by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 06-12-2003


This was in Mexico in 1988, on a crumbling hacienda being used as a set for the movie "Old Gringo." We arrived in midmorning, among the boxcars of the Mexican Revolution, and many horses, and a few hundred Mexican extras dressed as revolutionists. Then, without fanfare, a tall, older man walked from one of the houses. He was mustachioed, smiling and absolutely at ease.

That was Gregory Peck.

He was then 72. He had been making movies since 1943 and had been a star since "Keys of the Kingdom" in 1945, but no actor ever wore his stardom so lightly. The Mexican extras watched him, as if scrutinizing him for signs of the often terminal narcissism of the famous. They never saw it.

"Buenos días," he said to them, and smiled, while they smoked cigarettes and lolled in the sun of the valley of Morelos. They all replied with the same greeting, and smiled back, and a few shook his hand. Then they were all at ease, as he turned to the Argentine director Luis Puenzo to talk about his scene. Each of the extras would soon be able to say: I made a movie once with Gregory Peck.

At lunchtime that day, we talked for a while in his trailer. He said something nice about a book I’d written, and then discussed "Old Gringo," which was based on a novel by the fine Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes. He was playing Ambrose Bierce, a brilliant burned-out Hearst newspaperman, who went to revolutionary Mexico in 1917 in search of something and was never seen again.

"I think Bierce was trying to find something that would give his life meaning," Peck said. "A moment of true passion."

I asked Peck if he still felt a passion for making movies.

"Of course," he said. "As long as they’re not junk, what could be a better way to spend a life? Maybe a movie can change someone's life, make them feel something they’d never felt before, understand this whole deal a little more. Or just have fun. There’s nothing wrong with that either."

What made him happy

He had a slight hint of detached amusement as he spoke, as if conscious that he might be making too much of what he did for a living. But it was clear that day, and during the following days, that he was a man happy with his work. I told him that "Roman Holiday" (1953) was the movie that first made me imagine being a newspaperman. After all, Peck’s character had a great apartment in Rome, rode around all day on a motor scooter and never seemed to work. All that, and Audrey Hepburn, too! Peck laughed out loud and said: "I’d have liked that kind of life, too."

He had, in fact, started out wanting to be a writer, in his final years at the University of California, Berkeley (where he started as a pre-med student). At the same time, he was doing some acting. In 1939, he came to New York, which was still locked in the Depression. "I was never hungrier," he said, "and maybe never happier."

The happiness came from discovering that he indeed had some talent. By 1942, he was on Broadway in a forgotten play called "The Morning Star," and the following year he went to Hollywood.

He was convincing, in an awkward way, as a priest in "Keys to the Kingdom," then went on to "Spellbound" for Alfred Hitchcock and the strange Western "Duel in the Sun" and, in 1947, "Gentleman’s Agreement," directed by Elia Kazan. That powerful film about anti-Semitism began to give his screen persona some focus: the ability to express plain, old-fashioned moral conviction.

That quality infused what became his own favorite role, as Atticus Finch, in "To Kill a Mockingbird," the 1962 film based on Harper Lee's novel. Peck played a small-town lawyer in the South, struggling to keep a moral center in the midst of racism and its dehumanizing effect on children. It won him an Oscar for Best Actor. Peck could certainly play villains (see the scary part he played in "The Gunfighter," or his role as the Nazi Dr. Mengele in "The Boys from Brazil"). But what he expressed better than almost any other leading man of his day was human decency.

His own campaigns

That was true of his life, too. He worked hard at many charities. He was active in the institutions of his profession. Politically, he was a liberal Democrat and stayed faithful to the New Deal principles of his youth. But he resisted all attempts to get him to run for office, to become a liberal version of Ronald Reagan.

"Ah, hell," he said to me once on the telephone. "Actors should just be actors."

After Mexico, I met him again a few times in New York and several years ago spent a wonderful evening with him at the annual dinner of Irish-America magazine.

We lived on opposite ends of the country, and so we never became friends, in any true way. But I liked him very much. He was always graceful with strangers. He was very intelligent, a reader, an admirer of writers. He loved New York. He loved Ireland. He loved a good laugh. He loved his wife.

Now he is dead, at 87. He lived a long, good life and never added a sentence to the wretched history of human lousiness.

Adiós, old gringo. And a thousand thanks.