Cary Grant Read online

  * Little of Waugh's work made it into the final production.

  * There is at least one other possible explanation for Cukor's casting of Grant. The Countess di Frasso always insisted that it was her “influence,” such as it was, that got Cukor to hire Grant for Sylvia Scarlett. As it happened, she and Cukor were good friends, and although the story is most likely apocryphal, neither Cukor nor Grant ever publicly disputed the countess's often-made claim.

  11

  “I am most keenly reminded of what director-writer Garson Kanin had told me once about Leo McCarey's extraordinary influence on Cary Grant, the American screen's longestlived leading man, equally adept at comedy and drama: that in The Awful Truth, Grant was in fact imitating McCarey's own urbane manner as well as his infectious zaniness.”

  —PETER BOGDANOVICH

  During the filming of Sylvia Scarlett, Cary Grant had quietly and directly—that is to say, not through Paramount—received an offer to star in a small independent British film, Alfred Zeisler's The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss, a remake of a 1920 Henry Edwards silent comedy, that was to be shot entirely in Great Britain. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. After Scott's marriage bombshell, Grant couldn't wait to get out of town, and England now seemed to him the perfect place to go to. Grant had told Zukor about the offer, and the studio head had unhesitatingly given him a green light. The studio had nothing for Grant coming up, and Zukor was relieved that his talented but increasingly fussy actor—he was now making Hepburn-like noises about script approval—had found a project that would keep him not only occupied but out of everyone's hair for a while.

  Grant was excited about playing another British character in a role that allowed him to show off some of his ability to do physical comedy. Although he could as yet not fully articulate it, his growing dissatisfaction with Paramount lay in how the studio had continued to misuse his talent. This bothered him as much as any complaints he had about salary, billing, or the studio's seemingly neverending rules of morality. He no longer wanted to serve the house; he wanted it to serve him. And, if he ever had, he no longer sought the title of the next Valentino, or the second-string Gary Cooper, but the one and only Cary Grant. It was that goal as much as his feeling of having been abandoned by Scott that led him to fly to England to star in the independent production of Bliss.

  In it, Grant plays the title character, Ernie Bliss, a working man who unexpectedly inherits $5 million, then sets out to discover “the real meaning of life” by spending a year earning his living without any help from anyone or anything, including his own newly enriched bank account. Along the way he falls for a woman (played by Mary Brian, dubbed “the sweetest girl in pictures!” for her portrayal of Wendy in Herbert Brenon's 1924 silent version of James M. Barrie's Peter Pan), who comes to love him for who he is rather than what he has. The film is yet another variation on the theme of Chaplin's City Lights—the power of inner beauty—but unlike Wings in the Dark contains a great deal of wit, humor, grace, and insight.

  Grant was enormously pleased with his work in Bliss. Save for occasional flashes of brilliance (in Blonde Venus, She Done Him Wrong, and Sylvia Scarlett) in the five years and twenty-one movies he made before it, he had not appeared in a feature that fully showed off his unique physical and verbal comedic abilities as much as his particular romantic appeal. Without a tuxedo, murder weapon, period costume, physical affliction, or femme fatale in sight, Bliss finally allowed Grant to give the kind of performance he was capable of, the first true glimpse of what was to become the classic Cary Grant persona of charm, looks, wit, and decency.

  Mary Brian, seduced by Grant's charismatic performance, took an immediate liking to him away from the camera as well and responded with genuine affection when Grant developed what resembled a schoolboy's crush on her. Before long they were being photographed together in London nightclubs and restaurants, their “affair” played up in the gossips on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite all outward appearances, however, Grant had no sexual interest in the strikingly beautiful actress. Still, there were many in the industry and out who believed that something must have been going on between the two of them, a belief bolstered by two significant factors: Brian's strong resemblance to Virginia Cherrill, and Randolph Scott's impending marriage. The studio, sensing a good opportunity, went so far as to intimate through its reliable posse of gossip-mongers that Grant and Brian were engaged.

  The story was, of course, completely fabricated, but it gained a measure of believability when Grant, for whatever reason, was slow to deny it. Directly confronted by the press, he offered only a vague response that could be interpreted any way the entertainment reporters wanted. In truth, Grant was enjoying his friendship with Brian and may also have wanted to send a message to Scott that he wasn't suffering, although he knew all too well that Scott wouldn't interpret his relationship with Brian the way the public did. If there was any real message Grant was sending to Scott, it had to do more with loneliness than one-upsmanship.

  There may have been yet another reason why Grant publicly welcomed Brian's companionship, and that was to please his mother. During the filming of Bliss, Grant intended to spend as much time as possible with Elsie, unencumbered by any drama surrounding the presence of a fiancée. He looked forward to enjoying the incredible gift of his mother's “coming back to life”—and coming back to his life. He was, therefore, quite unprepared for the reality that awaited him.

  The first shock came after spending a day with Elsie, when he suddenly realized that she didn't exactly remember who he was. She seemed to treat him more like an old acquaintance than her son. The second came when he realized that she preferred to stay indoors as much as possible, in the same grimy house in Bristol from which she had been forcibly taken all those years before. It was as if she still believed she was being held in confinement. Grant once again offered to move her permanently to America so that she could live near him in comfort and style such as she had never known, but she laughed off the notion as completely absurd. At fifty-eight years old, she told him, the thought of moving to a foreign country was as comical as it was frightening.

  Perhaps worst of all, she began to nudge him about the prospect of marriage, seemingly unaware that he already had done it once. He was old enough, she insisted, to finally take on that sort of responsibility. If he didn't watch out, she warned him, he could wind up a lonely old man. This last part completely unnerved him.

  Grant did manage to convince Elsie to accompany him to London so she could watch some of the filming of Bliss. The visit, unfortunately, was interrupted by the news that his father, Elias, had fallen gravely ill. Decades of carousing, hard drinking, and chain smoking had finally taken their toll. At the age of sixty-three, his body had given in to all the self-inflicted abuse. On December 1, 1935, Elias Leach died of acute septicemia and gangrene of the bowel.

  Distraught at missing the chance to say good-bye to his father in person, Grant remained grimly terse toward the press, especially in the face of hard questions regarding Elias's decades-long double life and the heretofore unknown existence to the public of “only child Archie's” half-brother, Eric, with whom Grant would now attempt to forge a closer friendship.

  It all added up to a difficult replay of all the old traumas. Once again he was forced to deal with abandonment, this time by his father's death—which was real—and by his mother's resurrection, which in many ways had proven illusory.

  The only official comment he made regarding his father's passing was at the funeral, held in Bristol, before friends and family, in which he said, simply, “He was a wise and kindly man and I loved him very much.”

  The day after filming was completed, Cary Grant boarded a luxury liner and set sail with Mary Brian back to the States.

  Because it had trouble securing an overseas distributor, The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss did not arrive in American theaters until the spring of 1937, more than a year after it was made.* By then, everything in Grant's Hollywood caree
r and personal life had completely changed.

  Grant returned to Los Angeles early in 1936 to the bad news that Sylvia Scarlett had bombed at the box office, so much so that Katharine Hepburn was now considered all but unemployable by the major studios. In the wake of the film's failure, her personal relationship with Howard Hughes had also floundered. She was tough and singular and disinclined to let Hughes gloss over the deep wound of her career nosedive with a palliative high-fly among the clouds. She was, Grant knew, far more grounded than that.

  Despite the film's commercial failure, his outstanding reviews had put him at the top of everyone's popularity list. Adolph Zukor, who had by now been kicked upstairs to the supervisory position of chairman of the board as part of Paramount's reorganization, no longer had the studio under his absolute control. Two next-generation low-profile but high-powered executives, Barney Balaban and Y. Frank Freeman, had taken control over the actual making of movies. Unlike Zukor, they wanted to take advantage of Grant's popularity by casting him in Otho Lovering's Border Flight, opposite the studio's newest female discovery, Frances Farmer. It would prove the breaking point for Grant.

  He so disliked the script he decided to test his newfound popularity by taking a page out of Gary Cooper's playbook: he unequivocally refused to appear in Border Flight. He sent word directly to Zukor that the studio should not expect him to show up on the set for the scheduled first day of shooting. Moreover, Grant informed Zukor, from now on he must have complete approval over all the projects he was to be involved in, as well as a long overdue raise. At his present salary of $2,500 a week, Grant was by no means starving, but he was still earning less than half the $6,000 a week that Cooper was bringing in, and that truly galled him.

  Zukor went ballistic. As far as he was concerned, Cary Grant didn't deserve Gary Cooper's salary, because Cary Grant wasn't Gary Cooper. In his five years at Paramount, Grant had appeared in twenty-six films that—with a few notable exceptions, including Blonde Venus and She Done Him Wrong—were unremarkable product churned out factory-style by forgettable directors whose work more closely resembled that of assembly-line supervisors than of visionaries exploring the landscape of imagination.

  By comparison, Cooper, who had been with the studio for eleven years, had made fifty-nine films. His first major screen appearance was in William Wellman's 1927 Wings, the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, a level of success, achievement, and prestige that neither Grant nor any of his films had yet to match. Among the highlights of Cooper's career (through 1937) were Josef von Sternberg's Morocco (1930), a far more successful Dietrich vehicle than Blonde Venus; a segment in the eight-part If I Had a Million (1932), a panoramic multistar vehicle from which Grant was omitted because of his relatively low star-wattage;* Frank Borzage's A Farewell to Arms (1932), nominated for Best Picture of the Year; Ernst Lubitsch's terrific Design for Living (1933); Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936, on loan to Columbia), for which Cooper received a Best Actor nomination; Lewis Milestone's hugely successful The General Died at Dawn(1936); and Cecil B. DeMille's neoclassic star vehicle western, The Plainsman (1937). At this point in time, there was simply no comparison between the two actors' achievements.

  Which, Grant might have insisted, proved his point. It wasn't that Gary Cooper was a “better” actor—meaning a more popular and bigger moneymaker for the studio—it was that he was always given the superior scripts. More often than not, his discards and rejects went to Grant, who like most actors was almost always only as good as the films he appeared in and the directors he worked with.

  Nevertheless, Zukor took Grant's demands as the ungrateful tantrum of a second-tier actor whom the studio had carried while he walked through most of his contract years delivering a series of undistinguished performances, and who was still gainfully employed only through the good graces of Zukor's generosity, who had personally insisted on keeping him employed through the studio's roughest times and at the height of a national depression.

  Because Grant did not have an agent—he didn't know anyone whom he felt he could trust to negotiate financial terms for him—it was all the harder for Zukor, who abhorred negotiating directly with actors about anything, to deal with him. (Zukor didn't think actors were intelligent enough to know a good deal when they were offered one.) Still, to keep Grant happy, and over Balaban and Freeman's strong objections, he released him from Border Flight (John Howard was given the role) and offered him a thousand-dollar raise, to $3,500 a week, the highest among the second-tier performers at the still financially shaky studio. Zukor considered his offer more than generous and felt that if Grant didn't like it, he could leave at the expiration of his soonto-expire contract. The way he saw it, Grant had failed to make the big breakthrough to the level of superstar. Besides, the studio's real A-list—of which Cooper, Dietrich, and West occupied the top slots—were all demanding huge salary increases to re-sign with the “new” studio. If he had to let someone go, Zukor figured, it would be Grant before any of them.

  Still, Zukor hadn't completely given up on him, especially after the surprising critical reception for his work in Sylvia Scarlett. In one final attempt to mollify Grant, Zukor asked producer Walter Wanger to cast him as the lead in Raoul Walsh's upcoming Big Brown Eyes, opposite Joan Bennett, a film that Zukor considered important and prestigious for the studio, a role that could finally elevate Cary Grant to the A-list.

  In truth, Big Brown Eyes was not as great a project as Zukor had thought, as it was little more than an imitation Thin Man. Grant read the script and decided to accept the role, although he correctly believed that he wasn't really right for the character of Danny Barr, a fast-talking, tough gumshoe type more suited to James Cagney. Grant used a clumsy stepped-up pace to his speech to convey “street smarts” and otherwise reverted to his familiar comfort zone of pocket-posing throughout the performance. Predictably, Big Brown Eyes did nothing at the box office.

  In the wake of the film's failure, Zukor finally gave up on Grant, and when MGM asked to borrow him for George Fitzmaurice's Suzy, to star opposite the red-hot Jean Harlow, he quickly gave his approval.

  Despite Dorothy Parker's clever dialogue contributions, the script for Suzy was a mishmash of three genres: romance, war, and espionage. Harlow, set adrift in the blanched cinematic ether of the sanitizing Hays Office, despite her character's romantic involvement with a man while still married to a presumed-dead but very much alive husband, was being rendered wholesome by the studio, with the result that she appeared unappealingly wholesome. Meanwhile, the sight of Grant in a military uniform playing a macho romantic two-timing aviator brought a round of back-of-the-wrist snickering from Hollywood's knowing insiders. Grant's rival in the film for the affections of Harlow was none other than Franchot Tone. (Ironically, the reason Grant was offered the part was that MGM's regular roster of male A-list stars—Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Robert Young, William Powell, Robert Montgomery, and Spencer Tracy—were all considered too important to appear in the smaller role opposite Tone.)

  Despite Grant's decent-enough rendition of the song “Did I Remember,” which went on to become a modest sheet-music hit, the film was quite ordinary, jacked up by flying sequences that were far superior to and did not match the rest of the film's scenes (with good reason: they were outtakes from Hughes's self-produced 1930 Hell's Angels, which he leased to MGM for a hefty fee).

  Suzy was not an out-and-out flop, but it was by no means the major hit MGM had anticipated, and it did nothing for Grant's career. Shortly after its release, Grant made an extraordinary decision. He was not only not going to re-sign with Paramount, no matter what offer Zukor might come up with (if indeed he came up with one at all), but he would not sign an exclusive contract with any Hollywood studio. After his experience on Broadway with Hammerstein and the Shuberts, and now in Hollywood with Paramount, he had had enough of what he considered to be the actor's fate—indentured servitude.

  After Suzy, A-line stardom seemed less reachable now f
or Grant than ever. Just behind Cooper, Crosby, and Henry Fonda, a new crop of younger leading men were already nipping at his heels, among them Jimmy Stewart, Fred MacMurray, Ray Milland, and Robert Cummings, all with smiles almost as dazzling and hair nearly as dark and luminous as Grant's.

  And some could even act.

  If Zukor was still at all interested in trying to keep Grant at Paramount, it wasn't apparent from the next assignment he gave him, the last under his existing contract. In the summer of 1936 Grant starred in Richard Wallace's Wedding Present, once again opposite Joan Bennett, with only costar credit, his name significantly placed after the title.

  Wedding Present was a dull newsroom romance that once again gave Grant little opportunity to display his comic talents. After its release and quick fade (like Suzy and Big Brown Eyes, it was released prior to the American premiere of Bliss), Grant officially notified Zukor that he was not going to re-sign with Paramount.

  Zukor was surprised, not at the decision itself, but at Grant's audacity. At the time, in the Academy-controlled closed shop of major studios, contract players who became free agents rarely succeeded, and everyone in the business, including Grant, knew it.

  Nonetheless, it was a risk he was willing to take. According to Grant, “If I had stayed at Paramount, I would have continued to take pictures that Gary Cooper, William Powell, or Clive Brook turned down. Refusing a renewal of my contract wasn't the first time I took what seemed [to everyone else] like a step backward.”

  At the end of 1936, Cary Grant became Hollywood's first star-without-astudio. It was a bold move, to be sure, but a move everyone predicted would do to him what it had done to everyone else who had tried to go up against the insular Hollywood system: help him commit career suicide. Those who had previously tried to go freelance and failed included Rudolph Valentino and Ronald Colman. Valentino had died before he could act upon his decision. Colman, who in his studio contract years, from 1917 through 1936, had appeared in forty-two films, once he went solo made only fifteen in the next two decades, despite a 1947 Best Actor Oscar for his performance in George Cukor's A Double Life. Gradually eased out of the movie business, Colman, unlike Grant, who continued to make important films for the next two decades, spent his last productive years mostly in radio and TV. Charlie Chaplin, who had made dozens of short and feature films while under contract to Keystone, Essanay, Mutual, and First National, had to start his own studio, United Artists, to be independent, after which his output fell to an average of two features a decade.