"I turned into my own worst enemy." - Peppard said about his drinking after ex-wife Elizabeth Ashley wrote about it in her 1978 autobiography

Some people do better on their own. I don't. It sounds stupid to say, but it's true. I *like* women. I like them when they're little tiny babbies, and I like them when they're old ladies, and I like them all in between. They *please* me."

It's taken Peppard a long time-and four or five therapists-to learn certain things, he points out. One of those things is that he's difficult. About 20 years ago he told a group of friends about something or other that had happened to him. "Well, you know me," he said. "I'm easy going." He got no further. Everyone began to laugh. One friend laughed so hard that he slid from his chair onto the carpet. It hurt Peppard's feelings then. Now it amuses him. "There's nothing easy going about me at all," he says.

In 1972, he told TV Guide that he had "a troubled spirit." What troubled him he didn't say and doesn't now. Although he does say that he was never much of a George Peppard fan. And he may not simply be talking about his acting. "He said to me once, 'I'm not a nice man'," says a friend of his. "The fact is he *is* a nice man."

"I thought it was self-destructive," says Monique James, who watched him walk from "Banacek." She was Peppard's agent before she became co-head of new talent at Universal. "It was very difficult to get through to him in those days. You were talking to the bottle."