Cary Grant

  PRAISE FOR CARY GRANT

  “Reminds us that everyone wanted to be Cary Grant. Even Cary Grant.”

  —ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

  “Well-researched and competently written…. Even strangers to his work might feel they know the star—and the man—after reading this fast-moving biography.”

  —ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

  “Eliot's fascinating, sympathetic portrait is of a consummate performer who hid inner demons and used filmmaking to distance himself from reality (and four of his five wives).”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “This new treatment by the author of the acclaimed WALT DISNEY undoubtedly will garner popular attention.”

  —BOOKLIST

  “Showbiz biographies tend to be all play and no work, but Eliot is as good on the movies as he is on the man… I am tempted to say of CARY GRANT what CHARADE's Audrey Hepburn says of Cary Grant: “You know what's wrong with you? Nothing.'”

  —DAILY TELEGRAPH

  “Marc Eliot tells Grant's life story briskly and knowledgeably. Unusually for a showbiz biographer, he also has a snappy turn of phrase.”

  —IRISH INDEPENDENT

  ALSO BY MARC ELIOT

  DEATH OF A REBEL:

  Starring Phil Ochs and a Small Circle of Friends

  ROCKONOMICS:

  The Money Behind the Music

  DOWN THUNDER ROAD:

  The Making of Bruce Springsteen

  WALT DISNEY: Hollywood's Dark Prince

  THE WHOLE TRUTH

  TO THE LIMIT:

  The Untold Story of the Eagles

  DOWN 42ND STREET: Sex, Money,

  Culture, and Politics at the Crossroads of the World

  David M, Sarah M, Ernest G, Karen H,

  Phil O, David B, Shen Z.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART ONE ACADEMY AWARD

  PART TWO FROM BRISTOL TO BROADWAY

  PART THREE GO MAE WEST, YOUNG MAN

  PART FOUR WIVES AND MOTHERS

  PART FIVE INDEPENDENCE AND SUPERSTARDOM

  PART SIX ENTER HITCHCOCK

  PART SEVEN THE NOTORIOUS CARY GRANT

  PART EIGHT MARRIAGE AND OTHER MONUMENTS

  PART NINE A DAUGHTER IS BORN

  PART TEN INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

  Sources

  Notes

  Filmography

  Final Thoughts and Acknowledgments

  Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant. I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant; unsure of either, suspecting each. I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.

  —CARY GRANT

  He was the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema …The essence of his quality can be put quite amply: he can be attractive and unattractive simultaneously; there is a light and dark side to him but, whichever is dominant, the other creeps into view…He was rather cheap, and too suspicious … he was, very likely, a hopeless fusspot as man, husband, and even father. How could anyone be “Cary Grant”? But how can anyone, ever after, not consider the attempt?

  —DAVID THOMSON

  Where among Screwball stars William Powell, say, was one- dimensionally debonair, Ray Milland bland, Don Ameche plebeian and suspiciously Latin, Henry Fonda the soul of uprightness, and Gary Cooper a prodigy of plain speaking (though in some of these cases they played against type), Grant is marvelously protean, the multifarious embodiment of all these qualities and more.

  —BRUCE BABINGTON AND PETER WILLIAM EVANS

  The “heterosexual” couple of classical cinema encompassed within them and between them all sorts of shifting alliances: dyads, triangles, quartets, the great stuff of Freudian narrative, concealed and revealed. You don't have to see the perverse shadings and alternative readings in the old films, but they are there: to deny all the homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual possibilities inherent in the coming together of, say, Dietrich or Garbo and their lovers; Grant and his; or practically all of the screwball couples; or practically all star couples, is to read film literally and to insist on making unequivocal something whose very charm, whose layered inferences, were based on the equivocal.

  —MOLLY H ASKELL

  Star-gazing can be said to constitute one of the mass religions of our time.

  —ANDREW SARRIS

  Out of chaos comes the birth of a star.

  —CHARLIE CHAPLIN

  INTRODUCTION

  Although he would go on to star in six more Hollywood features, Cary Grant's thirty-four-year film career crested with his dual performance as George Kaplan/Roger O. Thornhill in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest.* Released in 1959, the film signaled the commercial and artistic peak not just of Grant's magnificent body of work but of Hitchcock's as well. One of the celebrated director's cleverest (and silliest) movies, North by Northwest afforded the increasingly maudlin filmmaker the chance to muse upon his most primal obsession, his own mortality, in this instance projected onscreen by the adventure of his favorite leading man, Cary Grant, in what would become for both their wildest flight of cinematic fancy.

  Kaplan's faked murder two-thirds of the way through the film forces the question of whether he actually is who the others believe him to be, someone entirely separate—Roger O. Thornhill—or whether he really ever exists at all. Out of this question a larger one emerges: is Kaplan the creation of the Hitchcock-like CIA operative (Leo G. Carroll) who has, thus far, remained largely unseen while cleverly directing the either/or/neither Kaplan/ Thornhill's every move? Or is he someone, or something, else, an externalized elaborate fantasy, perhaps, of Thornhill's most repressed desires for an idealized life of exciting adventure, of romance, of meaning?

  Grant must have found North by Northwest's multiple plot twists enormously appealing, as they so clearly reflected his own lifelong struggle to balance the great circus ball of fame with a desire to live an intensely private real life, a life whose very survival depended upon the enormous popularity of his synthetic movie star persona.

  Indeed, onscreen Cary Grant was nothing less than perfect, “the man from dream city,” as Pauline Kael once described him, the handsome devil every man dreamed of being and the devastatingly handsome lover every woman dreamed of being with. To the world that knew and loved him only through his films, he was worthy of worship and adoration, even if everything from his famous self-confident swagger and unflappable romantic charm to his magical name's ultra-British iambic flow was as calculated and artificial as—well, as George Kaplan.

  IN 1966, SEVEN YEARS AFTER the release of North by Northwest, Cary Grant officially retired from making movies for the third and final time; by then his place high in Hollywood's pantheon of cultural icons was well assured. In the twenty years of life he had left, his gait inevitably slowed, his skin thickened, his hair grayed, and his shoulders stooped, until, at eighty-two, he quietly joined Hollywood's league of legendary dead. Yet because of the glorious legacy of his films, to present and future fans he would remain forever young, eternally alluring, and preternaturally beautiful, the quintessential motion picture personification of the middle third of the American twentieth century's definition of “tall, dark, and handsome.” Once he became a star, with few notable exceptions, Cary Grant never ventured too far from “Cary Grant” and was always readily identifiable by the crystalline dazzle of his smile, the rolling shuffle of his slightly bow-legged walk, the suede slip-slide of his voice, that irresistible cleft in his chin, and those unforgettably piercing topsoil-brown eyes that connected him to the world—the twin-beam projectors of his inner emotions.

  Movie stars are the magnified external images of society's idealized dreams, hopes, and fantasies. Filmg
oers associate with these stars to such a degree that their physical beauty becomes a social metaphor for moral and emotional perfection. It is the reason they are so worshiped at the peak of their popularity, and why the crest of their stardom rarely lasts longer than five years. In film time this translates into perhaps a half-dozen major roles for a leading man, and even fewer for a woman, before reality crashes their endless party and irrevocably separates them from their fans. A once-flawless face's first wrinkle often signals the beginning of the descending arc of one's cinematic shooting star.

  How much more remarkable, then, that Cary Grant remained a top box office draw for thirty-four years. Not only did he defy the relentless downward curve of box office decline, he actually became more popular the older he became and the longer he made movies. His forty-eighth, Michael Curtiz's 1946 Night and Day, a bit of Hollywood fluff masquerading as Cole Porter's biography, was only his first color feature, and the first of his films that would ultimately make the list of his top twelve box office grossers. His number one top-grossing film was his sixty-second, Blake Edwards's Operation Petticoat, made in 1959 when Grant was fifty-five years old. And his seventy-second and final film, Charles Walters's Walk, Don't Run, released in 1966 when Grant was sixty-two, would place twelfth, more popular (i.e., profitable) than sixty of the other movies he made.

  During this most astonishing of Hollywood long runs Grant was, with one or two exceptions, every major Hollywood director's favorite actor, the first choice to star again and again in the best movies they made, opposite and often enhancing the luminosity of many of the most beautiful women ever to grace the silver screen.

  The list is as impressive as it is long. The highlights include Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus, with Marlene Dietrich (1932); Lowell Sherman's She Done Him Wrong, with Mae West (1933); Norman McLeod's Topper, with Constance Bennett (1937); Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby, with Katharine Hepburn (1938); George Cukor's Holiday, with Hepburn again (1938); George Stevens's Gunga Din, with Joan Fontaine (1939); Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings, with Jean Arthur (1939); John Cromwell's In Name Only (1939), with Carole Lombard, who first appeared with Grant in his second film, Alexander Hall's Sinners in the Sun (1932); Hawks's His Girl Friday, with Rosalind Russell (1940); Garson Kanin's My Favorite Wife, with Irene Dunne (1940); Cukor's The Philadelphia Story, with Hepburn (1940); Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion, with Fontaine (1941); H. C. Potter's Mr. Lucky, with Laraine Day (1943); Delmer Daves's Destination Tokyo, with Faye Emerson (1943); Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace, with Priscilla Lane (1944); Clifford Odets's None but the Lonely Heart, with Jane Wyatt (1944); Michael Curtiz's Night and Day, with Alexis Smith (1946); Hitchcock's Notorious, with Ingrid Bergman (1946); Irving Reis's The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, with Myrna Loy (1947); Henry Koster's The Bishop's Wife, with Loretta Young (1947); Potter's Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, with Loy (1948); Hawks's Monkey Business, with Ginger Rogers (1952); Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief (1955), with Grace Kelly; Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember, with Deborah Kerr (1957); Stanley Donen's Indiscreet, with Bergman (1958); Melville Shavelson's Houseboat, with Sophia Loren (1958); Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), with Eva Marie Saint; Blake Edwards's Operation Petticoat, with Dina Merrill (1959); Donen's The Grass Is Greener, with Kerr (1960); Edwards's That Touch of Mink, with Doris Day (1962); Donen's Charade, with Audrey Hepburn (1963); Ralph Nelson's Father Goose, with Leslie Caron (1964); and Charles Walters's Walk, Don't Run, with Samantha Eggar (1966).

  Just as amazing, if not even more impressive, the film career of the actor whom Time magazine once described as “the world's most perfect male animal” began relatively late, according to Hollywood's quick time clock. Grant was twenty-eight years old when he first went west to seek his fortune in films, having spent the better part of his twenties as a steadily rising leading man in a succession of Broadway musicals and comedies.

  Over the next three and a half decades, his impact on movies was so enormous, he would virtually redefine the cinematic image of the romantic American male. In the hands of Hollywood's immigrant-bred, mostly Jewish studio moguls endlessly obsessed with female WASP beauty, British Archie Leach was reborn as the projection of their own idealized American selves and presented to the world as Cary Grant.

  Yet, despite his physical beauty (and that was, with rare exception, all the moguls ever really required of him), Grant early on sensed something was lacking in his acting, that there was an internal disconnect between his manufactured cinematic image and his inner being. Indeed, without a masterful script to provide a compelling character, without a brilliant costume designer to dress him up, without an artful makeup man to apply the sheen to his skin, without a tasteful set designer to enshrine him, without a skillful editor to exact his comic timing, without a sharp-eyed cameraman to place him in the most favorable light, without a beautiful costar to externalize desire, and without a director to impose his own unifying personality, Grant feared that, at heart, he was less than the sum of his movie-star whole, a spiritless cinematic symbol.

  Moreover, once a performance was constructed and frozen on film, he knew he would forever have to compete with that symbol in a battle against time in reality he could never win. That is why, into the fifties (both his own and the century's), he became increasingly more selective in his choice of screen roles and directors, choosing only those parts and the men who guided him in them, directors who best knew how to help him perform that special Grant sleight-of-hand on audiences over and over again without ever once giving the trick away.

  In 1953, after having turned down three great roles—Norman Maine, eventually played by James Mason in George Cukor's A Star Is Born opposite Judy Garland; reporter Joe Bradley, which went instead to Gregory Peck in William Wyler's Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn; and Linus Larrabee, which Humphrey Bogart grabbed on the rebound in Billy Wilder's Sabrina opposite Audrey Hepburn (the latter two having directors and costars Grant had never worked with)—he chose instead to return to safer, if shallower, waters opposite one of his favorite leading ladies, Deborah Kerr, in Dream Wife, a strictly by-the-numbers romantic comedy for MGM, written and directed by his good friend Sidney Sheldon, who had penned the hugely successful 1947 Grant vehicle The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.

  When Dream Wife proved a major failure, Grant, just shy of his fiftieth birthday, was convinced that the magic had finally gone and announced his intention to retire. It took one of his favorite directors, Alfred Hitchcock, the so-called master of suspense and the supplier of many of Hollywood's most unforgettable corpses, to bring Cary Grant back to life. Grant accepted the lead in To Catch a Thief, a film whose plot centers on whether suave, urbane John Robie, the most notorious jewel thief in Europe, has in fact retired or is still on the job. Robie insists somebody must be imitating him—that he is not really who everybody thinks he is—a notion that perfectly captured both Grant's and Hitchcock's real-life ongoing professional and emotional issues of identity, image, and self.

  The enormous success of To Catch a Thief returned Grant to widescreen glory. This intended one-time-only encore lasted for eleven years and twelve pictures, each of which allowed him to reprise some aspect of his by-now- familiar repertoire of onscreen characters—romantic leading man, verbal wit, athlete, bon vivant, urbane hero. As with the previous two pictures he had made for Hitchcock (Suspicion, 1941, and Notorious, 1946), Grant's comedic instincts had been darkened, and therefore deepened, by the great director, who knew better than anyone how to use the extraordinary talents of one of his most favored leading men. Indeed, Suspicion, in which Grant may or may not have been a wife-killer, arrived at a time when he was considered essentially a comic actor, after such films as The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Holiday (1938), and The Philadelphia Story (1940), among the best of his screwball and light comedy work. His departure into melodrama immediately preceding Suspicion was Penny Serenade (1941), for which Grant was nominated for an Oscar but which was not as popular at the box office.
Suspicion, on the other hand, was a smashing success and restored Grant to the front line of Hollywood's most desired leading men.

  IT WAS NOT UNTIL Charles Walters's Walk, Don't Run, released in 1966, that Grant, no longer able to pass for the romantic leading man and with no desire at all to age gracefully into “uncle” or “grandfather” character roles, took himself off the cinematic treadmill this time for good, content to let “Cary Grant” live on through the endless recycling of his old movies. Having never been able to make the connection between his real life and the world his cinematic other had so successfully created, and with his movie persona as the great leading man firmly in the past, he could no longer find any romantic passion for making movies. Instead, he pursued the ongoing drama of his own real life. Away from the screen and with the help of therapy and psychotropic drugs, a brief fourth marriage that yielded the child he had so dearly wanted, and a fifth and final wife who became his devoted companion to the end, Grant managed in the last twenty years of his life to get closer than he ever had to reconciling his long struggle between person and persona, vision and visionary, dream and dreamer, movie star and man.

  That is why, for those of us who seek to find ourselves in the movies, to discover in them the projected passion of our own hopes and dreams; who believe we know ourselves better when we sit in the dark (but not the darkness); for those of us who see in our heroes what we hope to discover in ourselves, the story of Grant's lifelong pursuit of happiness cannot help but enlighten and inspire us all.

  * The final six were Blake Edwards's Operation Petticoat (1959), Stanley Donen's The Grass Is Greener (1960), Delbert Mann's That Touch of Mink (1962), Donen's Charade (1963), Ralph Nelson's Father Goose (1964), and Charles Walters's Walk, Don't Run (1966).