Cary seemed to like it and did just as Dyan had asked: he sang a rowdy old British music-hall song—did it full out, with a lot of gusto and humor but without kidding it. There was great affection in the way he sang it for Dyan and she appeared to be as delighted as we were in the back seat. I felt both awed and strangely touched. It’s one of my fondest memories of Cary Grant—sitting behind him in his Rolls, seeing only the side of his face and the back of his head, and sometimes his eyes in the mirror, as he lustily belted out for us a corny old comedy song.
That was early in 1965. The very next year he retired from the screen, and I directed my first picture-work. Within five years, both of our marriages would be over. His would produce one beautiful daughter, Jennifer, henceforth the main focus and love of his life, and mine would result in two terrific daughters. Both our divorces were long, somewhat loud and enduringly acrimonious. Dyan won custody of Jennifer, as Polly did of our daughters. Around that time I remember Cary saying ruefully to me over the phone: “Women always win in the end, you know, Peter, they always do win in the end. So you might as well just give up and give them what they want, they’re going to get it anyway.” So, although I was in my twenties and Cary in his sixties, we had a great deal in common over the next twenty years as divorced husbands and first-time fathers. Since he was experienced and I was callow, and as my career hit extremes of both highs and lows, he helped me many times with his hard-earned wisdom, his innate kindness.
All of our most intimate, and many not so intimate, conversations were over the phone. Nearly every talk had a similar feline pattern. Cary would usually sound suspicious, distrustful, but after a few minutes he warmed and then opened up more and more. Most of his helpful hints for better living came to me through the receiver. “Ne-ver put your hands to your face!” he would admonish, as a way of avoiding skin eruptions of any kind. One time I told him I’d stopped smoking, and he said, “That’s good—that means you like yourself again!”
Once, before I’d made a picture (and was relatively broke), I called to tell Cary that for a magazine piece I was writing, Polly and I were going to be staying for four days in the Presidential Suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, all expenses paid. He was delighted. “The first thing you must do,” he said, “is kick off your shoes and let a lot of minions pick them up!” Later, when I wanted to quote him in the piece, he said absolutely not, it wouldn’t sound good. In those days, you didn’t say “too elitist,” but that’s what he meant. However, it does also convey a not unnatural human reaction to dreams of luxury. Only someone who had to earn this comfort through hard or intense labor would make that sort of comment. In 1973, I was asked to sit on a dais with a hundred others for a Hollywood celebration and Cary advised, “Never eat while you’re on a dais.” Why? “Because they take photographs all the time, and they’ll get one of you with your mouth open, full of food, and that’s the one they’ll use!”
When Cybill Shepherd and I were getting a lot of bad press, Cary admonished me, “Will you stop telling people you’re in love!? And stop telling them you’re happy!” Why? I asked. “Because they’re not in love and they’re not happy.” But, I protested, I thought all the world loves a lover. “Don’t you believe it,” he answered. “Just remember, Petah, people do not like beautiful people.” The degree and depth of his knowledge about the destructiveness of jealousy and envy was far beyond me. I was starting to catch up when, on a tragic occasion a few years later, the only person not closely involved who called me was Cary Grant. “I’m so sorry, dear Peter, that you have to go through something so terrible.” At that moment, his call meant much more than I could possibly ever tell him.
Once I asked him what sort of a feeling it was all these years seeing his image projected in huge proportions. He didn’t really answer the question. All he did was nod (we were together somewhere for this) and say, “Yeah—you could park a car in my nostril!” Another time, he described an argument he’d got into on a plane in the late 1930s, and the other person had hit him with, “Who do you think you are!?” And Cary smiled cockily, and answered sharply, “I know who I am!” Early in 1972, I called excitedly to tell him that my new picture, a comedy called What’s Up, Doc?, was opening at New York’s famous Radio City Music Hall, in that year still America’s premier showcase for family-oriented quality entertainment. As a kid, I had loved going to the Music Hall with my parents now and then as a special treat, so the venue had special resonance for me. Cary’s response to the news was, “That’s nice—I had twenty-eight pictures play the Hall.” I exclaimed the number, and he added, “Yeah—all my pictures opened at the Hall.”
For me, that opening was most appropriate, since the picture was certainly in the screwball comedy tradition Cary had pioneered in movies with Leo McCarey and Howard Hawks. In fact, I had discussed the whole project with Grant, and asked if he would meet with my male star, Ryan O’Neal, to give him some pointers. Cary agreed—gladly, he said. When Ryan returned, I asked for a report and he told me the only thing Cary had advised was that Ryan “wear silk underpants while shooting the film.” We both laughed, but Ryan wore the silk underpants. And much of my direction was in pointing out to Ryan various takes or line-readings that essentially mimicked or recalled Grant. As Hawks had always said, “When you steal, steal from the best,” and there has never been anyone to equal Cary Grant at romantic comedy, period. So Ryan and I were consciously creating a Grant-like, bespectacled and inhibited professor. I don’t recall Cary ever saying much about the finished film except to congratulate me on its success, and he told Ryan he’d done a good job.
Talking about the Music Hall over the phone that first time, Cary said, “You know what you must do? Put on a raincoat and a pair of sunglasses—oh, well, you won’t need those. Just go down to the Hall and stand in the back, and you listen and you watch while six thousand five hundred people laaugh at something you did! It will do your heart good!” Of course, I went (twice). And—Cary being right again—it became one of the most exhilarating experiences I’ve ever had. Of those twenty-eight pictures of his that played the Hall, how many, I later wondered, had he himself come in raincoat and sunglasses to see, in order to do his own heart good?
Cary Grant, in even thicker glasses than he wore for Bringing Up Baby, does a typically subtle take on Marilyn Monroe’s pose, in Monkey Business (1952), the last of Grant’s five pictures with director Howard Hawks.
In the second half of the seventies, Warren Beatty was preparing to do his version of the Robert Montgomery fantasy Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), calling it Heaven Can Wait (1978), with a new script by Elaine May (and later Buck Henry). In talking to me about directing it, Warren said that Cary Grant was going to play “Mr. Jordan,” the messenger from heaven which Grant’s fellow Englishman Claude Rains had done in the original film. I said to Beatty that if Grant was really doing the picture, I would certainly be interested in directing. Warren assured me: Cary was going to do the movie. I decided to call Grant and ask if this was true. He wasn’t in, so I left a message. The next day, a Saturday, Beatty called to say he was in the neighborhood, could he drop by for a sandwich? Sure, I said, and while we were in the kitchen—Warren about to cut himself a slice of bread—the phone rang and I answered it right there: It was Cary returning my call.
I said, “Oh, hi, Cary,” and proceeded to have the conversation as though I were alone. So I told Grant what Warren had said and he replied, “I’m not going to do that picture. I mean, Warren certainly wants me to do it, and I like Warren, but I’m not going to do that picture!” Having nothing to lose, I said, “Well, it’s not really a very good part, is it?” Cary leapt on this: “No, it’s not a very good part! All those long speeches and none of the jokes. Claude pulled it off in the original picture—he was good, but it’s not really a very good part!” Feeling Beatty’s ire behind me, I pressed on: What if the scenes were rewritten to give Grant’s character the ability to appear and disappear at will? And therefore to just fade on for his line, the
n fade out again? And give all the long expositional speeches to the character of his assistant, letting Grant just come in for the punch lines. “Yeah,” Cary said, “that might work.”
With this tiny wedge in, I went on giving Grant some ideas on how to do the picture but especially how to deal with his character. Knowing he was very concerned about his looks, I suggested that before he’s actually seen his voice be heard in a kind of Godlike manner throughout an entire introductory scene that plays in heaven—with Beatty in the midst of a cloud—hearing Cary’s voice talking to him but not seeing Grant for quite a while. And then, eventually, we begin to see Grant through wisps of fog and cloud, but never see him absolutely in the clear for long, appearing and disappearing at will. Cary exclaimed, “That might work!” a couple of times, so I said why didn’t we rewrite it for him along those lines and see what he thinks then? “No,” Cary said, “because if you rewrite it especially for me and I don’t do it, then where are you?” I assured him my vote would be to redo it for him and take our chances. Cary said, “Well, that’s up to Warren and to you.” He wished me good luck as we hung up.
When I turned back to Beatty, he did not look amused. He was still holding the bread knife as he said, very softly, “Do you know why I don’t stick this knife in your belly and rip it open?” “No,” I said, “why, Warren?” “Because,” he said, “if I were you, I’d have done the same thing.” Cary didn’t do the movie, and neither did I, but Warren had a great success with it (as star, producer and co-director with co-writer Buck Henry), casting James Mason in the Mr. Jordan role. (Ironically, Dyan Cannon had one of her best roles in it.)
Grant wouldn’t do any of the numerous movies proposed to him over the years after 1965. It just wasn’t to be because Cary did not want his aged appearance to alter the essential screen image he had projected since 1932. I once complained, in the late seventies or early eighties, that here we’d known each other all these years and my two daughters had never even met him, and he said, “Well, you don’t want to frighten the poor dears, do you? I mean, they think they’re going to meet Cary Grant and in comes this old man in a wheelchair!”
In those years during which Dyan was making it very difficult for Cary to see his beloved daughter, there were times when I heard a different Grant talking about pictures. On those occasions, he had no use for films at all: just movies—who cares?—doesn’t add up to much. There was contained anger and contempt behind those words, not simply in what he said but in how he spoke. There was almost a sense of betrayal in his tone.
As there also was when Sophia Loren sold to television her best-selling autobiography, which pretty candidly featured her fifties affair with Grant. Cary had fallen pretty hard for Loren on the Spanish location of The Pride and the Passion. Describing their affair (which occurred while she was living with Carlo Ponti), Cary said to me once, “We certainly ripped up a few bull rings in Spain, I can tell you that!” I said, “I knew there was some reason you did The Pride and the Passion.” Cary responded brightly, “That was it, all right.” Immediately after, the two co-starred again in Grant’s own production of Houseboat, in the last scene of which their characters are married on-screen. In the ceremony, Cary is at his most ironic since, in real life, Sophia had just rejected his marriage proposal and agreed to marry Ponti. After the TV-movie was shown, I asked Cary if it wasn’t rather odd to have someone portray him in a film. “Yes,” he said, “it is rather odd, but let her go, poor darling, if she needs the money so bad-ly.” There was more than an edge of wounded bitterness there; in Cary’s life Sophia Loren seems to have been “the gal that got away.”
The only time I ever heard Cary really angry, however, was when Chevy Chase, in a Tom Snyder NBC-TV interview, called Grant “a homo.” Cary told me he wasn’t “going to let him get away with that,” and slapped Chase with a lawsuit. “I don’t have anything against homosexuals,” Cary said to me, “I just don’t happen to be one.” I remember asking Howard Hawks once in the sixties if there was any foundation to the old rumor that Cary was gay. Hawks, who had done five films with Grant by then, just snorted and wrinkled his face as though that was the silliest thing he’d heard all week. “Every time I see him, he’s got a younger girl on his arm.” Hawks shook his head. “No, that’s just ridiculous.” The Chase suit was eventually settled out of court. “Chevy didn’t really mean any harm,” Cary told me, “he was just stupid. He’s apologized. Actually, of course, he did me a favor.” How was that? “I’ve had it all my life,” Grant continued. “Guy takes his girl to a picture and there I am, and the girl says she likes me, so the fellow says, ‘I hear he’s a fag!’ Now he’s just done me a favor, hasn’t he? Because if I ever come to that town, who do you think will be the first one around my hotel to see if it’s true? His girl! He’s done me a favor, you see!”
Whenever I saw Cary, or spoke with him, during his marriage to his last wife, Barbara, he looked and sounded happy and contented. He told me he was a lucky man to have found Barbara. The two or three times I saw them together, they both looked awfully pleased to be with each other. Of course, Jennifer was still the light of his life, but as teenagers will, she needed her independence, and Cary was careful in his fatherly ways, wisely allowing for space when it was required. She was only twenty when he died, but I would guess that Cary’s last years were probably his most satisfying, certainly his most serene.
Not that he wasn’t still suspicious or distrustful at times. He invited me to join him and Barbara at the races one afternoon a couple of years before his death. Since Stanley Donen was also invited and lived only a block or two from me, Cary asked if Stanley could pick me up and bring me out to the track with him? And that’s what happened. On the way back, I remember, Stanley marveled at Cary’s physique, especially considering that Grant always swore the only exercise he ever got was from making love. Donen said as far as he knew, that was true.
It was a pleasant afternoon, very civilized. Surprisingly, there was hardly any film talk, and only casual interest in the ponies. Small bets. Good food. At one point, I was talking to Barbara (who was seated opposite me, Cary beside her) about an ancient calendar-system I’d become fascinated with in a couple of nonfiction books by Robert Graves. Since it was essentially a female-oriented calendar, Barbara was quite interested but I could feel that Cary was getting increasingly distracted from his conversation with Donen and director-producer Mervyn LeRoy, who was nearby. Grant finally turned to me, with some irritation, and said, “What is all that?” I started to explain but could see that he wasn’t at all interested. The impression I got was that Cary thought I was using the calendar as a kind of intellectual come-on with Barbara, and it annoyed him. I dropped the subject.
One time, when his daughter was about nineteen, I remarked to Cary that here we’d known each other all these years, and I’d never met his daughter. He responded immediately, “Yes, and knowing your predilection for younger women, I hope you never do!” (I didn’t until seven years after Cary had died, and I told Jennifer this anecdote. She laughed sadly.)
In 1984, for Cary’s eightieth birthday, Barbara had an audiotape made with all his friends saying, “Happy Birthday, Cary” however they liked. She included me, and asked me also, if I wouldn’t mind, to do my impressions of Hawks and Hitchcock saying, “Happy Birthday.” Since they had both died, and Cary had remembered my impressions as being accurate, she was certain it would please him to be reminded of them. So I did it, and Cary got a big kick out of the whole thing, he told me himself, and thanked me personally for all three greetings. “Come on, do Howard for me,” he said, as he often did. Hawks and Hitchcock were Cary’s favorite directors, and while people were always “doing” Hitchcock, hardly anyone knew what Howard Hawks sounded like. And so I would do Howard, and Cary would laugh, saying loudly, “God, you sound just like Howard!” It was, for both of us, a way to bring him back for a second, a kind of shock of recognition that was pleasant because he and I both were so fond of Hawks, and missed his vo
ice and presence.
The famous kiss sequence: Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in one of Alfred Hitchcock’s five best films, perhaps the most ambiguous love story ever made, Notorious (1946), screenplay by Ben Hecht. It was the second of four pictures Grant and Hitchcock did together.
The following year, I sent Cary for his birthday a two-foot-high styrofoam figure of himself as done by a California florist. It was quite a good likeness of the older Cary, with white hair and black-framed glasses. About a week later, he called me excitedly. “Petah! Barbara and I just got back from Bar-ba-dos and walked into the living room where there are all these pre-sents I haven’t opened yet. And, by God, sitting on the piano is this lit-tle Ca-ry Grant!” He stressed every syllable of the last three words with an absolutely bursting sense of amusement, thanked me profusely, and then asked if I had seen the little fellow before sending him over. No, I said. Cary wondered therefore if I’d like to drop by and see his “lit-tle Ca-ry Grant,” saying those three words exactly the same way.
So a couple of evenings later, I drove to Cary’s white ranch house up on top of the Beverly Hills. There was a very bright full moon as I got out of my car on the vast blacktop parking area in front of the simple, rustically designed and sprawling one-story house. In fact, the moon was so perfectly placed while I walked to the front door that I couldn’t help thinking it was extraordinarily appropriate in its cinematically pictorial effect as I approached Cary Grant’s home—for the first time, I suddenly realized, though I’d known him by then for twenty-four years.
The butler let me in and, entering, I looked down the corridor to the right. Coming slowly toward me were Cary and Barbara, arm in arm, and both beaming. After our hellos, they took me into the living room where the “lit-tle Ca-ry Grant” (as he called him yet again) was still perched on the piano, and did indeed look like Cary, in comic-strip terms, dressed in a tux. He posed with it briefly, doing a take for my benefit. His eyes were brimming with joy. There were so many unwrapped presents around the room that it looked like Christmas wasn’t over, though it was late in January or early in February.
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