Cary Grant Page 8
WHILE THE FORWARD THRUST of Grant's early film career seemed to have been stalled by Madame Butterfly, Zukor decided to bet the studio's future on one final extravaganza, a film version of Mae West's 1928 scandal- splattered Broadway stage hit, Diamond Lil, the sequel to her 1926 self- written stage smash, unsubtly titled Sex, very loosely based on Somerset Maugham's short story Rain. The project had originally been signed by Schulberg, who believed its sensational star and vehicle couldn't help but make a fortune for the studio. In New York the stage version had caused many highly publicized police “raids” for “lewdness, nudity and profanity.”*
What worked on Broadway was one thing; turning it into a hit movie would prove to be quite another. With the Hays Office gaining power in Hollywood, the major studios had become increasingly hesitant to make movies that Will Hays deemed too controversial, too antisocial, or too sexu- ally explicit. Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, was the first to consider a screen version of Diamond Lil but was ultimately pressured by Hays into giving up the idea, even after signing West to a generous contract.
Indeed, West's persona as a fleshy, smirky sex goddess without modesty or morals had made her as pervasive a pop culture phenomenon as Chaplin's celebrated “Little Tramp.” One of West's favorite publicity stunts was to allow herself to be photographed in her famous “swan” bed, whose headboard looked like nothing so much as the bare upper thighs of a Victorian woman with skirts hiked high up the front. Her enduring popularity—her audiences wanted to know everything about her, including what she wore in the boudoir (“a black lace nightgown, sometimes with black stockings”)—trans- lated into money, a lot of it, and her talent for making it finally convinced Zukor to greenlight Schulberg's offer to West of a $5,000-a-week salary (above the negotiated rights for Diamond Lil) to star in the movie version of her play for Paramount.
Less than six weeks after her arrival in L.A. in the fall of 1932, Zukor, eager to see some return on his investment, put West into a quickie film role as Maudie Triplett, opposite another Paramount Valentino-hopeful, song- and-dance man George Raft, who bore a slight physical resemblance to the dead actor but lacked his charm, mystery, and heat.
The seventy-minute film, Night After Night, proved a huge winner at the box office, and West received rave reviews, while Raft was all but ignored. Photoplay, one of the most influential film magazines of the time, said, “Wait till you see Mae West. An out-and-out riot!” Zukor then hired Schulberg back on a freelance basis to produce Diamond Lil, having promised the Hays Office a complete rewrite of the original stage version and a cleaned-up, san- itized film version, not just of the play but of the West persona, as well. After changing the project's name to She Done Him Wrong, the film was added to the fall production schedule. George Raft, originally cast by Zukor as the love interest, was at Schulberg's directive replaced by Cary Grant, who had always been the producer's first choice to play opposite West.
One of the most erroneous yet persistent myths about Cary Grant is that he was discovered by Mae West while both were strolling the Paramount backlot, that she took one look at him and said, “If that guy can talk, I'll take him—he's the only one who could do justice to the role of ‘The Hawk.'” Several versions of this “moment of discovery” exist; the most popular comes from West's own memoirs.* Here she recalls visiting the Paramount lot one day in 1932 prior to signing on to film Diamond Lil and seeing “a sensational- looking man walking along the studio street… the best thing I'd seen out there.” According to West, she then insisted that Grant be her costar or there wouldn't be a film.*
Grant himself flatly denied the story many times, always claiming, “It wasn't true. Mae West didn't discover me. I'd already made four pictures before I met her.”† In an interview he gave to Screen Book in December 1933, he gave this version of the story: “I had met Miss West one night at the [American] Legion [Friday night] fights at the Hollywood American stadium. I understand that she had already seen me and asked for me to play ‘The Hawk’ in her picture. It seems that during her search for a suitable leading man, she had seen me getting out of my studio car and decided I was the type to play opposite her. I suppose it was because she is blond and I am dark and we make a suitable contrast. Another factor in my getting the role in She Done Him Wrong was that Lowell Sherman, the director, had liked my work with Miss Dietrich in Blonde Venus.”
In fact, both West's and Grant's version were likely made up, and for good reason. Grant and West had appeared on Broadway at the same time for sev- eral seasons and became quite well acquainted during this period. As it hap- pens, while West was developing her sex goddess stage image, she was also running a highly successful male escort service. One stresses that there is no smoking gun, but because of how perfectly the timings mesh (West was run- ning her service before, during, and after the two-year period when Grant “disappeared”), it is tantalizing to wonder if Grant worked for her, and if she was, in fact, the otherwise unknown, unidentified “Marks.”
Because of the studio's financial difficulties, the film was given an eighteen-day shooting schedule (instead of the fifteen to twenty weeks nor- mally allotted a “big” picture). Filming began on November 21, after the full seven-day rehearsal period that West had insisted upon. Set in a Bowery bar at the turn of the twentieth century, the sanitized but still raunchy story cen- ters on Lady Lou, the proprietor of the Dance Hall (a standard euphemism for a house of prostitution), corun by West's husband (Noah Beery Sr.), which sells beer to the boys while also dealing in a little white sexual slavery on the side. Captain Cummings, aka “The Hawk” (Grant), is an undercover cop running a nearby missionary and is bent on “saving” her. One of the most famous (and often misquoted) lines in all of film history is uttered in She Done Him Wrong with a moistness hard to misinterpret, when Lil meets Cummings for the first time and says, “Why don't you come up sometime, see me. I'll tell your fortune.” By the end of the film, after a series of bizarre plot twists, love changes and redeems them both. In the final scene, Cummings leads her away, with the strong suggestion he is going to reform her first, then marry her. They get into a cab and Grant removes all the rings on her fingers so he can slip a single small diamond on one. Lou looks into his eyes and murmurs, “Tall, dark, and handsome,” to which he replies, “You bad girl.” “You'll find out,” she says, sucking in her cheeks and smiling wickedly as the film ends.*
She Done Him Wrong, West's second film, was, in retrospect, the best per- formance of her career. It was loosely based on her own early experiences in New York, the saloon being a substitute for the stage, white slavery a refer- ence to her (and possibly Grant's) escort days, and her arrest at the end rem- iniscent of the legal troubles her shows had run into with the city's moral squads.
It was also the eighth and final film Grant made in 1932 and, after this highly productive year, the one that brought him closer than ever to the first rank of Paramount's leading men.† Ironically, it was Grant's approach to playing the romantic lead in She Done Him Wrong that did it. His onscreen aloof- ness, a reflection of nothing so much as his own uncertainty as to how to play a love scene opposite the voracious West, was taken by the public to be just the opposite—manly, moral resistance to Lil's many charms—and created a new type of romantic sophisticate, not only for Grant but for the legions of actors who would thereafter try to imitate him. Grant's “Hawk” was under- played and always gentlemanly, resistance translated into self-assurance and moral righteousness, all highly glossed with what would become his trade- mark shimmering elegance.
No one was more surprised than Grant at how successful he was opposite the voracious West. As in the past, he had tried to mask what he thought of as his own lack of any true acting style by emulating his performing idols, Chaplin, Noël Coward, Jack Buchanan, Rex Harrison, and Fred Astaire. Years later Grant perceptively and graciously summed up his acting in She Done Him Wrong as a combination of pose and impersonation. “I copied other styles I knew until I became a conglomerate of pe
ople and ultimately myself,” he told an interviewer. “When I was a young actor, I'd put my hand in my pocket trying to look relaxed. Instead, I looked stiff and my hand stuck in my pocket wet with perspiration. I was trying to imitate what I thought a relaxed man looked like.”
Nevertheless, the physical image of Cary Grant seemed even more per- fect on the big screen than it had on stage. In his early movies especially, the camera quickly discovered and magnified the perfection of his features, the beautiful dark and sharp eyes that sat carved beneath his thick black brows, the handsome nose, the flawlessly smooth skin, the thick, slick hair always perfectly cut and parted, and that remarkable cleft in his chin, whose two smooth and curved bulges resembled nothing so much as a beautiful woman's naked behind while she was on her knees in sexual supplication before the godlike monument of his face.
Opposite West, Grant's arched body language seemed to react with bemused distaste, an apparent product of calculated wit. He smartly held his own by not allowing himself to get engaged in a competition he could not win. In the silvery sheen of sharp black and white, all Grant had to do was show up and let his irresistible face be photographed in shadowed cuts, as if caught in the flash of lightning. Holding his own, however, was not enough.
Working with West had taught him a valuable lesson. As long as he was the pursuer, the focus was always going to be on the object of his affection. The thing to be in any movie was the one pursued. It was what all front-rank stars in Hollywood benefited from, and why he was not yet in their league. Should he ever have the opportunity to call the shots, as West had, he promised him- self, he would make himself the object of his co-stars', and by extension the audience's, heated pursuit. Eventually this decision would come to define the essence of, and the reason for, Cary Grant's superstar persona.
The enormous profits generated by She Done Him Wrong were enough, for the time being at least, to save Paramount from impending bankruptcy. Costing what was then a risky $200,000, the film earned more than $2 mil- lion in its initial three-month domestic run, making it one of the highest- grossing and most profitable films Hollywood had ever produced. It would go on to gross an additional million dollars worldwide in first release (despite being banned in Australia after its premiere and in several other smaller mar- kets), and it remains to this day one of West's few films still shown on the theatrical revival circuit and on cable TV's classic movie channels.
For her next movie, Paramount agreed to pay West $300,000 plus writing royalties to star in I'm No Angel.* Grant was once again assigned to costar, and in appreciation for his contribution to the success of She Done Him Wrong, Paramount raised his salary from $450 to $750 a week. By contrast, he knew, West was being paid a mint. Not because she was a better actor than he was (although that might have been the case), but because she was a bet- ter businessperson. Like his idol, Chaplin, she had managed to remain a per- picture independent, able to demand and get her price, one that, unlike Broadway money, could be parlayed into a real fortune. In the theater, an actor (with rare exceptions, such as run-of-the-play contracts) was paid for a single performance, or number of performances, and if asked to go on the road, paid again. An actor in film was also paid once, but the film could earn residual money as long as it could be run and rerun. The only way, Grant realized, to get some of that money was to do what Chaplin and West had done, to find a way to own a piece of the pie.
Even before production began on I'm No Angel (during which time Grant made three more nondescript studio “quickies”),* he had already begun to formulate a plan for his own financial emancipation.
SHORTLY AFTER THE SUCCESS OF She Done Him Wrong, as if on the studio's cue, Cary Grant's steady ride to stardom was threatened by rumors that were being spread by the studio-controlled gossip columnists. Everyone in the business knew these journalists-cum-rumormongers were organs of the industry, used to keep their players in line. Hedda Hopper, Sheilah Graham, and Louella Parsons owed their success to easy access behind the studios' iron gates, where all the “good” stories were. The hard truth was, no matter how talented a director, screenwriter, or producer, no matter how crucial they may have been to the suc- cess of their movies, no one cared about them or went to see a film because of them, at least not knowingly. The only real attraction factor in the studio era was star power. For this reason the studios carefully stroked the egos of their stars and at the same time sought to control them by resisting union movements, never grooming noncontract players for stardom, and most effectively, imposing the so-called morals clause. The public, the studios knew, would tolerate a lot, was in fact titillated by the endlessly reported bouts of drinking, fighting, illicit but consentual sex, and even, for a while, subversive politics (like liberal Hollywood's romance with the Lincoln Brigade). Everyone, however, drew the same line in the moral sand when it came to the three absolute no-nos: het- erosexual rape, child molestation, and male homosexuality.
No star, however big, ever completely escaped the gossip rumor mill— those who had affairs, those who didn't, those who weren't gay, those who were, those who were suspected, and those targeted by a rival studio. Gary Cooper, known in the industry for the size of his penis (huge) and his love of gorgeous women (insatiable), because of his extremely pretty face and enormous box office clout was a favorite target of rival studios, who used to continually hint that he really preferred men to women (ridiculous).†
But the same stories about Grant—who, unlike Cooper, had never been romantically attached to any woman during his New York years and now not in Hollywood—made the heads of Paramount a bit nervous. Their anxiety grew after their biggest female star, Marlene Dietrich, who made a habit of literally taking the measure of her male costars—during the filming of Morocco she raved about the size of Cooper's sex organ and his ability to use it—let it be known among her inner circle, who then informed the gossips, that in the love department, Grant got an “F for fag.” He was, she claimed, “a homosexual.” Grant's angry and unconvincing response was to hint at Dietrich's well-known penchant for women, saying, “If women want to wear men's clothes, let them do men's work.” He didn't mean construction.
The niggling rumors about Grant's sexual preferences, generated by com- peting houses and spread by the gossips, took a giant step into the public's consciousness when Tallulah Bankhead, his costar in Devil and the Deep, who had tried and failed to bed Grant, publicly echoed Dietrich's evaluation of his lack of sexual interest in women. Next to give him the failing grade was his Sinners in the Sun costar Carole Lombard. This landslide of negative evaluations that began to show up in the gossip columns became increasingly difficult for either the studio or the public to ignore.
To counter the running rumors, Paramount arranged for a torrent of sanc- tioned newspaper “interviews” and “inside stories” to be published about Cary Grant—“The Lover,” “The Ultimate Ladies' Man,” “The All Around Athlete”—and flooded magazines with photos of him taken with every leading woman it had under contract. Grant, for his part, seemed willing to play the publicity game, hoping that in the end it would result in his greater value to the studio, and therefore to himself. Another reason he was reluctant to rock any boats was that Neale's Smart Men's Apparel—in which he had invested, hoping it would turn into a nationwide franchise and make him a millionaire—had turned into a bottomless money pit and sucked him dry of nearly every penny he had before it finally went under.
On the other hand, much to Paramount's dismay, the rumors about Grant's standoffishness with women failed to induce him to behave with caution. A few months earlier, in the fall of 1932, Grant and Phil Charig had moved out of their small Sweetzer apartment into a larger, although still cozy house by Hollywood-movie-star standards, on West Live Oak Drive in Griffith Park, nestled just below the giant-lettered hollywoodland sign, a place that afforded them a fabulous view of the night-lighted sky of Tinseltown.* Then, just before Grant began shooting She Done Him Wrong, Charig sat his roommate down and broke the news that h
e was giving up trying to break into the motion-picture-scoring business, had packed his things, and was returning to New York City to work on Broadway.
If Charig thought Grant might try to convince him to change his mind and stay, he was mistaken. Instead, Grant told him he understood, thought he was doing the right thing, wished him well, and asked him how soon he could leave.
One week after Charig's departure, Grant put out a permanent welcome mat for his new roommate: the young, single, handsome, and athletic con- tract player he had met during the filming of Hot Saturday, Randolph Scott.
* Decades later in an interview Cooper gave to actress/journalist Suzy Parker, he confessed his long- standing “hate” for Grant, adding a swipe at his looks and acting style by mentioning that his “man- nerisms always got on my nerves.”
* Schulberg likely was aware that the so-called raids were actually staged by the producers to sell tick- ets, a clever scheme that turned an ordinary show into a box office sensation. It made West the biggest star on Broadway, and that was enough for Schulberg to want to bring her to Paramount.
* A highly fanciful bit of self-promotion ghostwritten by Martin Sommers in 1933 for the News Syndicate Co., which ran it in several installments. It later appeared in book form under the title Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It.
* Another version of the Grant discovery story, from West herself, went like this: “In 1932 I was standing with William LeBaron, the producer of the film I was going to make, She Done Him Wrong. I saw Cary across the studio street. I says, ‘What's this?' I says, ‘If this one can talk, I'll take him.' He says, ‘What part will you use him for?’ I says, ‘The lead, of course.'” West recounted this version of her “discovering” Cary Grant to Richard Gehman in American Weekly, October 21, 1962.