Cary Grant Read online

  Clearly Cary Grant was ready to make some changes in his private life, even if he didn't have a clue as to what he wanted or how to go about finding it.

  As it turned out, he wouldn't have to. Change found him, beginning in the spring of 1940 when—out of nowhere, or so it seemed at the time— Barbara Hutton appeared in Beverly Hills and immediately sought out the companionship of Cary Grant.

  Hutton had gained a bizarre reputation as one of the so-called Beautiful People whom everyone loved to hate. Born in 1912, she had grown up with her name and pictures in the newspapers from the day she was five years old and her mother committed suicide, leaving little Hutton a one-third heir to her grandfather Frank Woolworth's estate; her share was estimated at the time to be in the $100 million range. Her father took personal charge of his daughter's inheritance and improved it by another $50 million, then predicted the collapse of Wall Street and got out of the market weeks before America was plunged into its Great Depression.

  The Hutton name then became synonymous with greed and selfishness— and that was before blond, blue-eyed, five-foot-two, eighty-five-pound Barbara met Prince Alexis Mdivani, a universally reviled fortune hunter whom the twenty-year-old Hutton, it was widely believed, paid $2 million to marry her. She tired of him three years later and paid him $1.5 million more for a noncontested divorce so she could marry Danish Count Haugwitz-Reventlow, reportedly paying him $1.5 million for his hand in marriage. In order to conform to Danish rules of royal heritage, Hutton had to renounce her American citizenship, which she did without a moment's hesitation.

  Hutton's second marriage lasted little more than a year, just long enough for her to have a baby, after which she and the count legally separated. She then relocated to London, where she planned to raise her infant son, Lance Reventlow, until England's entry into World War II drove her back to the safety of the United States.

  She bought a home in San Francisco and, at the suggestion of her friend the Countess Dorothy di Frasso, hired a public relations firm to try to improve her image. She made a series of huge donations to several charitable causes, including a much-publicized $100,000 gift to the Red Cross.

  In 1940, while she was visiting di Frasso, who lived in Beverly Hills, the countess threw a large, celebrity-studded dinner in Hutton's honor at her home. One of the invitees Hutton had insisted on was that handsome actor she had met on her voyage to America a year earlier aboard the Normandie.

  It is not difficult to understand Hutton's attraction to Grant. Less obvious but no less compelling is why he was so receptive to her very public (and well-publicized) pursuit. While the moviegoing public adored him, he felt stuck on that streetcar. At the age of thirty-six he had already “divorced” twice, counting Scott, a relationship that in many ways had been more of a marriage than the one to Cherrill. His desire for a lasting, meaningful partnership churned beneath the surface of his emotional aloofness. Because the risk of being hurt by love was so frightening to him, he kept a careful distance from everyone for whom he felt anything—his onscreen persona of nonpursuit a reflection of the way he personally kept himself safely out of intimacy's reach. Grant's unrealistic notions of romantic love were conveniently entwined with his unconsummated infatuations. After his disastrous marriage to Cherrill, the only women he was able to form long-term, meaningful relationships with were those wealthy enough for him to be certain they weren't after “Cash and Cary's” money or those to whom he wasn't sexually attracted, such as Phyllis Brooks, Jean Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, and Rosalind Russell. On those terms, Barbara Hutton was a perfect match.

  There was all of that, and something else. Grant's relationship with Scott had always been highly competitive, as intense as any real sibling rivalry. In many ways, Scott was, to Grant, the embodiment of the older brother he was denied by the early death of John William Elias Leach. Grant was by far a bigger star than Scott. He was also better looking and in better shape. He had managed to keep the house they had both wanted. Scott, on the other hand, had more money, and an heiress wife. By marrying Barbara “Woolworth” Hutton, Grant knew, he could surpass his former lover and sibling substitute on both counts.

  When Hutton made herself available to Grant, he began to see her but insisted her publicity firm not cover their relationship. He did not want to see their names together in print. If she was interested in publicity, Grant told her, she should find someone else. And, as for her high-end social life, he wasn't interested in that, either.

  Grant had more than the fear of somehow being exploited by Hutton on his mind when he insisted on keeping their relationship a secret. The last thing he wanted was a confrontation with the always-volatile Brooks over the new woman in his life. He didn't see the need to hurt her or go through any unnecessary confrontations. He didn't have time for that, or for much of anything else, conveniently adding new movies to his schedule.

  Although he was somewhat bored making them, besides serving as his emotional escape valve, he also feared that if he were out of work for too long, the government would no longer allow him to stay in the country on what was, after all, a glorified if strictly limited work permit. He had agreed to England's request to make patriotic movies, whatever they were supposed to be, and he couldn't very well do that if he were off on a beach somewhere in Mexico. For that matter, due to his residency permit restrictions, he couldn't even go to Mexico, any more than he could go to Dover, Rome, Barcelona, or the French Riviera. The war was raging everywhere, it seemed, except in America. Around the world men his age were worried about catching a bullet between the eyes, while his biggest worry was landing a role in Hepburn's newest project, the film version of her hit Broadway play The Philadelphia Story.

  In the spring of 1940, at Cohn's suggestion, and because it seemed sufficiently “patriotic,” Grant accepted a role in Columbia's production of Frank Lloyd's The Howards of Virginia. Cohn believed the film would open Grant's range to an even wider variety of roles, but the film turned out to be one of the least successful of Grant's career. The Howards of Virginia was a favored project of Cohn, who had purchased the original novel on which it was based, a buckskin War of Independence drama entitled The Tree of Liberty by Elizabeth Page. He chose Frank Lloyd, who had won an Oscar for directing Mutiny on the Bounty, to produce and direct it.

  The film was shot mostly on location in the recently restored “colony” of Williamsburg, Virginia (which John D. Rockefeller had paid for and now let Cohn use for free as a way to promote tourism). In the movie, a badly miscast, ponytailed Grant plays Matt Howard, a surveyor friend of Thomas Jefferson, who works for Fleetwood Peyton (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) and falls in love with his daughter Jane (Martha Scott). At Jefferson's encouragement, Howard enters politics, and when the Revolutionary War threatens to break out, he sides with the colonists and runs off to join the army, despite Jane's pleas not to get himself killed. He is joined by his two sons, one of whom he has been estranged from. They reconcile in the heat of battle and return home to the waiting arms of a tearful wife and mother.

  The Howards of Virginia is notable for being the first film in which Grant played “age.” Gray temples and grown sons were odd elements for the stillyoung actor, as were the strangeness of buckskin and muskets. Grant vamped through the film while he waited for production to begin on The Philadelphia Story.

  To no one's surprise but Cohn's, The Howards of Virginia laid a turkeysized egg at the box office and in so doing put an end to Grant's unbroken string of box office hits. No one wanted to see Grant with gray hair and grown children. Unlike his other “war” film, Gunga Din, in which Grant, Fairbanks, and McLaglen were children, this film lacked humor and irony, as well as any trace of Grant's patented brand of urban sophistication.

  Barbara Hutton had been planning to move to Hawaii with her son, Lance, for the duration of the war, but once her relationship with Grant became more serious, she decided instead to rent a place in Beverly Hills, while he worked on the long-awaited production of The Philadelphia Story.
>
  The Broadway version of the Philip Barry play, written especially for Katharine Hepburn, had been a huge hit, but Howard Hughes was having difficulty selling the film rights in Hollywood, where Hepburn—the toast of the Great White Way, having won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for her performance—was still considered something of a stomach-lining irritant. The handsome New York show that opened in the spring of 1939 costarred Joseph Cotten as C. K. Dexter Haven, Tracy Lord's (Hepburn's) divorced first husband; Van Heflin as Macaulay Connor, the sardonic gossip columnist (Heflin claimed, as nearly everyone else in the original cast did, that Barry had specifically written the part for him—in Hepburn's case it was true, in Heflin's it wasn't); and Shirley Booth. While the casting was perfectly suited for New York audiences, it did nothing to enhance the prospect of a film. Selznick said he wanted it, but as a vehicle for Bette Davis. MGM wanted it for Joan Crawford. The only decent offer Hughes got was from Warner Bros., which was willing to pay Hughes $225,000 if it could cast its star Ann Sheridan in the lead. The bottom line was, every studio was interested in the play, but none wanted Hepburn, and there was no way Hepburn would let Hughes sell the rights without her. When independent moviemaker Samuel Goldwyn, who according to his biographer Scott Berg was “mad for the material,” offered to put Gary Cooper in the starring role and get William Wyler to direct, Hepburn said no to him as well. She wanted George Cukor, and only George Cukor, to guide her through this film.

  MGM's Louis B. Mayer finally put an offer on the table that she felt she could live with—$175,000 for the rights, and $75,000 for her to reprise her Broadway performance as Tracy Lord. The studio envisioned Clark Gable or Spencer Tracy (whom she had not yet met), or possibly even Robert Taylor, as the male lead, and Mayer wanted to feature Jimmy Stewart in a supporting role.

  MGM hit its first brick wall when Gable, Tracy, and Taylor turned the film down. Each was running hot at the box office and did not want to take the risk of starring opposite “box office poison” Hepburn, and besides, none of them particularly liked the script. Gable in particular thought it was too wordy, and Tracy was much more interested in playing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Victor Fleming's upcoming production of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic.

  Mayer then offered her Cary Grant, and Hepburn jumped. (Grant had agreed to make the film for Mayer if he got top billing over Hepburn and a bump in his usual salary to $137,500—double what Hepburn was getting.) She was eager to work with him again, not because their previous outings together had been so great, but because he was now indisputedly the hottest actor in Hollywood. If he gave her Grant, Mayer said, she would also have to take Stewart, which was fine with Hepburn. Most important to Hepburn, and what sealed the deal for her, Mayer okayed George Cukor to direct. Upon hearing the news, a disappointed Goldwyn sent Hepburn a wire at the Shubert Theater in New York, where she was still appearing in the show: “I am heartbroken and I hope what I have heard is not so.”

  Gary Cooper was upset about losing out to Grant and publicly complained that Grant was too pretty to play Dexter, that no one would believe Hepburn could ever throw him out. On the other hand, he said, he, Cooper, would have been perfect for the role.

  With the casting in place, Hepburn ended the play's Broadway run in May 1940, and production on the film began that July in Hollywood. On the first day of shooting Grant's high salary was reported in the gossip columns. Grant immediately announced that he was donating his entire salary to the British War Relief Fund, a gesture for which he was grandly applauded.*

  From the famous opening silent prologue, in which Tracy breaks Dexter's golf club over her knee as he is leaving her, and he retaliates by covering her face with his palm and shoving her backward through the front door, The Philadelphia Story is simply one of the greatest sound comedies Hollywood has ever produced. It opened in December 1940 and broke box office records everywhere, including at Radio City Music Hall, where it beat the venue's previously all-time highest-grossing film, Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).*

  In many ways, The Philadelphia Story is really the last great film of the 1930s. With traces of slapstick, melodrama, verbal wit, and manners, it represented nothing so much as the last, innocent days of an America that faded into history in the wake of the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Here is a wealthy family so self-absorbed and isolated from the outside world that the only hint of gathering clouds is those on the outside of the iced champagne glasses. The Lords' house, for all intents and purposes, exists in a place where time and space serve only to elongate comic situations and airily glide into happiness-ever-after. As Grant told one reporter, regarding what he considered the film's irresistible charm: “When I go to the movies I want to forget the dirty dishes in my sink, and what's on my mind. I want to forget my troubles, get out of myself. I want to laugh a little.”

  Everyone in the cast of The Philadelphia Story gave what many critics consider the best performances of their careers. Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times, said it “had just about everything that a blue-chip comedy should have, a witty romantic script derived by Donald Ogden Stewart out of Philip Barry's successful play, the flavor of high society elegance, in which the patrons inevitably luxuriate, and a splendid cast of performers.”

  The film went on to become the second-highest grosser of the year, just behind the Warner Bros. release of Howard Hawks's World War I reluctanthero, sleeping-giant-awakened hagiographic look at the all-American boy at (the coming) war, Sergeant York—starring—Gary Cooper.

  In November, Grant returned to Harry Cohn and Columbia to begin work on his third movie of 1941, the soapy Penny Serenade, to be helmed by Gunga Din's George Stevens.

  What had attracted Grant to this project was the chance to work again with Irene Dunne, his favorite costar, in a serious drama rather than another screwball comedy. He told one reporter shortly after production began, “Irene and I sit here and worry a half-hour a day, regularly, about the people who are laughing already, in anticipation of another mad marital mix-up. Oh, they're going to get chances to laugh, but the concentration in this film is on human drama. There isn't any other man and there isn't any other woman. We're married, and the story is about the trials and tribulations of two ordinary people and the things that might happen in any marriage.”

  The title Penny Serenade refers to the records played by Julie Gardiner Adams (Dunne) as she prepares to separate from her husband, Roger Adams (Grant). In flashbacks, we see their courtship unfold. Adams is a newspaperman who meets and woos Gardiner, a music shop sales clerk. They fall in love, marry, and move to Japan, where Roger has a job as a news correspondent. Julie becomes pregnant but is caught in an earthquake that provokes a miscarriage. She is subsequently told she can never have children again, and so they decide to adopt a baby daughter. They struggle through six years of financial hardship, only to suffer the death of their adopted daughter just as they appear to have finally become solvent. The marriage is almost destroyed but is saved when the couple agree to adopt another child.

  Grant let Stevens guide him through a part he could play with his eyes shut and his hands tied behind his back, until on January 25, 1941, he was informed on the set that five of his relatives on the Leach side—Mr. and Mrs. John Henry Leach, his uncle and aunt, and their daughter, son-in-law, and infant grandson—were all killed when a German bomb made a direct hit on Bristol. The news of their deaths unnerved him and produced a swell of guilt and remorse for having avoided returning to England, joining the army, and fighting the Germans. Grant, however, made no public comment about the incident and allowed no interruption in his filming schedule. Ironically, the real-life grief he was feeling gave his portrayal of Roger Adams a nontechnical reality that was eerily unlike anything Grant had ever done before or would do again in the movies.

  During the closing days of shooting, the Academy Award nominations for the best films, direction, technical expertise, and performances of 1940 were announced. As ex
pected, Hepburn was nominated for Best Actress for her portrayal of Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story. The shocker came with the Best Actor nominations: James Stewart got one for his portrayal of Macaulay Connor, but Cary Grant was once again overlooked. Because of it, Grant chose not to attend the Awards ceremony. Stewart did and won, as did screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart for his adaptation of the Barry play.*

  Penny Serenade opened April 24, 1941, to positive reviews, many of which singled out Grant's performance for special praise. Otis Ferguson, writing in The New Republic, said, “Cary Grant is thoroughly good, in some ways to the point of surprise, for there is not only that easy swing and hint of the devil in him, but faith and passion expressed, the character held together where it might so easily have fallen into the component parts of the too good, the silly, etc.”

  Grant was pleased with the critical response to his performance, but he was now looking ahead to his first really exciting project since The Awful Truth. At last his schedule and Alfred Hitchcock's were in sync, and Grant eagerly signed on to appear in the director's fourth American film, Suspicion.†

  What particularly delighted him was the role of Johnnie Aysgarth, a different type of romantic lady-killer from the ones he was used to playing.

  A murderous one.

  * The house was located at 10050 Cielo Drive. Years later, after having been rebuilt several times, the address would become the site of the 1969 Sharon Tate murders, done at the directive of Charles Manson. Through the years, completely unfounded rumors have confused the addresses and the eras, at times placing Grant there, earlier in the day of the grisly slaughters, for a sexual rendezvous with Tate's houseboy.

  * According to the IRS, Grant's donation was actually $62,500, the amount he earned after taxes and after paying the cost of refurbishing Vincent's suite of offices—a reward for his work in securing Grant the film at such a high fee.