Cary Grant: Dark Angel

by Geoffrey Wansell

  To the fan magazines, Cary and Randy were the epitome of Hollywood’s new young men, and Paramount did everything they could to polish that image. Pictures of them together at the dinner table, dressed in swimming trunks on the diving board of their pool, at boxing matches on Friday nights, were circulated by the studio, along with Carole Lombard’s description of their housekeeping arrangements in the house she christened ‘Bachelors’ Hall’: ‘Cary opened the bills, Randy wrote the checks, and if Cary could talk someone out of a stamp he posted them.’ In the late summer of 1932 Silver Screen took up the refrain: ‘Cary is the gay, impetuous one. Randy is serious, cautious. Cary is temperamental in the sense of being very intense. Randy is calm and quiet.’

  Naturally enough, Paramount wanted Cary and Randy in a picture together and decided they should star opposite one another in Hot Saturday, a film adaptation of Harvey Ferguson’s best-selling novel. Grant was to be a rich playboy, just as he had been in Blonde Venus, while Scott was to play the leading lady’s childhood sweetheart who calls off their marriage at the last moment because he believes she has been unfaithful. The film could have been just another in the Paramount pipeline, but Cary Grant had learnt from Dietrich and von Sternberg. This time, he watched carefully where the lights were being set up — as he had seen Dietrich do — and he stopped ‘acting’ ostentatiously, as von Sternberg had told him to. Instead, he allowed the camera to discover him. Variety said his performance exercised ‘extreme restraint’. It was a technique he was to refine in the years to come.

  GRANT’S CLOSEST FRIEND IN HOLLYWOOD, RANDOLPH SCOTT, IN THE HOUSE THE TWO MEN SHARED. WITH BIRTHDAYS JUST FIVE DAYS APART, THEY STARRED TOGETHER IN HOT SATURDAY WITH NANCY CARROLL IN 1932 (ABOVE).

  As soon as Hot Saturday was finished, Paramount wanted Grant to go back to work, in a film version of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, co-starring B.P. Schulberg’s mistress, Sylvia Sidney. Grant baulked. He did not think he could sing all that well. Was there no one else they could use? Schulberg insisted, and the filming went ahead in the late autumn. As it turned out, he had been right to resist. ‘He sings one song, and it ain’t so hot,’ Variety commented when the film was released on 30 December. But the bad reviews hardly mattered. Four weeks later, at the end of January 1933, Cary Grant took his first real steps along the Hollywood streetcar, making his eighth film for Paramount, She Done Him Wrong, opposite the remarkable Mae West.

  ‘WHY DON’T YOU COME UP SOMETIME AND SEE ME?’ MAE WEST’S FAMOUS INVITATION IN SHE DONE HIM WRONG HELPED GRANT’S SALARY RISE TO $1,000 A WEEK IN 1933.

  West was Broadway’s biggest and most voluptuous star, ‘buxom, blonde, fat, fair and I don’t know how near forty’, in the words of the columnist Louella Parsons. In a string of stage shows she had made sex respectable by ‘taking it out in the open and laughing at it’, and Adolph Zukor had guaranteed her $5,000 a week for ten weeks in 1932 as a result. ‘Broadway was in real trouble,’ she wrote later. ‘Maybe, I decided, I’d take a fling at Hollywood.’ She Done Him Wrong with Cary Grant was her first film, and her first words on the screen made her a star. She despatched an awestruck hat-check girl who commented, ‘Goodness, what beautiful diamonds’ with a reply that she had written herself: ‘Goodness had nothing to do with it.’

  Mae West would claim later that she ‘discovered’ Cary Grant on the Paramount lot, telling her producer when she spotted him, ‘If that man can talk, I want him for my co-star.’ But Grant disputed the story, insisting that it had been the director, Lowell Sherman, who chose him, after seeing his performance in Blonde Venus. But West gave Grant the opportunity to add another dimension to his appeal. She helped to make him the man every woman in the cinema audience longed to seduce, allowing him to refine still further his half-surprised, half-knowing reaction, and she used his vaudeville timing to unique effect. For, as well as being Mae West’s leading man, Grant became her straight man. ‘Haven’t you ever met a man who can make you happy?’ he asked her. ‘Sure, lots of times,’ came the reply.

  She Done Him Wrong passed into Hollywood folklore for its dialogue. ‘You know, I...I always did like a man in uniform, and that one fits grand,’ West told Grant in his role as the Hawk, a man who is apparently a Salvation Army captain but is actually a government agent. ‘Why don’t you come up sometime and see me? I’m home every evening.’ Then, with just a moment’s pause, ‘Come up. I’ll tell your fortune. Aw, you can be had.’ Grant’s half-raised eyebrow proved forever that he was capable of far more than the straightforward parts he had so far been given by Paramount.

  The film took more than $2 million at the American box-office, and helped to pull Paramount out of a dangerous slump. Zukor had been forced to consider a merger with MGM, as well as the sale of Paramount’s 1,700 cinemas across the United States, but Mae West and She Done Him Wrong meant that he could shelve the plan. Three months later he agreed to pay her $300,000 for her next film, and $100,000 for the screenplay. Somehow he seemed to forget that her co-star was Cary Grant, who was being paid just $750 a week. The memory of Paramount’s reaction to the success of She Done Him Wrong was to rankle with Grant for years. He felt that the studio had ignored his contribution to the picture, which in turn convinced him that his future lay as a freelance, free to make whatever : deals he could with whoever was prepared to pay his price, free to choose the kind of films he wanted to make.

  But to Paramount he was still merely a contract player. To prove it, just as She Done Him Wrong started to draw crowds across the country and he completed another melodrama with Nancy Carroll called Woman Accused, the studio put him into a John Monk Saunders flying story, The Eagle and the Hawk, opposite Fredric March. Grant loathed the part, not least because Gary Cooper had turned it down, but he had no choice. In the event, Variety proved he was right, calling the film ‘strictly a formula story’. But no sooner had Grant stepped out of his Royal Flying Corps uniform than the studio had him posing as a confidence trickster opposite Benita Hume in Gambling Ship. There was nothing he could do to escape.

  To add insult to injury, Paramount then insisted that Cary Grant appear in Mae West’s second film, I’m No Angel, this time as a rich socialite whom she sues for breach of promise when he refuses to marry her. Though he was now earning $1,000 a week, it infuriated him. He believed he deserved better. With fewer of the double entendres that distinguished She Done Him Wrong, and with West herself ‘minus the bustle and corsets’, in Variety’s words, ‘something was missing’. Nevertheless, when it was released in October 1933, I’m No Angel still earned Paramount $2 million at the American box-office.

  Off the set, Cary Grant meticulously protected the image Hollywood had given him. He might argue in private with Paramount about the films he was asked to make, but he knew what was required of a star in the making. He sunbathed whenever he could to keep a tan, avoided being photographed smoking (although he smoked thirty or forty cigarettes a day), did not wear a hat (because Schulberg felt it did not suit him) and chose whom to be seen with in public with considerable care. One young woman he was seen with increasingly in the spring of 1933 was Virginia Cherrill, a striking blonde from Chicago. Cherrill had become a star just two years before, playing the blind flower girl in Chaplin’s silent masterpiece City Lights. She was effervescent, uninhibited and completely confident in herself; Louella Parsons had named her ‘Hollywood’s greatest beauty’. Grant confessed later, ‘I fell in love with her the moment I saw her.’

  RIGHT: WITH NOEL COWARD AND MAE WEST WHILE SHOOTING I’M NO ANGEL IN 1933.

  BELOW: BACK IN UNIFORM, OPPOSITE FREDRIC MARCH IN THE EAGLE AND THE HAWK.

  THE ACTRESS VIRGINIA: CHERRILL BECAME THE FIRST MRS CARY GRANT IN: FEBRUARY 1934 IN LONDON, SHORTLY AFTER THIS HOLIDAY TOGETHER IN PALM SPRINGS.

  In the late summer of 1933 Cary Grant and Virginia Cherrill became an item in the Hollywood gossip columns, just as he started work on Paramount’s Christmas production. Zukor had decided that the studio needed to make a major family film in the wake
of its success with Mae West, and had settled on a new version of Alice in Wonderland. Gary Cooper was to be the White Knight, W.C. Fields Humpty Dumpty, Jack Oakie Tweedledum and Zukor wanted Bing Crosby to play the Mock Turtle and sing Lewis Carroll’s song about beautiful soup. But Crosby backed out and Zukor cast an unenthusiastic Cary Grant in his place. When the film opened in New York just before Christmas, The New York Times called his ‘lachrymose Mock Turtle...highly amusing’.

  As soon as Alice in Wonderland had finished shooting, however, Cary Grant and Virginia Cherrill left Hollywood for England. The crowd of reporters who saw them off thought they were going to get married, but there was another, more significant reason for Grant’s first journey across the Atlantic for fourteen years. He was going to see his mother. Elias Leach, who now lived with another woman, Mabel Johnson, with whom he had a son Eric, had finally written to his son to explain exactly what had happened to Elsie. She was still in the Bristol mental institution to which Leach had sent her almost twenty years before; he suggested that his son might visit her. Cary Grant did not want to make the journey alone.

  SOMEWHAT TO HER SURPRISE, WHEN THE NEW MRS CARY GRANT MOVED INTO HER HUSBAND’S HOUSE IN HOLLYWOOD, RANDOLPH SCOTT SEEMED IN NO HURRY TO MOVE OUT.

  Cary Grant never talked about what happened when he met his mother again after two decades. It was one of the secrets he kept throughout his life, presumably a memory so painful that he could never bring himself to discuss it. But their relationship seemed to take up almost exactly where it had left off. Archie Leach, the boy who had become Cary Grant, still longed for his mother’s approval and was still frightened of her temper. Elsie Leach still seemed determined to give her son the impression that she alone knew best. On 9 February 1934, the day after his mother’s fifty-seventh birthday, Cary Grant married Virginia Cherrill at Caxton Hall registry office in London. It was her second marriage, but his first. ‘We’re both due back in California for work on pictures,’ he told the reporters waiting outside, ‘so our honeymoon will be short.’ It was. They were back in Hollywood within ten days, and while her new husband started work again for Paramount the first Mrs Grant moved her belongings into his house on West Live Oak Drive. To her surprise, Randolph Scott did not seem to intend to move out.

  Grant’s new film, Thirty Day Princess, in which he was again to star opposite Sylvia Sidney, was no better than many of the others he had been offered. A feeble story of a princess on a goodwill mission to the United States who gets the mumps and has to be replaced by an actress who looks exactly like her (Sidney played both parts), it called for Grant to be a millionaire newspaper publisher. Once again, he was required to do little more than spend most of his time wearing white tie and tails. When the film was released in May, Esquire called it ‘a complete dud’. And an infuriated Cary Grant demanded that he be allowed to choose his own roles. Paramount retaliated by lending him to United Artists.

  ALWAYS A PAINSTAKING PROFESSIONAL ON THE SET: HERE EXAMINING TESTS FOR B.P.SCHULBERG’S ROMANTIC COMEDY KISS AND MAKE UP IN 1934.

  Grant might have been better advised to keep quiet, because the film he made for United Artists, Born to Be Bad, with Loretta Young, also demanded that he spend most of his time in white tie and tails, this time as the president of a large company who is sued for knocking down a boy in a road accident. Brutally edited at the last minute, it ended up being what The New York Times called ‘a hopelessly unintelligent hodgepodge’. To make matters worse, Variety described Grant’s performance as ‘colorless’ and ‘meaningless’. It was to become another of the handful of films that Grant wished he had never made.

  Back at Paramount, Schulberg put him straight into a light romantic comedy, Kiss and Make Up, as a beautician who does not realize his plainish secretary, played by Helen Mack, is in love with him until she threatens to elope with someone else. The New York Times dismissed it as ‘a first-class lingerie bazaar and a third- class entertainment’. Undeterred, the studio made Grant the lead in another feeble story, this time as a philandering Parisian in Ladies Should Listen, opposite Frances Drake. That too was a flop, although one critic complimented him on his ‘delightful flair for comedy’.

  In the four months since his return from England, Cary Grant had made four films and four flops. In despair, he begged to be loaned out to MGM, who were planning a film based on a new book about the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789. Irving Thalberg had specifically asked him whether he would consider playing one of the main supporting roles, alongside Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh, and he desperately wanted to do it. It would give him an opportunity to prove he could do more than wear a white tie and tails. But Adolph Zukor was adamant. He would do what Paramount wanted, when they wanted and with whom they wanted: nothing else. A disappointed Thalberg gave the role to Franchot Tone.

  At home in West Live Oak Drive, Cary Grant was heartbroken. But Paramount’s decision was not the only reason. His marriage to Virginia Cherrill, barely seven months old, was turning out to be a disaster. In particular, he had become insanely jealous if she paid any attention to another man. His fear of being deserted by a woman, in the wake of his mother’s reappearance in his life, had taken its toll. If they went to one of William Randolph Hearst’s parties, for example, he would insist that his wife spoke to no one except him. When he wasn’t working he preferred them to spend their time at home, so that he could go through his press cuttings. Even that could drive him into a rage, however, when he came across a bad review or saw Gary Cooper being praised. In the middle of September 1934, Virginia went back to live with her mother, claiming that her husband was given to ‘murderous rages’.

  Grant tried to dismiss his wife’s departure as nothing more than a ‘quarrel, such as any married pair in Hollywood might have’. But by the beginning of October he was drinking heavily, and in the early hours of the 5th he was discovered unconscious with a bottle of pills on the bedside table. An ambulance was called and Grant was taken to hospital, but no traces of poison were found in his stomach. When he finally recovered consciousness he tried to pass the events off as ‘a prank’. But some time later he admitted, ‘I had been drinking most of the day before, and all that day.... You know what whisky does when you drink it all by yourself. It makes you very sad. I began calling people. I know I called Virginia.... The next thing I knew they were carting me off to the hospital.’

  Paramount despatched a chastened Grant to work on Enter Madam, alongside the opera star Elissa Landi. It was the story of an opera singer’s stormy marriage, complete with arias. This time Grant was in both black tie and white tie, tuxedo and tails. He was certain the film would be another flop, and he was right. Now the studio put him into Wings in the Dark, opposite Myrna Loy, straight from her success as Nora Charles in The Thin Man. This time he played a pilot attempting to perfect instrument flying who is blinded in an accident and befriended by the stunt-flying Loy. When the film opened in February 1935, Variety said his performance ‘topped all his past work’.

  THE STUDIO LIKED ITS LEADING MEN TO BE SEEN IN THE COMPANY OF BEAUTIFUL WOMEN. HERE GRANT IS NEXT TO LILI DAMITA, WITH RUBY KEELER AND TOBY WING BEYOND.

  PARAMOUNT KEPT GRANT WORKING RELENTLESSLY FOR FOUR YEARS, THIS TIME AS THE BLINDED PILOT IN WINGS IN THE DARK IN 1935.

  But the good reviews for his acting were overshadowed by his wife’s reviews of his performance as a husband. In December 1934 Virginia Cherrill told a Los Angeles court that Grant ‘drank excessively, choked and beat her, and threatened to kill her’. She went on to ask for substantial maintenance payments from the $1,000 a week her husband was receiving from Paramount. The studio was horrified. Their leading men could not afford publicity like that. Grant settled his wife’s financial demands out of court, and in January 1935 slipped out of Hollywood for another trip to England. He was still away when Virginia returned to court for the final divorce hearing in March, describing him as ‘sullen, morose and quarrelsome in front of guests’. Their marriage had
lasted just thirteen months.

  When he got back to California, Paramount put him in uniform, as a British officer in The Last Outpost, with Claude Rains. Graham Greene was later to describe the film in the Spectator as ‘a curious mixture. Half of it is remarkably good and half of it quite abysmally bad’, but that did nothing to improve Cary Grant’s relations with Paramount. He was convinced they would never give him anything of any real value. In the end, it was not Zukor or Schulberg but his friend Howard Hughes who offered him a part that allowed him to demonstrate just how good a performer he could be.

  Since his own divorce in 1929, Hughes had been involved with a series of beautiful young actresses, but in the past year had become steadily more and more attracted to the angular, unconventional and independently minded Katharine Hepburn, who had won an Oscar in 1933 for her performance in Morning Glory. Both suspicious of strangers and reluctant to waste time on Hollywood’s extravagant parties, Hughes and Hepburn shared a passion for aeroplanes. Naturally, Hughes had talked to Hepburn about his friend Cary Grant, and she in turn had mentioned his name to the director of her next project, George Cukor, who was working at RKO. Hepburn wanted to make a film version of Compton Mackenzie’s novel, The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett, which had been inspired partly by the Crippen murder case. Focusing on the escape from France to England of an embezzler who teams up with a Cockney conman called Jimmy Monkley, the story required Hepburn, as the embezzler’s daughter, to spend most of her time wearing a young man’s clothes to help them avoid detection. She suggested that Cary Grant should play Monkley. Cukor liked him and recommended him to Pandro Berman, who was to produce the picture for RKO. ‘He had no chance at Paramount,’ Berman said afterwards. ‘He was a failure there. I gave him the part because I’d seen him do things which were excellent, and Hepburn wanted him too.’