Cary Grant Page 27

  After much convincing, Grant told Hughes he'd chaperone, provided he could bring a suitable traveling companion to make the reason for his presence a bit less obvious. Grant then asked Irene Mayer Selznick if she'd like to accompany him, and she quickly agreed. Grant and Selznick had been friends since his theatrical days in New York City, when he was an actor and she was a producer, and Grant still considered her one of his closest and most trusted confidantes. At the time Selznick and her husband were having difficulties in their marriage, and Grant thought the trip might take her mind off her troubles for a few days. He was right; they both had a ball watching Hughes fall flat on his face trying to woo Bergman. All four spent at least one night together in the upstairs room of “21” eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Grant's choice, chased with expensive iced champagne. The only thing Hughes got out of it was a sticky tongue.

  That Monday, Grant and Selznick took an early commercial flight back to L.A., while Hughes insisted that Bergman fly with him later in the day. When they arrived a few minutes late at check-in, Bergman discovered that not only had the seats Hughes insisted he had reserved been given away, but all the seats on every L.A.-bound flight scheduled for that day had been sold. She didn't know it at the time, but Hughes had purchased them all so that they would have to fly home in his private plane, which happened to be fully fueled, on the runway, and cleared for takeoff. “It was all very flattering,” Bergman said later, “and I imagine some women would have been very impressed.”

  Unfortunately for Hughes, she wasn't one of them. She found his attempts at seduction laughable (and, not surprisingly, she found Grant far more attractive). Upon their arrival back in Los Angeles, Hughes dropped off Bergman and went directly to the home of Linda Darnell and apologized for the “pressing business” that had necessitated his sudden trip to New York that weekend.

  When Jack Warner felt he had a workable Cole Porter script, delivered to him by a team of screenwriters that included Charles Hoffman, Leo Townsend, William Bowers, and Jack Moffitt, he hired Porter's close friend and Broadway veteran Arthur Schwartz to produce the movie, and Monty Woolley, another member of Porter's tight circle, to serve as technical adviser (he also played himself in the film). To direct, Warner chose Michael Curtiz, a selection that made no one happy except Warner, who had him under salaried contract. Curtiz, a solid journeyman director, had an old-world temperament and histrionic methods that made him extremely unpopular among actors, despite his roster of impressive movies that included Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), for which he was nominated for Best Director, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), for which he was again nominated, and Casablanca (1942), which finally brought him the coveted Oscar.

  Production on Night and Day began in the fall of 1945. Grant, in a foul mood and still lingering in post-Hutton melancholia, was in no mood for Curtiz's high-booted whip-cracking, and soon the two were going at it, in an on-set feud that became the talk of Hollywood.

  For Grant, however, the real problem wasn't Curtiz but the gnawing fear that once again he had chosen a project that, rather than propelling him forward, was merely spinning his wheels.

  Night and Day was released July 2, 1946, its world premiere held at Radio City Music Hall. Despite generally lukewarm reviews by skeptical critics, who knew better than to accept this version of Cole Porter's life as anything but Hollywood fantasy, everyone loved Grant's acting and even his campy singing in a memorable rendition of “You're the Top.” Whenever Porter was asked how he felt about it, he insisted he loved the film as well, but he was always quick to qualify his opinion with the disclaimer that there wasn't a word of truth in it.

  Audiences didn't seem to mind the film's extended flight of fancy, and to Grant's surprise and Warner's delight, Night and Day became the hit of the summer, grossing more than $14 million in its initial domestic theatrical release, more than justifying the huge amount of money Warner had spent to make it. Indeed, he had spared no expense, insisting that the picture be shot in beautiful three-strip Technicolor—Grant's first color feature film— and the incandescence it added to Grant's face astonished audiences, most of whom had previously seen Grant only in glossy black and white.*

  Having once more proven his alchemical ability to turn leaden celluloid into box office gold, Grant decided to leave the motion picture business on a high note, and this time he meant forever.

  * Academy Award winners in biographical roles after Night and Day include Best Actors: Maximilian Schell as Hans Rolfe in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons (1966), George C. Scott, Patton (1970), Gene Hackman as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, The French Connection (1971), Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (1980), Ben Kingsley, Gandhi (1982), F. Murray Abraham as Salieri, Amadeus (1984), Daniel Day-Lewis as Christy Brown, My Left Foot (1989), Jeremy Irons as Claus von Bülow, Reversal of Fortune (1990), Geoffrey Rush as David Helfgott, Shine (1996); Best Actresses: Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan, The Miracle Worker (1962), Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine, The Lion in Winter (1968), Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice, Funny Girl (1968), Sally Field, Norma Rae (1979), Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena, Boys Don't Cry(1999), and Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich (2000). Several actors won biographical Supporting Oscars, such as Joseph Schildkraut, The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Walter Brennan as Judge Roy Bean, The Westerner (1940), Anthony Quinn as Paul Gauguin, Lust for Life (1956), Shelley Winters, The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Patty Duke as Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker (1962), Estelle Parsons, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee, All the President's Men (1976), Robards again as Dashiell Hammett, Julia (1977), Vanessa Redgrave, Julia (1977), Maureen Stapleton as Emma Goldman, Reds (1981), Haing S. Ngor as Dith Pran, The Killing Fields (1984), Brenda Fricker as Mrs. Brown, My Left Foot (1989), Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, Ed Wood (1994), Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare in Love (1998), Marcia Gay Harden as Lee Krasner, Pollock (2000), Jim Broadbent as John Bayley, Iris (2001), and Jennifer Connelly as Alicia Nash, A Beautiful Mind (2001).

  * Grant had actually appeared onscreen in color once before. In 1935, MGM released a twentyminute color short, Pirate Party on Catalina Isle, that featured several cameo appearances, including a very brief shot of Cary Grant sitting at a table with Randolph Scott, listening to Buddy Rogers and his band. The film was directed by Louis Lewyn. Grant was in it because, at the time, he was on loan to MGM for Suzy, and the studio wanted to take advantage of his availability. Grant agreed to do the short on condition that Scott appear in it as well. After its brief initial release, it was rarely screened again in theaters.

  21

  “Notorious resumes the general visual key of Suspicion with Cary Grant common to both films, like the theme of domestic poisoning …To [the former's] single-minded study in undeserved paranoia, Notorious counterpoints an undeserved contempt.”

  —RAYMOND DURGNAT

  This time forever lasted all of two weeks, before Grant eagerly agreed to appear in Notorious, the film that would reunite him with Alfred Hitchcock. The director had to wait in line for another chance to use Grant, having wanted him for Shadow of a Doubt (1943) to play the murderous Charlie, a role that went instead to Joseph Cotten, and for Spellbound (1945) as the psychotic John Ballantine, whom Gregory Peck eventually played, neither of which role would have met with the audience's approval.

  Hitchcock first began to think about Notorious as early as 1943, when he had a notion to make a movie about a woman “carefully trained and coached into a gigantic confidence trick which might involve her marrying some man…the training of such a woman would be as elaborate as the training of a Mata Hari.” It would become a movie about a man whose control over a woman also makes him her victim, to the point of testing her loyalty by forcing her to marry his rival and then inconsolably suffering over it when she does—cinematic manna to both Hitchcock and Grant.

  By early 1945 Hitchcock had developed
and clarified the theme of the film. During lunch at Chasen's, he told William Dozier, a producer at RKO, that the film was going to be about sexual enslavement. After listening to a breakdown of the plot, Dozier took it directly to Selznick, who was eager to get the play-or-pay Hitchcock back into production, even if he, Selznick, was too busy to supervise the making of the film itself. At the time Selznick was in preproduction on Duel in the Sun, a postwar western eroto-epic (“Lust in the Dust!”) that starred Gregory Peck (whose spectacular performance in Hitchock's Spellbound had resulted in his being hailed as the “new” Cary Grant). Selznick was also more than a little preoccupied with Duel's female lead, the comely Jennifer Jones, who happened to be his paramour and eventually the second Mrs. Selznick. (Grant was relieved that Selznick wasn't going to be around very much: he didn't want to be caught between his professional obligations to Selznick and his personal friendship with his wife, who was, at the time, suffering from Selznick's public romancing of the much younger and far more beautiful Jones.)

  Selznick's involvement with Duel stalled the commencement of production on Notorious, something that did not bother Hitchcock all that much. He was happy to collect his $7,000-a-week paycheck while he waited for Notorious to get the green light, and he used the time to work on the script, whose first draft, written by Spellbound screenwriter Ben Hecht, had fallen far short of what Hitchcock envisioned. At Grant's suggestion, the director called in Clifford Odets to rewrite the script, but he soon quit when Hitchcock insisted he add additional “love scene” dialogue between Devlin and Alicia while she is lying in bed, about to die from poison.

  To solve the problem of his split loyalties (to his two films, not his two women), Selznick sold off Notorious as a completely self-contained package to RKO for $800,000 plus 50 percent of the eventual net, leaving him, after all preproduction expenses (including salaries), with an instant profit of $500,000. It wasn't that difficult a choice; Duel in the Sun was his obsessive love letter to Jones, while his difficulties with Hitchcock had made him reluctant to work again with the director. To ensure that Hitchcock would not be offended by the deal or try to do anything that might kill it, Selznick offered him guaranteed star billing—“An Alfred Hitchcock Production, Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.”* In the parlance and value system of Hollywood, that meant creative control, something the director craved. But true to form, Selznick managed to keep an active hand in virtually every step of the production of Notorious, particularly with the still-unfinished script, constantly pushing Hitchcock to build up Grant's part. In the early versions of the screenplay, in a pivotal scene, Alicia goes to the wine cellar alone and discovers her husband's “secret”; Devlin is thus absent from one of the most important scenes in the film. At the end of several early versions, Alicia dies in Devlin's arms, even as her husband, Sebastian, is planning, with his Nazi cronies, to expand their sphere of evil. Selznick's stubborn insistence that the film must have a “happy ending” forced Hitchcock to restructure the entire story.†

  Selznick also dictated that the role of Sebastian's mother, Madame Sebastian, become more central to the sexual aspect of the doppelgänger struggle between Devlin and Sebastian, as Devlin's bitter rage at Alicia gradually turns to love, even as Sebastian's love for her turns to murderous rage. In this sense, thanks to Selznick, the Devlin-Alicia-Sebastian triangle becomes infinitely more complex by the increased presence of the fourth member of this bizarre couple-swap, Madame Sebastian. Selznick's story instincts apparently triggered Hitchcock's wealth of Oedipal fantasies, which run rampant through the film, as Madame's fierce jealousy of Alicia inspires her sadistic plan to kill her while forcing her guilt-ridden son to help her do it.

  Notorious opens in Miami during the last months of World War II. The night following the conviction of her father as a Nazi spy, we discover Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) at a party, where she is celebrating by getting drunk. Also at the party is undercover agent T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant), who has been assigned to simultaneously seduce and recruit her. The self-absorbed Devlin soon becomes conflicted about his attraction to Alicia, aware of her family background and reputation as a hard-drinking, “fast-living” (sexually loose) woman.

  In each of the four films Hitchcock made with Cary Grant, there is a dangerous car ride that serves to cleverly thrust the plot forward. In Notorious it takes place when, early on, even though Alicia is drunk, Devlin lets her take the wheel. She drives fast and recklessly—life is cheap and expendable to the both of them. She starts to speed. He warns her she is going sixty. She pushes hard on the pedal and takes them to eighty, looking to go even faster when she is pulled over by a motorcycle cop. Just as she is about to be arrested, Devlin takes control of the situation, pulls rank, and the policeman backs off. Having barely escaped a bad situation, Alicia wants to remain in the driver's seat. In response, Devlin slaps her into submission, then shoves her over to the passenger side and takes the wheel. For the rest of the film, they will struggle over which of them is really in the driver's seat.

  On orders from the Bureau, Devlin assigns her the job of spying on Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), the head of a Nazi Party cell located in Brazil, to find out what secret weapon the group is harboring. Alicia does her job a little too well; against the advice of his sadistic, possessive, and jealous mother (Leopoldine Konstantin), Sebastian proposes marriage, and in a move that surprises, infuriates, and embitters Devlin (in that order) but one that he is not in a position to oppose, she accepts. At a postwedding reception to which Devlin has been invited by Alicia, they find their way down to Sebastian's wine cellar, where they discover a secret stash of uranium ore (or something) hidden in specially marked champagne bottles. When Devlin realizes that Sebastian is spying on them, he suddenly grabs Alicia and kisses her to throw Sebastian off. It doesn't work. To his horror, Sebastian realizes he is married to an American agent. Totally humiliated, he listens to his mother, and together they begin to slowly poison Alicia to death. Just before she succumbs, Devlin, sensing she is in great danger, boldly goes to Sebastian's house, where he rescues her and in so doing sends Sebastian and his mother to their certain death at the hands of their vicious fellow Nazis.

  Although filled with intrigue, espionage, murder, sex, and betrayal, to Hitchcock the film was essentially a love story. Devlin's Mephistophelean character is enraged at Alicia for being a drunk and a slut, and at himself for being attracted to her. To punish her and protect himself, he becomes her pimp by turning her into a prostitute, all in the name of duty to country. She chooses to marry Sebastian partly out of her own fury—she wants Devlin to prevent it, and he doesn't. She then taunts Devlin by showing him the power of her own sadistic tendencies: the ability to seduce powerful, if damaged, men and enjoy it. The sexual merry-go-round then shifts into high gear: Devlin loves Alicia but gives her to Sebastian; Alicia loves Devlin but gives herself to Sebastian; Sebastian is hopelessly slave-locked in forbidden boy-love with his mother while at the same time jealous of Devlin.

  This crazy carousel apparently carried over to real life. Those close to the action believed that during production Hitchcock had fallen deeply and hopelessly in love with Ingrid Bergman; what Hitchcock dared not try in real life, he could act out and control vicariously through the actions of his characters. As Hitchcock directed Grant, so did Devlin direct Alicia.

  At times, it is difficult to tell if Grant is playing Devlin, or Devlin is playing Grant, especially when so much of Devlin's behavior to this point in the film mirrors Grant's in real life, at least some of which Hitchcock must have been aware of and that he may have used as a way, for the sake of the character, to try to connect Grant to his own darker side. Devlin works for a national security bureau; Grant had been involved with the FBI. Devlin slaps the woman he loves; Grant had been accused by Virginia Cherrill of slapping her. Devlin falls in love with a woman who has strong emotional and family ties to Nazis; Grant's second wife was suspected of being friendly with several Nazis.

  Notorious is filled with scenes
that rank among the most famous set pieces of both Grant's and Hitchcock's careers, including the famous kissing scene between Devlin and Alicia, interrupted and therefore extended by incidental dialogue and even a phone call (critic Andrew Sarris described it as “a kissing sequence that made 1946 Radio City Music Hall audiences gasp”); cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff's beautifully paced and razor-blade precision shot that begins at the top of the stairs and steadily zooms in to a close-up of Alicia's fist, offering a glimpse of the all-important key to the wine cellar that she has stolen from her husband; the quick-zooms into the faces of Sebastian and his mother at the moment of Alicia's realization that they are in the process of killing her; the fantastic wine cellar lipless kiss that she and Devlin “fake” to try to mislead Sebastian.

  Finally, the entire film is held together onscreen by what must be ranked among the best performances of the decade—Claude Rains's tortured mama's boy, Leopoldine Konstantin's dragon mother murderess, Ingrid Bergman's lusty leggy nymphomaniac, and Cary Grant's matineeidol hero/Satan.

  Notorious was not only a huge commercial success, it provided Grant with a crucial career leap. His performance as Devlin proved once and for all that he could successfully portray charming, heroic, romantic characters that had both darkness and depth, even while dressed in his requisite tux (which he donned for the reception scene). Prior to this film, his comic turns in The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, and The Philadelphia Story had heightened his reputation as a fine comic actor, even as critics tended to dismiss his more serious roles as too offbeat, such as Ernie Mott in None But the Lonely Heart, or as mere personality poses, like Captain Cassidy in Destination Tokyo. Ironically, by allowing Hitchcock to cast him in a role that was emotionally truer to any that he had played in the past, he was newly hailed for his ability to “act” by playing against type. As he had done in Suspicion, Hitchcock understood that the best way to “direct” Grant was to shine the spotlight precisely on the dark side.