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  * The Philadelphia Story's total Radio City Music Hall take was in excess of $600,000—more than half the net earned from the play's entire Broadway run.

  * The Philadelphia Story was nominated for six Oscars: Best Actor (J. Stewart), Best Actress (Hepburn), Best Supporting Actress (Ruth Hussey), Best Director (Cukor), Best Picture (Joseph Mankiewicz, producer), and Best Writing, Screenplay (D. O. Stewart).

  †Hitchcock's first three American films were Rebecca (1939), Foreign Correspondent (1940), and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941).

  18

  “The consensus was that audiences would not want to be told in the last few frames of film that as popular a personality as Cary Grant was a murderer, doomed to exposure.”

  —ALFRED HITCHCOCK

  The chance to work with Alfred Hitchcock couldn't have come at a better time. After his bitter disappointment at being left out of the nominations for The Philadelphia Story, and the personal trauma he suffered during the making of Penny Serenade, Grant had considered retiring from movies. He had made his money and left his mark; he wondered why he should continue to subject himself to the further humiliation of being rejected by the Academy. What renewed his interest in film acting was the opportunity to work with Hitchcock.

  Production on Suspicion, which had begun on February 10, 1941, only weeks after Grant had completed Penny Serenade, dragged along for five months, while Hitchcock and David O. Selznick furiously clashed over the fate of the character of Johnnie Aysgarth.

  By the time he began Suspicion, Hitchcock had come to regret his decision to sign with Selznick. From the start he had found himself battling with Selznick over the script for Rebecca, something that caused him great consternation, especially when Selznick won most of the story points he was fighting for. Because of it, despite the film's winning the 1940 Best Picture Oscar, Hitchcock would always consider it Selznick's picture. In his notebooks Hitchcock bitterly observed that Rebecca had taught him that Hollywood regarded the director as “a minor figure in a fast film industry made up of entrepreneurs who headed the studios.”

  As for Selznick, by the end of 1940, having won Best Picture two years in a row,* he was physically exhausted, creatively spent, and ironically, in serious need of immediate cash. Both films were expensive period pieces that endured heavy cost overruns and produced myriad problems, all of which pushed him into a debilitating addiction to Benzedrine that in turn fueled an already-out-of-control gambling habit. In 1940 Walter Wanger (who had made a series of successful films in the 1930s while under contract to Paramount, Columbia, and MGM, respectively)† had signed a new distribution deal with United Artists, borrowed Hitchcock from Selznick to direct Foreign Correspondent, and wanted him again to direct Suspicion, which he was about to produce for RKO. Despite the fact that Wanger was willing to pay Selznick $5,000 a week for Hitchcock's services while Selznick was only paying the director $2,500 a week, Hitchcock made no attempt to interfere with the deal. No matter what it cost him in dollars, he was as anxious to get away from Selznick as Selznick was to get away from him.

  Suspicion was based on the 1932 British novel Before the Fact by Anthony Berkeley Cox (written under the pseudonym Francis Iles), which RKO had purchased in 1935. After several unsuccessful attempts to make a movie out of it, they shelved the project until Hitchcock and Wanger found the book gathering dust on the studio's shelves. The novel tells the story of Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth (Joan Fontaine), a passive but wealthy woman overly attached to her husband, Johnnie (Grant), who she discovers is in fact an embezzler, has murdered his best friend, and is about to murder her.

  Debilitated by her love for him, she cannot do anything to stop him, and, in the climactic scene, she calmly accepts a glass of milk from him that she knows is poisoned and dies.

  This was fertile turf for Hitchcock, who loved the idea of making a movie about a woman so masochistically attached to her husband she would actually allow him to kill her. If, in fact, that was what he intended to do. Hitchcock's brilliant twist was to keep the audience guessing until the very end whether Aysgarth was really a murderer, or if the whole thing was only a figment of his wife's paranoid imagination.

  If Hitchcock clearly envisioned the film in his mind, his studio-assigned producer, Harry Edington, did not. And when Hitchcock, who had vacillated over the ending of the film, decided Grant should turn out to be a killer, Edington said that was impossible because audiences would never accept Grant in that type of role. This impasse came two months into production and lasted until Hitchcock finally and reluctantly altered the script to make the woman the victim only of her own paranoid delusions.*

  Filming then resumed, and for the next three months Fontaine became so unnerved by the director's relentless harping on her to “act crazy” that she developed an upset stomach that once again halted shooting. This delay stretched into a week and caused the entire project to once again come up for review at RKO, where, because of the vagueness of the shooting script, in which it still remained unclear as to whether Johnnie was a killer, the studio's board members considered canceling the whole project. One alternative solution was to cut from the completed footage all negative references to Johnnie's character and see what that would leave; the studio then produced an incomprehensible fifty-five-minute “happy” version of the film that horrified Hitchcock, who then assured the studio that he would finish the film the way they wanted. As a result, Suspicion ends with a wild car ride down the side of a winding road, in which Johnnie at first seems to be trying to kill Lina but in reality is only trying to save her from falling out of her side to certain death.

  Despite all the plot confusion, for the first time in his career, due in large part to Hitchcock's direction, Grant gave a performance almost entirely defined by his character's internal emotional life rather than his exterior features. Grant's Johnnie Aysgarth embodied Hitchcock's darkest projections of himself, as the director audaciously took one of the most popular actors in Hollywood and used his smooth veneer as a mask to drive the audience mad trying to figure out what was underneath it. As had every other of the major directors who'd helped mold Grant's onscreen persona as an extension of their own, Hitchcock, through his skilled and idiosyncratic use of the tools of his trade—close-ups, angularity, the rhythm of the montage against the composition of the mise-en-scène—was able to create rather than elicit a performance from Grant without what he considered the unnecessary instrusion of “acting.” In Sternberg's hands, Grant had become the epitome of the sleazy ladies' man; McCarey's vision was someone with charm, wit, and the boundless energy of love-infused youth; to Hawks, Grant was the romantic, athletic adventurer; to Cukor, he was the adventuresome, interior romantic. It was Hitchcock who finally took Grant deeper, who used his insecurity as an actor (a reflection of his own very real repression) to create a personality whose criminal darkness was the perfect cover to protect the emotional defects of the charismatic performer, the complex but amiable surface of the character he played, and the masterful director who managed to at once put them all on dazzling display. As John Mosher correctly put it in his review for The New Yorker, “Cary Grant finds a new field for himself, the field of crime, the smiling villain, without heart or conscience. Crime lends color to his amiability.”

  For both star and director, their inspired collaboration on Suspicion became a virtuosic display of not only what they could do on film but what film can do best, the visual, or surface, display of one's soul by the behavioral display of one's private (secret, repressed, forbidden) thoughts and desires. This great Hitchcockian touch is what makes Suspicion so compelling. By allowing Grant to act out the subtext of his character—a man so enraged at his wife that he wants to kill her—he becomes, in Hitchcock's morally rigid world, an actual killer. And even more shocking, his wife becomes his coconspirator for her “role” in triggering such murderous thoughts.

  Even with its denatured script and studio-imposed happy ending, Suspicion proved an unqualified box office success and joined the
two previous films he made that year—The Philadelphia Story and Penny Serenade— on the list of top-five-grossing films of 1941.* The film's record-breaking Thanksgiving weekend opening took place at Radio City Music Hall (officially kicking off the 1941 holiday moviegoing season), and this time everyone in the business believed there was no way the Academy could deny Grant a long-overdue Oscar.

  Shortly after he completed work on Suspicion, Grant, claiming exhaustion, opted out of his next scheduled picture, Edmund Goulding's bigscreen version of the long-running Broadway hit The Man Who Came to Dinner, in which he was to play Sherman Whiteside. The role went instead to Monty Woolley, who had done it on Broadway. Then on the morning of August 18, 1941, without telling anyone except the government, which had given him a special exit and re-entry visa, Grant packed a few bags, got into his car, and quietly drove to Mexico City, where he checked into the Hotel Reforma for what he told his friends was to be a long and well-earned rest.

  It lasted two days.

  * Best Picture Oscars go to the producer. Selznick won in 1939 for Fleming's Gone With the Wind and in 1940 for Hitchcock's Rebecca.

  †Wanger productions included the Marx Brothers' The Cocoanuts (1929); Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933); Rouben Mamoulian's Queen Christina, starring Greta Garbo (1933); John Ford's Stagecoach, the film that made John Wayne a star (1939); Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937); and William Dieterle's Blockade (1938).

  * According to Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto, while Hitchcock insisted later on that he never intended to alter the plot of the original novel, his memos to RKO in its archives suggest that from the start the director “wanted to make a film about a woman's fantasy life.” It is likely that the purpose of those memos was to tell the studio what it wanted to hear, in order to get the film into production. A previous attempt by the studio to film Suspicion, as a star vehicle for Laurence Olivier, had been abandoned for the very same reason: the studio refused to have him play a killer.

  * Of the sixteen movies Grant made in his first five years as a freelancer, Suspicion came in at number three, grossing more than $400,000 in its initial theatrical release, RKO's highest-grossing movie of 1941. The Philadelphia Story opened in December 1940 and played in theaters well into 1941. Grant made a third film in 1941, Arsenic and Old Lace, which was not released until 1944.

  19

  “Cary Grant is a great comedian, a great light comedian. He's very good-looking, but he's also very funny. That makes a devastating combination, and that's why he's been a star so long.”

  —FRANK CAPRA

  Shortly after Grant arrived in Mexico City, Barbara Hutton flew down to be with him, bringing with her the happy news that her divorce from Count Reventlow was finalized. Before they had signed off on their financial agreement, the count had been detained in Denmark by the Nazi occupiers and supposedly, under “threat of death,” been forced to collaborate with them on certain “matters of security.” One of the “rewards” for his cooperation was his captors' promise that he would be allowed to sign his divorce papers, receive his money from Hutton, hand most of it over to them, and be released.

  Grant and Hutton stayed together in Mexico through Labor Day, after which they returned, separately, to Los Angeles, where Hutton wrote to the Nazi officials in Denmark asking for written proof that her divorce from Reventlow was indeed finalized. That correspondence was copied without her knowledge and given to the American government. All during this time Hutton was unaware that she was the target of a secret FBI investigation and under constant surveillance by someone able to track her every move.

  That someone was Cary Grant.

  By 1941, at the end of nearly a decade of nonstop filmmaking in which he appeared in forty features, Grant desperately looked to slow down the pace. After the highly satisfying but intense experience he had making Suspicion, he wanted to choose his next projects more carefully to see if he could maintain the quality of acting Hitchcock had gotten out of him.

  Unfortunately, he was unable to do so. Shortly after returning to Hollywood, Grant met with Frank Capra, once Columbia Pictures' hottest director, who had finally made good on his threat to leave Cohn and moved to Warner Bros., where he was about to make the screen version of the longrunning Broadway comedy Arsenic and Old Lace. Over lunch Capra told Grant that he was the only actor who could do justice to the role of Mortimer Brewster. The director was as good a salesman as he was a filmmaker. He had already offered the part to Bob Hope, who was eager to do it but couldn't get Paramount to agree to a loan-out. Capra had also approached Jack Benny, who said no, and even Ronald Reagan, who turned the part down, before Grant agreed to do it.

  Production on Arsenic and Old Lace began that October. The plot of the movie centers on theater critic Mortimer's engagement to Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane), which triggers mayhem, murder, and other assorted bits of craziness by his murderous aunts and deranged uncle, leading him to believe any children he will have will inherit his family's madness. The fast-paced farce continues until the final moments, when Mortimer discovers he was actually adopted and can therefore marry Elaine without fear of her giving birth to another generation of lunatics.

  As it turned out, Grant did not at all enjoy working with Capra, and in the years that followed, whenever asked, he always described his portrayal of Mortimer as his least favorite film performance. Although he liked Capra personally—“a dear, dear man”—he felt the film “was not my kind of humor… too much hysterical shouting and extremely broad double takes.” In truth he hated everything about the production. He thought the sets were wrong, too dark and stagy, the supporting cast—except for Jean Adair, for whom he had a special affection—too theatrical (both Josephine Hull and Adair, who played Mortimer's aunts, were borrowed by Capra for filming during their vacation from the still-running Broadway production), and the comedy bits too forced. According to screenwriter Julius Epstein, Capra was aware of the film's problems and meant to fix them with reshoots and editing. That plan changed when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that December 7, and Capra abruptly left Hollywood to join the Signal Corps. Grant then donated his entire $160,000 salary to the United Service Organization, the British War Relief, and the Red Cross.*

  Two unexpected events happened during the shoot that deeply affected Grant. The first reached all the way back to when young Archie Leach was touring with the Pender troupe; he had come down with rheumatic fever in Rochester, New York, and for several weeks was confined to his rooming-house bed, alone for most of the day. Jean Adair happened to be appearing at the same vaudeville house, heard about the boy whose only relatives lived in England, and made it a point to bring him flowers and fresh fruit every day until he recovered. When Capra introduced him to the actress on the first day of shooting, Grant immediately recognized her and asked if she did him. Of course, she replied, she had seen all his movies. When he told her he was that young acrobat who had taken ill in Rochester, she suddenly smiled, threw her arms around him, and pulled him close to her. While she didn't remember him by name (he was still Archie Leach at the time), she told him she thought there was something familiar about him.

  The second event was Grant's unexpected reunion with his onetime roommate and companion Orry-Kelly, who by sheer coincidence happened to be the costume designer on Arsenic and Old Lace. Grant and Orry-Kelly spent a long evening together reminiscing about “the old days” and afterward promised to stay in touch.

  They didn't.

  In January 1942, back at Columbia, Grant made The Talk of the Town, produced and directed by George Stevens, an altogether forgettable film about a small-town love triangle that costarred Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman.* Just before shooting began, in the wake of America's entrance into World War II, the thirty-eight-year-old Grant—who was still not an American citizen and therefore ineligible for the draft—decided to do volunteer work for the Hollywood Victory Committee, where he helped organize bond rallies and celebrity hospital tours and hosted severa
l stateside performances for servicemen.

  That February, Grant was nominated for Best Actor for his performance in Penny Serenade. The other nominees were Walter Huston in William Dieterle's All That Money Can Buy (aka The Devil and Daniel Webster), Robert Montgomery in Alexander Hall's Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Orson Welles in his Mercury Players production of Citizen Kane, and Gary Cooper in Howard Hawks's Sergeant York. The race was really between Grant, considered the favorite, and Cooper.

  The Academy dinner, hosted by Bob Hope, was held on February 26, 1942, at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Grant attended with Hutton and sat quietly through the progression of awards, until James Stewart, winner of the Best Oscar the year before, was introduced by Rosalind Russell to award both the Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor. After announcing that the Best Supporting Actor went to Donald Crisp for How Green Was My Valley, Stewart opened the envelope for Best Actor and, staring at the name for several seconds, looked up and let a wide grin cross his face as he announced Cooper's name. The room broke into cheers, and Cooper received a standing ovation as he walked to the microphone. In his familiar halting, wet-lipped style, he leaned over and said, “It was Sergeant Alvin York who won this award.” That brought on another round of applause.

  Joan Fontaine then won Best Actress for her performance in Suspicion. Backstage, after congratulating Fontaine, a gracious Cary Grant took Hutton's hand and left the ceremonies, skipping all the parties, and went home. In the car he turned to Hutton and said that this was the last Academy Awards he was ever going to attend.

  J. Edgar Hoover believed that Barbara Hutton was funneling significant amounts of money to the Nazis, via her second husband, in return for their continued guarantee of his safety. In June, when production wrapped on The Talk of the Town, another secret meeting took place in Washington between Grant and Hoover. Within two days of his return to Beverly Hills, Grant asked Hutton to marry him as soon as possible. She agreed, and a day later Frank Vincent, at Grant's insistence, had a prenuptial agreement drawn up that said should he and Hutton divorce, he would not get any of Hutton's money (which was mostly held in secret Swiss accounts) and she would not get any of his. The notion of the prenup likely came not from Grant or Vincent but from Hoover, who, in order to protect Grant from any future complications, did not want his finances to be connected to Hutton's. Within days, despite all the previous delays, Grant's application for citizenship was suddenly expedited, and on June 26, 1942, at the age of thirty-eight, Archibald Alec Leach found himself taking the oath of allegiance from Federal Judge Paul J. McCormick in Los Angeles, after which he was officially a citizen of the United States. Later that same day he legally changed his name to Cary Grant.