by Stephen Vagg
Like most cinephiles of my generation, I was first exposed to George Peppard via The A Team, must-watch-TV for any ten-year-old boy. I have to admit, me and my friends were not initially that impressed by the old (to us) actor. The number one attraction was of course Mr T, with Dwight Schultz’s Murdock a close second, then Dirk Benedict’s Face (because of his Battlestar Galactica heritage). George Peppard’s Hannibal Smith was fourth – nothing personal, everyone loved his catchphrases and appreciated he was the boss, he was just no Mr T.
I soon became aware of Peppard’s history via a combination of my parents making comments like “oh, is that George Peppard, is he still alive?” and seeing his old movies pop up on television. Because, at one stage, Peppard was a movie star. Not a front-rank one – he never made the top ten – but definitely a name above the title, who could get films greenlit by his presence in them. From 1960 to 1966, he averaged around one big hit a year: Home from the Hill, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, How the West Was Won, The Victors, The Carpetbaggers, Operation Crossbow, The Blue Max. Then the cold streak kicked in. Peppard managed to keep acting, always played leading roles until his death, but he never regained his earlier prominence – and it was for a very specific, avoidable reason.
What was that, I hear you ask? Read on…
Peppard was born in Detroit in 1928, the son of a building contractor and music voice teacher. He went into the Marine Corps in 1946, serving 18 months, then studied engineering at college. Peppard fell in love with acting during this time.
He moved to New York City and began studying at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg. In hindsight, the late 1950s was a perfect time to be a handsome, Method trained male actor of ability with a beautiful speaking voice based in New York – theatre was vibrant, live television provided plenty of work. Peppard found himself in constant employment almost immediately, in plays (on Broadway and off) and television. His notable early credits include Bang the Drum Slowly on TV with Paul Newman (you might’ve seen the Robert de Niro starring film), and Girls of Summer on Broadway with Shelley Winters.
Peppard’s first movie came via his Actors Studio connections – The Strange One (1957), featuring many Actors Studio alumni, particularly Ben Gazzara who made a big splash as a bullying military cadet. Peppard followed this by playing a Korean War soldier in Pork Chop Hill (1959) and had a Broadway hit as the juvenile lead in Pleasure of his Company; he appeared in the latter opposite Cyril Ritchard (an Australian actor who no one remembers now but who was a huge Broadway star at the time) and future nun Dolores Hart – you might’ve seen the 1961 film version, where Tab Hunter played Peppard’s role.
MGM came calling and gave Peppard a juicy part in a horny Southern family melodrama that the studio was making with Vincente Minnelli, Home from the Hill (1959). The script was written by Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch, who specialised in horny southern family melodramas (The Long Hot Summer, The Sound and the Fury, Hud), many of which starred Paul Newman, and Peppard was getting “new Paul Newman” heat. He played the hunky bastard son of Robert Mitchum, dealing with sooky brother George Hamilton. The movie was a big hit and Peppard was launched as a film “name”.
In order to do the movie, Peppard had to sign a long-term contract with MGM, which led to The Subterraneans (1960), a hilariously bad attempt by Arthur Freed to tackle the beat generation via Jack Kerouac’s novel. I completely buy Peppard’s performance in this movie as a self-loathing, boozy aspiring writer, who gets consumed by his passions… after all, he was that in real life to a certain degree (he’s certainly better cast than Roddy McDowall and Jim Hutton as beatniks). But the film just feels silly and was a big flop.
Peppard continued to do television, directed by Alfred Hitchcock in Incident at a Corner (1960). He bounced back in films when cast as Audrey Hepburn’s fellow prostitute in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). He was only a few months older than Hepburn, who typically played opposite men old enough to be her father, giving their liaison extra freshness. Tiffany’s confirmed what Home from the Hill had indicated – Peppard’s strength as a leading man was being a solid centre to a movie, someone who could ground the drama around him. In Home from the Hill, he was a decent person in a sea of sex-mad neurotics; in Breakfast at Tiffany’s he was straight man to the nutty New Yorkers. Peppard was not as vibrant as, say, a Bob Mitchum or Hepburn, but they played off well against him. This would turn out to be the defining element of Peppard’s star appeal – he would never have the pull to carry a movie on his own, but he could, in tandem, with another element. This isn’t a dig by the way – stars who can carry a film alone on their sheer charisma, like a Cary Grant or Jennifer Lawrence, are very rare. And matching it against Audrey Hepburn isn’t always easy – look at Anthony Perkins in Green Mansions (1959).
Peppard confirmed his status as a first rate “solid centre” when MGM entrusted him with a key role in its all-star spectacular, How the West was Won (1962). If Debbie Reynolds carried the first two-fifths of the movie, Peppard (playing her nephew) carries the last three-fifths: if anyone is the leading man of that movie, it’s him. It was a spectacular box office success.
Also popular was The Victors (1963) a war film from Carl Foreman, which focuses on American troops in Europe. Kind of forgotten today, the movie has scenes of tremendous power and Peppard is excellent (as is co-star George Hamilton) as, once more, a sensible, tough man surrounded by colourful characters.
What really put Peppard up top was The Carpetbaggers (1964), a hugely popular adaptation of Harold Robbins’ best-selling novel, where Peppard played a character based on Howard Hughes. Again, he had a less flashy part – Carroll Baker danced nude in a chandelier, Robert Cummings sleazed all over the place, Martha Hyer was in a porno – but he was a solid centre. Quentin Tarantino argued that when Peppard played a bastard in Carpetbaggers, “you just don’t buy it. He actually came across as a genial guy, who for some reason was usually cast as a hardass son-of-a-bitch.” I think it’s more accurate to say Peppard played a sympathetic prick, which probably helped at the box office – if he’d been truly ruthless, The Carpetbaggers might have been too tough for audiences (there’s “ruthless” and there’s “Hollywood ruthless”). The film was significant in Peppard’s personal life as he wound up marrying co-star Elizabeth Ashley (she was wife number two of four in total).
MGM had squabbled with Peppard over various film projects, but the two made up for Operation Crossbow (1965), a terrific all-star guys-on-a-mission-to-blow-something-up war film. Peppard called it “crap”, but I love this movie, for me it’s one of the best “mission” films of the ‘60s, and should have been a bigger hit (although it did well, it just wasn’t Guns of Navarone) – maybe the story takes too long to get going.
Then things started to get a little wobbly. He and Ashley starred in an amnesiac thriller, The Third Day (1965), which was a programmer, really – too stagnant, not enough peril, and Peppard lacked big personalities to bounce off. More disastrously, Peppard was cast in Sands of Kalahari (1965) and walked off the set after only a few days of filming, having to be replaced by Stuart Whitman.
Since Home from the Hill, there had been (very accurate) reports that Peppard had developed an ego – memoirs/accounts of those who worked with Peppard routinely comment on this. Over time, he would develop a drinking problem that flourished into alcoholism. Elizabeth Ashley wrote in her memoirs that Peppard was torn between being an actor and a movie star; it’s hard to have too much sympathy, as there’s no reason that he couldn’t have been both, as contemporaries like Paul Newman and Burt Lancaster demonstrated. Two projects from MGM sounded especially promising, but were unfortunately never made: an adaptation of Kaufman and Hart’s Merrily We Roll Along and a remake of The Most Dangerous Game. He did play the lead in The Blue Max (1966), a highly entraining World War One flyer movie that would have been even better at 90 minutes; again, Peppard was a sympathetic heel who had other things to bounce off (plane spectacle, James Mason, literally in the case of Ursula Andress, who never looked better, which is saying something). The picture was another big hit, and it seemed Peppard might survive any post-Kalahari backlash.
Then the cold streak started.
And it had one root cause – Peppard started making films for Universal.
Universal was one of Hollywood’s most efficient and profitable movie studios, perfectly capable of turning out a good movie if the stars aligned, but overly susceptible to mediocre product, and little empathy for artistry. In Quentin Tarantino’s novel Once upon a Time in Hollywood, Ric Dalton’s hopes of a movie career are wrecked by his association with Universal. Yes, he’s a fictitious character, but it had a basis on reality: Alfred Hitchcock’s artistry was killed when he moved to Universal in the 1960s. So too was Ann-Margret’s and George Peppard who signed a five picture contract with the studio in 1966.
It started off okay-ish with Tobruk (1967), another guys on a mission film, with Rock Hudson; Peppard plays (very well) a German Jew and there’s annoyingly no mention of Australians. Then came Rough Night in Jericho (1967), with Dean Martin, from excitement-killing director Arnold Laven. There was an appallingly unfunny comedy called What’s so Bad about Feeling Good? (1968), from some old men who had made Marx Brothers movies and tried to recapture that feeling and failed disastrously. There were two thrillers directed by John Guillermin (The Blue Max): PJ (1968) (where Peppard is memorably beaten up by some leather clad gay men in a bar) and House of Cards (1968). Things did not improve post Universal: Pendulum (1969), The Executioner (1970), Cannons for Cordoba (1970), One More Train to Rob (1971), and The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972).
Look, these films have their fans and some pleasures. I can see their appeal to Peppard – they would have seemed commercially “safe” (Westerns, war flicks, thrillers), and all probably did make a profit. But they were all basically programmers. Quentin Tarantino, an aficionado of stars and B films during this period, described Peppard’s movies as “the studio B-level product. Not bad movies, but modestly budgeted action vehicles, usually starring another movie star in the same boat, that were meant to make a quick buck at theaters, export well to Europe, play for the next three to four years as the lower half of studio double bills and when the time was right, move effortlessly on to network television.”
Tarantino is quick to add these post-Blue Max efforts “are my favourite movies of Peppard’s” particularly The Groundstar Conspiracy. Look, I love a good programmer, but Peppard needed to be mixing it up more, trying something with more artistic inclinations, or be taking a pay cut to work in a bigger film or with a better director/script/source material. Certainly, Universal churned out a lot of Lew Wasserman-approved formulaic crud but part of this is Peppard’s own fault – he turned down a role in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968) because he did not want to play a character who (gasp) might be gay, exactly the sort of showy part he should’ve sought out. There was some really interesting work being done in the late sixties and Peppard managed to miss all of it.
He also should’ve done some theatre. In 1966, Peppard whined “I’d love to do a play if there was a playwright who wanted to write a play for me. But what’s so great about Broadway? Most plays spend three hours on the problem of whether somebody is going to get laid or not, and you know as well as I do, it’s not that big a problem.” Yes, Broadway drama was pretty much a toilet by the late 1960s but not completely; he could’ve done a short-term revival of a classic somewhere to keep his theatre muscles sharp, like Charlton Heston routinely did. Ashley claimed Peppard encouraged her to retire from acting in the mid-sixties; those acting fees could have lessened the financial pressure on him. She also said that he felt “trapped” because he needed to pay off a cattle ranch that he’d bought for financial security. I don’t mean to be rude, truly, but what sort of idiot with no background in farming goes and buys a cattle ranch for “security”? The answer, in Hollywood back in the day, was “quite a few, actually”: John Wayne and Stewart Granger were just some of the none-too-bright movie stars, who stuffed up their finances buying a cattle ranches. Just invest in blue chip shares and real estate, guys. It’s not rocket science. (Incidentally, the complex account of Peppard in Ashley’s memoirs is fascinating – paying tribute to his talent, charisma and kindness, as well as his violent, abusive, alcoholic nature.) Finally, if Peppard had been less ego-riddled, he might’ve received better offers from better filmmakers. Having said that, his consistent employment is a tribute to his charisma, ability and talent.
So, it was off to television: The Bravos (1972) then Banacek (1972-74), an admired series which helped revive his fortunes. Peppard divorced Ashley and faced a criminal charge of sexual assault on a stripper (he was cleared). He had a rare chance to actually do some acting in Guilty or Innocent: The Sam Sheppard Murder Case (1975), but most of his projects were more routine, such as Newman’s Law (1974) and Doctor’s Hospital (1977), Crisis in Mid Air (1979) and Torn Between Two Lovers (1979). Damnation Alley (1977) was meant to be a big popcorn blockbuster but came out wonky, with Peppard’s performance hurt by a weird moustache. He acted in, directed and produced a drama Five Days from Home (1978) but any industry cred this gave him was overshadowed when he went on a drunken rant on Password Plus.
Peppard eventually quit drinking in 1979. He was cast in the pilot of the TV soap Dynasty, but clashed with the producers and was fired, replaced by John Forsythe. He appeared in one of his best ever films, Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), playing “Cowboy” – warm, funny, touching… this sort of performance was why Peppard remained employed, for all his issues. He did Your Ticket is No Longer Valid (1981), a wild drama about impotence shot in Canada, and Race for the Yankee Zephyr (1982), an adventure film shot in New Zealand. He had his biggest hit since The Blue Max when cast in The A Team (1983-87), stepping into a role originally devised for James Coburn. It showed his great strength as a star: ground the drama as a solid sensible centre with wacky support cast.
The series restored Peppard’s financial fortunes. He kept busy for the rest of his life doing television and international films, and most significantly returned to the stage in Papa and The Lion in Winter – he really should have done this from the 1960s. He died in 1994, only aged 65, but considering he was an alcoholic chain smoker for many decades, that’s not too bad.
What lessons if any can be learned from the career of George Peppard?
1) Don’t get married or drink alcohol if you can’t handle either.
2) Live within your means and don’t invest in dumb things.
3) If you make programmers, try to make the best ones you can.
4) Don’t neglect your art.
5) You get a lot of second chances in Hollywood if you’re a handsome male white film star.
