eyes at him disdainfully when they met on the street. The first time Greg drove past her house, proud in his bellowing chariot, she capitulated. He took her to a sweetshop for a malted. Odd that her eyes didn’t seem so beautiful on closer inspection and that her complexion seemed a little muddy. Well, anyway, there was that really beautiful girl who lived on the Heights. . . . But driving the huge truck was sheer delight and he got over his route quickly and well. But one day this job didn’t offer any challenge any more. It was at this point in his life that Gregory Peck took an objective look at himself and asked a question— What do you want to make of yourself? He didn’t know; but he thought a good education might help him make up his mind. So he went back to college. There, the astonished professors saw a solemnfaced kid tearing into his books as though his life depended on it. It wasn’t easy. Mathematics was a wilderness where he wandered lost and alone. It was also the highest hurdle he had encountered thus far in his short life and he went after it with a kind of concentrated fury. The next fall, he passed his examinations for entrance to the University of California and started for Berkeley. To the long-legged kid with the shock of unruly black hair, it was all vastly stimulating. Like most freshmen, he thought he Heart ought to go out for something. Too light for football, he decided to try for the crew, and to his complete surprise, made it, eventually rowing in the Hudson River Regatta in New York. Not long after re-, turning to Berkeley from this trip, however, he suffered a back injury in training which ended his career as an oarsman. Disconsolate, he was wandering across the campus one afternoon when he was stopped by Everett Glass, director of the Little Theater at Berkeley. He needed a tall, black-haired youth for a play he was putting on. Outwardly, at least, Peck met every requirement, so hg agreed to try for the part of the mate in an adaptation of Herman Melville’s great story, “Moby Dick.” There followed a period of the most exquisite torture. Peck was such a poor actor that the director, himself, laughed. “I could hardly walk across the stage without falling on my face,” Peck says. THE important moments of our lives are never labeled. Greg didn’t know it, but the instant he stepped on the stage at Berkeley, the whole pattern of his life was set, once and for all. Never again would there be any floundering or indecision. And, here at last, was a challenge which, some inner prescience told him, would either break his heart or lift him to unimaginable heights. He accepted it with a kind of bitter determination, and by the time he left Berkeley, Gregory Peck was known as a young actor with “interesting” possibilities. “That was just the beginning of the hurdle I had to get over,” Greg says now. “But the big question, could I make a living out of my chosen profession, still remained to be answered. They told me I’d never find out till I got to New York. So I went there.” Nothing very much happened to Peck during the next four years, unless you consider starving to be important. Being young and lost in a dream, he didn’t. Finally, when hope seemed gone, he won a $500 scholarship at the New York Neighborhood Theater after being told to go home and forget all about acting. Martha Graham, with almost surgical skill, discovered the spots where he wounded most easily. She gibed at him, she sneered, she laughed at his desperately eager efforts. She made his trials for the award periods of torture. He bent his head and took it, but kept trying, always doggedly trying. And then one day, when he knew he had failed, word came that he had won the scholarship. “Half the fun of winning was gone by that time,” he says, “but there was one great solace, I knew that eventually I’d get over my hurdle. I would prove that I could make a living out of the business of acting. The rest of the journey would be just a challenge to my staying power. It was there, though, still a challenge.” When Peck had completed his training at the Neighborhood Theater he began looking for a job, finally landing one through almost unbelievable good fortune, with Katharine Cornell. It was she who lit the lamp that bums in his mind to this day. She taught him to hate mediocrity, and never to compromise with excellence. In the end, she made an actor out of the lanky, slat-bodied kid from San Diego. Following his long engagement with Miss Cornell in “The Doctor’s Dilemma,” Peck was launched upon a series of distinguished flops, too dreary to enumerate. Before he was finished with them, a rather sinister word was being whispered in producers’ offices, “Peck is the original Hard Luck Kid. Any play in which he is cast