Cary Grant Page 25

  On July 7, Hutton, her girlfriend Madeleine Hazeltine, and eleven members of the Hutton personal staff caravaned from Beverly Hills to Frank Vincent's mountainside getaway just outside Lake Arrowhead for her wedding to be held that day. To ensure that no one in the press would discover what was about to happen, Vincent was somehow able to obtain two marriage licenses with both names left blank.

  To further throw everyone off track, a few days before, Grant had begun filming Leo McCarey's Once Upon a Honeymoon, a zealous bit of wartime nonsense that he had reluctantly agreed to star in for RKO at the request of the FBI, which had “asked” Grant to make an explicitly anti-Nazi film. Barely a week into the shoot, Grant asked for and received a two-day leave.

  On the morning of July 7, 1942, he drove to Lake Arrowhead, stopping on his way to buy flowers from a Beverly Hills shop, and arrived at Vincent's by noon. Less than an hour later a six-minute wedding ceremony took place, conducted by the local Lutheran reverend. Grant's only witness besides Vincent was his male secretary, Frank Horn. Notably absent were Randolph Scott, Howard Hughes, and any members of the Malibu Brit colony. That night the newlyweds returned to Beverly Hills, and the next morning Grant decided to enlist.

  He took and passed an army physical and on August 4 was notified by the Adjutant General's Office that he was to report on September 15 for official induction. However, without any explanation, at the time or for the rest of his life, Grant never showed up, and nothing was ever again mentioned about his “enlistment” by anyone in or out of the government. Three months later, on December 11, his eligibility was mysteriously changed from 1A to 1H by the Selective Service. The only official reference to all this is buried in an internal RKO memorandum that reads as follows:

  Washington suggests that they would like to have Cary Grant's name on their list of people who from time to time might do some temporary service. In each instance, if called upon, he will have an opportunity to say “yes” or “no” to whatever job is proposed and it is not at all certain that they will call upon him in any case. We understand that the type of work that he might be called upon to do would not be of the sort that would require him to drop out of whatever other activities he may be engaged in and the fact that he was doing the work would be publicized.

  The studio source of this extraordinary document remains cloudy, but the source from “Washington” is, without question, J. Edgar Hoover. It assumes all responsibility for Grant's nonspecified “temporary service” in an unnamed organization and concludes with a promise of “publicity” that was standard FBI code for a Bureau coverup by way of media misdirection. In effect, the FBI had put the studio on notice that Grant was to be made available whenever they wanted him.* This marked a dramatic shift in Grant's political activities, a far cry from the days when Hoover had personally warned Grant that he was in danger of violating the Neutrality Act (something, of course, that lost all meaning when America formally declared war on Japan, Germany, and the rest of the Axis powers).

  Immediately after getting married, Grant went right back to making movies. He finished the aptly named Once Upon a Honeymoon and followed it with H. C. Potter's equally fortuitously titled Mr. Lucky, in which he looked absolutely shimmering as a handsome, roguish, draft-dodging gambler hustling the moneyed set aboard a cruise ship, only to be redeemed in the last reel by finding true love and renouncing his evil ways. The character was an unusual one for Grant to play and ventured almost beyond the limit of what an audience would accept from him. Manny Farber, writing in The New Republic, described the film, and Grant's performance in it, as “interesting, like a bad salad with an intelligent dressing.”

  With Mr. Lucky in the RKO can, Grant waited for his next assignment while the war raged on. In May 1943 he made a brief appearance at a Hollywood War Bond Drive, where Jack Warner buttonholed him and asked him to please play the starring role in Destination Tokyo. After the government's initial neutrality warning, and until he had been granted full U.S. citizenship, Grant had steadfastly refused to appear on film in any military uniform. He did not want to be seen as a foreign visitor portraying American heroes, fearing it might offend too many people and result in his somehow being asked to leave the country. With all of that resolved, however, he was more than willing to appear in Warner's picture.

  To acquire Grant's services, Warner had to go through Columbia, where Grant had extended his nonexclusive contract. Columbia agreed to the loanout in return for the services of Warner star Humphrey Bogart for Sahara (a role Grant had turned down), clearing the way for Grant to star in Destination Tokyo (in a role previously rejected by Gary Cooper).

  Directed and cowritten by Delmer Daves and Albert Maltz, based on an original story by Steve Fisher that appeared in Liberty magazine, and made with the full cooperation of the U.S. Navy, Destination Tokyo tells the story of an American torpedo submarine's daring and highly dangerous spy mission into the heart of Tokyo Bay. In the climax of the film the submarine sinks several Japanese warships, miraculously escapes from screen-shaking depth charges, and returns home to San Francisco.

  Six weeks of filming began in September 1943 on a Burbank set that the studio built to the exact physical specifications of the interior of a naval submarine. The actors were directed to project the quiet authority of men on a mission. They talk in the hushed whispers of the righteous and acknowledge each other's bravery with smiles of pride and recognition. The only woman in Destination Tokyo is Faye Emerson, who was hardly even in the film until the end, when, home at last, the heroic Captain Cassidy (Grant) is reunited with his wife and child at the military dock. The film ends with their warm embrace—the implied reason “why men fight.”

  Grant enhanced his excellent performance by having thirty duplicate uniforms on hand at all times so he would always look immaculate onscreen—the epitome of the sleeves-rolled-up, handsome, manly, gallant American he envisioned his character to be.

  Destination Tokyo was critically well received and proved to be a box office smash when it opened on New Year's Day 1944, two weeks before Grant's fortieth birthday. According to Newsweek, “Even moviegoers who have developed a severe allergy for service pictures should find Destination Tokyo among the superior films of the war… Cary Grant gives one of the soundest performances of his career; and John Garfield, William Prince, Dane Clark, and the rest of the all-male cast are always credible either as ordinary human beings or extraordinary heroes.”

  Because filming on Destination Tokyo had dragged on well beyond its original six-week schedule, Grant was forced to shoot his sequences at the Warner lot during the day, then scuttle back to Columbia Pictures, where he had already begun work on his next film. Alexander Hall's Once Upon a Time, costarring Janet Blair and the venerable James Gleason, was a fluffy life-on-Broadway comedy about, of all things, a caterpillar who stands upright and dances whenever he hears the song “Yes Sir, That's My Baby.” Harveyesque in its concept—no one can see the caterpillar except Jerry Flynn (Grant)—the story, originally written and produced for the radio, was one of the more glaring miscues of Grant's prime career.

  The overlapping production on the two films resulted in Grant's often staying overnight at the studio and sleeping in his dressing room—something that understandably displeased his bride, Hutton, who resented her husband's frequent absences. Increasingly during their first year of marriage, while Grant stayed either at the studio or alone at their rented house, Hutton attended lavish parties without him, thrown mostly by her transplanted European friends of questionable title (and apparently little money, as she usually paid for everything, something the always-parsimonious Grant resented). Alone at the rented house one night, Grant—who liked to be in bed by eleven when he was working, wearing only the tops of his pajamas, a cup of hot tea on the night-table, and reading a good book—had been completely captivated by None But the Lonely Heart, a novel by Richard Llewellyn, whose previous work, How Green Was My Valley, had been made into a spectacular movie by John Ford.

 
None But the Lonely Heart is set in poverty-stricken London in the days leading up to World War II. The hero, Ernie Mott, still not completely over the death of his father in the last war, works in his mother's secondhand store to help her get by. At one point he becomes so desperate for money that he joins a band of thieves and is nearly caught. When he finally gets home, he is shocked to find that his mother has been arrested for trafficking in stolen goods. He soon learns the reason for her action: she is dying of cancer and wants to make sure she leaves something behind for him. She dies in his arms in prison, and Ernie promises himself a better life.

  Grant told RKO he was interested in the book, and Charles Koerner, the new head of the studio, immediately secured the rights to it with a preemptive bid of $60,000 and then agreed to Grant's $150,000 asking price plus 10 percent of the profits to star in it.

  Clifford Odets, the Broadway playwright who had gained great fame (but not a lot of money) dramatizing the plight of the working class (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Golden Boy), was looking for a fat paycheck before being drafted into the army. He asked his agent to find him something quick and lucrative in Hollywood, and RKO responded by hiring him to adapt None But the Lonely Heart for the screen.

  He actually began working on the script before Grant's deal was finalized and was shocked when he found out that the forty-year-old actor had been signed to play Ernie Mott, who was only nineteen in the novel and still living with his mother. Odets tried several different ways to make the disparity work, until he came up with a story that aged the boy and made the mother slightly younger, retaining the elements of their character in a more believable mold. Grant, who had also been concerned about the age factor, felt that Odets's screenplay so perfectly captured the essence of both the story and the characters that he called Koerner and insisted that Odets be hired to direct the movie, as well.

  Not wanting to rock any boats, Koerner quickly agreed, which is how it came to be that the young Philadelphia-born and New York–based playwright, one of the founders of the Group Theater, who had never before set foot in Hollywood or directed so much as a foot of film, was hired to helm a big-budget movie on its journey from page to screen.

  During production, Grant and Odets became good friends, and Odets helped Grant connect the film's dramatic high points to the touchstones of his own early life, particularly his relationship with his mother and the hardships of life in working-class London. Part apologia, part autobiography, part shrine to Elsie, and part social criticism, the film remained one of Grant's personal favorites.*

  In an increasingly politically polarized 1940s Hollywood, however, the presence of the openly left-wing Odets, a onetime member of the American Communist Party, enraged the industry's powerful conservative faction. Odets became one of the first targets of the notorious Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), founded by rightwing extremists Walt Disney, William Randolph Hearst, and director Sam Wood (and later headed by John Wayne).* The Alliance actively encouraged J. Edgar Hoover to launch an intensive “investigation into Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry.” The FBI's 1944 investigation was a prelude to the postwar witch-hunts to come.

  One of the first things the FBI did was to examine in detail the content of Hollywood's wartime films, and they singled out five as “among the industry's worst, i.e., most pro-Communist offerings to date”: Herbert J. Biberman's The Master Race, which he also wrote; Citizen Tom Paine; H. C. Potter's Mr. Lucky; Delmer Daves's Destination Tokyo; and Odets's None But the Lonely Heart.† Amazingly, of the five movies the Bureau cited, three starred Cary Grant. A Bureau memo then stated that the following Hollywood celebrities had “known Communist connections”: Lucille Ball, Ira Gershwin, John Garfield, Walter Huston, and Cary Grant. Grant's “known Communist connection,” according to the FBI, was Clifford Odets. Later on, in 1947, during the first round of House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings (brought to Hollywood at the urging of the MPA), Lela Rogers (the avenging mother of Ginger Rogers), who had been hired by RKO to serve as its resident “expert” on Communist infiltration, testified before the Committee that in her opinion None But the Lonely Heart's despair and hopelessness were nothing more than Communist propaganda, citing as her proof the single line in the screenplay where Ernie Mott's mother tells him she is not going to get him to work in the secondhand store so he can squeeze pennies out of the little people poorer than he is.

  She also cited Destination Tokyo for a single line of dialogue. Albert Maltz, who had written the film's screenplay (and would go on to become one of the so-called Hollywood 10 during the 1950s round of HUAC investigations), has Captain Cassidy (Grant) say after his submarine is almost blown up by an enemy bomb that was stamped “Made in the USA,” “Appeasement has come home to roost, men.” While the meaning of the line seems clear enough—an ironic comment on the sale of American munitions overseas before the war—it somehow came to be interpreted by Rogers and the committee as Communist propaganda. John Garfield, Grant's costar in the film, was eventually called to testify at the second HUAC hearings, denied he was ever a Communist, and was subsequently blacklisted, as was Maltz. Unable to find work, Garfield turned increasingly to drink and died prematurely of a heart attack in 1952, at the age of thirty-nine.*

  Yet Cary Grant—whose name and movies turned up repeatedly in these FBI's investigations; who starred in three of the five movies cited by the FBI's investigation into Communist infiltration; who was close friends with several of those later called before HUAC and accused of being Communists; who had avoided military service first in England and later in America; who refused to appear in any patriotic movies before being granted citizenship; who married a woman who had once renounced her American citizenship to marry a suspected Nazi sympathizer whose closest friends were either known or suspected Nazis or Nazi sympathizers—remained completely untouched and unsullied by both the FBI and the HUAC.

  After an examination of existing files of others and related sources, the only logical and unavoidable conclusion is that Grant was protected by the one man in Washington with the power to do so—J. Edgar Hoover—most likely as part of a deal made with the FBI and the British government. This “deal” allowed Grant to avoid prosecution for the Philippine bond scandal, kept him out of wartime service in both Britain and America, allowed him suddenly to switch citizenship (making possible his marriage to Hutton and better access to the accountability of her money), and kept the HUAC hounds from nipping at his especially tempting heels. Grant's part of it—and what had made him so angry after that initial call from the British War Office—was his forced agreement to serve as one of Hoover's domestic “volunteer” spies. There can be little doubt that Cary Grant was a special agent or contact for the FBI assigned prior to and during the war to spy on Barbara Hutton.

  Given Hoover's known methods of intimidation and persuasion—which included threats of prosecution and/or exposure of the private sexual practices of those whose services he wanted, and Grant was clearly vulnerable on both counts—it is not difficult to see how effective Hoover's exercise of power, or more accurately, his abuse of it, could be.

  Except for one incident, there is little evidence that Grant actually did anything for the Bureau, other than supplying information about Hutton's finances. She had an ongoing “friendship” with one Carlos Vejarnano Cassina. Grant, a bit jealous, believed Cassina was pretending to be romantically interested in Hutton to get to her money, and he was soon arrested by the FBI as a Nazi spy. When taken into custody, a personal letter of recommendation was found in his coat from Hutton for a highly sensitive defense job that Cassina was trying to get. After keeping him under surveillance for months, the FBI had known just when to pounce. Grant had been present the day Hutton handed Cassina the letter.*

  In 1944, after finishing work on None But the Lonely Heart, Grant looked forward to the return of Hutton's only son, Lance, who had been away for six months in New York visiting his father, the c
ount. Reventlow had suddenly been released by the Nazi authorities in Denmark, flown directly to New York City, remarried, and settled into life in a luxurious Park Avenue apartment, all without any visible means of support. Grant was genuinely fond of the boy and enjoyed playing ball with him and taking him around Hollywood to see the sights. That July, when Lance arrived in Pacific Palisades, he was dropped off by representatives of the count, who delivered a message to his ex-wife that he intended to seek full custody of their son.

  One week later Lance disappeared. Fearing he had been kidnapped, Grant called the police, and a frantic search ensued. Police swimmers searched the shallow coastal waters in case the boy had accidentally drowned. A day later Grant and Hutton received word from the count that his men had taken the boy and secretly transported him to Canada, out of the clutches of his ex-wife and beyond the reach of American law.