Cary Grant Page 11
Shortly afterward, an exhausted Grant, having made five pictures in 1933, thirteen in two years, suffering from a variety of physical ailments made worse by his shattered nerves, decided it was the perfect time for himself and Cherrill—who had completed her film and returned to L.A.—to take a vacation. Now was as good a time as any, he figured, to show her England. Scott believed this choice of locale was no accident, and correctly figured Grant was taking Cherrill home to meet his family and get married.
To Grant's surprise, Cherrill was less than thrilled at the notion of a long cruise to London; not because she didn't want to make the trip—especially since Cary had begun to hint the end result would indeed be marriage—but because he insisted on waiting for Scott to finish acting in a film he was making called Broken Dreams so he could come along. When she asked him why Scott had to be there, Grant replied with a smile that every fellow needed a best man. Cherrill did not find it at all amusing.
The next day she accompanied Grant to Monogram Studios, where Scott was filming, all the while continuing to try to persuade him to leave his “pal” home. Their disagreement exploded into a furious argument on the set that interrupted shooting; it was a dust-up that made the local gossip columns.
The next day Scott announced his engagement to Vivian Gaye.
The day after that Grant booked passage for three on the French liner Paris, set to depart from New York, destination Southampton, England.
And the day after that, an enraged Cherrill flew by herself to New York City, from where she wired Grant that she was not going if Vivian Gaye wasn't. Grant wired back saying that under no circumstances was Gaye going to join them. Cherrill's response was to book passage for herself on the next liner bound for England.
And so it was that on November 23, a distressed and heavily sedated Cary Grant, accompanied by Randolph Scott, flew to New York City, headed straight for the pier to board the Paris, and set sail for England, where he hoped to find Cherrill and salvage their relationship.
Romantic salvation, however, would serve only as the point of departure, for upon his triumphant return to England after thirteen years in America, awaiting Grant was nothing less than a miraculous resurrection, one far more unexpected and shattering than anything he could ever have imagined or dreamed of.
* In the film, Wayne plays the head of a group of boys whose goal it is to oust all girls from their col- lege. The issue is finally decided by a basketball game. Virginia Cherrill, the female lead, seduces Wayne in an attempt to change his mind about the necessity of women in a man's life. Variety summed up the B movie this way: “Theaters playing to a clientele of class will find nothing in it.” To the end of his life Wayne laughingly referred to Girls Demand Excitement as the silliest film he had ever made.
* Rupert Hughes, Vicki Baum, Zane Grey, Viña Delmar, Irvin S. Cobb, Gertrude Atherton, J. P. McEvoy, Ursula Parrott, Polan Banks, and Sophie Kerr.
* Not to be confused with Raoul Walsh's 1949 White Heat, which starred James Cagney and Virginia Mayo. Because of the same first names of the female leads, these two films are often mistaken for each other.
Virginia Cherrill and Cary Grant arrive in Hollywood after their tumultuous wedding in London, February 1934. (Courtesy of the private collection of the Virginia Cherrill Estate)
8
“The first day that Cary, the perfectionist, walked into my house, he went immediately into high gear. He pursed his lips, made clucking noises, and set about straightening the pictures. Through the years to come he made generous efforts to straighten out my private life by warning me of the quirks and peculiarities of various ladies…enthusiasm was a most important ingredient in Cary's makeup, and it shone out of that side of his character which he presented to his friends; the other side was as mysterious as the dark side of the moon.”
—DAVID NIVEN
Cary Grant was miserable because Virginia Cherrill had not come on the trip to England with him, and Scott was miserable because Grant was. So they locked themselves inside their first-class cabin and stayed drunk for the entire voyage. They never even bothered to get dressed, preferring to stay in their silk pajamas, flannel robes, and ascots while they ate, drank, and chain-smoked. All day every day Grant loudly and mournfully played the grand piano the captain had installed as a courtesy.
Grant crucified Bach while he rambled through his besotted mind and put together a rescue plan. Should he be able to find Cherrill, he would immediately ask her to marry him, believing now that that was what it would take to get her back.
As for Scott, he had already gone public with the announcement of his engagement to Gaye and had promised to marry her in time for them to spend Christmas together as husband and wife, but when he told her she wasn't allowed to come on the trip to England, she became angrier than he'd ever seen her before, or ever imagined she could get. Although neither made it public at the time, she had abruptly broken off their engagement. Before Scott returned from England, she began dating director Ernst Lubitsch, whom she would eventually marry.
Upon disembarking in Southampton, the two were driven directly to the Savoy in London and taken by private elevator to the top-floor suite that Paramount Publix had reserved for Grant, all expenses paid (for the hotel and everything else for the entire length of his stay, in return for his agreeing to make a single public appearance at the gala London opening of She Done Him Wrong).
Even before his bags were unpacked, Grant began to search for Cherrill. He spent much of his first day in London in his suite, calling every hotel in the city until he found her. They talked on the phone, he went to her hotel and waited for her in the lobby, she came down, they kissed and made up, and she checked out of her suite and moved into his. At this point a fed-up Scott decided to return to the States. He had no desire to get between the two of them again.
Alone with Cherrill, Grant spent that night and the next day with her in the suite and because of it missed the London premiere of She Done Him Wrong. As the time approached and with Grant nowhere in sight, a desperate studio representative called the hotel, managed to get Grant on the phone, and reminded him of his obligation. Grant angrily replied that he was under no such obligation because he hadn't as yet been paid what he insisted was an appearance fee, separate and apart from his travel expenses. When the dis- traught Paramount executive explained to him that his “fee” was the pickup of all his expenses, Grant insisted he was mistaken and hung up. What Grant really wanted was to be left alone with Cherrill, to mend his romantic fences, and he wasn't about to leave her alone again while he went to the opening of Mae West's movie.
They didn't emerge from the hotel until days later, with a much calmer Grant eager to give Cherrill a tour of his homeland. They traveled by lim- ousine from London to Bristol to revisit all the familiar sites of his youth— the Fairfield School, and the local music halls and playhouses where he had begun his career. To his utter amazement and delight, he was greeted by throngs of cheering fans who had waited for days to welcome home their most famous son.
In charge of all the planned festivities were several of the Kingdons, his mother's side of the family, including Aunt May and cousin Ernest, who had looked after him once his father had relocated to Southampton. They hosted a private reception at Picton Street, where Ernest Kingdon had hung pictures of the young Archie Leach all over the walls. Also in attendance was his step- brother, Eric, the child of Elias and Mabel, his Southampton mistress. During the festivities Eric informed Grant that his father wanted to meet with him, in private and at his convenience, to discuss a matter of great importance.
He knew it was not going to be easy. They hadn't been face to face in fif- teen years, since the day Elias had seen him off to America, after which time Elias had committed himself to his new life in Southampton. Since then there had been no contact between the two. Now Grant hoped he and his father could somehow revive their relationship.
On the night of the meeting, Grant dressed in his best dark blue suit, pressed a
s sharp as a razor's edge to impress his father, and took Cherrill along. Grant made the appropriate introductions, and they all had dinner together, after which Grant left Cherrill with Mabel and Eric while he and Elias went to a local pub to talk. They found one Elias liked, went to a table in the rear, and got down to serious business—the nature of which Grant was totally unprepared for. Even after being warned by relatives that his father had become a bad drunk, Grant had been shocked at how Elias's once- handsome face had been raked by sun and scotch, with sagging jowls, piloted by a pair of dead eyes. He waited to see if this was going to be a genuine rap- prochement or, more likely, a touch-up for money. Grant was prepared for and ready to go along with either or both.
He couldn't have been farther from the mark.
After two pints, Elias stared into his third and said, softly, “Now, son, would you like to see your mother?”
“What?”
Elias took a deep breath, slurped some foam, and then began to calmly explain the truth about Elsie's “death.” He took his boy back to that day when young Archie came home from school to find his mother gone. He told him that Elsie had not died after all, that for all this time she had been only a few miles away, involuntarily committed to Fishponds, the Country Home for Mental Defectives on the outskirts of Bristol, after she had suffered what he called a severe “nervous breakdown.”* Elias expected Elsie to remain at Fishponds for the rest of her life, which was why, he said, he had thought it better that Archie, for his own sake, be told she was dead.
Grant was devastated. By the time he left the pub to return to his hotel, he had lapsed into a fog of depression, unreachable even by Virginia Cherrill, who became frightened by his bizarre demeanor.
A million miles away in his mind, Grant wondered how his father could have done it to his mother. To him. All those years thinking she was dead, she had been alone, locked up, shunned. For Grant, learning the truth meant that he had not been abandoned after all, at least not by his mother, but he had been abandoned by Elias, lied to and tricked by the father he had so adored.
That night, Grant fitfully tossed and turned through nightmarish visions of his mother made to suffer for his father's sins. Cherrill was unable to soothe him with her voice or her arms around him, as he wrestled until dawn with the recast demons of his reawakened youth.
After dropping off at the first sign of morning light, Grant awoke late the next day and seemed relatively composed. After an afternoon breakfast in the suite with Cherrill, he telephoned Elias and requested his help in arranging a visit to his mother at Fishponds. Elias said he would take care of everything.
The next day, alone, Cary Grant hailed a cab and took the fifteen-minute ride to the insane asylum. Upon his arrival, he stepped through the stone- and-gate front entrance and was escorted by the administrator and the head nurse to a reception room where Elsie was sitting, waiting for him. The shock of actually seeing his mother stunned Grant. There she was, alive and … smiling.
The thirty-year-old actor and his fifty-six-year-old mother sat side by side on a stiff lounge, she doting on him as if he were still a little boy, her little boy, while he smiled and brushed away a tear as he gazed at a woman he only vaguely recognized, whose strong voice had turned high and thin, whose thick lovely hair had turned mousy gray, and whose bones seemed to stick out of their joints.
It quickly became apparent to Grant that Elsie was a bit more than out of it. Apparently, she had no idea how much time had passed, that he had gone to America and become a movie star. To her he was still precious little Archie. They talked for a long time, and before he left Grant promised his mother he would get her released by her next birthday, coming up in February, and that they would celebrate it together on the “outside.” Then he put his arms around her and held her tight. He could feel a slight giggle pass through her as he held back his tears.
To the end of his life, Grant never spoke to anybody except Virginia Cherrill of that first, shocking reunion with his mother, nor about much of anything having to do with his early life in Bristol, nor the purposeful deception perpetuated by his father, other than the few romanticized memories he included in his memoirs.*
As the days passed in the hotel, Cherrill noticed that Grant's mood con- tinued to darken. It slowly dawned on the woman he had so desperately pur- sued throughout Hollywood, then across America and on to the other side of the Atlantic, that she was no longer the only living female worthy of his deep- est affections. Nevertheless, Cherrill determined not to let anything interfere with their plans to be married. She continued to refer to herself, to the gos- sips of London's daily press, as Cary Grant's “fiancée.”
The only problem was that he hadn't as yet formally proposed. Amid all the confusion and emotional upheaval, the conflicting forces of his emotions snapped through him like static electricity. He retreated once more into the confines of his hotel room—and sought the shielding comfort of expensive scotch.
His drinking dramatically increased and soon he began to complain to Cherrill, who tried as best she could to stay out of the line of fire, of his con- tinuing physical aches and pains, including a return of his old back problem from the explosion on the set of The Eagle and the Hawk.
After Cherrill met with the press and blithely talked of a possible Christmas wedding in London, Grant's physical condition worsened. He imagined him- self the victim of every illness imaginable, as if he were a magnet and the metal shavings flying through the air were germs of disease seeking to attach themselves to him. Psychosomatic or not, real physical symptoms began to exhibit themselves. When he began bleeding heavily from his rectum, Cherrill insisted he see a doctor.
The initial diagnosis was a bad case of hemorrhoids, aggravated by Grant's fragile emotional condition, a conclusion the hypochondriac actor rejected in favor of his own more dramatic one: that he was suffering from terminal rectal cancer. His fears grew worse the next day, when the physical symptoms intensified. While he was brushing his teeth, pulses of blood shot out of the upper left side of his mouth. It was enough to convince him to check into a clinic on Fulham Road in preparation for cancer surgery.
Although later on Grant (and others) would insist that he had suffered from either “cancer” or a “pre-cancerous” condition, there is absolutely no medical record of any such condition having actually existed. Equally in question are the “radiation treatments” Grant claimed to have taken in the weeks that followed. Radiation for cancer was still heavily experimental at the time, and it is unlikely that the private clinic where he stayed would have been equipped to administer such sophisticated treatment. In addition, there is no recorded evidence, no medical charts, no photos, nothing to document any of the side effects of radiation—temporary baldness (almost always), vom- iting, weight loss, weakness, and constant bed care. Nor are there any med- ical records to show that he had any type of chemotherapy.
On the other hand, it is quite possible, judging from photos taken of Grant before and after this visit, that he was hospitalized for, among other things, a touch-up of the nose work he had first had in the States. Or equally plausible, drinking as heavily as he was, he might have used the time at the hospital to dry out, or was never in the hospital at all but went instead to a rehab clinic. No matter what the actual series of events, one thing is certain: Grant and Cherrill's so-called wedding plans were indefinitely postponed.
Almost as bad for her was the thought of having to play nurse to Grant for the prescribed four weeks or more of hospital bed rest. Cherrill, already on edge, developed a severe bout of laryngitis that Grant was certain was throat cancer. She continued to make plans for their wedding, setting a January date, until she discovered that her final divorce papers (from Irving Adler) were still in Hollywood and she could not obtain a marriage certificate with- out them. It would take at least a week or two for them to arrive in London. She then picked February 9, 1934, as their proposed wedding date (one day after Grant's mother's fifty-seventh birthday). Grant, too weak to a
rgue, gave his consent.
When the news hit the papers, Grant tried to call Scott several times and finally reached him at the beach house, but despite his pleas, Scott refused to return to England to stand up as best man. Grant asked no one else, including his father, to do the honors.
On February 9, the day of his wedding, the mobs outside his hotel were so big, he somehow got separated from Cherrill, with whom he was supposed to drive to the Caxton Hall marriage registry office in London.
They arrived separately, in time for an altogether joyless civil ceremony. Afterward they were taken directly by limousine to the train station, where they traveled by rail to Southampton. Upon their arrival they directly boarded the luxury liner Berengaria, bound for the United States, with first-class accommodations once again provided by the studio. With new film dead- lines pressing, Grant had no choice but to forgo any honeymoon, return home with Cherrill, and resume making movies, knowing all the while a dis- gruntled Scott was waiting for him.
Worse for Grant, Elsie had rejected his impassioned pleas to come to America with him, and he was not even able to stay in England long enough to keep his promise about celebrating her fifty-eighth birthday together on the outside. It wasn't until Grant and his new wife were still at sea that Elsie Leach was, thanks to Grant's efforts, officially declared “sane” and released from Fishponds after nineteen years of incarceration. She quietly returned to the same house in Bristol from which she had forcibly been taken; her sister May and other members of the Kingdon family waited there to receive and care for her.
Grant had been miserable without Cherrill on the journey over to London. On the return trip to America, he was miserable for having married her. Cherrill, meanwhile, who had at the very least hoped for a romantic honeymoon at sea, was bitterly disappointed by her bridegroom's ignoring her the entire voyage.