Cary Grant Read online

  One morning while grant was sunning himself by the pool, his next- door neighbor, legendary comic film director Hal Roach, dropped by for a noontime swim. The two had become good friends, and Grant had given Roach a standing offer to come by anytime he felt like going for a dip.

  Roach, like Mack Sennett, had been a successful producer of silent comedy, but unlike Sennett, he had been able to continue delivering funny movies that talked. Of all the forms of filmmaking, comedy was the most pro- foundly changed by the advent of sound: the emphasis necessarily had to shift from the extraordinary visual hysterics of Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, and the other silent greats, sometimes for better and far more often for worse, to rapid-fire verbal humor. Among the most successful to make the transition were Laurel and Hardy, both of whom found voices that not only matched their silent-stare and arm-waving reactions but actually deepened the humor of their characters, so much so that in 1932 The Music Box (MGM) won the “Short Subject” Oscar for Roach and the comedy team. Now, a year after his second Academy Award,* eager to move into feature films, and searching for a new feature property to produce, Roach had come across the popular Thorne Smith novel Topper, which he believed contained all the elements necessary to make a hit movie: a simple but funny plot, great characters, henpecked husbands, spirited wives, and ghosts. When George and Marion Kerby, high-flying socialites at home in tuxes and with Tiffany, are unexpectedly killed in a car accident, they return as sometimes visible, sometimes invisible apparitions. They then set about to help George's wealthy but submissive banker partner find liberation from the short leash of his well-meaning but bossy wife. Having made a number of ghost stories in both the silent and the sound eras with Laurel and Hardy, Roach knew they were surefire laugh-getters that showed what the screen could do that the stage couldn't.

  That morning while having a dip in Grant's pool, Roach casually talked up his new project and pretended to suddenly be “struck” by the notion of casting Grant as George Kerby, the film's young romantic lead. Of course the whole thing had been planned, Grant knew it, and Roach knew he knew it. Amused by the unsubtlety of the charade, Grant laughed off the notion as part of the gag, but when Roach persisted, he gracefully declined the offer. His agent, he claimed, would never allow him to play it for anything below his new asking price, $50,000 a picture, which was far more, he believed, than Roach—who had come up in the era of five-dollar-a-day performers in short subjects whose entire budgets were often less than Grant's asking price— would ever agree to.

  Undaunted, Roach raised the subject with Grant whenever he saw him, ignoring all suggestions to call Vincent and instead appealing to the friend- ship factor. Grant liked Roach and admired his films a great deal, particularly his silent comedies, so as a favor to him, he decided that if Roach agreed to make a percentage deal and the film could be done quickly enough, then he would say yes. Roach agreed and quickly hired director Norman Z. McLeod to direct Topper, a move that both surprised and bothered Grant. He had worked for McLeod before, in the Paramount ensemble production of Alice in Wonderland, and did not have fond memories of the experience. There was, in fact, little about that film that Grant had liked. He had hoped that Roach would hire someone more contemporary, someone with a greater flair for the patented Roach style of physical comedy.

  In truth, McLeod had a terrific flair for it, having directed one of the best of the Paramount Marx Brothers features, Monkey Business (1931), a movie that captured them at their anarchic best. Moreover, he had worked with Roach before and, despite Grant's concerns, knew exactly what his producer wanted—speed, energy, and razor-sharp timing for a comedy about ghosts— and that is precisely what he delivered.

  In truth, the real reason Grant had said yes to Roach had less to do with friendship than with ambition. Having finally won professional independence, more than ever he wanted to play comedy. As he reflected later on, “For years I had begged Paramount to let me do something besides straight romantic leads. I said I ought to be doing light comedy. They wouldn't listen. When my contract was up, and they offered to renew, I said, ‘Does choice of roles go with it?’ and they said no. So I didn't sign… The first [comedy] I did as a freelance was Topper.”

  During filming, Roach came up with what he thought was a great plot twist, but Grant flatly refused to go along. It simply didn't fit into his longrange formulation for what he perceived as the “new Cary Grant.” Roach had decided midproduction that he wanted to turn the film into a satire of marriage by having the Kerbys retake their vows after their death and reemerge as ghosts. Then, if George Kerby still wanted Marion as his wife, he would have to pursue her all over again. Grant steadfastly rejected the idea, as he had promised himself after working with Mae West; if Constance Bennett's character wanted him, if any female character onscreen wanted him, from now on she was going to have to do the pursuing.

  Roach, unaware of the reasons for Grant's refusal to woo Bennett onscreen, thought it incomprehensible. Men chasing women was the very stuff of comedy, a reflection of the way the world really was. After thinking about it awhile, he finally concluded that Grant's real reason could be explained in two words: Ginger Rogers. Oblivious to Grant's sexual orientation, and to his reluctance to compete with Howard Hughes for Rogers's affections, Roach concluded that Grant's pursuit of her must not be going well, otherwise he would have had her by now, and that he didn't want to risk losing her altogether by chasing another woman, even if only in a movie. Ironically, the inspired lunacy of this logic was far more original and amusing than anything Roach came up with for the final scenario of Topper.

  One aspect of the film that did intrigue Grant was Norman McLeod's use of cartoon sketches to show his actors how he wanted them to look in a scene (as opposed to how he wanted them to act). The comedy of physical action was something Grant wanted to learn more about. McLeod used his sketches to show facial expressions, body positions, and overall mise-en-scène he wanted within each frame. Grant studied them until he felt he had the character McLeod was after clearly in his head. With the director's help, he experimented with the range of physical comedy he was capable of, not merely to heighten the Cary Grant screen persona but to fundamentally redefine it.

  Grant's next challenge in this project was less creative than commercial. Roach wanted Grant to share top billing with his costar, Constance Bennett, which he was reluctant to agree to. Billing (then as now) translated into money in Hollywood, and one of the primary reasons Grant had ventured out on his own was that he no longer wanted to play the second-fiddle, aftercredit foil to Paramount's top female stars. But again, as a personal favor to Roach, he acquiesced.

  Roach's first choice to play Cosmo Topper had been W. C. Fields, another former vaudevillian whom Grant very much admired and was looking forward to working with. When Fields turned the role down, Roach gave it instead to Roland Young. Ironically, earlier in his career Grant had played supporting roles in a number of Young's starring movies, when Paramount had believed Young was going to be Hollywood's next great leading man. Grant's part was by far the better one, but it still bothered him that, according to the credits, the title character belonged to Young.

  Topper was released on July 16, 1937, and to the delight of both Roach and Grant, it was a huge success and captured the summertime imagination of audiences. It went on to be the second-highest-grossing film of the year, a giant career leap for Grant as well as a solid financial investment that paid off in huge dollar dividends. It was by far the most popular and best Cary Grant film to date, but before the year was over, Grant would surpass his work in Topper in every way.

  By the time it opened, Grant had formed a chaste passion for yet another Hollywood starlet, this time the young and beautiful Phyllis Brooks, whom he had met one weekend early in the shooting of Topper.

  That Friday evening he had driven with Ginger Rogers up the coast to San Simeon for one of the weekend tennis celebrity tournaments that Hearst loved to hold on his castle grounds. G
rant's natural athleticism put him among the front ranks of Hollywood's players, second only to Chaplin, who had far less natural ability but played with much greater ferocity. Rounding out the weekend, as always, was a full roster of events, including horse riding, lavish dinners in the unimaginably ornate dining room, and feature-length movies screened in the castle's modern, fully equipped screening room. This weekend, as always, was hosted by William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies. Grant adored being in the company of Hearst and Davies, and they liked him as well, particularly Hearst. Grant was among the very few Hollywood celebrities equally welcomed at San Simeon and at the still-very- much-married Hearst's Sands Point mansion in New York, where the eastern intellectual elite were the favored privileged guests.

  Grant got a kick out of the dramatic predinner cocktail entrance Hearst always made, alone and just before Davies; they would meet in the dining room and greet each other in beautiful formal wear, as Davies stretched out her hand for Hearst to kiss. He appreciated and respected their eccentric ways, such as their rigid alcohol policy (other than cocktails and wine), which Hearst enforced in deference to Davies's dislike for alcohol, something Grant and most of the other guests who liked to drink got around by stopping at David Niven's room before dinner and sharing the secret stash he always brought with him and kept hidden under his Richelieu guest bed.

  This weekend's lush gathering was attended by dozens of Hollywood's most glamorous figures, including Chaplin, whom Grant finally got to meet, Tyrone Power, and his date for the weekend, Phyllis Brooks, “Brooksie” to her friends. Of all the guests at the affair, none caught Grant's eye more than the gorgeous young ingenue. Although he said nothing to her the entire weekend, after he left he could not forget her.

  Phyllis Steiller (Brooks's real name) was a transplanted midwestern beauty who had come to Hollywood with the hope of parlaying her face and body into a film career. She had a naturally easy manner about her, a quick giggle, and a habit of running her hand through her hair before tossing it back. She also loved to swear like a sailor. In many ways, her personality, good looks, and salty manner resembled Carole Lombard's, which was how she managed to land a player development contract in 1934 at Universal. When it didn't happen for her there, she was let go; RKO picked up her contract, put her in a number of B movies, didn't renew her, and she landed next at Fox. By this time she was a now-and-again starlet, one of a number of pretty if nameless faces that could light up a screen like a sparkler on the Fourth of July, only to quickly burn out and be forgotten.

  She was soon relegated to candy duty, assigned by studio execs to attend openings with their unattached male stars. Everyone welcomed her frequent presence at these events, even the cynical hatpin-in-the-rear gossips who smirked at any woman with a handsome Hollywood bachelor if there was no word of marriage lingering in the air. Louella Parsons in particular was especially fond of Brooks and never failed to write glowing passages whenever the beautiful young blonde showed up at a premiere.

  Brooks was a natural night owl whose favorite haunt also happened to be Grant's, the Sunset Strip's Trocadero, where Hollywood's male motion picture royalty (and their current ladies-in-waiting) knew they could count on being effectively sheltered from the civilians forever seeking autographs, and the freelance photographers restricted to the front entrance in the hopes of catching a salable shot of the latest screen idol. It was at the Troc one night that Grant caught his next glimpse of the striking Brooks, on the arm of her agent, Walter Kane, who wore her like an expensive bauble he was looking to sell to the highest bidder with a movie deal thrown in.

  That evening, Eleanor French, a friend of both Grant's and Brooks's, was at the Trocadero. A café club singer Grant knew from his theater days in New York, French had come out to the coast to vacation. He had always enjoyed her witty manner and the way she tilted her head to one side and smiled as she told her favorite off-color joke. When Grant asked her if he knew the young woman sharing a table with Kane, French smiled, said of course, and took him over and made the introduction.

  As the night came to a close, Brooks insisted they all get together again sometime soon, and Grant, without hesitating, said his friend Randolph Scott was returning from a brief vacation in Virginia to begin work on his new film, Last of the Mohicans, and wouldn't it be sweet if they threw a welcome- home party in his honor. Brooks readily agreed, and the idea was sealed with the clank of three empty glasses.

  What seemed like a happy coincidence was, in fact, anything but. Brooks had recognized Grant that night as soon as he had walked into the club. At the time she still had quite a crush on Tyrone Power but knew nothing could come of it because of the iron lock that ice-skating star Sonja Henie had on his emotions. (Henie happened to be out of the country when Brooks accom- panied Power to San Simeon.) An eligible bachelor was her prey, and as far as she could tell, none was more eligible than the one actor she had met who was single and even more handsome than Tyrone Power—Cary Grant. Knowing her girlfriend Eleanor was coming out for a visit, that she knew Grant, and that he liked to frequent the Troc, she had worked out an elaborate (and unnecessary) plan of introduction, apparently unaware that Grant had noticed her as well that weekend at San Simeon. When he ended the evening by inviting them both to help throw a party to welcome home Scott, Brooks was, to say the least, elated.

  Brooks was soon dating Grant on a regular basis, and within weeks was referring to him as “the love of her life.”

  * Roach won again in 1936 for Best Comedy (One Reel) Live Action Short Subject, for Bored of Education, starring the Our Gang kids.

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  “The great majority of screwball comedies save marriage for the final fade-out or even beyond. Screwball comedies are therefore generally comedies of courtship …. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne romp through a series of slapstick situations that would have given pause to Laurel and Hardy.”

  —ANDREW SARRIS

  The surprising commercial success of Topper added luminosity to Cary Grant's screen image and bigger box office clout to his name, so much that Harry Cohn wanted him back at work on his next film as soon as possible, in a project he had already green-lighted, a comedy to be directed by Leo McCarey called The Awful Truth. Cohn decided to pair Grant with Irene Dunne, an extremely pretty southern-born actress who had come from nowhere a few years earlier to strike it big with a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance in Wesley Ruggles's Cimarron (1931). Cohn had recently signed her away from RKO for a long-term contract and wanted to put her to work right away. The Awful Truth, her twenty-third film, was the latest entry into the extremely popular, if ultimately short-lived, subgenre of comedy known as “screwball,” which emerged during the great 1930s economic (and emotional) Depression. It was Grant's twenty-ninth film, and the one that would finally propel him to superstardom.

  Screwball is a particularly apt term for a certain type of movie that, like the baseball pitch of the same name, travels a fast but unpredictable path before somehow managing to cross the plate for a perfect strike. The dialogue is sometimes delivered as fast as two hundred words a minute, and oftentimes the meaning of a character's lines is submerged by the rhythm of its delivery, to the point that the delivery itself becomes the meaning.

  Another defining element of screwball is the relationship between its male and female leads. They are almost always young, rich, unattached or separated, at once hopelessly attracted to each other and facing a particularly zany path on the road to true and lasting love. By the early 1930s the cen- sorship of the Hays Office had helped to make a joke out of cinematic eroti- cism: the unfunny punch line of marriage always loomed at the final fade-out, the government-sanctioned metaphor for the end of guileless romance. As film historian Andrew Sarris points out, “Frustration [in screw- ball comedy] arises inevitably from a situation in which the censors have removed the sex from the sex comedies.” Perhaps that is why children almost never appear in screwball, lest they replace the often childlike (but rarely childish) behavi
or of the adult romantic leads.

  As a staple of Hollywood for much of the second half of the 1930s, screw- ball comedies excelled both at satisfying the censors and at getting a rise out of audiences by teasing them with beautiful women who were in turn teasing their costars. And who better to depict the victim of this female scheming than the actor who did not like his characters to pursue women?

  The Awful Truth, based on a 1922 Broadway play by Arthur Richman, had already been filmed twice by the recently bankrupt Pathé Studios. Harry Cohn believed in recycling “sure things,” as he liked to call remakes, because he thought it gave his pictures “better odds.” When he acquired the rights to all of Pathé Studios' properties (for a onetime payout of $35,000), he found The Awful Truth among them and immediately commissioned an updated version of the 1929 Marshall Neilan film of the same name that he could make on the cheap.

  From the outset Cohn wanted Leo McCarey to direct. McCarey had first teamed Stan Laurel with Oliver Hardy (a credit that is usually and wrong- fully given to Hal Roach). After supervising, writing, and directing many of the best comedy duo's silent comedies, he then made a splash in sound pictures while a contract director at Paramount, with his 1933 direction of the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup and Charles Laughton's 1935 Ruggles of Red Gap. Despite the success of both movies, McCarey languished for several years through a series of undistinguished Paramount assignments, including Belle of the Nineties (1934) that starred an already-fading Mae West, and a failed attempt at resurrecting Harold Lloyd's career with The Milky Way(1936). McCarey finally scored another hit with what was, for him, a major stylistic departure, the unsettling Depression-era family tragedy Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), the personal favorite of all his movies, which restored some critical luster to his career. But it was too little, too late: McCarey was handed his unconditional release by Paramount at approximately the same time Grant decided not to renew with the studio.