Cary Grant Read online

  Following a few moments of silence, Cherrill, a seasoned player in the ongoing emotional push-pull of their relationship, hung up, waited, and when the phone didn't ring, called Grant back. The phone was answered by Grant's part-time Filipino houseboy, Pedro, who conveniently just happened to be on duty that night. Cherrill told him she was worried that Cary himself had not picked up. Pedro said he would check on Grant, who was in his bed- room. He put the phone back in its cradle, entered the room, and found his boss stretched out on the bed, clad only in boxer shorts, with a pitcher of water and a large, nearly empty bottle of sleeping pills on the night table. In a panic, Pedro called the police emergency services, and at 2:28 in the morning an ambulance came screaming up to the front of the house, several med- ical personnel rushed in, hooked Grant up to a respirator, put him on a stretcher, and took him to Hollywood Hospital. There his stomach was pumped, his blood was tested, and despite Cherrill's initial fears that he had fatally overdosed, he quickly revived. Later on the doctors told her they had found no more than a single tablet's worth of sleeping medication in Grant's blood, but that his alcohol level had been dangerously high.

  Somehow, the story of Grant's “attempted suicide” made headlines in the next afternoon papers, and working with the publicity department at Para- mount, he scrambled to come up with a story. He was instructed by the stu- dio to tell the reporters that “I had been at a party with friends, and when I got home they tried to play a joke on me. They called the police after I lay down. It was all a colossal gag.”

  And a colossal lie.

  There is absolutely no evidence that anybody was with Grant that night, but telephone records confirm the series of calls he made on the evening of October 4. Later on, in fact, Grant himself would change his story and describe the incident this way: “You know what whiskey does when you drink it all by yourself. It makes you very, very sad.” So much for being “at a party with friends.” He went on to say, “I began calling people up. I know I called Virginia. I don't know what I said to her, but things got hazier and hazier. The next thing I knew, they were carting me off to the hospital.”

  The incident might have been more easily written off (as it has by most of Grant's biographers), if not for his mysterious and never fully explained hospital stay in England the previous December, immediately following Grant's discovery that his mother was, in fact, still alive. What had really made Grant so ill back then that required several weeks of hospitalization? It is safe to say that the one thing it wasn't was rectal cancer. A truism says a single event is an incident, a series a pattern. It is difficult to see these two relatively close and emotionally traumatic episodes as unrelated. Curiously, all relevant hospital records in both instances have disappeared.

  The divorce proceedings were not particularly lurid, but because they involved a handsome movie star and his beautiful ingenue wife, they were front-page news. Preliminary hearings began on December 11, 1934, in Los Angeles Superior Court, before the ironically named divorce court judge William Valentine. At the hearing Cherrill testified that in the three months since their separation Grant had almost completely cut her off financially, and because of it she had had to pawn her engagement ring and diamond watch and take a second loan against her car just to have enough money for food. In all that time, she claimed, Grant had given her a total of only $125. Now she demanded a thousand dollars a month, pending the finalization of their divorce, so she could properly prepare for her return to a career in films.

  Grant, through his lawyer, made a counteroffer of $150 a month. When called to the bench by the judge to explain how he had arrived at his figure, Grant said, “She managed to [get along on that much] before we were married, so she could do it again.”

  That was enough for Valentine. He ordered Grant to immediately start paying Cherrill $725 a month until the final settlement and subsequent dissolution of their marriage. In addition, Grant was required to post a $20,000 bond, to ensure his payment of both his and Cherrill's legal fees. Last, he was prohibited from selling any of his property.

  A week later Cherrill amended her complaint to include accusations that, during their marriage, Grant “drank excessively, choked and beat her, and threatened to kill her.”

  If Cary hit the roof, Zukor went through it. The last thing he needed was to lose his best and least expensive contract player to this kind of scandal. On Christmas Eve he brought the lawyers from both parties together in a secret meeting at the backlot, during which he warned Cherrill's attorneys that before any settlement could be reached, she would have to drop the chargesagainst Grant regarding his drinking and threats of violence. They agreed, knowing that at this point it didn't make much difference, as the columns had already headlined the accusations for the public's eager consumption.

  By the time the divorce proceedings began, a still depressed Grant failed to show up in court, claiming he had to do last-minute reshoots of his two latest movies, Elliott Nugent's Enter Madame and James Flood's Wings in the Dark. It was a reasonable excuse, and Grant was allowed to have his lawyers stand in for him.

  A single one-hour divorce session was held on March 26, 1935, and produced enough “revelations” from a well-rehearsed Cherrill for the next morning's papers. Her lawyer, Milton Cross, who specialized in Hollywood divorces, got her to claim, through her tears and in such a reluctantly soft voice that Valentine had to continually ask her to speak up, that her husband was “sulky, morose, took to drinking … and would argue with me on every point. He said I was lazy and ought to go to work, but when I tried to, he discouraged me and refused to let me work … he was tired of me and said he didn't want to live with me anymore.” To reinforce her claims, Cherrill's lawyers brought her mother to the stand, who testified she had seen Grant “mistreat” her daughter several times.

  At Zukor's insistence, Grant had instructed his lawyers in advance not to cross-examine Cherrill or anyone else, including her mother, and to make no further comments of any kind on his behalf, either outside the courtroom to the press or inside before the judge. Grant agreed that the best thing to do was to get it all over with, even if he had to pay a premium price. In the end, the judge formally declared the eleven-month marriage over and awarded Cherrill half of Grant's property, estimated to be worth $50,000.

  Less than a month later Cherrill left alone for an extended vacation in England.

  Grant, meanwhile, reluctantly gave up the apartment at La Ronda and Scott quickly gave up his place next door. They returned together to the house under the hollywoodland sign on West Live Oak Drive. Scott was delirious to have Grant back and chose to pretend that nothing involving Cherrill had ever happened.

  An inconsolable Grant didn't have to pretend. Nothing had, and he hated himself for it.

  * No one was less happy to see Tone get the role over Grant than Gable. He and Tone had been bit- ter rivals for the affections of Joan Crawford and did not like each other at all.

  On the Columbia Pictures set of The Awful Truth (1937), Cary Grant mirrors the physical style of his director and first comic mentor, Leo McCarey. (Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

  10

  “My first great chance came in 1936, when I was borrowed by RKO for Sylvia Scarlett playing opposite Katharine Hepburn. This picture did nothing to endear its female lead to the public, but it helped me to success…. After this picture I made one after another, probably too many.”

  —CARY GRANT

  Once he and Randolph settled back into West Live Oak Drive, Grant became something of a social recluse, refusing to leave the house for any reason except to go to the studio, fearing he would be laughed at by his friends because Cherrill had left him and because of the sordid details of her testimony. On weekends he took to sitting alone in the sun for hours at a time, with a glass of straight scotch in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other.

  He did some last-minute reshoots for James Flood's Wings in the Dark, a weeper with Grant as a blind man who learns to “s
ee” through the love of a good woman, played by Myrna Loy, in many ways a reversal of Chaplin's City Lights scenario, but without any of Lights's humor, depth, or emotion. Grant showed up for the reshoots with his face deeply tanned and insisted the studio come up with light pancake to match the skin tone of his earlier scenes. Thus began what was to become a pattern for the rest of his moviemaking days, using the sun's rays for makeup.

  After Wings in the Dark, because of Paramount's financial problems, Grant's next film was a long time coming. While waiting for a new script, he became involved in an odd relationship with a significantly older woman who called herself Countess di Frasso, a fifty-year-old heiress whose real name was Dorothy Taylor and whose New York–based family had become wealthy in the decidedly nonroyal leather goods trade. She had acquired her title by marrying an Italian count, her second unsuccessful foray into legal bliss. He turned out to be a deadbeat with no appreciable earning skills. Their fortune, such as it was, all came from her, and it was barely enough to pay the mortgage on their beautiful Italian villa.

  Nevertheless, the count and countess loved to lavishly entertain at their villa, especially visiting Hollywood celebrities, one of whom, Gary Cooper, arrived in 1931 and returned to Beverly Hills with Countess di Frasso dutifully in tow. Cooper and the countess carried on an open affair in Hollywood until he surprised everyone, including her, by suddenly marrying socialite Veronica Balfe.

  The jilted countess decided that rather than return to her villa she would stay in Hollywood and soon enough, after following the details of Grant's divorce in the newspapers, marked him as her next Hollywood paramour. While it is highly unlikely that he sexually serviced her with anything like the passionate fervor that Cooper did (if he serviced her at all), they met and somehow managed to become, if not lovers, good friends. Hovering over this new relationship was the ever-present professional rivalry and personal animosity between Cooper and Grant. This time Grant got to “replace” Cooper in a way he knew would annoy his heavily narcissistic competitor.

  For the next several years, the countess occasionally blew through Grant's life like an unpredictable breeze, depending upon her availability and his. Their noticeable age difference (she was twenty-two years older), his great looks (she loved being seen with him in public), her financial generosity (she paid for everything), and his appetite for social status (she was, after all, a countess) made him the ideal companion. On Grant's side, his serial melancholia about Elsie made the countess an ideal mother-surrogate: a doting older woman willing to spoil her precious and beautiful “little boy.” In the parlance of the real golden days of Hollywood, as one who was there at the time rather crudely recalled, “Cary was the perfect central-casting fag to Taylor, a rich, old, self-delusional hag.”

  Meanwhile the studio, deep into reorganization and temporarily unable to get major bank funding for any new films, tried to raise cash by loaning Grant to Warner Bros. as a last-minute replacement for an ailing Robert Donat in that studio's big-budget production of Michael Curtiz's Captain Blood.* Grant, with his natural athletic abilities, would fit perfectly into the part of the swashbuckling British pirate. But when Zukor offered him to Curtiz, Warners unconditionally turned him down. According to one version, Grant was rejected by the studio for being “too effete.” Although the quote has been often repeated, it is rarely attributed. It was actually made by Warner Bros. contract director Michael Curtiz himself, his angry reply to Jack Warner for even making the suggestion. Curtiz—the “wild Hungarian,” as he was known—had little use for Grant and his “type.” Instead, he cast über-heterosexual Errol Flynn to play the role that would go on to make the handsome, rugged Australian a star.

  With time on his hands and his skin cooked to a golden tan roughly the tone and consistency of a holiday turkey, Grant continued to ignore Scott's advice to get out of the sun, out of the house, and back into the social scene. To make that happen, Scott finally agreed to introduce Grant to Howard Hughes, one of the few Hollywood celebrities besides Chaplin he still wanted to meet. Scott figured if anyone could get Grant's head out of his own rear end, it was Hughes; after all, MGM may have had more stars than there were in heaven, but Hughes had all the starlets. If Grant still wanted to play with girls, a couple of nights together out on the town, Scott believed, would make him forget all about Virginia Cherrill.

  Scott's reasons for wanting to put Grant and Hughes together were not completely selfless. Already thirty-seven years old, Scott had a far less successful movie career than Grant, and even fewer prospects. He figured that if he supplied Hughes with something he wanted, Hughes might give him something more in return. Hughes loved beautiful women, and Scott knew that Cary Grant was the ultimate lure.

  Meanwhile, to replenish his nearly depleted post-divorce bank account, Grant accepted radio work in New York. Appearing on radio was something he had previously been opposed to, believing that giving away a performance for free would make audiences less inclined to pay to see or hear an actor perform onscreen. Nevertheless, with no films in his immediate future, on May 5, 1935, he made his debut on the airwaves starring in a live broadcast of the Lux Radio Theater, opposite Constance Cummings, a thirty-minute onetime performance for which he was paid $1,750, plus airfare and hotel.

  To his surprise, he quite enjoyed the whole experience. For one thing, no physical preparation was required, and for another, it exposed him to a new group of performers, mostly East Coast types who, for a while, dominated the prime time airwaves. Throughout the next twenty years, whenever he had the opportunity, Grant worked on the radio, either as a character in a drama or as a guest on a celebrity variety show, most often with Groucho Marx on his Kellogg Show, The Eddie Cantor Show, and George Faulkner's talk show, The Circle. Whenever Grant did Faulkner's show, he would find himself alongside other Hollywood luminaries, such as his good friend British actor Ronald Colman. One time he even recorded a full-length radio version of his blindman opus, Wings in the Dark, that, as it turned out, worked far better on the sightless medium than it had in the movies.

  He returned to making movies after the dust settled around Paramount's 1935 reorganization. Paramount Publix became Paramount Pictures and emerged from bankruptcy. In some ways, at least as far as Grant was concerned, day-to-day operations at the studio had changed little; mostly it was business as usual.* Gary Cooper had recently scored a tremendous success starring in Henry Hathaway's The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, but when Zukor wanted to make a sequel, The Last Outpost, both Cooper and Hathaway rejected the idea, and the project fell to studio hacks Charles Barton and Louis Gasnier, who cast Grant in the Cooper role and told him to prepare for the role by trying to look more manly. Grant's response was to grow a mustache that made him a ringer for Douglas Fairbanks.

  His costar in the film was Claude Rains, who upstaged everyone else in it, including Grant. The Last Outpost was released in October 1935 and quickly disappeared, after which Zukor lent Grant to RKO Radio Pictures to costar opposite a new up-and-coming actress by the name of Katharine Hepburn. The move would prove crucial to Grant's career and forge two professional relationships that would profoundly affect both his career and his personal life.

  Katharine Hepburn, “the Magnificent Yankee,” had been born into a line of bluebloods of Scottish descent from West Hartford, Connecticut. Her father was a noted urologist and surgeon and an early pioneer in the fight against syphilis. He was tall, good-looking, and athletic, a highly skilled investor who had become wealthy from stocks and real estate. Her mother, known to everyone as Kit, was a Boston Houghton (accounting for all six of the Hepburn children having the same Houghton middle name) and a cousin of the ambassador to Britain.

  Under her father's strict guidance, Hepburn became a superb athlete, with considerable skills in wrestling, tumbling, trapeze, water sports, and golf. She was intrigued by acting at an early age, a drive that became supercharged in a twisted way after her older brother Tom tried to duplicate a trick they had seen in a stage production
of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and accidentally—or as some claim, deliberately—hanged himself. She attended Bryn Mawr and, while exhibiting superior learning skills, nearly flunked out because she spent most of her time in the drama department.

  Upon graduation she joined a Baltimore theatrical company and soon made the jump to Broadway, where she appeared in several shows, most of them flops. Then in 1928 she surprised everyone by marrying Ludlow Ogden Smith, a Philadelphia socialite. Upon her return from their honeymoon she agreed to understudy the Broadway star Hope Williams in the lead role of Philip Barry's Holiday (a role she would perform only once during its entire year-long run). That led to a starring role in 1932 in The Warrior's Husband, a contemporary version of Lysistrata. The part gave Hepburn the chance to showcase her considerable athletic skills and also to display a lot of her body, including her previously undisplayed gorgeous long legs.

  Word of her audience-pleasing performance eventually reached Merian C. Cooper, the executive producer of RKO Radio Pictures, who sent his then production head, David O. Selznick, to New York, to offer the young actress an exclusive acting contract with the studio for $150 a week. When Selznick met with Hepburn, he asked what it would take to get her to come to Hollywood, and she pulled a figure out of her head that she was certain would send Selznick running. Through her agent, Leland Howard, she had demanded a starting salary of $1,500 a week. Selznick agreed without hesitation, and when The Warrior's Husband ended that summer, she flew to Hollywood to begin her film career.

  Her first fearure was A Bill of Divorcement, in the leading role that every young actress in Hollywood had fought for. It was based on the New York stage play by Clemence Dane that had made a star out of Katharine Cornell in 1921. Once the studio had acquired the rights to the play, it was given to one of its hot new directors with a Broadway pedigree, George Cukor, who, because of his success with Cornell and his superior stage work with Ethel Barrymore, Laurette Taylor, and Helen Hayes, had developed a reputation as a “woman's director.” When film legend Dorothy Gish committed to making her long-awaited Broadway debut in Young Love, she'd insisted George Cukor direct her.