With Rita Hayworth as “Ju-dy, Ju-dy, Ju-dy” (though Grant never actually says that in the movie) for Howard Hawks’ moody and exciting flying picture Only Angels Have Wings (1939). Though he was a star in romantic comedies, this was Grant’s first dramatic success and established him securely among the top leading men in pictures. One of the (rarely acknowledged) great American films.
Forming the arch of his own career, Cary made just a few real clinkers (like The Howards of Virginia or The Pride and the Passion, both unfortunate costume pictures), and only rarely did conventionally glossy Hollywood product (like playing Cole Porter in Night and Day, having been Porter’s own choice). He could be equally believable and vivid as the crooked gambler/con man in the underrated crime romance Mr. Lucky, or as the cockney drifter in Clifford Odets’ poetic and touching family drama, None But the Lonely Heart, for which Grant received the second of his two Oscar nominations. Grant and writer-director Odets remained close friends, despite the film’s lack of financial success, and it was through Odets that seventeen years later I would meet the actor.
Generally, Cary Grant’s career was divided between films he did for directors he admired, like Hitchcock, Hawks or McCarey, and family/romantic comedies he chose or, later, initiated (like The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, Room for One More, Houseboat, That Touch of Mink, or Father Goose). During World War II, he was as convincing as ever in naval uniform as the commander of a submarine for Destination Tokyo, agreeing to allow writer Delmer Daves to direct his first of numerous pictures. Grant did the same for Richard Brooks, in whose first directorial effort, Crisis, Grant is extraordinarily believable as a brain surgeon: watch him in the operation scenes and you will believe he has done it a thousand times. Some years later, Grant was also the first superstar-producer to hire Blake Edwards—a troubled relationship that produced the biggest box-office hit of Cary’s career, Operation Petticoat, a service comedy with Grant again commanding a submarine.
Among other highlights: Frank Capra’s adaptation of the hit Broadway farce Arsenic and Old Lace, a picture Cary always disliked, saying his performance was over the top, but the film remains a classic; arguably Hitchcock’s best films, the dark love story Notorious with Ingrid Bergman and the quintessential chase saga North by Northwest with Eva Marie Saint, not to mention the entertaining, glamorous To Catch a Thief with Grace Kelly; for Hawks, there was the hilarious I Was a Male War Bride with Ann Sheridan, and the less successful Monkey Business with Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe, though his scenes with Marilyn are vintage stuff; with Stanley Donen directing, Grant produced four comedies—two misfires and two both likeable and popular—Indiscreet, reunited with Ingrid Bergman, and Charade with Audrey Hepburn, which was released two years after I first met him.
That encounter happened in early January 1961, on my maiden visit to Hollywood. The previous season, I had revived Odets’ Hollywood drama, The Big Knife, and had corresponded with the playwright but not met him. Clifford would later tell me that the lead character in The Big Knife—the troubled and doomed movie star—had, in fact, been conceived by Odets with Cary Grant in mind. I was preparing to do an article on my impressions of Hollywood, and anxious to meet Odets and also as many other picture professionals as possible. I phoned him a couple of weeks before to confirm my arrival. I was a little nervous as I’d never been in a plane before. Clifford said he was at that moment sitting with a person who’d flown all over the world his whole life and never had a problem—Cary Grant. I could vaguely hear a man’s voice in the background, and then Odets said, “Cary says to be sure and take a jet plane, not a propeller-driven one; he says the jet engines are simpler. “It was the first, but by no means the last, piece of advice I got from Grant, and not the last I heeded, either.
Odets arranged a meeting for me at Grant’s bungalow-office on the Universal lot. It was an odd experience, walking into an office and confronting a man who didn’t know me but whom I’d known for as long as I could remember. He’d just come out of a long story conference, his hair was messy, he hadn’t shaved for a day or so, and his dark slacks and white shirt looked as though he’d slept in them. We talked about Clifford for a while, and I don’t remember a word of what was said. My mind was flooded with images from all the Cary Grant movies I’d seen—and I had this uncanny desire to be terribly honest and open with the man, at the same time realizing this might easily put him off. It’s a feeling I’ve had with several movie stars I’ve met—knowing them so much better than they could ever know me—and finding it impossible to satisfactorily bridge the gap. All I could think about was how like his movie self he was: the same charm, humor, the totally uncalculated yet unmistakable air of mystery. I kept thinking, He’s just like Cary Grant.
It wasn’t his celebrity that impressed me; I can think of several stars who wouldn’t have affected me one way or another, but Grant has always been among my two or three favorite actors, and certainly one of a handful of the great movie personalities. Because Cary Grant became synonymous with a certain character, a kind of cockney directness combined with impeccable taste and a detached and subtle wit. What made him so desirable as a player and so inimitable (and there’ve been many counterfeits through the years) was a striking mixture of farceur’s talents and matinee idol’s looks. He became such an accomplished master at comedy, both high and low, that his dramatic talents have been generally overlooked. Each of the great directors he worked with brought out different facets of Grant’s fascinating personality; I asked several of them about certain particularly delightful moments in their Grant films, often getting the same reply: “That was Cary’s.” Hitchcock, whose (not entirely justified) reputation is of a director who cares little for actors, told me, “One doesn’t direct Cary Grant, one just puts him in front of a camera….”
I remember how complimentary and warm Grant had been about Hitchcock that first time I met him: “Oh, Hitch is great!” he had said. “You walk on his set for a scene and the set is everything you thought it would be, just as you envisioned it—never anything out of place or wrong.” He smiled. “And he’s so patient. I’ll never forget when we were shooting Notorious with Ingrid. In the morning we started a scene that was quite difficult because, you see, Ingrid had to say some of her lines a certain way so that I could imitate her readings. Well, anyway, we started,” he went on, leaning forward, acting out the situation, “and Ingrid just couldn’t get it. We went over and over the scene and she was in some sort of daze. You know, she just wasn’t there! But Hitch didn’t say anything. He just sat there next to the camera, pulling on his cigar.” Cary laughed slightly at the memory. “Finally around eleven o’clock, I began to see in Ingrid’s eyes that she was starting to come around. And for the first time all morning, the lines were coming out right. And just then Hitch said, ‘Cut.’” Grant stopped and did a fast downward take to the left, as though looking amazed at Hitchcock, yet leaning his body backward slightly as he’d done in a score of films. “And I thought,” he said, looking back at me, “what on earth is he stopping for now? Hitch just sat and looked up at Ingrid and said, quietly, ‘Good morning, Ingrid.’” Grant’s eyes were wet with amusement as he broke up at the recollection.
The perfect leading man or zany, the most admirable dandy, the most charming rogue: except perhaps in his earliest years at Paramount, he was never allowed to die at the end of a film and with good reason—who would believe it? Cary was indestructible. Yet, by 1965, he had never won an Academy Award. That year, accepting the Oscar for co-writing a Grant vehicle called Father Goose, Peter Stone was perfectly succinct: “My thanks to Cary Grant,” he said, “who keeps winning these things for other people.” Five years later, when the Academy finally gave him an honorary award for his whole career (it was the evening’s highlight and one of the rare TV appearances he made), Grant gave an especially gracious and spirited thank-you speech, prominently mentioning most of the best directors he had worked with. It was quite a list, and no accid
ent either, but rather a monument to his good taste as well as his ability—since he worked with more good directors than any other star in pictures.
Grant didn’t make a film after 1966, when he did Walk, Don’t Run, in which he let Jim Hutton and Samantha Eggar have the love interest, while he played their matchmaker, a role that had been done originally by (heavyset aging English character man) Charles Coburn in the first version of that story, The More the Merrier, directed by George Stevens. The remake was not an unlikeable movie, but audiences didn’t care to see Grant in that sort of part. There is a moment in the movie when Cary gives Samantha a glass of champagne and a kiss on the hand that must have made everyone yearn to see him go further—it was certainly the most romantic bit in the picture. But Cary had decided he was too old to play opposite young women and, in fact, I would guess the relative failure of Walk, Don’t Run prompted his unannounced exit from the movies. If people wanted him only as a figure of romance and he felt he was just too old, the only thing to do was quit. No one ever convinced him he was wrong. I remember Howard Hawks complaining to me in the early sixties that Cary wouldn’t do the comedy Man’s Favorite Sport?, which Howard had conceived and written for him. I asked why, and Hawks answered, “Because he doesn’t wanna be surrounded by all those young women. ‘Holy smoke,’ I said to him, ‘how old was that girl I saw you with last week?!’” That she was in her early twenties wasn’t the point for Cary—life was not the movies. Pushing sixty, Grant was fearful of looking like a dirty old man.
When I told Cary that I’d love to get him into a movie again, he answered jokingly that if there were a role for an old fellow in a wheelchair, maybe he’d do it. No matter that he looked only about fifty years old then, and that most women I knew (young or old) became slightly moony at the mention of his name. Nothing to be done—he was off in the international business world and fascinated by it, he claimed. Perhaps he was happy, but the movies lost someone quite irreplaceable. Too soon. He could argue that he had done everything in pictures, and of course he had, but I always wished he hadn’t stopped.
When an Esquire column I did on him appeared in 1972, Cary called me and said, “I want you to read that at my funeral! It’s a eulogy!” He thanked me profusely and then, nearly ten years later, called to ask a favor regarding it. He was being feted by the Kennedy Honors (in 1981), and Garson Kanin had been asked by the committee to write the Grant tribute for the official published commemorative program, but Cary was very unhappy with the result. “You know Gar,” he said ruefully, “the smiler with a knife.” No doubt I had not been the only one over the years to whom Kanin had told of the essential origins of Grant’s comic persona. But, of course, I’m sure Gar knew that Leo McCarey could have given exactly the same material and business to another actor and the fires would not have started; because it was Cary Grant doing the stuff and making it work. “Anyway,” Cary was asking, “you remember that lovely piece you did in Esquire some years back? I wonder if you would allow the Kennedy Honors to reprint it?” I said that I’d be more than honored, and would rewrite the article somewhat to fit the occasion. He said he was thrilled and would supply tickets to the gala night if I wanted to go. I did and got three tickets.
The evening provided for me another enduring Cary Grant image. All the honorees for the Kennedys are always seated in the first balcony, so that people in the orchestra have to turn around in their seats and look up in order to see reactions from them during the staged festivities. Before these had begun, I was gazing up at Cary when yet another President, Ronald Reagan, arrived, the last one in. The honorees all shook hands but Grant was first, and as Reagan enthusiastically grasped Cary’s hand, it appeared to me from that distance like a long shot in a late-fifties movie. The beloved President Grant on the left welcomes the boyishly tardy Vice President Reagan. Certainly no movie would have ever cast it the other way around. Only life could be that square.
After Grant and I first met, he would make just four more pictures before his retirement. I happened to be in L.A. on a magazine job so he invited me to a private screening of the first of those, That Touch of Mink (1962), and an error in show-business etiquette on my part that night is probably one of the main reasons why I wasn’t invited to any of the others. (I was only twenty-two, but should have known better.)
It was a small gathering in one of the more intimate projection rooms at Universal. Cary sat right in front of me holding hands throughout with his fiancée—and soon to be fourth wife—Dyan Cannon. On the other side of the aisle, also holding hands, were Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. A couple of days later, I typed a note about the picture for my personal movie file (a 4 × 6 index card on every picture I saw, 1952–70) that accurately encapsulates my first reaction to the movie forty years ago: “Poor. Cary Grant’s superb comic talents and charm are wasted in this tasteless, silly little sex comedy with Doris Day. Most memorable aspect: sitting behind Mr. G. at screening in Universal City. Least favorite aspect: he produced it.”
I should have borne that last fact in my head as I walked up to thank him for inviting me and comment on the picture. I knew he hadn’t heard me laugh much but I lied and said it was funny and that I’d enjoyed it. Then I made the mistake. I jokingly said that there was only one little unimportant factual error in the picture: I had just been getting unemployment insurance in New York myself, and the way Doris Day’s character got hers in the picture was not the way it worked. Grant became very agitated. “No, no! We did a lotta research on that, and it is exactly the way it’s done.” I laughed slightly and didn’t press the point. Grant repeated that the whole issue had been carefully researched and that I was mistaken. I said it didn’t matter really, and moved away. He even called after me that there had been “much research” done.
Less than a year later, I heard Cary was passing through New York and I called him at his hotel. “You didn’t like my picture!” he said almost immediately. I lied fervently, but he would have none of it. “No,” he said, “you didn’t like my picture. But that’s all right, it’s been quite profitable and a lotta people enjoyed it. But I know you didn’t like it!” By messenger, I sent over the recently published Museum of Modern Art monographs I’d done on Hawks and Hitchcock, in both of which he was discussed fondly by the directors, and was featured in numerous photos. He called to thank me for them, and marvel on the extent of both men’s work. That Touch of Mink was never mentioned again. Though I remember his somewhat irritable exasperation when he said, referring to me, “The man doesn’t have a clue …,” regarding how much Grant did as producer of his films. Because, of course, he was right, I didn’t. It turns out he was extremely hands-on, much to Blake Edwards’ regret, for example, though that picture (Operation Petticoat) did make Edwards virtually overnight a bankable director, thanks to which he got Breakfast at Tiffany’s, another smash and one of his signature films.
On a later visit to New York, Cary was involved in an auto accident. He was being driven to Kennedy airport in a limousine, and there was a collision. It made all the papers, but he wasn’t badly hurt, only some bruises and a few cuts. When I called him, he told me: “If I’d been wearing my seatbelt, I wouldn’t have been even slightly injured! Let that be a lesson for you—always wear your seatbelt—even in a limousine!” Since that day, every single time I’ve hesitated about putting on a seatbelt, I invariably recall his admonition and always put it on: if an accident can happen in a limousine to Cary Grant, no one is safe anywhere.
After moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, my then wife Polly Platt and I were invited one time by Cary to join him and his (by then) wife Dyan, for a baseball game: the Dodgers, with the legendary Sandy Koufax pitching. Polly had first met Grant when I was sent to Hollywood for a couple of writing assignments in 1962 and she accompanied me. I brought her to his Universal office; he took a call just as we were being seated. While we waited, I leaned over and asked if she was nervous. She was terrified, she said. Just then Cary hung up and looked at us over his lef
t hand, as he said, very dramatically, “What are you two wiseacres whispering about?” Polly stammered something, but he was gracious and disarming as always. He took one look at my jacket and said, “Brooks Brothers?” I said yes, surprised. “Right off the rack, isn’t it?” I nodded. “Yeah, I do the same thing. Fits perfectly.” (This reminded me that I had recognized the shirt he puts on in the hospital scene in North by Northwest as being from Brooks Brothers.)
Now Polly and I were parking our car on the Universal lot, as Cary had asked. He then picked us up in his Rolls-Royce and, Dyan at his side, he drove us to Dodger Stadium and back to our car that afternoon. And he bought us all hot dogs. Neither Polly nor I were fanatic baseball fans as both Cary and Dyan seemed to be—they had a very informed commentary going throughout the game—making it all the more fun for us, even if we had no idea what they were talking about.
Dyan Cannon was Cary’s penultimate wife—after actress Virginia Cherrill in 1934–35 (she was Chaplin’s poignant leading lady in City Lights); heiress Barbara Hutton, also in the thirties; and the quirky and likeable actress Betsy Drake in the late forties and fifties. I saw Cary and Dyan together only twice really, but I somehow always felt Cary was more in love with her than she was with him. He seemed to dote on her and do whatever she asked, and she appeared to enjoy showing him off: “Sing ’em that song, Archie!” she called out on the way back from the game. In his earliest theatrical days, as a London stilt-walker and in British music halls, Archie Leach had been his name; the “Cary” came from one of his first stage roles, and the “Grant” he just picked out. (In Hawks’ His Girl Friday, there’s an inside reference to this when Grant’s character says to someone on the phone: “Say, the last person who called me that was Archie Leach, the day before they hanged him!”) Cary’s aged mother, who had never left Bristol—she was still alive as we rode back from that baseball game, and lived to be ninety-six—no doubt had once called him Archie, too.
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