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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.