Afterlives of the Rich and Famous (28 page)

From Francine

While Eva was being mourned by her countless friends on earth, we on the Other Side were euphoric to have her light, her laughter, and her kindness with us at Home again.
The throngs of loved ones from her thirty-one incarnations had to wait to welcome her until what seemed like thousands of animals from those incarnations had finished saying hello, and no one was more ecstatic than Eva herself, who never doubted for a moment that she’d be returning to God’s arms and a joyful eternity the instant her body took its last breath.
In typical style, she spent her time at the Scanning Machine focusing on the great fun and success she had along the way rather than the many times she struggled through family betrayals and career disappointments.
She credited her mother with teaching her to be a smart businesswoman, to be responsible with her money, and to never compromise her ability to take care of herself.

There was a time, for example, when her dear friend billionaire Merv Griffin wanted her to sell her Beverly Hills house and move in with him on the top floor of a luxurious hotel he owned.
She refused, despite his displeasure. “Give up my house, my most solid investment, my security that I’ve worked so hard for all my life, to please a man?
Mama would have killed me,” she says.
She laughed as she reviewed another “Mama would have killed me” incident.
She was sound asleep early one morning when an earthquake rumbled through Los Angeles. “I jumped out of bed, raced to my closet, took off the T-shirt I was sleeping in, put on a silk peignoir, and went back to bed.
Mama didn’t raise her girls to be found in a pile of rubble wearing a T-shirt.”

From the Scanning Machine she returned to her ecstatic life at Home: a fascinating variety of friends ranging from former U.S. presidents and esteemed actors and actresses to the most modest housekeepers and dressmakers; a Tudor house filled with animals and surrounded by a swimming pool that circles the house like a moat, where she continues swimming laps; devout worship at one of our most ancient and treasured cathedrals in what corresponds to your Italian countryside; and devoted work as a therapist in the cocooning chambers in the Hall of Wisdom.
In fact, she was there for both her mother and her sister Magda, to help them through the cocooning process when they returned Home not long after she arrived.

Eva and Merv, who are kindred spirits (her soul mate is an Egyptian man named Nitocris), are almost inseparable now that he’s here with her.
He’s teaching her to play tennis, and the two of them are popular lecturers on the subject of business ethics for those who are preparing to reincarnate and become corporate managers.
Merv specializes in the financial aspects of business success, so foreign to many of us on the Other Side, where money doesn’t exist, while Eva focuses on returning decency and compassion to corporate priority lists.
While she rarely revealed this fact during her lifetime, she says she made it her daily habit, as essential as brushing her teeth, to perform an anonymous act of kindness.
She says,
“I was a smart businesswoman who looked for ways to conduct my company in that same spirit of quiet, generous giving.
Why so many corporations think they have to make a choice between being profitable and being kind I will never understand.
Have they never heard of karma?”

She won’t be incarnating again, explaining with a smile, “No one ever accused me of not knowing the right time to leave a party.”

Gregory Peck

E
ldred Gregory Peck, Academy Award–winning actor and humanitarian, was born in San Diego on April 15, 1916. His father, Gregory Pearl Peck, a pharmacist, and his mother, Bernice Ayres Peck, were divorced when the young Gregory was six years old. He lived with his maternal grandmother until, at the age of ten, he was sent to St. John’s Military Academy in Los Angeles. He returned home to his father when his grandmother died, and he graduated from San Diego High School before heading on to college, first at San Diego State University and then at the University of California, Berkeley, where he—handsome, six foot three, and strongly built—gained attention as both an athlete and an actor at the university’s renowned Little Theater.

After graduating from UC Berkeley, he moved to New York to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse and made his first appearance on Broadway in the
1942
production of
The Morning Star
. Acting jobs were plentiful thanks to World War II, a war in which Gregory Peck (he left his given first name Eldred behind when he headed east) was exempt from military service due to a back injury, while so many of his fellow actors were enlisting and being deployed. Instead, he was quickly recruited by Hollywood, where his first film,
Days of Glory,
was released in
1944
, launching a distinguished screen career that didn’t end until
1998
with a remake of his earlier classic
Moby Dick
.

Both onscreen and off, he exuded a sense of strength, dignity, and decency. He was very outspoken against racial injustice, the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, and even the controversial House Un-American Activities Committee and its infamous search for alleged Communists in the film industry. He took some pride in being named to Richard Nixon’s notorious “enemies list” and even more humble pride in the Medal of Freedom presented to him by President Lyndon Johnson. And despite the fact that he was a lifelong practicing Catholic, he was an advocate for women’s freedom of choice.

His first marriage, to Greta Kukkomen Rice in 1942, produced three sons before it ended in divorce in 1955. Their first son, Jonathan, who became a television journalist, committed suicide in 1975. Very shortly after Gregory’s first marriage ended he married a Paris reporter named Veronique Passani, with whom he had a son and a daughter, and their marriage lasted for the rest of his life.

Gregory’s extraordinary half-century career earned him, among other honors, five Academy Award nominations; one Best Actor Oscar, for the 1962 masterpiece
To Kill a Mockingbird;
three Best Actor Golden Globe awards; the prestigious Cecil B. DeMille Award; a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award; the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award; and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

During the last years of his life he traveled throughout the world on speaking tours, during which the National University of Ireland made him a Doctor of Letters; he became a founding patron of the University College Dublin School of Film; and he served as chairman of the American Cancer Society. On June 12, 2003, at the age of eighty-seven, Gregory Peck died of natural causes in his Los Angeles home with his wife, Veronique, holding his hand.

From Francine

Gregory was ready to come Home, as his wife will confirm, and he was ecstatic that the first to embrace him was his son Jonathan.
While his Catholicism had always taught him that victims of suicide were banished from heaven, his heart and soul had always believed that couldn’t be true, so finding his beloved son waiting for him was less a relief than a confirmation.

Gregory was also among the few who, for the most part, enjoyed his time at the Scanning Machine. While there were countless situations he wished he’d handled differently, he was satisfied to see that he never dismissed his significant mistakes with the egocentric defensiveness so common among his peers, but instead made every effort to learn from them.
By his own account, he was still amused by his place on Richard Nixon’s “enemies list,” although they’re perfectly amiable when they happen upon each other here, and he took great delight in his performance in and the whole experience of the film
MacArthur.
He and Jonathan were both there to greet Gregory’s first wife, Greta, when she arrived on the Other Side, and while Gregory and Greta don’t spend time together, they have laughed together over their misguided belief that two people so innately, resolutely different from each other could build a successful marriage, and they’re fondly grateful to each other for the children they cocreated.

For the most part, Gregory is as much of a loner here as he was on earth—not unfriendly, just private and appreciative of his own company.
He has returned to his position as a quadrant sentry, his house is a small cabin on what corresponds to your island of Fiji, and he never misses a performance of the opera or our popular debates among former U.S. presidents and other world leaders in search of a path to lasting peace on earth.
Among his few close friends and tennis partners are his son, his father, and a very short slender blonde female whom he says his family will recognize.

Above all, he is content, grateful for the long, full life he lived and satisfied that he put his chosen life themes—Loner and Builder—to their best possible use.
He has no plans to incarnate again.

Spencer Tracy

S
pencer Bonaventure Tracy, one of the most gifted and versatile actors of the twentieth century, was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on April 5, 1900, to Irish Catholic truck salesman John Tracy and his wife, Caroline Brown Tracy.

Not an enthusiastic student, Spencer tried but failed to convince his parents to let him quit school at the age of sixteen to go to work. But in 1917 he leapt at the opportunity to quit school, join the navy, and serve his country in World War I. He was discharged without ever leaving the Norfolk Navy Yard, where he first served, and used his military education benefits to enroll in Ripon College with a focus on premed. Joining the debating team at Ripon led to his interest in acting, and when he successfully auditioned for the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, he finally found a passion that was exciting and fulfilling enough to make him a good student for the first time in his life.

He met a young actress named Louise Treadwell when he joined a stock theater company, and they fell in love and were married in September
1923
. Nine months later their son John was born. They were devastated to discover that he was deaf, but they made it their mission to help him lead a normal, happy life. (In fact, they also made it their mission to help as many others like John as possible and, in
1943
, founded the still thriving John Tracy Clinic, an education center for hearing-impaired infants and preschool children.) They also had a daughter, Susie, who was born in
1932
.

Spencer was performing in a play called
The Last Mile
in
1930
when the legendary director John Ford discovered him and promptly hired him to costar in Ford’s upcoming film
Up the River
with another newcomer named Humphrey Bogart. The Tracy family moved to Hollywood in November
1931
, and Spencer appeared in a whirlwind sixteen films during his three-year contract with Fox Films before he was signed by MGM, the most powerful and esteemed studio in the business at the time. It was through his films for MGM that he was able to prove his renowned versatility, moving brilliantly and effortlessly from comedic scripts to dramatic works. To no one’s surprise, he made history by being the first to win the Best Actor Oscar two years in a row, in
1937
and
1938
.

It was in 1942, while making a film called
Woman of the Year,
that
Spencer met, costarred with, and fell in love with Katharine Hep
burn, who was to become his partner both onscreen and off for the rest of his life. His Catholicism prevented him from ever divorcing Louise, but she did agree to a discreet, respectful, permanent separation, thanks to which the Tracy-Hepburn affair managed to proceed without bitterness and sensationalism. He reportedly had affairs with a number of other celebrated actresses over the years, but Katharine rode them out, well aware of Spencer’s frailties and secure in her knowledge that if she simply stayed out of the way, his compulsive wandering eye would satisfy itself and he’d be back.

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn made a total of nine movies together, including his last film, 1967’s
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
. By then Spencer’s health was seriously compromised from
years of alcoholism, diabetes, and recurring heart and lung problems, and his shooting schedule on
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
was
limited to the few hours a day he had the stamina to work. On June
10, 1967
, seventeen days after filming was completed, Spencer Tracy died of heart failure at his Hollywood home, leaving behind a legacy of almost eighty films, seven Academy Award nominations, and two consecutive Best Actor Oscars.

From Francine

Spencer actually remained earthbound for several years after his death.
He was frankly too stubborn to leave Katharine, and he was also reluctant to find out whether God would welcome him after a life in which he felt he’d committed more than his share of sins.
He visited Katharine relentlessly, trying to get her attention to let her know he was still there, and because he had no idea that he was dead, he couldn’t understand why she persisted in ignoring him.
She sensed his presence countless times, but her Yankee practicality would never allow her to believe in something as intangible as life after death, and she would scold herself for letting the intensity of grieving the loss of him lead her to indulge in such foolish fantasies.