Cary Grant: Dark Angel

by Geoffrey Wansell

  JOAN FONTAINE WAS GRANT’S WIFE, AND POTENTIAL VICTIM, IN SUSPICION IN 1941. SHE WAS NEVER SURE WHETHER HIS CHARM CONCEALED MURDEROUS INTENT.

  What Hitchcock had sensed in Cary Grant was the dark, brooding side to his character, the devil that lurked behind his smooth, efficient charm. McCarey had seen it, and so had Hawks, but they had both used it in comedy. Now, for the first time, Hitchcock wanted to bring that menace to the surface. But he did not intend merely to make Grant into a villain, he also wanted the charm and the humour to remain, thereby making him even more compelling as a murderer. Was he to be trusted or not?

  Certainly Grant did not find it difficult to want to kill his new co-star. Within a few days of the start of shooting, Joan Fontaine had become one of the few actresses he would positively dislike. To him, she seemed unprepared and unprofessional. To her, he seemed aloof and distant. Hitchcock, the consummate manipulator of the fragile egos of actors, gleefully let their dislike for one another come through on film, contenting himself with telling his stars to ‘move around and see if you can keep from running into each other’. Their mutual antipathy made it only too possible that Cary Grant would end up murdering Joan Fontaine.

  ART MIRRORED REALITY ON SUSPICION: GRANT DISLIKED HIS CO-STAR (ABOVE); SMALL WONDER THAT HE LOOKED SO CONVINCING CARRYING THE POISONED MILK UPSTAIRS IN ONE OF THE FINAL SCENES (RIGHT).

  In the end, however, RKO prevented Grant from playing a murderer, insisting that he become simply a man whose wife suspected him of murder. Nevertheless, Hitchcock’s revelation of the menace that lay behind his dark charm was not lost on the critics. When the film opened at Thanksgiving weekend, 1941, the New Yorker wrote, ‘Cary Grant finds a new field for himself, the field of crime, the smiling villain, without heart or conscience. Crime lends colour to his amiability.’ Variety agreed: ‘Grant puts compelling conviction into his unsympathetic but arresting role.’ The Hollywood Reporter carped that RKO’s ending hurt the film: ‘If this sop of a happy ending was dragged in by the heels, as it appears, its serves only to spoil a great picture.’ But the studio’s decision did not hurt the film at the box-office. Suspicion became the most successful RKO film that year, making a profit of $440,000, far more than Citizen Kane, which they released in the same year.

  Soon after Hitchcock had finished with him, Cary Grant left the United States for a month’s trip to Mexico with Barbara Hutton. Her divorce from Reventlow had finally come through, and now that she was free he wanted her to marry him at once. But now, suddenly, she hesitated. She was not sure she wanted to rush into marriage for a third time. Disappointed, Grant accepted her decision and went back to filming again in October 1941. Warner Brothers had offered him a role he coveted — that of the acid-tongued Sheridan Whiteside in the film version of George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s play The Man Who Came to Dinner. Bette Davis had persuaded the studio to pay $250,000 for the rights as a vehicle for her and John Barrymore, but Barrymore’s alcoholism — then in its final stages — had made the studio nervous and Grant had been asked if he might be interested in the part. He was, but Davis was less keen and the part went instead to Monty Woolley, who had played it on Broadway.

  Ironically, only a few weeks afterwards, Cary Grant started filming another Broadway hit for Warners. The studio had asked Frank Capra, winner of three Academy Awards for Columbia during the Thirties, to direct a film version of Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace, about two old ladies who poison the lonely old men who visit their Brooklyn home. Jack Warner had originally offered the part of the ladies’ manic nephew, Mortimer Brewster, to Bob Hope, but Capra had insisted he wanted Grant, and Capra had prevailed. Julius and Philip Epstein had written a script, and Grant had negotiated a deal that allowed $100,000 of his $150,000 fee to be divided between the American Red Cross, the United Service Organization and the British War Relief Association. He was to receive his fee immediately, even though the film itself could not be released until the play’s run had been completed in New York.

  On the surface, everything seemed to bode well. Shooting started on Warners’ giant Number Seven sound stage in the third week of October 1941, with Capra well aware that he had just six weeks of Grant’s time. The set was a replica of the Brewster home, complete with a scale model of the Brooklyn Bridge and a graveyard, where, as a joke, one of the tombstones bore the name Archibald Leach. But the fiery Italian-American Capra was not like the laid-back McCarey or the laconic Hawks. Ferocious, determined and interfering, he did not believe in letting his star decide the best way to play a part. Instead he insisted on imposing his own style on Grant, making him act in a faster, more frenzied way than he had ever done before. Grant found himself overacting, forcing farce into the role, mugging for the camera, playing Brewster more as a slapstick clown than a droll. He hated it.

  Grant tried to tell Capra how unhappy he felt with all the double-takes that the director was demanding, but to no avail. The comedy that Capra saw was not the comedy that Grant felt he could deliver. Though the supporting cast, including three of the principals from the Broadway production — Josephine Hull, Jean Adair and John Alexander — alongside Priscilla Lane and Raymond Massey, were excellent, Arsenic and Old Lace was to become one film that he could never bring himself to watch in the later years of his life. ‘I was embarrassed doing it,’ he explained. ‘I overplayed the character... Jimmy Stewart would have been much better in the film.’

  A distinctly relieved Cary Grant left the Warners lot on 12 December 1941, less than a week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But it was not simply pleasure at being released from Capra’s direction, it was also the fact that, with the Americans now drawn into the war, it would not be unchivalrous to announce his intention of becoming an American citizen. It was an announcement that also meant that he could settle the question of his marriage. Barbara Hutton had been reluctant to marry him while he was still a British citizen, not least because her accountants had advised her that she would risk a substantial portion of her fortune being ‘frozen’ in London. Once Grant was an American, however, that could not happen.

  WORKING WITH DIRECTOR FRANK CAPRA DID NOT TURN OUT TO BE THE JOY GRANT HAD HOPED IT WOULD (LEFT). ARSENIC AND OLD LACE, WITH RAYMOND MASSEY AND PETER LORRE [RIGHT], NEVER SATISFIED ITS STAR.

  Before the end of 1941, Grant submitted his naturalization papers and immediately went back to Columbia to work with George Stevens for the third time. The success of Penny Serenade had convinced Harry Cohn that he should put the director back together with Grant and Dunne as quickly as possible; the new comedy-drama he had found for them was The Talk of the Town. The story concerned a small-town schoolteacher forced to choose between a law professor who dreams of becoming a Supreme Court judge and Leopold Dilg, a rebellious mill worker, whom she hides after he is falsely accused of arson and murder. It was written for the screen by Irwin Shaw and Sidney Buchman. Grant was to play Dilg and Ronald Colman the professor. It was the first time that Grant and Colman, one of Hollywood’s longest-standing British-born stars, had ever appeared together. But now it was Grant who was sitting at the front of the Hollywood streetcar: he had top billing. When Irene Dunne dropped out at the last minute, Harry Cohn replaced her with Jean Arthur, Grant’s co-star from Only Angels Have Wings.

  Stevens took the precaution of shooting two different endings for his new film, one in which Arthur decides to marry Colman and the other in which she chooses Grant, and Columbia asked the preview audiences to decide which one he should use. Hardly surprisingly, the audiences went for Grant. When it was released in August 1942, The Talk of the Town became one of the most successful Columbia films of the year. ‘Well turned and witty’, in the words of Newsweek, ‘at its best when it sticks to the middle ground between farce and melodrama’. Variety added, ‘One of the season’s more important entries.’

  GRANT’S SEAT ON THE HOLLYWOOD STREETCAR ALONGSIDE RONALD COLMAN WAS ASSURED. THEY WORKED TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME ON THE TALK OF THE TOWN FOR COLUMBIA IN 1942.

&
nbsp; The Talk of the Town was eventually nominated for an Oscar as Best Picture, although once again Grant’s own contribution was overlooked. It was not to be his only Oscar disappointment that year. While The Talk of the Town was still shooting, he watched Joan Fontaine win the Oscar as Best Actress for her performance in Suspicion, while his performance in Penny Serenade was passed over. Even more galling, he was beaten for the Best Actor Oscar by his old rival Gary Cooper, who won for his performance in Howard Hawks’s First World War drama, Sergeant York. The experience was to give Grant a life-long sensitivity about the Oscars.

  At RKO in April 1942, Grant joined Ginger Rogers and Leo McCarey to make the often postponed Once Upon a Honeymoon. The studio wanted an anti-Nazi picture, and McCarey had come up with a story which he had written with Sheridan Gibney. Grant was to play a radio correspondent covering the threat of war in Europe, and Rogers a former burlesque star about to marry to an Austrian Baron who is also a secret agent for the Nazi party. Grant was to try to dissuade Rogers from marrying, but on failing he was to travel round Europe after her, trying to get her to see the truth. Grant was enthusiastic. The only stumbling block was the billing.

  Ginger Rogers was one of RKO’s biggest stars, and she insisted on top billing. But Grant had had top billing over Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, as well as over Ronald Colman in The Talk of the Town, and he was determined not to forgo the position. For a time it even looked as though the film might never happen, until eventually RKO found a compromise. Half the paid advertising would have Rogers at the top, the other half Grant.

  AT THE 1942 OSCARS PARTY WITH ROSALIND RUSSELL. JOAN FONTAINE PICKED UP AN AWARD FOR SUSPICION WHILE GRANT LOST TO GARY COOPER. DISAPPOINTED, HE WENT TO WORK WITH GINGER ROGERS IN ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON (RIGHT).

  Made between April and July 1942, Once Upon a Honeymoon was nothing like as trying an experience for Grant as The Awful Truth had been five years earlier. One reason was that McCarey was less interested in improvising comedy, only too aware that what the studio expected was a propagandist film. The result was a well-intentioned piece of professionalism rather than one of McCarey’s inspirational comedies. The New York Times noted the mistake of ‘trying to mix romantic comedy with tragedy too stark and real’. Newsweek added, ‘The result is probably a screen hit, but the attempt to play for both laughs and significance against a terrifying background of Nazi aggression is, on the whole, a little disappointing.’

  As soon as Once Upon a Honeymoon was finished, Grant intended to join the American Army Air Corps. RKO had applied for his deferment while McCarey was shooting, but Grant was determined to enlist. His naturalization papers finally came through in the middle of June, and on the 26th of that month the man born Archibald Alec Leach in England took the American oath of allegiance before a United States Federal Judge in Los Angeles. On the same afternoon, he formally changed his name to Cary Grant.

  Twelve days later, at 12.30 on 8 July 1942, he married Barbara Hutton in the garden of his agent’s house at Lake Arrowhead, east of Los Angeles. The bride was twenty-nine and the groom thirty-eight. The ceremony, conducted by a local Lutheran pastor, took just six minutes. Randolph Scott was not there, and neither was Dorothy di Frasso. The only witnesses were Hutton’s companion and her maid, together with Grant’s secretary and agent. Neither the bride nor the groom thought the marriage was anybody’s business but their own. The following morning Cary Grant returned to RKO. Leo McCarey had given him permission to be one hour late.

  A month later the War Department notified him that he could enlist on 15 September in Los Angeles. He was then to report to the Officer Candidate School at Miami Beach. But Cary Grant never reached the Officer Candidate School. At the last moment the United States government decided that he was more valuable to them as an actor who could be called upon from time to time to give what they called ‘temporary service’. A disappointed Grant issued a brief statement: ‘Wherever Uncle Sam orders my utilization to the best purposes, there I will willingly go, as should every other man. I feel that Uncle Sam knows best.’

  Grant had hoped he and Barbara could live in his Santa Monica beach house, but she decided that it would be ‘too small’. Though she was frightened in the company of strangers, she nevertheless loved to entertain, and wanted nothing more than to give dinner parties nearly every night. She was also accustomed to a staff of almost a dozen, including a companion, a secretary, a valet, a chauffeur, six general servants and a cook. Grant manfully insisted the he would be paying for ‘rent and groceries’, but he had never considered exactly what that meant and Barbara had never bothered to enlighten him.

  To meet the new Mrs Grant’s needs, the couple leased a house owned by Douglas Fairbanks Jr in Pacific Palisades. Called Westridge, it stood in twelve acres and had more than enough room for the servants, as well as for Lance, who was now six. Barbara would play tennis in the morning on the court in their garden, and then ride or swim in the afternoon, but in the evenings she would entertain. For his part, Grant preferred the Sunday evenings when they were alone together. He felt suffocated in a house full of servants and guests.

  NO ONE LOOKED MORE LIKE MR LUCKY – THE TITLE OF RKO’S NEW COMEDY ABOUT A GAMBLER – THAN GRANT, WHO HAD MARRIED BARBARA HUTTON IN JULY 1942.

  Slightly uncomfortable, Grant went back to work. RKO were anxious to follow up the success of Suspicion, and he had an idea which might make a good picture. Milton Holmes, a tennis professional at the Beverly Hills Club, had written a short story called Bundles for Freedom and given it to him to read. It focused on a gambler who decides to launch a gambling ship to dodge the draft, but is then persuaded to change his mind and ferry medical supplies to help the war effort. The theme of redemption appealed to Grant and he persuaded RKO to let Holmes work on the screenplay with Adrian Scott. The studio then attached H.C. (Hank) Potter as director and retitled the picture Mr Lucky.

  On the set, Cary Grant was as professional as he had always been. ‘He knew where the camera was, what he wanted to do and he worked very hard,’ his co-star Laraine Day recalled later. ‘He had managed to teach himself a lot of tricks, and he used them and taught them to other people. It was a treat to work with him.’ But in the evenings everything changed. ‘Then he wasn’t the bright cheerful person he had been on the set all day,’ Day remembered. ‘He was subdued, a completely different person. It was astonishing.’ It did not go unnoticed. As early as January 1943, Photoplay suggested, ‘He gets sudden periods of depression’, and Hedda Hopper provided one of the reasons: ‘Cary was upstairs cramming twelve solid pages of script into his head. Up at six for a studio call, home late dead tired and was not amused by the upper-crust goings-on around the place.’

  In deference to his wife, Grant took a break from films as soon as Mr Lucky was over. He wanted to take her to England to meet his mother, but the American authorities refused to issue him with a passport. He contented himself instead with ‘goodwill’ tours to meet American soldiers. When Mr Lucky opened in May 1943, his instinct that it might make a good film was proved triumphantly correct. It rapidly became one of RKO’s biggest hits of the year, making a net profit of $1.6 million and a substantial sum for Grant from his profit participation. The critics were less impressed, however. Otis Ferguson dismissed Mr Lucky as ‘a bad salad with an intelligent dressing’ and Newsweek added that it was ‘as realistic as Hans Christian Andersen and occasionally several times as arch’.

  Nevertheless, it was to remain one of Grant’s favourite films. ‘The character I played was more like the real Cary Grant than any before. Mr Lucky was seemingly a happy-go-lucky guy, but that was a cover for a sensitive soul.’

  Nowhere was Grant’s sensitivity more apparent than at home. The more he sat there doing nothing, the more disconsolate he became. Unable to stand the inactivity, he accepted Jack Warner’s offer to make a picture to help the war effort. Warner wanted to make a film about the war in the Pacific, a portrait of life in the American submarines in action there. D
elmer Daves, who had been a writer at MGM for ten years and had just joined Warner Brothers, had worked up a story based on a magazine article about an American submarine’s trip to Tokyo Bay. The submarine’s commander was to be the personification of America’s submariners; strong, silent, even a little sad. And Warner wanted Grant. He knew as well as Hitchcock that every member of the audience would sympathize with him as the commander.

  Daves had never directed before, but with Grant’s support shooting started on 23 June in a specially constructed submarine interior built on the Warners lot. The only difficulty was that Grant had also agreed to start a film for Columbia in the middle of September, which meant that Daves had just six weeks to shoot the film now called Destination Tokyo. He did not manage it. By the time Grant was called to Columbia, the Warners film was only a little over half finished. But Destination Tokyo had been specifically designed for a Christmas release — the story even opened with the submarine’s crew singing carols and suddenly receiving their orders to sail. The only solution was for Grant to shoot for Columbia during the day, and then go to Warners at night to finish. So throughout September and October 1943 Cary Grant filmed Destination Tokyo during the evening, and a new film for Columbia during the day. As a result he saw little or nothing of his new wife. He would return home exhausted, usually to find a dinner party in progress, and would retire to bed rather than join in. The cook would send soup up to his room, and he would look at the two scripts for the following day.