Cary Grant: Dark Angel

by Geoffrey Wansell

  An immensely grateful Cary Grant said afterwards, ‘For once they didn’t see me as a pleasant young man with black hair, white teeth and a heart of gold.... It permitted me to play a character I knew.’ Filming began in the summer of 1935, after Edmund Gwenn had been hired to play the embezzler. Grant relished the role of the artful Monkley. As Hepburn herself suggested afterwards, ‘George Cukor brought the Archie Leach out in Cary Grant.’ Cukor agreed: ‘It was the first time he began to feel that an audience could like him. He had an awfully good part, and he suddenly felt the ground firm under his feet.’ When Sylvia Scarlett opened at the Radio City Music Hall in New York in January 1936, the critics noticed the change at once. ‘Cary Grant...virtually steals the picture,’ claimed Variety, and Time was of the same mind: his ‘superb depiction of the Cockney’ almost ‘steals the show’. The New York Times noted loftily, ‘Cary Grant, whose previous work has too often been that of a charm merchant, turns actor in the role of the unpleasant Cockney and is surprisingly good at it.’

  ONE OF HOLLYWOOD’S ARISTOCRATS, COUNTESS DOROTHY DI FRASSO, DANCES WITH GRANT AT HER ‘RED AND WHITE BALL’ IN 1936. INVITED TO WEAR RED AND WHITE, THE GUESTS LATER CHANGED INTO CREPE PAPÊR COSTUMES.

  ‘CHARM MERCHANT’ CARY GRANT TURNS ACTOR AS A COCKNEY CONMAN FOR GEORGE CUKOR AND RKO IN SYLVIA SCARLETT IN 1936, THE FIRST OF HIS FOUR FILMS WITH KATHARINE HEPBURN.

  But Cary Grant was not in America to bask in his first important critical success. By the time Sylvia Scarlett opened he was already shooting again, though not for Paramount. The studio had agreed that he could go to England to make a sound version of The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss, the story of a man who inherits £2 million, but decides to work for a year to prove he can support himself. His co-star was Mary Brien, a former beauty queen who had become a star in 1924 as Wendy in the first film version of Peter Pan. One reason Grant had accepted the role was that it would allow him to see his father, who had been taken ill. In fact, it was the last time Grant would see him alive. Elias Leach died on 2 December 1935 at the age of sixty-two, from what the death certificate called ‘acute septicaemia’, but what his son later called ‘a slow breaking heart, brought about by an inability to alter the circumstances of his life’. Cary Grant was to keep his father’s pocket watch for the rest of his own life.

  After the funeral, he brought his mother to London with him, while he went back to work. In the evenings he would try to get to know the tiny, upright woman who turned her head away when he bent down to kiss her, but it was an almost impossible task. Elsie Leach refused to leave the private world that had become her own. She and her son were strangers. When the filming was finished, Grant settled her into a small house in Bristol near her surviving brothers, and set off for California again. He was to support her for the rest of her life, but he would never truly come to know her.

  Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Randolph Scott had decided to marry the heiress Mariana du Pont, who was more than twenty years older than he was. But he was determined that his life in California was not going to be affected. She was to remain in her native Virginia, while he was not intending to leave West Live Oak Drive and Cary Grant. As Louella Parsons remarked some years later, after the couple had divorced, ‘Scott’s marriage to the du Pont heiress was always a mystery.’ It certainly did not affect his friendship with Cary Grant — quite the opposite. Scott and he now felt affluent enough to lease the beach house that the producer Joe Schenck had built for his wife, the silent star Norma Talmadge, at 1018 Ocean Front on the Pacific at Santa Monica.

  BACK IN ENGLAND IN 1935 TO MAKE THE AxyMAZING QUEST OF ERNEST BUSS. HIS FATHER DIED DURING THE PRODUCTION.

  The beach house was the one bright spot on the horizon. Early in 1936 Grant had gloomily returned to working for Paramount. The studio had cast him, opposite Joan Bennett and Walter Pidgeon, as a private detective in Big Brown Eyes, which was to be directed by Raoul Walsh. As the Hollywood Spectator remarked when it was released, he ‘seemed slightly ill at ease as the two-fisted detective’. The highlight was the tiny cameo in which Walsh allowed Grant to impersonate a girl on the make. Only then did his talent show through.

  Paramount loaned him out again, this time to MGM, to make Suzy, the story of a French flyer in love with Jean Harlow, alongside Franchot Tone, the man who had just been nominated for an Oscar in the role Grant had been offered in Mutiny on the Bounty. He did his best with the MGM melodrama, but his heart was not in it, although when the film was released Grant’s performance convinced the Hollywood Spectator that he was something more than just a leading man: ‘Since his outstanding performance in Sylvia Scarlett, his talents for varied characterizations have been recognized, and in each new venture he makes good.’

  That did nothing to repair his strained relations with Paramount. Back at their lot, he was teamed with Joan Bennett again in a newspaper comedy called Wedding Present, based on a Paul Gallico story. Grant played a practical-joking reporter who gets promoted to city editor, only to realize that he loves the girl he has been teasing ; relentlessly for the first two reels. He kidnaps Bennett on her wedding day and drives off with her in a wagon with ‘Insane Asylum’ on the side. As Variety put it: ‘They try hard, but the combination of story, direction and whatnot is pretty much against them.’

  But as 1936 came to an end, so too did the five-year contract Cary Grant had signed with Paramount. He had made twenty-one films for them in five years, but was only truly proud of Sylvia Scarlett — for RKO. So although Adolph Zukor was offering him $2,500 a week to sign a new contract, Grant refused. ‘If I had stayed at Paramount I would have continued to take the pictures that Gary Cooper, William Powell or Clive Brook turned down,’ he explained later.

  With the help of his agent, Frank Vincent, Grant went to look for a contract that would allow him to make the films he wanted to make. It was a bold move for someone who was not quite a star, but to his relief Harry Cohn at Columbia offered him a two-year, four-picture contract which guaranteed him $50,000 each for his first two films and $75,000 each for the next two, as well as allowing him to work elsewhere. These were substantial sums for a man who had yet to prove he was a real box-office attraction. Sylvia Scarlett had been a disaster at the box-office, in spite of Grant’s excellent reviews. The Amazing Life of Ernest Bliss, which was just opening in the United States retitled Riches and Romance, and which had Variety applauding his ‘deft characterization’, certainly did not put Grant on a par with Cagney, Gable or Cooper.

  Remarkably, Grant then managed to manoeuvre himself a second contract, this time at RKO. It allowed him to make one film for Columbia, then one for RKO and then one of his own choice, possibly at another studio altogether. It was almost unheard of in Hollywood in 1937, but it meant that he had taken control of his own career in a way that the contract players were not usually able to do. As the two deals were being negotiated, and as evidence of good will, Grant agreed to make a film for both studios.

  Columbia’s promised well. It was written by Robert Riskin, the author of Frank Capra’s award-winning comedies It Happened One Night and Mr Deeds Goes to Town, and Grant hoped that it might do for him what Riskin’s earlier films had done for Gable and Cooper. But he was to be disappointed. Though it was designed to establish him as a comedian, his co-star was the opera singer Grace Moore and, even more significantly, it was directed by Riskin himself, not Capra. When You’re in Love, as the film was finally called, turned out to be no more than average. The charming Miss Moore sang prettily enough, but there was no magic between her and Grant on the screen. When it opened at the end of February 1937, the critics damned it with faint praise.

  By that time, however, Grant had gone to RKO to star in a film biography of the nineteenth-century American entrepreneur Jim Fisk, who had made and lost a series of fortunes by gambling with stocks and bonds on Wall Street. Called The Toast of New York, it was to co-star Edward Arnold, Jack Oakie and Frances Farmer. The studio had struggled with the script for months, using two differe
nt books and half a dozen writers, but even that could not make the project work. Cary Grant hid his disappointment by retiring behind his public persona, which did not appeal to his highly strung co-star. Frances Farmer accused him afterwards of being ‘an aloof, remote person, intent on being Cary Grant playing Cary Grant’.

  Deflated, Grant returned to his Santa Monica beach house and the companionship of a new young actress. He had briefly fallen in love with one of RKO’s biggest stars, Ginger Rogers, for whom Howard Hughes had also fallen, but she had deserted them both, and he had taken up instead with Phyllis Brooks, a feisty blonde who was not in awe of anybody. They were to remain together for the next two years, spending weekends either at Santa Monica or at William Randolph Hearst’s castle 150 miles up the coast at San Simeon.

  TALENTED BUT UNPREDICTABLE: FRANCES FARMER DID NOT CARE FOR HER CO-STAR IN THE TOAST OF NEW YORK IN 1937.

  ACTRESS PHYLLIS BROOKS BECAME GRANT’S CONSTANT COMPANION AFTER THE BREAK-UP OF HIS FIRST MARRIAGE.

  In fact it was in Santa Monica that Grant was also to get his next role. His next-door neighbour at the beach was the comedy producer Hal Roach, who had purchased the rights to a new ghost story, Topper, with the idea of making it into a film for MGM. He wanted Grant as his star, to play the ghost. Weekend after weekend Roach badgered Grant until he finally agreed. He would do it before his first major production under his new contract with Columbia, which was due to start in May.

  Roach had originally approached W.C. Fields to play Topper, the henpecked banker who is haunted by his two rich former clients, Marion and George Kerby. But Fields had turned the part down, and Roach had cast Roland Young in his place. Grant suggested Jean Harlow for the part of his wife Marion, but Roach preferred Constance Bennett, who was much less to Grant’s taste. Nevertheless, she brought a chemistry to her role as his spectral wife that Cary Grant had not found with Joan Bennett, Grace Moore or Harlow. But he did not care for the film or his performance. It came as no surprise to him when The New York Times called it ‘rather a heavy consignment of whimsy’.

  Though he had now made twenty-nine films in Hollywood, Cary Grant had still not managed to grab his own seat on the streetcar. He was still standing — nearer the front certainly, but not yet established as a star. He was about to meet the man who was going to do as much as anyone else to help him sit down: the amiable, shrewd and unrepentantly eccentric Leo McCarey.

  IN TOPPER IN 1937, WITH HOAGY CARMICHAEL, GEORGE HUMBERT AND CO-STAR CONSTANCE BENNETT, HE PLAYED A MISCHIEVOUS GHOST.

  CHAPTER THREE • SCREWBALL

  ‘Comedy holds the greatest risk for an actor, and laughter is the reward.’

  LIFT: NEVER WAS HIS EYEBROW RAISED TO GREATER EFFECT THAN IN THE AWFUL TRUTH IN 1937, ALONGSIDE RALPH BELLAMY AND IRENE DUNNE. IT WAS A TECHNIQUE HE WAS TO USE AGAIN AND AGAIN, ESPECIALLY IN BRINGING UP BABY WITH HEPBURN A YEAR LATER (ABOVE RIGHT).

  Towards the end of his life, Cary Grant liked to tell the story of the old actor on his death bed who was asked how he felt. ‘Dying’s easy, comedy’s hard,’ the old man replied. Every time he told the story Grant laughed. He knew exactly how the actor felt. ‘People think it’s easy to get a laugh,’ he would say. ‘It’s not.’ Grant knew only too well that comedy was an enormously serious business, and film comedy was even more serious. He had learnt that from a master of the art: the fey but brilliant Leo McCatey.

  Born and bred in Los Angeles, the son of a boxing promoter, McCarey had started in the movies immediately after leaving law school and quickly prospered, particularly in comedy. He had brought the best out of the silent comedian Harry Langdon; had gone on to team Stan Laurel with Oliver Hardy in 1924; and directed one of the Marx Brothers greatest hits, Duck Soup. Like an old vaudevillian, McCarey relied on inspiration. He would re-write any script as he went along, improvising ideas and jokes as the thoughts struck him.

  Like Grant, McCarey had suffered at the hands of Zukor and Paramount, and he too had left the studio at the end of 1936. By chance, McCarey and Grant joined Columbia at the same time and the studio decided to put them together in a remake of Arthur Richman’s 1922 stage comedy The Awful Truth, which had been filmed twice before. Typically, McCarey had torn up the script he was given and had started writing another one in his car on the way to the studio in the morning. Alongside Grant, Columbia gave him Irene Dunne, who had just won the studio an Oscar nomination for Theodora Goes Wild.

  McCarey’s habit of arriving on the set each morning with new pages of script did not commend itself to Cary Grant. Shooting had been under way for only a day when he asked if he could swop parts with Ralph Bellamy, and within a week he was offering to do another picture altogether — for nothing — if Harry Cohn would just let him out of The Awful Truth. Grant was so uncomfortable with McCarey’s methods that he even offered Cohn $5,000 to let him leave the picture. When McCarey heard about it he told Cohn he would give him another $5,000 himself if he would remove Cary Grant from the picture. The studio head simply laughed.

  By the second week of shooting, in May 1937, Leo McCarey could barely stand the sight of Cary Grant. Even thirty years later he would still remember him as ‘impossible’, not to mention ‘nervous, uncertain and insecure’, and Irene Dunne agreed that her co-star could be ‘very apprehensive about nearly everything in those days ...so apprehensive in fact he would get almost physically sick’. But gradually it began to dawn on Grant that McCarey was a genius at comedy and, even more importantly, that the director was presenting him with a character that fitted him more perfectly than anything that he had ever played before.

  DIRECTOR LEO MCCAREY BROUGHT OUT THE MISCHIEVOUS QUALITY BEHIND GRANT’S FLASHING SMILE, REVEALING A HUMOUR THAT OTHER HANDSOME YOUNG MEN, LIKE HIS STAND-IN ON THE AWFUL TRUTH, COULD NEVER QUITE MATCH (BELOW). NOT EVEN A FLANNEL NIGHTSHIRT COULD DISGUISE IT (RIGHT).

  With McCarey’s help, Cary Grant began to reveal to the cinema audience the ambivalence that was to make him one of the cinema’s great comedians. As the filming progressed McCarey drew out the mischievous, almost malicious quality that lay beneath the surface of Grant’s charm. In his screen relationship with Irene Dunne, Grant even started to reveal the strain of misogynism that was, in fact, part of his own personality. If women were attracted to him, they were never entirely to be trusted, and never to be taken too seriously. Everything a woman said was to be greeted with a raised eyebrow.

  In The Awful Truth, the story of Lucy and Jerry Warriner, a couple on the brink of divorce, McCarey made the story of every man and woman who could live neither together nor apart. Each suspicious of the other’s unfaithfulness, they start divorce proceedings — only to fail to agree on who should have custody of their dog. When their divorce is eventually finalized, they realize that they were happier together than they are apart. The film ends with their reconciliation.

  McCarey not only brought an edge to Grant’s screen persona, he also gave him the confidence to improvise his own lines. In some scenes McCarey utterly refused to tell Grant what his lines were. His only instructions were to Irene Dunne. On one occasion, he simply told her to open the door of her apartment, discover Grant and say, ‘Well, if it isn’t my ex.’ It was Grant himself who came up with what became the most famous line in the film: ‘The judge says this is my day to see the dog.’

  McCarey also encouraged Grant to use the physical skill he had learned in vaudeville to make some of the scenes comic without words. At the end of the film, when Grant and Dunne retire to a log cabin to consider their future, McCarey made sure that his male star was discovered on his hands and knees behind his ex-wife’s bedroom door wearing only a striped flannel nightshirt. Grant had played the whole scene without a single line of dialogue. When The Awful Truth was released in October 1937 it was an instant success. The New York Times complimented its ‘unapologetic return to the fundamentals of comedy’ as ‘original and daring’, and the New Republic called it ‘the funniest picture of the season’. The magazine’s critic, Otis Ferguson,
pointed out that the comedy McCarey had created was ‘founded in the commonplace of actual life’ and should not be confused with the ‘humorous intentions of those who rack their brains for gags, falls, punch lines and the cake-dough blackout’. The film was to win McCarey an Academy Award as Best Director and give Cary Grant an essential part of his personality. The writer and director Garson Kanin believes that in the years to come Cary Grant polished that personality, playing it over and over again — ‘each time more skilfully and successfully’.

  ‘THE FUNNIEST PICTURE OF THE SEASON’ WON ITS DIRECTOR AN OSCAR, AND GAVE ITS LEADING MAN A PERSONALITY THAT HE WAS TO POLISH WITH METICULOUS CARE IN THE YEARS TO COME.

  The success of The Awful Truth brought Cary Grant confidence in himself on the screen — a frail confidence, certainly, but one which from then on he would do everything he could to protect. As the film was released, he started work on his first project for RKO under his new deal. The studio’s production head, Sam Briskin, wanted him to work with Katharine Hepburn again, and had entrusted a new project to the patrician Howard Hawks, who had recently joined the studio as a producer and director. It was a magazine story written by Hagar Wilde, about a shy palaeontologist and a spoilt New England heiress; it was called Bringing Up Baby.

  Hepburn’s career had not prospered since Sylvia Scarlett. She had made a string of flops for RKO, and had taken refuge in a touring stage version of Jane Eyre. But she had lost none of her appeal for Howard Hughes. He had followed her stage tour in his private plane, and now wanted the studio to use her again. She was to play the heiress Susan Vance, but it had not been clear at first who should appear opposite her. When the reviews of The Awful Truth appeared there was no doubt. RKO would use their new contract player, Cary Grant.