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  Cohn, meanwhile, thought McCarey's comic talents had been misused and overlooked and immediately signed him as a possible replacement for Frank Capra, who was threatening to walk out on Cohn and Columbia. Having brought prestige and several Academy Awards to the studio, Capra demanded a hefty raise from Cohn, who refused to renegotiate Capra's long- term contract. Instead, he offered McCarey a bare-bones $100,000 a year. Desperately in need of cash, McCarey accepted and signed on to Columbia.

  During the Laurel and Hardy phase of his career, McCarey used Oliver “Babe” Hardy as his onscreen alter ego—it was always Ollie, and never Stanley, who looked directly at the audience to comment on his own predica- ments. But in real life McCarey was far more suave, sophisticated, and good- looking, with a degree in law and a witty sense of humor. He was, in brief, the real-life model for the comedic persona he was about to help Cary Grant refine in The Awful Truth.

  After reading the original Pathé script, McCarey promptly threw it in the trash and, with the help of his friend and sometime freelance collaborator, Viña Delmar, rewrote it from beginning to end. In the McCarey-Delmar version, the story becomes one of marital deception and misconception that goes wildly out of control. A major breakdown in communication between a husband and wife leads to a breakup of their marriage, which sparks a series of schemes and tricks as each tries to win the other back without admitting that that is what they truly want, until one final, romantic reunion allows love to conquer (and clarify) all.

  The Awful Truth is the epitome of screwball, what film critic Stanley Cavell described as “a comedy of remarriage.” No one seeing the film ever doubts that Grant and Dunne will eventually wind up together (that the ball will cross the plate for a strike); the comedy comes from the crazy pathway they each take to get there. Jerry Warriner (Grant), in a story line McCarey and Delmar more or less lifted from Laurel and Hardy's Sons of the Desert, tells his wife, Lucy (Irene Dunne), that he is going on vacation to Florida, when what he really intends to do is remain in New York. To ensure the success of his marital deception, he takes sun-lamp treatments to make his fake vacation seem more convincing. When he finally returns home, he is surprised to find that Lucy is not there waiting for him like the good little wife. In fact, she is out and about, enjoying the company of her handsome but lecherous voice teacher, Armand Duvalle (Alexander D'Arcy). Upon her return, Lucy is surprised to see Jerry's tan, since the weather reports out of Florida had been all rain. Soon each Warriner becomes convinced the other is a liar and a cheater (and in fact either or both may have been, as the truth, whatever it is, remains purposefully ambiguous). Communication continues to break down between the two until they decide that divorce is the only answer. After a nasty court proceeding, Lucy wins custody of their beloved pet dog, Mr. Smith (played by Asta of Thin Man fame), while Jerry retains limited visiting rights.

  With the terms of their divorce settled, Jerry wastes no time resuming the bachelor life. To make Lucy jealous (although he won't admit it to himself), he begins dating one of his former flames, saucy nightclub entertainer Dixie Belle Lee (Joyce Compton). Lucy, meanwhile, becomes involved with extremely wealthy but extremely dull oil heir Daniel Leeson (Ralph Bellamy), realizes she still loves Jerry, and prior to the finalization of her divorce, asks Armand to help her salvage whatever is left of her marriage.

  Even as she is explaining the situation to Armand, Jerry shows up unex- pectedly to make amends with his wife. Lucy, caught off-guard by his arrival, hastily stashes Armand in the bedroom. Soon Leeson arrives, and Jerry is given the hide-'em-in-the-boudoir treatment, where a slapdash tumult erupts and Jerry leaves, angrier than ever. To complicate matters still further, Jerry then becomes engaged to socialite Barbara Vance (Molly Lamont). To try to stop the marriage from happening, Lucy shows up at a dinner party Barbara's parents are throwing, pretends she is Jerry's sister, and proceeds to get riproaring drunk (on ginger ale). Jerry takes her outside to try to sober her up and winds up driving to their mountain cabin, where they finally unravel all their romantic misunderstandings and, presumably, live happily (if not necessarily ever) after.

  During the making of The Awful Truth, Cohn had not bothered to assign an office to McCarey—he didn't believe directors needed such extrava- gances—so the director was forced to do the majority of his daily rewrites by hand in the front seat of his car, with Delmar sitting next to him on the passenger side, scribbling down pages of dialogue in pencil. Then after trying out that day's pages, they kept what worked with the actors and rewrote what didn't for the next day's shoot.

  It was a directing style Cary Grant loathed. He was not a spontaneous actor; the “magic” didn't happen for him when the camera rolled. He preferred to work from a completed script and rehearse his fixed lines with the other cast members over and over again until he had nailed every detail of his verbal and physical performance in advance, “freezing” it before a single foot of film ever passed through the camera's lens. This was Grant's standard method; with no formal acting training it was the only way he knew to approach a role.

  Because Grant's pre-set approach was so radically different from McCarey's essentially improvisational style, it didn't take long for the two to clash and for Grant to start becoming emotionally unwound. His overall anxiety level soared, and he was noticeably on edge with the other actors.

  To complicate matters further, Grant developed his by now familiar leading-lady crush on Dunne, whose projection of wholesome integrity made her wrong for the part of Lucy Warriner but an ideal candidate for one of Grant's chaste love-objects-from-afar. These infatuations were always the same—equal parts Leach and Grant, blended into whatever character was being cooked up. Besides whatever emotional tic they may have satisfied, these attractions also provided Grant with a valuable, if neurotic, focal point, the foundation for what came across as a smooth and sophisticated screen style.

  Unlike Grant, his character was a womanizer, and while the written script left it purposely vague as to whether he actually committed adultery (so as not to rouse the Hays Office), his performance left little doubt that he had. This was something Grant found difficult to connect to, especially while in crush mode. Indeed, his infatuation with Dunne led him to believe that anyone lucky enough to be married to a woman like her (or Lucy Warriner), having blown it would not be able to get over it so easily, least of all by dating other women. So Grant at first felt no affinity for the kind of physical screwball comedy that McCarey's style demanded. He believed it substituted physical motion for emotional depth. His idea of film comedy was more Chaplinesque— humor as a reflection of tragedy, laughter happening between tears. To Grant, screwball's limits lay in the way it drove audiences to tears of laughter, in the absence of any intimations of tragedy that might otherwise deepen the story.

  His insecurities and objections were not eased by McCarey's often rambling daily descriptions of what each day's scenes were supposed to be about; they only added to Grant's anger and confusion. On the first day of actual filming, someone handed him a series of notes handwritten on scraps of brown paper bag. Grant, as he read what McCarey wanted to get from him that day, thought the director was joking. And when none of the routines seemed to work, McCarey simply told his actors to make something up that sounded funny. Grant was appalled, but said nothing and did the best he could, believing things had to get better as the shoot developed.*

  When the same thing happened the next day, however, Grant turned on his heels, left the set, and went directly to Cohn's office to register his dissatisfaction. Cohn, who had no patience for temperamental and what he considered vastly overpaid actors—which meant all actors, as far as he was concerned—brushed him off by growling at him to go back, do his job, and for chrissake stop acting like a little old lady.

  The next day Grant returned to Cohn's office and politely offered to switch roles with Ralph Bellamy and play the smaller, supporting part of the rich oil heir, a character for which he claimed he was much better suited. Bellamy, he assured
Cohn, was willing to trade places. Cohn asked him to please get lost.

  The day after that Grant went back again to Cohn, but this time before he said anything, he handed him a neatly typed eight-page memorandum that he, Grant, had stayed up the whole night working on and that outlined exactly what he believed was wrong with the picture (the total lack of comedy, the absence of a completed script, McCarey's unstructured, improvisational style of direction). Along with the note, Grant offered Cohn $5,000 in cash as a bribe to be taken off the picture, on top of which he promised to star in another picture for Columbia—any other picture—for free. Cohn refused the money and once again told him to go back to work.

  McCarey was infuriated when he heard what Grant had done (and for years told anyone who asked that when he showed Grant's note to Asta, the dog bit him). From that day on, except for giving him specific directions, he refused to talk to his star for the remainder of the shoot and, except for when they worked together, for the rest of his life. At one point, McCarey later claimed, he became so angered by Grant's attitude that he went to Cohn and offered to double Grant's offer to $10,000 if Cohn would fire the actor.

  Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the friction between director and star, the performance McCarey got from Grant was nothing less than astonishing. It not only redefined Cary Grant's image as a leading man, it helped alter the public's notion of what a leading man in film was supposed to be.

  Prior to The Awful Truth, a romantic male who was at once charming, intelligent, romantic, sensitive, witty, sexy, rascally, and as beautiful as a leading lady simply did not exist in American movies. Hollywood's first generation of leading men were, with rare exceptions, courtly Europeans with sculpted mustaches and slicked-back hair such as Ronald Colman; elderly leches like Adolphe Menjou, devilish hedonists like Rudolph Valentino, or all-American cowboys like Tom Mix.

  As talkies became the standard, this image shifted more toward all- American image of the WASP, largely humorless rural hunks—Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, young Jimmy Stewart, and to a lesser degree Henry Fonda and John Wayne. Cooper and Stewart in particular specialized in the duped hick steeped in and therefore redeemed by his own moral self-righteousness.

  Others, like the urbane William Powell as Nick Charles in the Thin Man series (1934–47) and the cartoonishly insane John Barrymore in Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century (1934), were a combination of the older, mustachioed European sophisticates and arrested (and extended) American adolescents, where intellect and wit replaced rather than led to any real sexual sparks.

  In The Awful Truth, Cary Grant's Warriner was handsome, sexy, and urbane, with just a whiff of British sophistication, and not a hint of twofistedness to foul the funny air. His charismatic performance was, despite McCarey's methods, part Chaplin heartbreak—a wounded heart that must rise above the hurt—and part Keaton, imbued with an extraordinary physical grace that is at once attractive, elegant, and expansive. Ironically, McCarey's comedic skills and film smarts helped Grant, in spite of his resistant stance, merge his individual characteristics into a wholly realized character. As Jerry Warriner, his good looks were not just those of another pretty face but a personal come-hither invitation to stop by and look around, all the way to the inside of his soul.

  With McCarey's assured direction, Grant had finally found a way to use physical humor to portray the essential humanity of Jerry Warriner. Grant's catlike physicality, which had brought him to the brink of lugubriousness in his earlier leading-heel roles, now translated into a youthful, rhythmic prance fueled by the high energy of light comedy. A bend of his knee became the equivalent of a punch line. A lifting of his palms expressed a lifetime's skepticism. A tilting of his head suggested a turning of the other cheek. Critic Andrew Britton pointed out, in one of the most insightful explanations of Grant's enormous appeal in The Awful Truth, that his performance was “remarkable for the extent to which characteristics assigned by those [traditional gender] roles to women could be presented as being desirable and attractive in a man.”

  The film also caused a sensation for its inspired and at the time postmodernist depiction of women. As portrayed by Dunne, Lucy is an attractive, intelligent equal, able to hold her own in the eternal battle of the sexes. Dunne's brilliantly lunatic performance set the stylistic stage for such later comic film actresses as Judy Holliday and Audrey Hepburn, and in TV comedy the antics of Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and Gilda Radner.

  In the film's unforgettable last scene, in their cabin hideaway, McCarey brilliantly reconciles his characters' relationship by resolving their emotional crisis. In a reconciling two-shot, McCarey shows Lucy in bed, a quilt covering her legs, her chin resting softly in her right palm, her face lit with the beauty of forgiveness, watching her man go through a visual cacophony of facial expressions and body movements—brow furrowed, eyes wide and damp, mouth and throat locked in gulp, his right hand cupped and pointed up. The unspoken reconnection between them provides the audience with a privileged and breathtaking moment of pure requited love.

  When The Awful Truth premiered on October 21, 1937, at New York City's famed Radio City Music Hall (the first of twenty-eight Cary Grant movies that would open there, a record never broken), the critical and popular reaction was rightly unanimous in declaring it the best film of the year, if not the entire decade. Among the most enthusiastic reviews was the one that appeared in The New York Times, which called it “an unapologetic return to the fundamentals of comedy [that] seems original and daring!”

  In less than a month, The Awful Truth earned its costs back and then some, surpassing the half-million-dollar profit mark while still in its first-run release. It would go on to become one of Columbia's all-time box office smashes. Thanks to Vincent, Grant's cut of the film included 10 percent of the gross on top of his contract fee, a deal that would, at the end of the film's initial domestic theatrical run (prior to rereleases, foreign distribution, and eventual television and video rights), put more than a half-million dollars into Cary Grant's pocket.

  In one of the most spectacular career leaps in the history of Hollywood, Grant had gone from a position of relative unimportance only two years earlier, when he had received less than 1 percent of the annual votes cast in the Motion Picture Herald Poll (at the time the most popular and respected pre–Entertainment Tonight listing), to one of the top five male box office attractions of 1937. His inspired performance, the first to give the world a glimpse of the comic persona of “Cary Grant,” put him in the pantheon alongside Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Paul Muni, and Spencer Tracy.

  At a still-youthful-looking thirty-three, Grant had already lived a lifetime (by Hollywood's standards) of being miscast—“resplendent but characterless, even a trace languid, outrageously attractive if vaguely ill at ease—a slightly wilted sheik or a slightly fleshy cow-eyed leading man with a pretty-boy killer looks,” as Pauline Kael later observed. Indeed, after nearly a decade spent as a vaudevillian acrobat, another as a moderately successful but undistinguished Broadway leading and song-and-dance man, and an uninspired run as a humorless foil to the most glamorous leading ladies in Hollywood, he had, at last, discovered a director—or more accurately, he was discovered by a director, Leo McCarey—who helped him make the transition into the sophisticated, handsome, witty, and urbane leading man the world would come to know and love as Cary Grant. Suddenly, women were swooning over his handsome face and physique while men tried to comb their hair the way he did and put metal screws to their chins trying to drill themselves a Cary Grant cleft. Everyone, it seemed, had gone crazy over him.

  Everyone, that is, except Cary Grant. While he gratefully accepted the accolades for his performance in The Awful Truth, he confided to close friends that he still intensely disliked the movie and especially his part in it. Indeed, no one was more surprised than he was by its success, mostly because he had no idea where the great performance he had given in it had come from. He was amused but not cheered by everyone's assumption that he was in real life the same affab
le persona he was in the film—the superbly handsome comic rascal, everyone's perfect fantasy.

  In truth, he still had no clear image of who he really was. Whenever he saw himself onscreen, it was like looking at a gigantic mirror whose reflection was familiar, but one he could not quite identify with or relate to. The person up there, the idealized and romanticized character whose every move was dictated by an unseen director, whose every clever word and turn of phrase were put into his mouth by an unseen screenwriter, and who was lit and photographed by unseen experts who knew just how to make his skin glossy, his eyes bright, his hair shiny, his chin granite—that manufactured character, he believed, was more handsome and funny and clever and wise than he could ever be in real life, more smoothly graceful and impossibly svelte than any man could ever be. That was the man everybody adored—that was “Cary Grant.”

  Back on his own real-life side of the glass, however, he could see all the shortcomings with crystal clarity. Without a producer, without a costar, and without a script, he didn't need a director to tell him what to do; he needed a god to show him who he was.

  And sure enough, one was on his way, a fellow Brit who would know exactly how to redeem Cary Grant from the beautiful distortion of his own blinding starlight.

  * Interestingly, it was out of these improvisations that Grant came up with one of the best lines of dialogue in the film. When Jerry shows up unexpectedly to visit his dog, Dunne opens the door and says, “Well, if it isn't my ex!” No one could come up with a line for Grant, and when McCarey told him to make one up, without missing a beat he said in his best deadpan manner, “The judge says this is my day to see the dog.”