On April 14, 1969, Gregory Peck strode across a deserted hall of Los Angeles's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion like a weary cowboy crossing a prairie. He had become the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences two years earlier, and his job was to introduce the Forty-first Academy Awards. On camera, Peck descended a mirrored staircase in the atrium, looked around, with his thick eyebrows furrowed, and announced in his deep voice, "It's kind of lonesome out here. The audience is already on the inside."

The most nominated films that year were the splashy studio musicals "Oliver!" and "Funny Girl," whose twenty-six-year-old star, Barbra Streisand, showed up to the ceremony in a see-through pants suit. In an effort to make the Oscar broadcast less lugubrious, Peck had hired the stage director Gower Champion. In place of Bob Hope, hosting duties were shared by "Oscar's best friends," among them Ingrid Bergman, Sidney Poitier, Burt Lancaster, and, for the youth market, Jane Fonda, her short hair waved for her role in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"

When Bergman opened the Best Actress envelope, she found a shocker: Streisand had tied with Katharine Hepburn, for "The Lion in Winter." Because Hepburn was absent, Streisand had no chance of being upstaged. She cooed to her statuette, "Hello, gorgeous!" "Oliver!" won five awards. Several months earlier, the M.P.A.A. had instituted a new ratings system, replacing the old Production Code after three and a half decades. "Oliver!" was rated G, designating it as the kind of wholesome studio entertainment that could be enjoyed by "general audiences," whoever those were. But a closer look revealed another Hollywood—and a more unconventional kind of movie—clawing at the gates. "Rosemary's Baby" was nominated only for its screenplay, by Roman Polanski, and for the performance of Ruth Gordon, who won Best Supporting Actress. Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" had managed four nominations, Best Picture not among them, and won for special effects—the only Oscar that Kubrick would ever receive. And sitting next to Streisand was her estranged husband, the little-known Elliott Gould, wearing the droopy mustache he had grown for Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H."

After the awards, congratulations on a smashing show poured into Peck's Academy mailbox (along with a few complaints that it was "too far out"). "At a time when the morals within movies are being pushed to the outer edges of chaos," Vincent Canby wrote in the Times, awards for films such as "Oliver!" "reassure everyone in the industry that all is well, that Hollywood really isn't some giant bordello that's about to be raided."

He spoke too soon. A year later, Gould would be nominated for a movie about wife-swapping, Fonda would hold up a fist on the red carpet, hippie garb would turn the Oscar stage psychedelic, and the winner of the Best Picture award would be rated X.

If Hollywood had arrived late to the sixties, the Academy arrived even later. "The Graduate" and "Bonnie and Clyde" made the Best Picture cut in 1968, but both lost to the Sidney Poitier drama "In the Heat of the Night," one of Hollywood's belated acknowledgments of the civil-rights movement. The next year, the thirty-six-year-old Paramount executive Peter Bart watched "Rosemary's Baby" lose the adapted-screenplay award to "The Lion in Winter." "I was by far the youngest person in the audience," he said. On the eve of the forty-first awards, the Times mocked the Academy for its byzantine membership procedure, "a trying ritual that rivals finding a cheap apartment in Manhattan," noting that its three-thousand-odd voting body was "heavily weighted with older people, many of whom are no longer very active in the film business." The nominations proved the point. As Variety observed, the "Over-50 demographic age characteristics of Academy members was brought sharply home with lack of a best picture nomination for '2001,' this year's youth fave."

If anyone could lead the Academy out of obsolescence, reincarnating it like "2001" 's Star Child, it would have to be someone who understood what the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll generation was looking for. Yet the job had fallen to a square-jawed fifty-three-year-old whom most of America thought of as Dad: Gregory Peck.

Peck had arrived in Hollywood in 1943, a former rower with the clean-cut handsomeness to match. He could be stalwart to the point of being stiff, but, with the war depleting Hollywood of leading men, his robustness had appeal. In the nineteen-forties, he was nominated for Best Actor three years in a row, for "The Keys of the Kingdom," "The Yearling," and "Gentleman's Agreement," which won Best Picture. In the last, he played a Gentile journalist who poses as Jewish to expose antisemitism, a role that chimed with his offscreen liberalism. In 1950, he was nominated a fourth time, for the war drama "Twelve O'Clock High." Onscreen and off, he exemplified the reasonable man who takes a principled stand. But it wasn't until he was forty-six that he found the role that burnished his legend: Atticus Finch, in "To Kill a Mockingbird." From behind round spectacles, Atticus embodied the citizen hero, the gentle father, the fair-minded dissenter. "In that film," Harper Lee said, "the man and the part met."

Lee gave Peck a gold watch and chain that had belonged to her late father, the model for Atticus, and he carried it with him to the Academy Awards on April 8, 1963, where he finally won Best Actor. The moral glow of Atticus Finch propelled Peck to a new role as civic figurehead. The next year, he was elected to the Academy's board of governors. Unlike Ronald Reagan, Peck declined to run for political office, instead becoming Hollywood's unofficial mayor—Reagan's liberal shadow. In June, 1967, he was elected Academy president.

Peck's role as Hollywood's liberal ambassador came at a cost to his acting career. In the first month of 1969, Lyndon Johnson awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, calling him a "humanitarian to whom Americans are deeply indebted." Three days later, Vincent Canby panned Peck's new film, "The Stalking Moon," writing, "Peck is so grave and earnest it seems he must be thinking about his duties on the board of the American Film Institute, rather than on survival." Children who were eleven in 1962, when they first saw Peck as Atticus Finch, were now burning their draft cards. They didn't want a father figure; they wanted rebellion.

Peck wasn't blind to the sea change. "Film turns young people on like nothing else," he said in 1968, predicting an "American New Wave," brought on by such directors as Mike Nichols and Francis Ford Coppola. Where Peck belonged in that future was uncertain. Splitting his time between a Brentwood mansion and a house in the South of France, he preferred Trollope to Philip Roth.

Peck entered 1969 pulled in different directions. His son Stephen had received his draft card and joined the Marine Corps. "He was very patriotic, my dad, even though he was against the war," Stephen recalled. "He stoically said, 'Well, you gotta do what you gotta do.' And off I went." In the spring of 1969, Stephen shipped out to Da Nang, where his father sent him boxes of Dickens and Brontë.

At the Academy, Peck was putting out fires. He had received "some bruising comments" about the Oscar telecast, he wrote to a friend, "especially about Barbra Streisand's derriere." The efforts to jazz up the broadcast had failed to halt a ratings slump. As in recent years, when the #OscarsSoWhite scandal cast a harsh light on the Academy's sclerosis, the swiftly changing times were rendering the Oscars irrelevant. Peck had to do something bold to bring the Academy up to date. He had already commissioned a study of the membership rolls, with the idea of demoting administrators and P.R. people to non-voting status. Then he got a nudge from an unlikely source: the twenty-two-year-old starlet Candice Bergen.

In 1967, Bergen had returned to Los Angeles after nearly two years of jet-setting, making films in France and Greece, going along on pheasant shoots, and liaising with an Austrian count. She had the statuesque beauty of a Nordic deity, with silky blond hair and a tapered nose that ended in elegantly flared nostrils. Her wardrobe was stocked with Dior and Hermès, and her style fell somewhere between Holly Golightly and Princess Grace.

But the L.A. she came back to was unrecognizable. "Men in page-boy haircuts preened, ruffled and jeweled, lurching in high-heeled buckled boots, fashionably foppish," she wrote in her memoir "Knock Wood," "while women's heads were shorn: they were more eyelashes than hair, peering out from under the spiky black thatch shading each eye and trying to look like Twiggy, their patron saint." In New York, Bergen had attended Truman Capote's Black and White Ball at the Plaza, wearing a mink bunny mask loaned to her by Halston. As she swanned among the crowd, a Women's Wear Daily reporter asked her: Wasn't it inappropriate to be hobnobbing at a ball while war was raging in Vietnam?

"Oh, honestly," Bergen sniffed in her bunny ears.

Back home in Los Angeles, she prepared for her twenty-first birthday, sending out invitations to "mourn the passing of my youth" to guests who included Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant. This was the world she knew: the world of her father, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, whose fame had come courtesy of his top-hatted wooden alter ego, Charlie McCarthy. When Candice was born, in 1946, the press called her "Charlie's sister." In her father's office, she would gaze at his special Oscar, awarded in 1938—made of wood, with a movable mouth.

Now that Candy had broken through as a Revlon model and a star of "The Group," the film Sidney Lumet made from the Mary McCarthy novel, her fame eclipsed Edgar's—the "father of Charlie McCarthy" was now the "father of Candice Bergen." The sixties had rendered him prehistoric; now Edgar and Charlie were reduced to performing at county fairs. But it wasn't as if Candy were especially up with the times. "Evidently the Sweet Bird of Youth had passed me by like a Boeing," she recalled, "and I found myself, at twenty-one, peering at the generation gap like a tourist—from the far side."

One night, Bergen went to a party in Benedict Canyon in her Dior lounge pajamas. Inside the house, she smelled burning sandalwood. Janis Joplin's voice blasted from the sound system. The women wore moccasins; the guys were shaggy-haired and festooned in beads and bells. "People were sitting and passing a joint and listening to the music," she told me, "and I'm there with my crocodile bag and my little kitten heels. It was just, like, where am I?"

Bewildered, Bergen found the host, Terry Melcher. Doris Day's son, Melcher had been Bergen's first love when she was sixteen and he was a college dropout in Italian loafers. Five years later, Melcher wore jeans and an Indian shirt, his hair down to his shoulders. He worked at Columbia Records, which placed him at the center of the California rock scene: he produced the Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man" and played on the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds." "You seem so old," Melcher told Bergen. "Don't you miss being a kid?"

The two became a couple again. They took motorcycle rides through the mountains, and she tried to fit in with his hippie circle, which included Brian Wilson and John and Michelle Phillips, from the Mamas and the Papas. "I was beyond straight," she recalled. "No number of robes and beads, no amount of dope was going to change that, though God knows I tried." She moved into Melcher's house in Benedict Canyon, where the party had been: 10050 Cielo Drive.

Among their dinner guests was the self-styled shaman Rolling Thunder, who once asked Bergen if she had any fresh meat for a sacrifice; she gave him chicken legs and ground sirloin from the freezer, and he took them up a mountain and burned them. Bergen was finding her side of the generation gap. By 1968, she was covering the Oregon primaries for Cosmopolitan and expounding to the Los Angeles Times on the Maharishi and "cosmic consciousness." Her Republican father disapproved of Melcher, whose radical politics were rubbing off on his daughter, with her lectures on materialism and vegetarianism. "One week it's ducks, the next it's Indians!" her exasperated father would exclaim.

One day, Melcher came home talking about a commune he'd visited at an old movie ranch, where young women doted on their Christlike leader, singing in the nude. Melcher halfheartedly asked if she wanted to meet them, but she had no interest in Charlie Manson.

In January, 1969, Melcher abruptly told Bergen that they were moving to his mother's beach house in Malibu. Manson had been dogging Melcher for a record contract, and the producer asked friends not to tell Manson his new address. Soon after they left the Cielo Drive house, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate moved in.

Terry's stepfather, Martin Melcher, had died nine months earlier; his survivors were shocked to learn that he had embezzled millions from Doris Day, saddling Terry with mountains of financial briefs. Terry leaned on sleeping pills and liquor, and Bergen watched the life drain out of him. Left alone to walk her St. Bernard on the beach, she felt adrift. In April, she watched the Academy Awards and saw that something was missing: people her age. "The Academy needed new blood," she told me. "It seemed to need blood, period. It skewed way too old."

She was uniquely qualified to act as a bridge—bred by the Old Hollywood but versed in the New. She had crossed paths with Gregory Peck growing up but didn't know him well. Nine days after "Oliver!" won Best Picture, Bergen sat down with her stationery pad and wrote in blue cursive:

Dear Mr. Peck,

Not being an Academy member, I am most certainly out of place in writing you. I am a film lover and you seem to be the most receptive and constructive of all Academy Presidents.

Among the rising questions provoked by antiquated Academy rules is that of membership. Many or most members are anachronisms clogging the works of an incredibly facile mechanism called motion pictures.

I would be very grateful if I could help in any way to recruit newer, younger members. Perhaps one way is compiling a list of those whose creativity and energy the Academy never before solicited. And by mailing memberships to those people voted upon jointly by the Academy or its Board of Directors. Application procedures are somewhat lengthy & discouraging.

In this way the Academy might be more of a vital, social organism improving higher, more honest standards and encouraging new talent.

I know you are concerned with these very same things. I don't mean to be rude, I am simply offering my help and interest if it is needed. (Attested by the fact that I used 3 pieces of good stationery...)

Congratulations to you and Mr. Champion on such an exciting show. You do us proud.

Sincerely,

Candice Bergen

Two days later came a reply on Academy letterhead, along with the closely guarded membership list. "Why don't you go over it, and then make out a list of young people who should be in the Academy," Peck suggested. "I agree with you that the Academy must break down resistance to new ideas, and indifference to the kinds of films which have meaning today to younger audiences. Since we can't put older members, who in their time made important contributions, out on the icebergs to die, we must do our best to balance things by encouraging all of the qualified younger people to join and exert their influence."

Empowered by her latest crusade, Bergen got to work. Among her recruits was Dennis Hopper, who was about to release a film that would tilt Hollywood on its axis: "Easy Rider." "He was sort of a brilliant lunatic," Bergen recalled. "Totally unedited and uncensored, just this force of nature, without any impulse control." The movie opened at Manhattan's Beekman Theatre on July 14th, as the summer of '69 was under way, and made back its budget in a week. Teens lined up barefoot and smoked so much pot in the men's room that the staff had to remove the stall doors. Life credited Hopper with creating "the style of a New Hollywood in which producers wear love beads instead of diamond stickpins."

Later that month, as the world stopped to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, Bergen was in Eugene, Oregon, shooting "Getting Straight," a comedy about a campus protest. It starred Elliott Gould, as a sardonic teaching assistant; Bergen, as his coed girlfriend; and the twenty-seven-year-old Harrison Ford, as a long-haired art student. The movie was the sort of studio concoction that tried too hard to chase the youth vote, up to its ludicrous last shot of Gould and Bergen getting it on mid-riot. As the cast gathered in a hotel room reeking of pot smoke, Bergen rolled her eyes. "Candice said, 'While you were all downstairs watching the moon landing, I was upstairs watching 'The Prisoner of Zenda,' " Gould told me.

Soon after, Bergen returned to Malibu and to Terry Melcher, who had got hooked on Placidyl. Weird things were happening. One morning, they woke to find that the telescope on the veranda was missing. Days later, a friend passed on the message that Manson was looking for Melcher—and if he happened to be missing a telescope, that's because Manson had borrowed it. A week later, Hollywood awoke to absolute horror: Sharon Tate and four others had been murdered in Terry and Candy's old house on Cielo Drive. Bergen panicked. "It could have been me!" she wailed to Melcher. "I could have been killed!"

"We could have been killed," he corrected her. Bergen moved out.

Rumors circulated that the unidentified killers had a movie-star hit list. Los Angeles was upended with fear and speculation. Was it the Black Panthers? A celebrity stalker? Who was next? Throughout Hollywood, people armored their mansions with automatic gates and guard dogs. Gregory Peck hired a night guard in Brentwood.

Peck was summering in France, conducting Academy business through the post. The most pressing matter was his plan to move noncreative members to "associate" status, without Oscar-voting privileges.

He was also brooding about his son Stephen, in Vietnam. "He spent a year in almost terror of the Western Union," Peck's younger son Carey, who, at the time, was starting at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, recalled. During his first semester, Carey was arrested twice for civil disobedience. His father's agent chided him for exposing Peck to potential scandal. But Peck told his son, "These days, if you don't have an arrest record, you're not young and alive and standing on the right side of things."

Bergen was in Mexico making a new film, "Soldier Blue," when Terry Melcher told her on the phone that Manson had been arrested in connection with the Tate killings. (Manson later invited Dennis Hopper to see him in prison, hoping that he would play him in a movie.) She received a subpoena but arranged to testify in private. She sat in the back of the courtroom when Tex Watson, one of the accused, was brought out. She was asked if she recognized him, but she didn't. Hippies all looked alike to her.

Bergen had bought her own place, called the Aviary, on the old John Barrymore estate. Having once housed exotic birds and, later, Katharine Hepburn, it was an impractical but romantic dwelling: a Mediterranean tower amid cypress trees, with stained-glass windows and moldy murals that reminded Bergen of the "Arabian Nights" tales. She had a horse named Herschel and spent her days practicing photography and contemplating ecological causes. But, after the Manson murders, everything seemed darker. "I remember John Phillips came over to visit once, with Quincy Jones, and left me a gun," she told me. "I said, 'Why are you giving this to me?' "

Bergen had kept up her end of the bargain with Peck, cajoling Hopper and other friends to join the Academy. Her father and Peck had co-sponsored her own membership, and she sponsored her flock in turn. In the fall of 1969, she wrote a letter to the Academy president, telling him that she'd filled out the forms he'd sent for nine of her friends. "All of them are people who are a vital and creative part of our industry (perhaps the only vital and creative part of the industry)." But each of them needed a co-sponsor: would he oblige?

By then, Peck was in Tennessee shooting "I Walk the Line," in which he was miscast as a married small-town sheriff who has an affair with a mysterious young hillbilly. From the Holiday Inn in Cookeville, he kept up on Academy affairs. ABC was "adamant" that Bob Hope be invited back to host the Oscars, but Peck was keen to draw in the New Hollywood set. The Academy's executive director, Margaret Herrick, wrote to him about the sponsorship cards he'd sent in, many with Bergen's help. "Warren Beatty and Katharine Ross have been members since 1968; Julie Christie was invited in 1967 and never responded; Dustin Hoffman was invited in 1968 and never responded, but Jack Nicholson, [Elliott] Gould, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Robert [Forster, the star of "Medium Cool"] should definitely be invited before the end of this year as they are certainly more than eligible."

The indifference of such young talents as Julie Christie and Dustin Hoffman was bad news. Peck sent them personal appeals, writing, "I urge you to accept membership in the Academy when it is offered to you, as it will be in December. It is not your dues we are interested in. We do want your point of view reflected in the annual voting for awards." He assured them that even a single vote could change the outcome: "Witness last year's tie vote between Katharine Hepburn & Barbra Streisand."

The drawbridge was lowering, and fast. Peck had something even bolder in mind. Over the winter, the Board of Governors finalized a radical new plan: anyone who had not been active in the movie industry for seven years would be made an "associate" member, without an Oscar vote—in other words, put "out on the icebergs to die." Secret lists were drawn up; lawyers were consulted. The board agreed that the purge would be kept under wraps until after the Forty-second Academy Awards.

Dennis Hopper forgot all about the Academy Awards ceremony, until someone reminded him to show up. "Easy Rider" had been nominated for its screenplay and for its supporting actor Jack Nicholson's performance. On April 7, 1970, Hopper arrived in a velvet tux, cowboy boots, and a Stetson. Jane Fonda, wearing her "Klute" shag, held up a fist to the roaring fans and yelled, "Right on!" Her political opposite, John Wayne, also received a swell of cheers, although one person held up a sign reading, "JOHN WAYNE IS A RACIST." Down the street, some fifty people demonstrated against Hollywood's stereotypical depiction of Latinos in movies like "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," with placards reading, "Power to the Chicanos!"

In the Best Picture race, "Butch Cassidy" was up against the musical extravaganza "Hello, Dolly!" and the period melodrama "Anne of the Thousand Days." Another nominee was John Schlesinger's "Midnight Cowboy," starring Jon Voight as a Texan who goes to Manhattan to be a gigolo but winds up servicing men, while befriending a consumptive con man called Ratso Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman. United Artists had actually pushed the ratings board to give it an X rating, which would equal cachet with the hippie crowd.

When the curtains opened, Gregory Peck walked onstage and struck a philosophical tone. "Most of us these days are asking ourselves and each other these questions: What is the meaning of the new freedom of the screen? Is it something to be feared? Should the screen be censored?" Bob Hope, who had been invited to give his usual monologue, said a hammier version of the same. "It's such a novelty seeing actors and actresses with their clothes on," he joked, after coming onstage wearing a "True Grit" eye patch. Summing up the new epoch of sex, drugs, and violence, Hope said, "This is not an Academy Awards. It's a freak-out, ladies and gentlemen."