Cary Grant Read online

  Lasky eagerly anticipated the arrival of Archie Leach after word had come to him out of New York, via Singapore Sue director Casey Robinson, that the studio ought to lock up the actor immediately, before MGM got a look at him. Zukor ordered Schulberg to do whatever was necessary to sign him. Schulberg invited director Marion Gering, his wife, and Archie to dinner at his home, an honor usually reserved for the studio's biggest stars. Over cof- fee, Gering told Archie that Schulberg happened to be screen-testing his wife the very next day. At that point Schulberg butted in, put an arm around Archie, and as if he had had a sudden revelation, said, “Why don't you make it with her?”

  Archie knew he had tested well when the next day Schulberg called him into his office and asked him to think about changing his name to something that sounded more all-American, something like, say, Gary Cooper. That night Archie had dinner with Fay Wray and her husband, John Saunders, during which Wray told Archie that she was about to sign with RKO to star as the unrequited love object of a giant ape in Merian C. Cooper's forthcoming King Kong. The subject of Archie's impending name change then came up.

  He asked her if she had any suggestions, and without hesitating she smiled and said he should use Cary Lockwood, the character he'd played in Nikki. The next day, Archie brought it to Schulberg, who loved the first part because it rhymed with Gary, but was less satisfied with Lockwood. For one thing, the studio already had a contract player with that last name. For another, short last names were better because they showed up larger on a marquee and were easier for the public to remember. He handed Archie a list of names that he had had the studio publicity department compile and told him to pick one. Archie scanned the list and matter-of-factly chose Grant.

  “I like it,” Schulberg said. “Let's go with that one.”

  Archie smiled and said nothing.

  The next day Schulberg sent Bill Grady, Archie's agent, a contract for the services of Paramount's newest acquisition, Cary Grant.

  * Polly received devastating reviews and closed after only sixteen performances. Its worst review was also the funniest. Robert Garland, writing in the Telegram, paraphrased Robert Browning's 1845 poem “Home Thoughts, from Abroad” by writing, “Oh, to be in England now that June is here!”

  * This comment about his neck, thickened from years of acrobatics, caused Grant, for the rest of his life, to wear custom-made shirts with unusually high collars.

  Movie poster for the original theatrical release of She Done Him Wrong (1933), with Mae West receiving star billing over Cary Grant. (CinemaPhoto/CORBIS)

  5

  “Some men squeeze a line to death. Cary tickles it into life.”

  —MICHAEL CURTIZ

  In February 1932, only six weeks after his arrival in Hollywood, Archie Leach had become Cary Grant by way of a name change that was industry real if not legally official and had signed a five-year exclusive-services contract with Paramount Publix at a starting salary of $450 a week, with incremental raises to be made at the studio's discretion.

  Grant was convinced the movies would not only magnify every inch of his face, body, and movement, they would, in turn, enlarge his personality as well. The better he looked, he believed, the more of his personality his acting would project onto audiences. As a result, he became obsessed with his physical appearance even more so than he had while living in New York City. Every morning after his first shower (he took at least three daily) and shave, he would closely examine his face in the round extension wall mirror, pulling it close in to search for the tiniest of skin nicks or flaws. He declined to have his teeth “painted” white by the studio, a technique they used to increase the dazzle of a smile during shoots. He was especially proud of his great teeth and practiced fixing his smile in such a way as to show them off to their fullest advantage. He brushed them compulsively, several times a day, often until his gums bled. He started as soon as he woke up, and sometimes did it in the morning while still in bed with a dry toothbrush, always after every meal, and at night just before he went to sleep. He carried a brush with him at all times and in company would often excuse himself after smoking a cigarette to get to a men's room, where he would scrub any dulling residue, real or imag- ined, from his one-pack-a-day habit.

  He also refused to allow the studio to send him to Max Factor's face spe- cialists, who were adept at perfecting the slightest facial flaw. (Although throughout his life Grant denied he had ever had a nose job, it does look noticeably slimmer in photographs taken after 1932, with the slightly thick Roman curve somewhat reduced, the bridge a bit narrower, and the tip more smoothly planed.) He put weights in his bedroom and worked out every morning and every evening. He carefully monitored his diet and greatly reduced his intake of alcohol.

  As a personal reward for the physical progress he was making, he bought himself a beautiful Sealyham terrier he jokingly referred to as his alter ego. Owning a dog in New York had been impossible for him. Now that he could afford one, he wanted the best he could get. He named the hound Archie Leach.

  GRANT'S FIRST FEATURE FILM was Frank Tuttle's This Is the Night, an adaptation by George Marion Jr. of Avery Hopwood's Broadway sex comedy Naughty Cinderella, in which he played the role of a cuckold opposite Lily Damita and her costar, the comedic Roland Young. It was a thankless role in which Grant cheerily loses his wife to another man, and it annoyed him, not for the character he played, but because he was cast as a second-string sup- port player behind such A-listers as Charles Ruggles, Young, and Damita. He was further dismayed when he saw the film's final pre-release cut. He thought that even though he came off sleazy and weak-willed, no one would ever believe that someone so good-looking would lose his wife to the funny but unattractive Young. If the public bought him in this type of role, he feared they would never accept him as a legitimate leading man.

  After the screening, he left the studio, stopped off, had a few drinks, then a few more, and sometime around midnight returned to the house on Sweetzer and solemnly informed Charig he was heading back to New York City. Charig managed to calm down the obviously inebriated Grant and, while forcing coffee down his throat, placed a call to Orry-Kelly, who had lately not been all that available to Grant. Orry-Kelly had claimed it was sim- ply due to his heavy workloads, but the truth was, he had moved on, and while neither had admitted it to the other, both knew it was so. On the phone Orry-Kelly talked to Grant for a long time and tried to explain to him the real- ity of Hollywood. He was a working film actor now, and regardless of his roles, he should be grateful he had a studio contract.

  The next morning a hungover Grant returned to the studio, where he was to begin shooting scenes for his second feature, Alexander Hall's Sinners in the Sun, starring Carole Lombard. Schulberg had personally selected Grant for this role and, because the actor was still doing retakes on This Is the Night, had him delivered by golf cart between the sets of the two films, often with- out so much as time for a regular costume change, forcing Grant to slip into a tux while in transit. In Sinners, Grant was cast as a sophisticated man-about- town, a role he felt was a bit more suited to his abilities but still not the type he felt he could play.

  Because of it, he believed his acting days in Hollywood were likely num- bered, and he used some of his earnings to become a silent partner in Neale's Smart Men's Apparel, a retail clothing operation on Wilshire Boulevard. Neale was L. Wright Neale, whom Grant had met socially and liked, even though the man often referred to Grant as “Sister Cary” (a cutesy reference to the Theodore Dreiser novel Sister Carrie that Grant didn't particularly appreciate). The shop was located on Wilshire and Vermont, near all the new and fashionable retailers and large department stores that catered to the town's big movie money. Grant wanted to invest in a non–show business venture and chose tailoring because as a child he had learned something about the trade from his father. His participation in the business was, on some level, a tangible link to happier memories of childhood.

  To Grant's surprise, the Daily Variety called his performance i
n This Is the Night “striking,” and noted that “he looks like a potential femme rave,” Variety-speak to describe his good looks. The only thing about the review that bothered Grant was the critic's having mistakenly referred to him as “Gary.”

  Still in 1932 he was put into yet another film, Dorothy Arzner's Merrily We Go to Hell, starring Fredric March and Sylvia Sidney, who also happened to be Schulberg's mistress. Grant, meanwhile, quietly invested in a second retail branch of his clothing business, this one in New York City.

  In Merrily, March was badly miscast (comedy was never his forte), which allowed Grant to walk off with the film as a character-within-a-character in playwright March's play-within-a-play. His small but well-received perfor- mance was strong enough to convince the still self-exiled Gary Cooper to has- ten his return to the studio after his good friend March had sent word to the safariing actor that this new fellow Grant was apparently being groomed as his possible replacement. He also sent along the Variety review with Grant's misspelled first name.

  At a huge reception thrown by Zukor to hail its returning star, Cooper, whose feathers were still ruffled by the Cary/Gary name incident, delivered a personal gift he'd brought back from Africa for the studio head—a monkey on a chain. He also intentionally snubbed Grant by bypassing him in the reception line and ignoring him when Grant introduced himself and tried to make polite conversation over cocktails. It was the start of a personal ani- mosity between the two that was to last for many years.*

  To further placate their reluctant superstar, Zukor cast Cooper in a role he had, in fact, been considering for Grant, the lead in Marion Gering's Devil and the Deep, costarring Charles Laughton and Tallulah Bankhead, relegating Grant to a small and completely forgettable part. Nevertheless, Grant's performance was good enough to convince the studio to make him one of the leads opposite Dietrich in Blonde Venus, the fifth Josef von Sternberg/Marlene Dietrich film. The cast also featured British West End sensation Herbert Marshall as Dietrich's cuckolded husband, while Grant played Dietrich's guilty-conscienced lover.

  In the movie, American scientist Ned Faraday (played by Marshall in full- tilt British accent and manner) marries sultry German nightclub singer Helen Jones (Dietrich), a familiar echo of the Blue Angel scenario. Marshall, Sternberg's obvious onscreen surrogate, in this instance an intellectual not all that different from The Blue Angel's Professor (Emil Jannings), falls for his (Sternberg's) real-life obsession, the easy showgirl Marlene Dietrich, andthen proceeds to punish her brutally for the very thing that attracts her to him: her beauty and sexuality. When Faraday develops radiation poisoning that can be cured only by expensive treatments, Helen returns to work as the nightclub sensation “Blonde Venus,” making her first entrance dressed as a gorilla (Sternberg's inside joke on Cooper's gift to Zukor upon his return to the studio. Ever since Morocco, during the making of which Cooper and Dietrich had had a torrid affair, there was no love lost between and the actor and the director).

  While performing in the club, Dietrich's character meets and falls for mil- lionaire Nick Townsend, played by a slicked-up Grant, who promptly puts her out on the street as his slave-lover and high-priced prostitute. Nick is, in reality (if that is the right word), a pimp. Through him, Helen raises enough money to send her husband to Germany for medical treatment, but upon his return when he discovers she has been unfaithful, he leaves her and tries to take their child with him. Desperate, Dietrich flees to Paris, resumes her nightclub career, and once again takes up with Grant. This time he realizes he is in love with her, proposes marriage, and she agrees. Upon their return to America, her husband forgives her, and reluctantly she leaves Grant for Marshall.

  What is remarkable about this otherwise soapy film, besides the lumi- nous cinematography that captured Dietrich's always extraordinary beauty and overt sexuality, is the undeniable flash of dark brilliance Grant brought to his first substantial role. Von Sternberg usually allowed Dietrich to intim- idate her male costars (Emil Jannings, Victor McLaglen, Warner Oland, Adolphe Menjou, and Clive Brook; only Gary Cooper managed to come off as heartless, clever, sexual, and charming, a first-class womanizer too good- looking for his—or Dietrich's—own good). But Grant was able to deflect Dietrich's brute force—and play to the audience's sympathies—by showing compassion for Marshall's plight. He came off more noble and forgiving than weak and heartless. Audiences, women especially, loved it when Marshall took his wife back in the final scene (a plot turn hotly contested by Sternberg, who thought the studio-imposed ending was neither happy nor realistic, and that Dietrich should have wound up alone in the gutter where she belonged).

  The trickiest aspect of Grant's character, and what also made his playing of it so convincing, was his ability to sustain an evil yet appealing irresistibility. For the first time Grant showed the blueprint from which he would con- struct his style of acting—the suggestion of an emotional darkness beneath the brightness of his surface attractiveness. In the end, Grant managed to make Townsend's broken heart not merely comprehensible to audiences, but brood- ingly compassionate, all conveyed through a single last look on his wounded beautiful face that became even more beautiful because it was wounded.

  Throughout the filming of Blonde Venus (and throughout his career), Sternberg maintained his brilliant if eccentric sense of visual perfectionism. During the filming of Grant's first scene, Sternberg took a comb and parted his star's hair on the right side rather than the left, the way Grant had always combed it before. The change gave Grant's already remarkable face an added symmetrical beauty. For the rest of his life Grant would comb his hair in the manner first prescribed by Sternberg. The director also lit Grant in his trade- mark shadow-and-light stylistics, which kinetically enhanced his emotionally textured performance.

  Blonde Venus came very close to being rejected by the censorial Hays Office for its depiction of Dietrich's character having an adulterous affair with Cary Grant, enjoying it, and then returning to her husband and child to live happily ever after. With enough alterations to satisfy the censors, Blonde Venus was released, and while it didn't make Grant a star, it did well enough to solidify his reputation as one of Hollywood's new crop of fast-rising actors, one of the band of British “colonists,” as they were known in Hollywood, that included C. Aubrey Smith, Ronald Colman, Basil Rathbone, Victor McLaglen, Boris Karloff, John Loder, David Niven, Charles Laughton, and of course Grant's longstanding idol and role model, Charlie Chaplin.

  Grant finished out 1932 making his sixth and seventh films, William Seiter's Hot Saturday and Marion Gering's Madame Butterfly. That same year, for economic reasons Paramount eliminated many of its highest-paid performers, among them Tallulah Bankhead, George Bancroft, Buddy Rogers (who was unable to make the vocal transition to sound), the Marx Brothers (who would be picked up by Irving Thalberg at MGM and become the most successful comedy team of their era), Richard Arlen, Jeanette MacDonald, and Maurice Chevalier. This bloodletting created a casting vac- uum that helped suck surviving newcomer Cary Grant into the vacancies left by the studio's decimated top-of-the-line stars.

  When trouble erupted over the casting of Hot Saturday, the story of a love triangle, Grant was perfectly positioned to step in. At Schulberg's directive, he took over the starring role of Romer Sheffield when Gary Cooper refused to play it on the advice of his friend Fredric March, who had also flatly turned down the part, believing the supporting role of Bill Fadden was the more sympathetic one. Schulberg then cast another studio newcomer, Randolph Scott, in the supporting role of Fadden, which had originally belonged to Grant. Hot Saturday wasn't much of a movie but did have a profound effect on Grant's personal life, as it marked his first meeting with Scott and the beginning of one of the longest, deepest, and most unusual love relationships in the history of Hollywood.

  Grant's satisfaction at being cast in the lead of Hot Saturday was tempered by the studio's having to shelve its planned big-budget sound remake of its 1922 silent blockbuster Blood and Sand, in which he was to have played th
e role that the late Rudolph Valentino had created. Schulberg had been the driving force behind the remake and wanted Grant to star because of his dark-haired, tall, sleek, and sexually appealing screen presence. Schulberg, whose huge $6,500 weekly salary had afforded him far too much time to gam- ble, drink, and bed every starlet on the lot, had also caused him to lose sight of the financial realities that were closing in on Paramount. When, in 1932, Paramount could no longer make its mortgage payments on the studio's expansive real-estate holdings, and even after firing so many of its star play- ers could not make payroll, Zukor, whose studio now hovered on the brink of bankruptcy, blamed Schulberg's philandering for much of Paramount's problems, fired him, and canceled Blood and Sand. Grant was extremely dis- appointed at both the firing, as he had come to like Schulberg a great deal, and a lost opportunity to become the logical successor to the still manically worshiped and so far irreplaceable Valentino. Grant feared such a star- making role might never come his way again.

  His next film seemed to bear this fear out: a musical version of Madame Butterfly, whose script he found all but incomprehensible. The thankless role of Lieutenant Pinkerton, who drives Cho-Cho San (Sylvia Sidney) to suicide, was yet another that Cooper had flatly refused to play.

  Madame Butterfly was one of many Hollywood films of the 1930s that catered to the country's growing interest in Eastern culture. Unfortunately, to make the film “comprehensible” to the general public, Paramount chose to Westernize the Japanese characters, giving all the leads to well-known Anglo Hollywood actors and actresses. The film captured Grant's already dated singing style in his solo “My Flower of Japan,” a music-hall hiccough that infringed on his thin, reedy tenor. It remained to the very end (along with Singapore Sue) one of the films that Grant most detested. In later years he actually tried to buy the negative in order to destroy it.