Cary Grant Read online

  Despite the studio's desire for Hawks to turn out a cheap quickie, Bringing Up Baby developed into a long and difficult film to shoot. It completed production on January 6, 1938, forty days over its original fifty-one-day schedule, an overrun that pushed the budget to well over a million dollars. (The automatic salary increases resulted in Grant and Hepburn each receiving an additional $120,000.) Then, just before the film opened, RKO fell into receivership. Once more it was Howard Hughes who came to the rescue, hoping to make a killing by buying at a fraction of their production cost the negatives of it and nine other RKO films, then selling them as a package to the Loew's theater chain.

  Although the film is now regarded as a classic of the genre and a favorite of Hepburn fans and Grant fans alike, when it opened on February 18 at Radio City Music Hall and other venues around the country, it received mixed reviews and did not do well at the box office. Its first-week gross at the Music Hall totaled a modest $70,000, and it was pulled after a single week, prompting Variety to note that “the Katharine Hepburn draw, as expressed in some quarters, isn't what it used to be.” The film's total initial domestic gross came to just over $715,000 in the United States, with another $400,000 earned overseas.* It fell far short of Hughes's hopes, and its failure would have serious short-term consequences for everyone involved with the film, including Grant. Hawks's contract called for participation in the profits only when the film grossed $2 million, which it never reached (in theaters), and RKO, despite Hughes's bailout, because of the way his deal was structured, lost $365,000 in unrecouped production costs. Hawks suffered the additional indignity of being permanently removed from Gunga Din before RKO outand-out fired him, citing numerous breaches of his contract. Hughes vigorously objected to the studio's action, accusing it of making Hawks the scapegoat for its financial disarray, and threatened to back Hawks in a major lawsuit. In response, the studio offered Hawks a termination fee of $40,000 to walk, which he reluctantly took because he needed the money.

  The film's failure also caused Harry Brandt, who was then president of the Independent Theatre Owners of America—an organization of exhibitors that monitored stars' popularity in terms of how much their films earned— to quite famously point his angry finger at Hepburn and accuse her of being “box office poison.” (Far less remembered, amid all the myths surrounding Brandt's “damnation,” was the fact that Hepburn had been clustered by him with several other female movie stars, none of whom had had a particularly good year at the box office. The “bottom ten” list, with Hepburn holding the number one spot, also included such “A” stars as Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis, and five other lesser names, all to a greater or lesser degree victims of the public's changing taste.)

  Pandro Berman's public reaction to Hepburn's humiliation was to express his and the studio's continuing loyalty to her by insisting her career was far from over. Privately, Berman offered her a chance to buy out the remainder of her contract or face termination. Hepburn then forked over $220,000 for the privilege of never making another movie at RKO.

  Disappointment in the film's performance added to the insecurity Grant already felt about his acting career. He had no easy explanation for the film's ungraceful flop, an apparent miss so disastrous it would help put an end to the era of screwball comedy. Although he managed to avoid the critical and professional fallout that Hepburn suffered, Grant felt that he had damaged his career making Bringing Up Baby. Now more than ever, he believed he would be able to make movies only as long as his face stayed pristine and his waist appealingly slim.

  * He won Best Screenplay for John Ford's The Informer in 1935.

  * It is a moment that resonated throughout Grant's career, resurfacing seventeen years later in a visually similar but emotionally different tableau in Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, and four years after that in his North by Northwest.

  * Bringing Up Baby lost $350,000 in its initial domestic theatrical release, according to Variety. An American rerelease in 1941 earned it an additional $150,000.

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  “Only one actor was agile enough to fly alongside the young Katharine Hepburn, and that was Cary Grant. In their great comedies, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, and The Philadelphia Story, there was merely the perfect effervescence of two of the screen's greatest actors giving comedy everything they had, including a genuinely acrobatic intelligence.”

  —VERLYN KLINKENBORG

  Cary Grant began 1938 with a full and happy house: Randolph Scott was finished making his latest movie and was back at the beach, “the Brooks” was home from her shoot, and his savings for the first time topped a million dollars. Despite the failure of Bringing Up Baby, he had become a familiar figure at all the regular show business stops he liked. On any given day he could be seen taking a long lunch at the Hollywood-Brit contingent's favorite pub, the Cock and Bull on Sunset, most often sharing a booth with Howard Hughes, or having dinner at either the Brown Derby on Vine or the venerable Musso's and Frank's on Hollywood Boulevard, or dancing with the Brooks to big band music at the Troc deep into the night.

  His increased visibility made him more accessible to the press. Whenever he was asked by reporters about his wealth and fame, in the beginning at least he tried to display a certain self-effacing if low-key charm, always reminding whoever wanted to know that he never felt he had traveled all that far from the “brutal borders of poverty” and was always aware of the inherently transient nature of both fame and fortune. What he did try to conceal, without much success, was his slightly paranoid feeling that the government was now trying to rob him of nearly all his hard-earned cash. It was a subject that bothered him, but one he always tried to dismiss with a folksy “money isn't everything” approach.

  “Sure,” he told a reporter from Liberty magazine, “the government gets eighty-one cents out of every dollar I earn. But I'm one of the lucky stiffs who earn a lot of dollars, all with a Grant-marked nineteen cents in them. That's nice going! Now, people will say ‘Oh poor So-and-So having to work as an extra! How sad!’ What they don't say, perhaps don't remember, is that So-andSo was up there in the chips for a while. He had all that fun and more than the average guy ever gets, and certainly if he's a man at all he's got good memories stored up in him, got good laughs he can laugh over once again.”

  In reality, money was no laughing matter to Grant. There were those he trusted to help him make it, and others he looked to for ways to keep it. Frank Vincent, his agent, was in charge of making the deals, but Grant did not want him to be spread too thin or lose his focus on that primary function. And he certainly did not trust any of the women he was associated with. Ever since his divorce from Virginia Cherrill, the last thing he ever wanted anybody to know was how much money he really had.

  Grant was even wary of Hughes, but for different reasons. He felt he did not know him well enough to take his advice on investments, even if Hughes had been willing to offer any, which he never did. In this poker game Hughes held his cards even closer to his vest than Grant, a quality the actor happened to admire but that also kept him from seeking anything in the way of financial advice. Grant couldn't help notice how often Hughes seemed to lose significant amounts of money on ventures he invested in.

  That left Randolph Scott, whose expertise in what many thought were crackpot schemes—his uranium investments, for example—had left him wealthier than ever. Scott continually urged Grant to put his money to work, to let it grow, and not through the tortoise-slow interest the banks offered— and who could trust banks anyway in these uncertain times?—but in the hare-fast profits of bonds and securities. Scott especially loved foreign investments, to which the U.S. government tax collectors' reach was not quite as long. That made sense to Grant, and following Scott's lead, he invested nearly half a million dollars in Philippine-based bonds, believing that within a year that money would double.

  It was an investment that would come back to haunt both Scott and Grant and hasten their coming split.

  Th
at February Grant went back to Columbia to star in a new film that reunited him with George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn, all three of whom had worked on Sylvia Scarlett. Cohn had been eager to return Grant to the screen in another comedy, but with Irene Dunne playing opposite him. Cohn envisioned the winning couple from The Awful Truth in a remake of Philip Barry's 1928 Broadway hit, Holiday, which the studio had already filmed once before, in 1930, starring Ann Harding, Robert Ames, and Mary Astor.

  Following Sylvia Scarlett, Cukor had gone on to direct Camille at MGM, starring the already-legendary Greta Garbo, the young and handsome Robert Taylor, and the venerable screen icon Lionel Barrymore. Camille confirmed Cukor's reputation as a “woman's director,” both in his handling of difficult movie stars and in the huge appeal his films usually had to female audiences. He was still under contract to Selznick International Pictures (SIP), in anticipation of his directing the much-delayed film version of Gone With the Wind, waiting for production on the film version of the popular novel to begin. Two years had passed since Camille, during which time Cukor had turned down several plum SIP assignments, including 1937's A Star Is Born, which starred Fredric March and Janet Gaynor and won an Oscar for Best Screenplay for William Wellman and Robert Carson, and nominations for Selznick (Best Picture), William Wellman (Best Director), and both March and Gaynor. The other big picture Cukor turned down was 1938's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, directed by Norman Taurog (although some uncredited scenes were in fact directed by Cukor as a personal favor to Selznick, who was dissatisfied with Taurog's work).

  Early in 1938, when Cohn approached Selznick about the possibility of borrowing Cukor, Selznick quickly agreed. So far that year SIP had paid Cukor $155,000 for his services just for the month of January for some preliminary Wind research and location scouting in the South. That was why Selznick, who was always strapped for cash, agreed to loan Cukor to Cohn at the rate of $10,000 a week, to be split evenly, according to the terms of Cukor's contract, between the director and SIP.

  While Cohn was delighted to have snagged Cukor, his glee was dampened when Cukor flat-out rejected doing another Grant/Dunne film, telling Cohn it felt too much like a sequel to McCarey's The Awful Truth, something he felt doing would be beneath his current level of success. He insisted on using Hepburn, telling Cohn he would not work with any other female star.

  Cukor had his reasons for wanting Hepburn. For one thing, she was his first choice to play Scarlett O'Hara, something he was having trouble selling to Selznick, who didn't think she had the looks, the talent, or perhaps most important, the box office clout to merit the world's most coveted film role. Hepburn offered to take a relatively small salary of $80,000 for the role, but Selznick remained unconvinced. Instead, to cover all bets, he signed her to a $1,500-a-week option on her services for the film. This convinced Hepburn she was going to get the part, and because of it she delayed her stage production of The Philadelphia Story, a project she had commissioned from the same Philip Barry who had written the stage version of Holiday, using Howard Hughes's money to do so.*

  Once he heard that Hepburn was in contention to play Scarlett, Cohn changed his tune and allowed Cukor to cast Hepburn and signed her at what he thought was a bargain payout to Selznick, unaware that Hepburn was already in the process of buying herself out of her deal with SIP. Had he played harder ball, Cohn would likely have gotten Hepburn for nothing. Instead, he happily paid her several thousand unnecessary dollars.

  As for Dunne, when Cohn informed her she was not going to be in the picture he had supposedly promised her, she reportedly stayed home and cried the entire weekend. Despite having been nominated for Oscars in each of the previous two years (for Richard Boleslawski's Theodora Goes Wild in 1936 and The Awful Truth in 1937), she was summarily dismissed, at Cukor's insistence, for his favorite actress and close friend, the far less popular Hepburn.

  The plot of Holiday reprises the best element of The Awful Truth—the two protagonists' reluctance to admit the existence and ultimate power of mutual love—and its atmosphere anticipates the peculiar charm of The Philadelphia Story, with its eventual switching of partners that leads them to the big dance. Also like The Philadelphia Story would have, Holiday has a wellpolished veneer that gives its dark tale of sibling rivalry an appealing sophistication—what Cukor's biographer Patrick McGilligan defined as playwright Barry's stock-in-trade “see-saw of wit and despair.”

  The screenplay adaptation was done by Sidney Buchman, a Columbia contract writer, and Donald Ogden Stewart, who had starred in the original Broadway production as Ned Seton, the alcoholic son of the Seton family, and whom Cohn wanted for the movie until Cukor said no. The director preferred Robert Benchley, the popular middle-aged humorist. The role eventually went to Lew Ayres, the star of Lewis Milestone's 1930 Oscar-winning Best Picture, All Quiet on the Western Front.

  For the key role of Johnny Case, the fiancé of the rich and spoiled Julia Seton (played in the movie by Doris Nolan), Cukor's first choice remained Cary Grant.

  Shooting on Holiday had begun on February 28, the same day Bringing Up Baby was released, and a week after the Academy Award nominations for the previous year were announced. The Awful Truth was nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Irene Dunne), Best Supporting Actor (Ralph Bellamy), Best Film Editing (Al Clark), and Best Director (Leo McCarey, who would become the only Oscar winner of the group). Conspicuously missing from the list was the name Cary Grant.

  Despite his not being nominated, Grant, at Cohn's insistence, attended the Awards ceremony. At the time the Oscars were still little more than an industry banquet, held that year at the Biltmore Bowl of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The coolness Grant felt toward him that night was palpable. A large majority of the Academy's executive members still harbored a grudge against him for having successfully broken the hitherto ironclad contract system.

  Even at this very early stage, Grant had few supporters in Hollywood. Most actors were unnerved by the thought of existing without a studio contract, and creatively those like McCarey had no professional reason to try to improve relations with him. In truth, with the exception of fellow rebels like Howard Hughes, very few wanted to openly align themselves with Grant on any issue. In his acceptance speech, McCarey, still annoyed with the actor and smarting over his firing by Zukor for Make Way for Tomorrow's box office fizzle, was greeted warmly by the studio-studded audience. After being handed his Oscar, he said, “Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.”

  Grant said nothing as the audience cheered and applauded, the smile on his face as stiff as the tails of his tuxedo.

  Holiday opened on June 15, 1938, and proved a critical and commercial failure. If Bringing Up Baby suffered from a lack of character depth, Holiday's problem was its excess. Talky, insular, cranky, and only spottily sublime— Cary Grant's somersaults are a metaphor for his shifting romantic focus from Julia to Linda—the film was less screwball than three-fingered curve ball, slow, steady, with a decided dip in delivery. Holiday's end-of-the-world-solet's-party message celebrating the nonmaterial joys of life was one of Hollywood's favorite Thirties “messages”: the rich are unhappily trapped by their wealth, while the poor are free to love. But this message left lateDepression audiences more puzzled than charmed, and they were not at all charmed by Hepburn's strident throwback-style performance as Linda, Julia's somewhat cynical sister, whose role is to help Johnny (and the audience) come to the realization that in cynical families, the true cynic is the only romantic.

  The reviews for Holiday were mixed. The New York Times noted that “Hepburn's intensity is apt to grate on a man, even on so sanguine a temperament as Cary Grant's Johnny Case.” Otis Ferguson's New Republic review called the film “mechanical” and “shrill” and advised audiences to “save your money and yawn at home”—advice they heeded.

  Cohn had come up with the tag line for the advertisements—“Is it true what they say about Hepburn—that she's Box Office Poison?”—and a more misguided sell w
ould be hard to find. Holiday also proved a major factor not only in costing Hepburn the role of Scarlett in Gone With the Wind but in driving her once again out of Hollywood. After the picture's poor showing, she returned to the Broadway stage, where with Hughes's help she finally mounted The Philadelphia Story and set about to try once again to resurrect her moribund career.

  On a more positive note, for Cary Grant, in every way except financially, Holiday was a personal triumph. He liked the film's downbeat romance (more realistic to him than the lunatic look at love in both The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby) and especially the fact that Johnny, as written, is something of a ruthless heartbreaker (miserable and conniving, according to McGilligan) whose darker desires and impulses are masked by the charm of his somersaulting wit. The way Grant played him he was indeed a “case,” but a likable one.