Cary Grant: Dark Angel

by Geoffrey Wansell

  DENIED THE OPPORTUNITY TO JOIN THE AMERICAN ARMY AIR CORPS BY THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT, GRANT SET OFF ON A SERIES OF ‘GOODWILL’ TOURS TO ENTERTAIN THE TROOPS.

  GRANT SEIZED THE OPPORTUNITY TO PLAY AN AMERICAN SUBMARINE COMMANDER IN DESTINATION TOKYO IN 1943 FOR WARNER BROTHERS, AS HIS CONTRIBUTION TO THE WAR EFFORT.

  By the end of October, however, Destination Tokyo was finished, and he could devote all his energy to Columbia’s picture. A thin story, with faint echoes of Mr Lucky, it once again called for him to play a glib exploiter who finally achieves redemption. This time he was a down-and-out Broadway producer who discovers a nine-year-old boy who has trained his pet caterpillar to dance to the song ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’ when he plays it on his mouth organ. Based on a radio play called My Client Curly, it had been retitled Once Upon a Time. The female lead was played by Janet Blair. Cary Grant did not enjoy it.

  MARRIAGE PROVED A PROBLEM: GRANT AND HUTTON SEPARATED BRIEFLY IN THE AUTUMN OF 1944, ONLY TO BE RECONCILED IN 1945. IT DID NOT LAST.

  When the picture was finished, shortly before Christmas, the tension between Grant and Barbara Hutton came to the surface. She was planning to entertain forty people at their house during the week between Christmas and the New Year, while all he wanted was to spend the time quietly, recuperating from the past six months. Barbara seemed determined to surround herself with people. By the time the holiday was over, the only real contact between them was through Lance, who had taken to calling his new stepfather General. Grant was devoted to the boy, but on 1 January 1944 Lance was to leave to spend the next six months with his father. The thought of being without his stepson served only to intensify Grant’s gloom.

  One consolation was the reception for Destination Tokyo. Newsweek called Grant’s performance ‘one of the soundest’ of his career, and commented, ‘Even movie-goers who have developed a severe allergy to service pictures should find Destination Tokyo high among the superior films of the war.’ Bosley Crowther in The New York Times was uncharacteristically ebullient: ‘We don’t say it is credible; we don’t even suggest it makes sense. But it does make a pippin of a picture from a purely melodramatic point of view.’ It was to become one of Warner Brothers’ biggest financial successes of 1944.

  As the silences lengthened at home, Grant turned for support to the playwright Clifford Odets, who had become almost as close a friend as Randolph Scott. In the months since Grant had left their house in Santa Monica, Scott had been escorting his own heiress, Patricia Stillman, and was about to marry her, a marriage which would last the rest of his life. Odets, on the other hand, was recently divorced from the actress Luise Rainer, and had time for Grant. A former actor, the playwright had come to Hollywood after writing a series of left-wing plays for New York’s Group Theatre in the 1930s. Intense and insecure, he had a reputation in Hollywood for ‘saving’ screenplays that did not work and, as a result, Grant suggested that Odets should work on his next film for RKO. The studio believed they had found the perfect project to follow up the success of Mr Lucky. They had paid $60,000 for the rights to a new novel by Richard Llewellyn, the author of How Green Was My Valley, which had won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1941. Set in London, Llewellyn’s new novel was called None But the Lonely Heart and concerned a Cockney who discovers the meaning of his own life when he learns his mother is dying. Grant wanted Odets to rewrite the part of Ernie Mott specifically for him, even though Llewellyn’s character was just nineteen years old.

  The two men sat together for hours in the first weeks of 1944 talking about Grant’s childhood in Bristol and his feelings about his own mother. Odets then did everything he could to bring those experiences to life in his screenplay. The only question was who was to direct the picture. Finally, Grant suggested that Odets be allowed to do it himself. He felt sure his friend would bring out the best in the story they had spent so much time discussing. He and Odets then decided that they needed Ethel Barrymore to play Ernie Mott’s dying mother, and went to great lengths to induce her to return to Hollywood after eleven years in the theatre. They even persuaded RKO to pay the salaries of her touring theatre company for the six weeks she would be filming. Finally Barrymore, whose elder brother John had died of the effects of alcoholism just eighteen months before, accepted.

  Shooting started in March, but Odets did not find the task of directing Cary Grant straightforward. ‘His simplicity covers up one of the most complex men I’ve ever met,’ he said afterwards, and as filming got under way he quickly came to realize just how much the part of Ernie Mott meant to his star. Grant questioned, reconsidered and debated every line of dialogue before it was finally accepted. One was of particular importance to him. Ethel Barrymore, as Ma Mott, tells her son, ‘Love’s not for the poor, son. No time for it.’ The echoes of his own life were clear. With Odets’s help, Cary Grant had done everything he could to bring Archie Leach to life on the screen.

  ‘I thought the picture showed a successful bit of acting,’ Grant was to say years later. ‘In many ways the part seemed to fit my nature better than the light-hearted fellows I was used to playing.’ The scene in which Ernie Mott breaks down in tears with his mother remained one of Cary Grant’s favourite performances for the rest of his life, because, as he put it, ‘I didn’t do much of that kind of thing.’

  The reception for Once Upon a Time, which was released while Odets was shooting None But the Lonely Heart, convinced Grant that he had been right to search for a more serious direction. The flimsiness of Columbia’s picture showed through. ‘There just isn’t enough material for a full-length feature,’ suggested one critic, while applauding Grant’s ‘good characterization’; the Nation’s James Agee called it ‘not wonderful...just less witty and more gently intentioned than the radio hit’ on which it was based.

  To be taken seriously Cary Grant knew that he had to do more drama and hoped that None But the Lonely Heart would send a signal to Hollywood that he wanted to be thought of as more than simply a wise-cracking leading man in screwball comedies. When filming was completed in June, Grant had his script leather bound and sent to Odets as a present. The playwright wrote back immediately telling him that how proud he should be of his performance: ‘Such reality, constantly moving and warm, I have seldom seen in any film.’ Odets finished by comparing his friend to the hero in a Conrad novel, suggesting he shared with Conrad’s heroes a ‘quality of decency’ and goodness ‘that comes from the heart’.

  WRITER CLIFFORD ODETS SPENT WEEKS WITH GRANT ON THE SCRIPT OF NONE BUT THE LONEIY HEART IN 1944. AT THEIR REQUEST, THE STUDIO THEN TEMPTED ETHEL BARRYMORE TO BECOME HIS CO-STAR.

  Though neither man knew it at the time, None But the Lonely Heart was to be the last film Grant made for almost a year. The tensions in his marriage were to keep him away from a sound stage for the next eleven months. But these were not the only cause of his disappearance. There was also the question of custody of Lance Reventlow. The boy’s father, who had been taking care of him in New York, suddenly announced in July 1944 that he would not be returning him to California, and instituted legal proceedings alleging that Hutton had ‘used coarse and vulgar language in the boy’s presence’ and had ‘sought to undermine his affection for his father’. Count Reventlow’s suit also demanded that Cary Grant should never be allowed to speak to the boy.

  It was the final straw. As Grant and Hutton started legal proceedings to fight Reventlow’s action, so the strain on their relationship grew. Lance had been the one thing holding them together; without him and with every possibility that he might never return, their future together seemed bleak. Eventually, in August, Grant moved out of Westridge and into an apartment in Beverly Hills. Four days later, he tried to persuade Hutton that they should try again, but she refused. Undeterred, he moved back into their house in Pacific Palisades, only to watch her move out. The following day she told Louella Parsons, ‘There is no chance of a reconciliation.’

  Grant was convinced his life was ruined. When Jack Warner rang him to say h
e wanted him to star as Cole Porter in a film biography that Warner Brothers were planning, Grant told the studio boss that there was no point in discussing pictures. Warner pressed him, explaining that Michael Curtiz, the Hungarian who had just won the Oscar for Best Director for Casablanca, was going to direct. But Grant was firm. He would not discuss it. Even the reviews for None But the Lonely Heart, which was released a few days later, failed to lift his spirits. Time called it ‘one of the pictures of the year, a feather in the cap of all concerned in its making’, and Variety dubbed it ‘a class picture’. Grant’s own work was particularly singled out for praise. In The New York Times Bosley Crowther described his performance as ‘an exceptional characterization of bewilderment and arrogance’, while the Hollywood Reporter called it simply the ‘finest thing he has ever done’.

  By a strange irony, Arsenic and Old Lace was released the following day to almost equally enthusiastic reviews. The film had been sitting on the Warner Brothers shelves for more than two years, but Ida Lupino enthused in the Saturday Evening Post, ‘I was helpless with laughter as I watched Cary change from a normal young man to a decidedly dizzy one, talking to himself, staring into the window seat from which bodies mysteriously appeared and disappeared, and making various wild attempts to cope with the situation.’ Howard Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune, however, came closer to Grant’s own view: ‘For some reason or other, a fine actor merely mugs through the part of the sane member of the Brewster clan.’

  NO FILM IN HIS CAREER MEANT MORE THAN NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART: THE STORY OF A COCKNEY WHO DISCOVERS THE MEANING OF LIFE WHEN HIS MOTHER, PLAYED BY ETHEL BARRYMORE, IS DYING.

  Cary Grant did not take any interest in the reviews for either film. He was preoccupied with planning one last attempt at a reconciliation with Barbara Hutton. He had decided to drive up to see her in San Francisco. When he arrived, she agreed to see him and they spent the last weekend of September 1944 together discussing their future. Within a few days they were back

  together — in a new house in Bellagio Road overlooking the Bel Air golf course, not large enough to accommodate Hutton’s servants or her companion. A delighted Grant instructed the RKO publicity department to issue a brief statement confirming their reconciliation, and then he and his wife disappeared. He had promised Barbara he would spend more time with her.

  For a time they became ‘millionaire recluses’, in the words of one gossip column. Hutton tried to accept that he could not stand her dinner parties — where everyone seemed ‘only ever to speak in French’ — and tried to share his fascination with whose film had ‘opened well’. But they were still uncomfortable with each other, conscious that each was trying too hard. Gradually his dark moods began to return, and she became more remote. Finally, five months after their reconciliation, Hutton and Grant accepted the inevitable. On 26 February 1945 she moved out of the house on Bellagio Road and back to Westridge in Pacific Palisades. They issued a brief statement: ‘After much thought and with great consideration we have decided we can be happier living apart. As yet no formal plans have been formed regarding divorce.’ The next day Louella Parsons was predicting confidently that Hutton would leave Hollywood, ‘for since her reconciliation with Cary not one of her friends has seen her... They have been in complete seclusion.’

  For the next few months, Cary Grant remained in that seclusion. The failure of his second marriage seemed to overwhelm him. Certainly the seventeenth Academy Awards did nothing to alleviate his despair. Though he had been nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor for his performance as Ernie Mott in None But the Lonely Heart, the award went to Bing Crosby for Going My Way. The fact that Ethel Barrymore won as Best Supporting Actress merely sharpened Grant’s sense of isolation, the feeling that he was doomed never to be taken seriously as an actor. For the next eight weeks, Cary Grant hardly went out and barely talked to a soul.

  CHAPTER FIVE • NOTORIOUS

  BACK AT WORK AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF HIS SECOND MARRIAGE, GRANT STARRED OPPOSITE ALEXIS SMITH IN NIGHT AND DAY

  THEN TEAMED WITH HITCHCOCK TO MAKE NOTORIOUS WITH INCRID BERGMAN (LEFT).

  ‘You don’t lose your identity up on the screen. It’s always you, no matter how you behave... It’s much more difficult than anyone could possibly imagine.’

  Finally, on 12 May 1945, Grant ended his self-imposed exile and reported to Warner Brothers to start work on their long-delayed biography of Cole Porter. Jack Warner had persuaded him that he could not sit at home managing his investments for the rest of his life. But when he arrived at the studio, he wondered whether he had been wise. The shooting script of Night and Day, as the film was to be called, was a mess. Four writers had already worked on it and there had been so many drafts that Michael Curtiz had a large cardboard box in his room filled with pages from the various versions.

  Grant directed all the pain and frustration that had been building up in him over the past year towards the script. On the third day of shooting the unit manager noted that he ‘complained all day long yesterday about the dialogue — how bad it was, how poorly written — and what lousy characterization it gave him’. Two months later he reported, ‘Mike is just about frantic with all this rewriting (for your information it comes mostly from Cary Grant picking at and criticizing the script).’ By the end of three months, Curtiz was threatening to walk off the set altogether, because Grant seemed to want ‘to direct it himself. The crew joked that the Americans should have dropped their atomic bomb on Warners rather than Hiroshima: ‘That’s the only way the war between the director and the star will ever come to an end.’

  One reason for Cary Grant’s anxiety was that he knew Cole Porter personally and was concerned that the film did not convey either his friend’s ‘extraordinary talent’ or ‘the graciousness of its possessor*. (In fact Porter, who had been paid $300,000 for the rights to his songs and had been particularly keen that Grant should play him on the screen, had no complaints about his portrayal.) The other reason for Grant’s irritability on the set, of course, had nothing to do with the life story of Cole Porter, and everything to do with his own life. Eight weeks after shooting began Barbara Hutton filed for divorce in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The grounds she chose were ‘mental cruelty’.

  At the end of August, while Grant was filming Night and Day, Hutton appeared in court. She claimed that her husband had caused her ‘great mental anguish’ because he had often refused to come downstairs when she gave a dinner party, and ‘when he did come down he was obviously not amused’. The entire hearing lasted four minutes. As Time magazine remarked, ‘She would have made it in three if she had not taken time out to pose for the photographers.’ Grant did not defend himself, nor did he accept any financial settlement from his wife. He remained absolutely silent as Hutton was awarded a divorce. As a result he was to remain one of Hutton’s few friends until her death in May 1979, as well as unofficial guardian to his stepson, Lance Reventlow, who was to die in an air crash in 1972, at the age of thirty-six.

  AN ENORMOUS HIT AT THE BOX OFFICE IN 1946, NlGHT AND DAY NEVERTHELESS DID NOT APPEAL TO THE CRITICS, ONE DESCRIBED HIM AS ‘SO UNDERPLAYING THE ROLE THAT HE’S ALWAYS CARY GRANT’.

  Grant’s divorce did not end the arguments with Curtiz, however. On the final day of shooting in mid-October, he even told the director, ‘If I’m chump enough ever to be caught working for you again, you’ll know I’m either broke or I’ve lost my mind.’ He was convinced that the film would be a complete failure.

  He could not have been more wrong. Night and Day was to become one of the studio’s biggest hits when it was released in July 1946, even though Life magazine called it ‘a remarkably complete dossier of all that is wrong with the current musical film’. After the premiere, Grant sent Curtiz a telegram of apology. A week after finishing Night and Day, Grant was back at RKO.

  ONCE AGAIN HITCHCOCK BROUGHT OUT HIS MENACE IN NOTORIOUS, BUT IT WAS THE ADDITION OF INGRID BERGMAN, HERE WITH GRANT AND HITCHCOCK OFF THE SET, THAT ADDED AN EXTRA, SENSUAL,
QUALITY.

  Alfred Hitchcock had offered him the part of Devlin, a mysterious United States government agent who falls in love with a young woman who marries someone else for the good of her adopted country, in a new film to be called Notorious. Hitchcock had always wanted to make a film about a man in love with a woman who is forced, because of her official duties, to go to bed with another man, and the project had originally been prepared for David O. Selznick. But RKO had picked it up for $800,000, together with Hitchcock, the writer Ben Hecht and the young woman who was to be its female star, Ingrid Bergman.

  From the moment they were introduced, Grant was entranced by Bergman. He liked the fact that she did not wear make-up or expensive clothes, and that she took acting seriously. And as the filming got under way, Bergman encouraged him to relax. On the screen the luminous star of Casablanca seemed to shine even more brightly alongside Grant’s cool, dark elegance. Grant meanwhile seemed more attractive than he had ever been, calmer and more certain of himself, and he gave a performance that perfectly displayed his capacity for menacing charm.

  Nowhere was the sexual electricity between them more apparent than in the scene in which they kissed for the first time. The American Production Code insisted that no screen kiss should last for longer than three seconds, but Hitchcock, Bergman and Grant overcame it. As Bergman put it later, ‘We just kissed each other and talked, leaned away and kissed each other again. Then the telephone came between us, and then we moved to the other side of the telephone. So it was a kiss which opened and closed: but the censors couldn’t and didn’t cut the scene because we never at any point kissed for more than three seconds. We did other things, we nibbled each other’s ears and kissed a cheek so that it looked endless, and it became sensational in Hollywood.’