Cary Grant: Dark Angel

by Geoffrey Wansell

  But when Hawks, who had made Dawn Patrol and Scarface for Howard Hughes, first encountered his leading man and explained the part to him, Grant was far from enthusiastic. ‘I wouldn’t know how to tackle it,’ he told Hawks. ‘I’m not an intellectual type.’ The director was not to be put off. ‘You’ve seen Harold Lloyd, haven’t you?’ he said firmly. ‘You’re the innocent abroad.’

  Unlike Grant, Hepburn was fascinated with her part from the beginning. She was determined to overcome her poor reputation at the box-office, and dragged her reluctant leading man into the film, urging him to help her think up extra pieces of comedy. As a result, it was Grant who invented one of the film’s funniest scenes, in which he stands on the back of Hepburn’s dress, ripping out a panel, leaving her to walk around naked at the rear until he steps manfully behind her to conceal her embarrassment.

  Years later Hepburn called her co-star a generous actor and a good comedian, ‘though of course he was also very serious’. Hawks too came to appreciate Grant’s subtle gift for comedy. Indeed, he unwittingly also gave Grant another element of his screen persona. During shooting the director suggested that he should ‘whinny like a horse’ when he got angry, a suggestion which Grant not only took up at once but which he used to great effect in the years to come. At the end of the filming, in December 1937, Hawks called Grant a ‘great comedian and a great dramatic actor’, a man who could do anything.

  One of the things Hawks required Grant to do was to demonstrate his sexual ambivalence. But rather than dress his leading man in a long flannel nightgown, as McCarey had done, Hawks put Grant into women’s clothes. It was the logical extension of McCarey’s attempt to alter his stereotype as a leading man, and it was to add yet another ingredient to Grant’s screen image. With Hawks’s help he became a hero who is also something of a fool: a man who is never quite what he seems. It was also to lead to one of the film’s most often quoted lines, when Cary Grant, dressed as a woman, confronts Hepburn’s Aunt Elizabeth, played by May Robson. ‘I’ve lost my clothes,’ he tells her sadly. ‘Well, why are you wearing these clothes?’ she replies. In utter exasperation, Cary Grant shouts, ‘Because I just went gay all of a sudden.’

  RIGHT: NOW REGARDED AS ONE OF HOLLYWOOD’S GREAT SCREWBALL COMEDIES, BRINGING UP BABY OPENED TO LUKEWARM REVIEWS IN 1938, AND LOST RKO A FORTUNE.

  BELOW: GRANT’S PERFORMANCE AS THE MYSTIFIED PALAEONTOLOGIST REVEALED HIS ABILITY TO MAKE A FOOL OF HIMSELF – WITHOUT LOSING HIS DIGNITY, OR HIS MASCULINITY.

  Though it was to become one of the cult comedies of the 1930s, Bringing Up Baby opened to lukewarm rather than rapturous reviews. The New York Times remarked icily, ‘Miss Hepburn has a role which calls for her to be breathless, senseless and terribly, terribly fatiguing. She succeeds, and we can be callous enough to hint it is not entirely a matter of performance.’ Time magazine agreed, suggesting that the slapstick the film contained had been devised ‘with the idea that the cinema audience will enjoy (as it does) seeing stagy actress Katharine Hepburn get a proper mussing up’. Within six months the independent cinema owners of America were to compile a list of ten performers whom they considered ‘box-office poison’. Katharine Hepburn’s was the first name on the list. Bringing Up Baby lost RKO : more than $350,000.

  UNDETERRED BY KATHARINE HEPBURN’S NEW REPUTATION AS ‘BOX-OFFICE POISON’, GRANT STARRED WITH HER AGAIN IN THE FILM OF PHILIP BARRY’S PLAY HOLIDAY. ONCE AGAIN THE CRITICS DID NOT APPROVE.

  The same was certainly not true for The Awful Truth. It had become one of the biggest box-office successes of 1937, and when the Oscar nominations for the year were announced in February 1938, Irene Dunne, Ralph Bellamy and Leo McCarey were all on the list. The only person who wasn’t was Cary Grant. But the success made Columbia all the more anxious to follow The Awful Truth up with another Dunne and Grant comedy, and they decided to make a new version of Philip Barry’s 1928 Broadway play Holiday. The only snag was that Leo McCarey was reluctant to work with the two stars again so soon. The studio turned instead to George Cukor, who was just finishing Camille with Garbo at MGM. When he arrived at Columbia, however, Cukor promptly demanded a new female star. He did not want Irene Dunne to play the sharp-witted socialite Linda Seaton; he wanted Katharine Hepburn.

  After a tussle, Cukor got his way, and when she heard the news the gentle Dunne ‘cried the entire weekend’. It was not be to Cukor’s only blunt decision. He also insisted that Cary Grant revert to stereotype as Johnny Case, a young man who decides he does not want to make any more money, but instead wants to enjoy his life. Cukor dismissed the ambiguity that McCarey and Hawks had brought out of Grant, preferring instead that he act merely as a straight man to Hepburn.

  So although Cary Grant’s new-found confidence showed on the screen in Holiday, the film did nothing to deepen the screen personality that had been forged over the past year. This provoked the critic Otis Ferguson to call it ‘mechanical and shrill’ when it was released in June 1938, and The New York Times doubted whether anyone could put up with Hepburn’s ‘intensity’, even ‘so sanguine a temperament as Cary Grant’s Johnny Case’. The film failed to become the hit that Columbia had been hoping for.

  But that did nothing to dent Cary Grant’s box-office appeal. From being a promising young leading man, he had now become a star. He was receiving 1,400 fan letters a week and had earned more than $150,000 in the past year. Encouraged by Randolph Scott, he had been quietly investing his money in shares, and now he increased his holdings substantially. In the years to come he would spend as much time studying the Wall Street Journal on the set as he would studying his script. Grant had no wish to be poor again. The profitability of each of his films, and his percentages, were as important to him as the reviews.

  Suddenly Cary Grant was more in demand than he had ever been. Even if Bringing Up Baby had not been a great success, RKO still wanted to capitalize on their new star. As soon as he finished Holiday, the studio asked him to play the lead in an action adventure inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Gunga Din’ and written for them by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. The studio had originally intended that Howard Hawks should direct, but the experience of his slowness on Bringing Up Baby put them off and they decided to replace him with cameraman-turned-director George Stevens, who had a reputation for being fast, economical and easy to work with.

  Grant was to play Ballantine, one of three practical-joking British army sergeants in India at the centre of the story. But before shooting began he agreed with Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who was to be one of two his co-stars (the other was Victor McLaglen, who had won an Oscar for The Informer at RKO), that they would switch roles. Instead of Ballantine, Grant wanted to play Cutter, an eccentric Cockney. He had no wish to repeat his experience with Holiday and be little more than an orthodox leading man. He wanted to add something to the role. He even persuaded Stevens to allow him to call his character Archibald Cutter.

  MORE IN DEMAND THAN EVER, GRANT WENT ON TO STAR IN GUNGA DIN FOR DIRECTOR GEORGE STEVENS AT RKO, ALONGSIDE VICTOR MCLAGLEN, DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS JR AND ROBERT COOTE.

  GRANT CONCEDED TOP BILLING TO HEPBURN IN 1938; IT WAS THE LAST TIME HE WOULD DO SO.

  Shooting began at Lone Pine, California, in June 1938, and RKO assembled no fewer than 1,500 actors, featured players and extras at the largest location camp in Hollywood’s history, helping to make the film one of the most expensive the studio had ever made. Gunga Din took 104 days to complete, seventy-five of them on location, at a cost of almost $2 million. Nevertheless, it earned the studio more than $3 million, in spite of the fact that its overseas release was hampered by the outbreak of war. This straightforward adventure story, which the Nation dismissed as ‘spectacular’ but also ‘a fraud’, took more money at the American box-office when it was released in 1939 than The Wizard of Oz. It also confirmed Cary Grant’s place as one of Hollywood’s biggest box-office stars.

  As soon as the filming of Gunga Din was over, in October 1938, Grant sailed for England to see his mother. War
with Germany seemed inevitable, and he wanted her to consider joining him in the United States, not least because he was actively considering becoming an American citizen. Elsie Leach listened quietly as her son explained his plans, but she refused to budge. Only a month earlier Neville Chamberlain had insisted that there would be peace in our time, and she believed him. She had no wish to leave her home. Grant ruefully accepted defeat and sailed back to New York on his way to California and his next picture for Columbia. He was to work again with Howard Hawks.

  The new Hawks project, Plane Number Four, offered Grant the opportunity to play a dramatic role as the man in charge of a tiny airline running mail across the Andes. Hawks wanted the men in his picture to be tough professionals, playing down the danger in their own lives, while the women were to match their toughness. It was a theme to which Hawks would return time after time in his films, but it also allowed Grant to demonstrate his depth on the screen, underlining once again how far he had come from the flashy young leading man at Paramount. He also did not get all the jokes: the wisecracks were given to his co-star, Jean Arthur.

  Adapted by Jules Furthman from a Hawks story, Only Angels Have Wings, as the film was eventually retitled, allowed Cary Grant to show that he could hold a scene without attempting to ‘act’ and that he was not afraid of competition from his co-star. When it was released in May 1939, Newsweek called him ‘perfectly cast’ and praised the film for easily outranking ‘most of its plane-crashing, sky-spectacular predecessors’.

  IN 1939 IT WAS CARY GRANT’S NAME FIRST ABOVE THE TITLE, FOR BOTH RKO [ABOVE] AND COLUMBIA [BELOW].

  It was also the film that many believe gave Cary Grant his most often imitated line of dialogue, ‘Judy, Judy, Judy’. The director Peter Bogdanovich suggests that because Grant’s girlfriend in the film, played by Columbia’s new discovery, Rita Hayworth, was called Judith, he was constantly saying lines like ‘Come on, Judy’, ‘Now, Judy’ and ‘Hello, Judy’, which created the myth that he said, ‘Judy, Judy, Judy.’ Grant himself could not recall ever saying the line in the film, and wondered instead whether he might have said it in an advertisement he made for the Lux Radio Theatre, when Judy Garland was to appear. But like ‘Play it again, Sam’, ‘Judy, Judy, Judy’ became one of Hollywood’s myths, a line that everyone believes they heard on the screen, but never actually did.

  After Only Angels Have Wings was completed, Cary Grant duly applied for American citizenship before returning to RKO. The studio had planned that he should do another comedy with Leo McCarey, Once Upon a Honeymoon, alongside Ginger Rogers. But McCarey had suddenly been taken ill and at the last moment the studio put Grant into a drama about a loveless marriage called In Name Only, directed by John Cromwell and based on a screenplay by Richard Sherman. Grant was to play Alec Walker, a wealthy landowner whose wife (Kay Francis) has married him for his money, and who then falls in love with a widow who has taken a house on his estate for the summer (Carole Lombard). The two women compete for Grant’s affection, until in the final reel it is Lombard’s love that saves him from pneumonia.

  The new film made Cary Grant nervous, however. It was neither a comedy nor an action adventure, and he fretted that it might affect his newfound appeal at the box-office. After filming was finished he moped around his house on West Live Oak Drive, convinced that he had made a dreadful mistake, then took off on another trip to England to see his mother. While he was away he decided to have his front teeth capped to enable him to open his mouth and smile on the screen a little more than he had in the past.

  COLUMBIA’S LATEST DISCOVERY, RITA HAYWORTH, AS ‘JUDY’ IN ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS.

  When In Name Only was released in August 1939, the critics confirmed some of his fears. Time magazine noted, In Name Only will puzzle cinemagoers who thought they knew just what high jinks to expect when screwball Cary Grant falls in love with screwball Carole Lombard’, but went on to describe it as a ‘mature, meaty picture’. Graham Greene in the Spectator added, ‘This is a well made depressing little picture of unhappy marriage. It is often sentimental, but the general picture which remains is quite an authentic one — a glossy photographic likeness of gloom.’

  RIGHT: HIS ROMANCE WITH PHYLLIS BROOKS TEMPTED THE AMERICAN PRESS TO PREDICT MARRIAGE AFTER THEIR TRIP TO FRANCE IN JULY 1939. BELOW: BACK IN HOLLYWOOD, HE WORKED WITH CAROLE LOMBARD FOR DIRECTOR JOHN CROMWELL ON IN NAME ONLY.

  By then Cary Grant was suffering his own form of gloom. His relationship with Phyllis Brooks, which had been part of his life for two years, was suffering its own difficulties. They had travelled round Europe together in the summer of 1939, ending up at the Roman villa of Hollywood hostess Dorothy di Frasso, a place where many other stars had visited. The trip had been widely reported in the gossip columns. This, in turn, had infuriated Phyllis’s distinctly Victorian mother. In Europe, Grant and Brooks had even discussed getting married, and when he got back to California he had a prenuptial agreement drafted. One of its provisions was that Phyllis’s mother should never be allowed to set foot in their house. When Phyllis, then twenty-four but still living with her parents, told her mother, there was a furious row and Phyllis sided with her parents.

  ROSALIND RUSSELL WAS GRANT’S CO-STAR IN HOWARD HAWKS’S HIS GIRL FRIDAY IN 1940. SHE TRADED WISECRACKS WITH HIM LINE FOR LINE, AND BECAME ONE OF HIS CLOSEST FRIENDS.

  Grant retreated to Columbia to make his third film in three years with Howard Hawks. The director wanted to remake the Hecht and Macarthur newspaper comedy The Front Page, which had first been made into a film by Howard Hughes in 1931. But this time Hawks wanted Hildy Johnson, the reporter who decides to leave a Chicago newspaper and its ruthless city editor Walter Burns, to be a woman rather than a man. In Hawks’s new twist, Hildy was to be divorced from Burns and intent on marrying a naive insurance agent, when Burns tried tempts her back to her old job one last time. Grant was to play Burns, and Hawks had tried to persuade Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne and Claudette Colbert to play Hildy. They had all refused and he finally persuaded Rosalind Russell, a Catholic lawyer’s daughter from Connecticut, to consider the role. Russell liked the idea, but she also realized that her co-star was going to get the funniest lines. Without telling Hawks, she hired an advertising copywriter to help her improve her dialogue.

  When shooting began in early September 1939, Grant suddenly found himself in fierce competition with Russell. His natural arrogance, on which Hawks had capitalized in Only Angels Have Wings, once again underscored his performance, but this time he was not allowed to get away with it. Although Hawks, had been encouraging him to ad-lib some of his dialogue, he now found himself opposite a co-star who was ad-libbing hers, often to funnier effect. Grant was so taken aback that at one point during the filming he looked across to Hawks behind the camera and asked with a pained expression, ‘Is she going to do that?’ The director liked the remark so much that he left it in the final cut of the film. As a result, His Girl Friday, as Hawks rechristened The Front Page, included many of Rosalind Russell’s own additions to the script, not least her response to Grant’s line ‘Some day that guy’s going to marry that girl and make her happy.’ Russell paused just a moment before ad-libbing briskly, ‘Sure. Slap happy.’

  ABOVE: HOWARD HAWKS ENCOURAGED HIM TO AD-LIB IN HIS GIRL FRIDAY. BELOW: GRANT’S FRIENDSHIP WITH ROSALIND RUSSELL SAW HIM ACT AS BEST MAN AT HER WEDDING TO FREDDIE BRISSON.

  With Hawks’s encouragement, Grant and Russell rushed into their lines, rarely leaving each other a moment to breathe. As a result the film is one of the fastest-moving comedies ever made in Hollywood, with line overlapping line, gag overlapping gag, as a ‘vanished race of brittle, cynical, childish people rush around on corrupt errands’ at ‘breakneck speed’, in the words of the critic Pauline Kael.

  During the filming Grant and Russell became friends. She went out with him on Saturday evenings as his relationship with Phyllis Brooks stumbled from crisis to crisis. ‘It wasn’t that we didn’t love each other,’ Brooks explained later. ‘It was just
the ghastly situation.’ When Brooks’s London agent, Freddie Brisson, came to stay with Grant and Randolph Scott over Christmas in 1939, Grant introduced the agent to his co-star. Within two years he was to be the best man at their wedding.

  The chemistry between Grant and Russell, and their respect for one another as comedians, communicated itself to the audience. When His Girl Friday was released in the first weeks of 1940, Variety described him as doing his role ‘to a turn’, and The New York Times added, ‘Cary Grant’s Walter Burns is splendid, except when he is being consciously cute.’ The Nation complimented both stars on their ‘entertaining performances’, while another critic called them ‘hardened skunks (but softies underneath)’.

  By then Grant was back at work for RKO. Once Upon a Honeymoon was still on hold, this time because Ginger Rogers was not free to do it, and in its place Leo McCarey had started work on a new project for Grant and Irene Dunne. Written by Bella and Samuel Spewack, My Favorite Wife was based on the age-old story of a man who remarries only to discover that the wife he believed had died seven years earlier is, in fact, alive. And not only alive, she has spent the intervening years living on a desert island with a handsome scientist. The ever-mischievous McCarey cast Randolph Scott as the scientist, alongside Grant and Dunne as the long-separated husband and wife.

  Just before shooting started, however, McCarey was badly hurt in a car accident, and in his place RKO rapidly appointed Garson Kanin, then a twenty-eight-year-old writer and director, who had just finished making a film with Ginger Rogers. Dunne was costing them $150,000 and Grant $112,500 plus two and a half per cent of the producer’s revenue, and the studio were anxious to press on as quickly as possible. McCarey became the film’s producer, although not long after shooting started he began to turn up to see what was going on.