Cary Grant: Dark Angel

by Geoffrey Wansell

  NOTORIOUS IN 1946 PROVED THAT GRANT HAD BECOME ONE OF THE CINEMA’S GREAT STARS. THE STUDIO PUBLICITY STILLS OF THE PERIOD (LEFT) REFLECTED HIS EXTRA CONFIDENCE.

  Cary Grant’s performance in Notorious underlined how far his unique qualities as a screen actor had matured in the years since The Awful Truth. He had become more careful and restrained than the eyebrow-arching Jerry Warriner; he was now a man who had been hurt but who had survived, wounded but wiser. When the film opened at the Radio City Music Hall in July 1946, the critics paid fulsome tribute. In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther called Notorious a ‘romantic melodrama which is just about as thrilling as they come — velvet smooth in dramatic action, sharp and sure in its characters and heavily charged with the intensity of warm emotional appeal’. Crowther, along with almost every other critic, also noticed that Hitchcock had made Bergman the seductress and Grant the man to be pursued. Alfred Hitchcock had thereby forged the final, decisive part of Cary Grant’s screen persona.

  IN THE KISSING SEQUENCE IN NOTORIOUS HITCHCOCK’S STARS FLOUTED THE PRODUCTION CODE BY KISSING PASSIONATELY, BUT INTERMITTENTLY, FOR MUCH LONGER THAN THE CODE ALLOWED.

  Shortly after filming was over Grant set off for his first visit to England since the end of the war. The United States government was now prepared to give him a passport, and he wanted to celebrate his mother’s sixty-ninth birthday with her in Bristol. But when he saw her for the first time in five years, Grant realized nothing had changed. The small wiry woman was still as fiercely independent as she had been ever since she re-entered his life, and she still managed to make him feel uncomfortable. He would sit with her and she would tell him how pleased she was to see him, and yet he could never quite escape the feeling that nothing he did would ever truly please her, and that when she complimented him he did not really deserve it.

  Like Night and Day, Notorious was to become one of the biggest box-office successes of 1946, making RKO a profit of more than $1 million. By the time it was released Grant was filming again. His self-imposed exile after Barbara Hutton’s departure was firmly in the past. Shortly after his return from Engand in June, he started work for the studio again, this time starring opposite Myrna Loy and the seventeen-year-old Shirley Temple in a project which had started life as an original screenplay by a twenty-nine-year-old former script reader called Sidney Sheldon. The original title was Too Good to Be True, but the film’s producer, Dore Schary, had renamed it The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer. Designed to establish Temple as a believable teenager on the screen, it demanded that the former child star should subject Grant to a bewildering array of teenage activities, including eating ice-cream sodas and doing the jitterbug, while her elder sister, played by Loy, looked on.

  SHIRLEY TEMPLE WAS THE LATEST WOMAN TO PURSUE GRANT ON THE SCREEN. WITH HIS HELP, SHE BECAME A BELIEVABLE TEENAGER IN THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBYSOXER IN 1947.

  Throughout the shooting Grant fussed, as he had done so often before, but he also allowed Temple to control the screen. By delicately underplaying his own role, he enabled the young woman to blossom, and when the film was released in September 1947 Variety paid tribute to his ‘expert timing’, which, it added, ‘proves a terrific lift to an occasionally awkward plot’. The film was to become his fifth consecutive hit, bringing RKO more than $5 million in film rentals from the United States alone. It was also to win Sidney Sheldon an Academy Award for his screenplay.

  In public, Cary Grant still liked to preserve the image that he had so carefully constructed on the screen. He certainly did not care to reveal his private insecurities to the cinema audience, and this made him particularly cautious about accepting any role that might hint he was not what he appeared to be. Alfred Hitchcock had suggested that he would make a perfect Hamlet on film, and had even commissioned a screenplay, but Grant had politely declined. Harry Cohn at Columbia had tried to persuade him to play the lead in Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin’s new script, A Double Life, about an actor playing Othello who becomes so obsessed with his role that he murders the actress playing Desdemona. But, once again, Grant turned the part down. It might have been a mistake, as the role was to win an Oscar for Ronald Colman.

  Insecurity about revealing too much about himself was not the only limitation to the parts Cary Grant would consider playing. There was also the question of his fee. Money had become one certain means of stilling the private fears that still plagued him, and he had become expert at the business of making movies. Together with his agent, Frank Vincent, he had managed to obtain for himelf some of the best profit participations of any actor working in Hollywood. Some of his friends even suspected that he enjoyed the process of making the deal more than the performances themselves, although he denied it.

  Sam Goldwyn was certainly aware of Cary Grant’s reputation as a businessman. But the Polish-born producer of such hits as Wuthering Heights and The Pride of the Yankees also knew Grant’s value at the box-office, and he needed him to guarantee another winner. Goldwyn wanted to follow the success of RKO’s films about the life of a young Catholic priest, Going My Way and The Bells of St Mary’s, with a religious comedy of his own, although it was to be a Protestant one, based on Robert Nathan’s novel The Bishop’s Wife. Grant was to play a bishop so obsessed with raising money for a new cathedral that he drifts apart from his wife, to be played by Loretta Young, only to find himself assisted by Dudley, an angel in human form, to be played by David Niven. The script had been written by Robert Sherwood, who had just won an Oscar for The Best Years of Our Lives for Goldwyn, and revised by Leonardo Bercovici. Cary Grant negotiated his deal himself. It guaranteed him a minimum of $300,000.

  On 1 February 1947 Grant arrived at RKO to start work. The director of The Bishop’s Wife was William Seiter, a former Keystone Cop who had become one of Hollywood’s most accomplished craftsmen with light comedy, but the rehearsals did not go well. Once again, Grant fretted that he could not make his role work, while Goldwyn did not like the approach Seiter was taking. David Niven was struggling to come to terms with the sudden tragic death of his first wife, Primula, only a few weeks before. Finally, after the first weeks of shooting, Goldwyn decided to change the director. Seiter was paid his full fee, but replaced by Henry Koster, who had been directing in Hollywood since the Thirties. Nor did Goldwyn stop there. He also insisted that Grant and Niven swop roles, making Grant the angel and Niven the bishop. The decision infuriated Grant, who felt he understood the ‘befuddled’ cleric and said so. In retaliation Goldwyn fined him, only to reinstate the payment once filming had restarted.

  AS SOON AS HE HAD FINISHED THE BISHOP’S WIFE FOR SAMUEL GOLDWYN IN 1947, ALONGSIDE DAVID NIVENa (RIGHT),

  No matter how fraught the filming had been, when The Bishop’s Wife was released to catch the 1947 Christmas audience — not least because it featured a Christmas Eve reconciliation between the bishop and his wife — it appealed to the critics. The New York Times called it ‘as cheerful an invasion of the realm of conscience as we have seen’, while Variety described it as ‘fluent and beguiling’ as Cary Grant ‘rescues the role from the ultimate peril of coyness’. It did not, however, quite match the appeal of The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer at the box-office.

  In August 1947, as soon as shooting on The Bishop’s Wife was over, Grant once again left Hollywood for England. He had two months free before he was due to embark on another film, and that presented a chance to see his mother. This time he made the journey in the company of a friend, the English playwright Frederick Lonsdale, author of The Last of Mrs Cheyney. After Grant had paid his customary visit to Bristol, he and Lonsdale went to the theatre together in London, and in late September set off back across the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth. On board ship Grant noticed a twenty-four-year-old actress they had seen in London in a play called Deep Are the Roots. Her name was Betsy Drake.

  GRANT RETURNED TO ENGLAND TO VISIT HIS MOTHER IN BRISTOL(LEFT).

  LEFT AND ABOVE: IN THE BISHOP’S WIFE GRANT PLAYED A ‘BLITHE SPIRIT’ WHO MATERIALIZ
ES TO ANSWER A YOUNG BISHOP’S PRAYERS, AND HELPS SAVE BOTH CHURCH AND HIS MARRIAGE AT CHRISTMAS.

  After arranging an introduction, Grant ate every meal during the five-day voyage with the young actress, the daughter of a writer, born in Paris in 1923. Brought up in Washington, Drake had become a model, then an actress in New York, before accepting an invitation from H.M. Tennent to appear on Shaftesbury Avenue. ‘She intrigued me no end,’ Grant confessed. ‘She was interested in astronomy and yoga — subjects I’d never investigated myself — and she was bookish, but charmingly so.’ By the time they reached New York, Betsy Drake had become Grant’s latest project. He was determined to help her become a star in Hollywood.

  Drake herself was sceptical, but Grant persisted, telling her repeatedly that she could have a part in one of his films. After a time, she politely accepted his invitation to join him in California. There was no job waiting for her in New York, and Hollywood might have something to offer. But she refused to be seen as the latest ‘friend’ of a famous star. Drake insisted that she find her own apartment, and go to her own auditions. She might still stammer when she was nervous, but her father’s family had built the famous Drake Hotel in Chicago, and she did not intend to be taken for granted.

  As Grant arrived to start work on his new film for RKO in October 1947, where Dore Schary was now in charge of production and David O. Selznick was his producer, Betsy Drake settled herself into a small apartment in Hollywood. Grant introduced her to the agent Ray Stark, who was eventually to represent her, as well as to both Schary and Selznick, and he coached her for the screen test that RKO had offered her. He made no secret of the fact that he wanted her to be his co-star, and RKO were not anxious to upset the man who had made nine box-office hits for them over the past ten years. After the test, Schary and Selznick offered Betsy Drake a contract between them, and agreed to consider her for the picture after the one that Grant was just about to start shooting.

  AFTER YEARS OF NERVOUSNESS ON THE SET, GRANT SEEMED TO RELAX ON MR BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE, WITH MYRNA LOY, IN 1948. ‘IT WAS A JOY,’ HE SAID LATER.

  Satisfied, Grant started work on Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, a comedy based on the simple idea that every successful New York advertising executive longs to escape his cramped Manhattan apartment for a house in Connecticut. Grant was to play the advertising executive Jim Blandings and Myrna Loy his wife Muriel. Written by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank from an Eric Hodgins novel, the film was to be directed by Hank Potter, who had last worked with Grant on Mr Lucky. This time, in place of a dancing caterpillar, Potter was to have a clapboard country house that seemed destined never to be completed. ‘I loved it,’ Potter recalled years later. ‘The film was a pleasure to make.’ Myrna Loy agreed, and even Dore Schary noticed that Grant’s customary fidgety uncertainty had waned a little under the influence of Betsy Drake.

  THE STORY OF AN ADVERTISING MAN INTENT ON ESCAPING FROM MANHATTAN TO CONNECTICUT, MR BLANDINGS REMAINS A FAVOURITE OF NEW YORKERS TODAY.

  The good nature that surrounded the production was reflected in the reviews. When Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House opened in March 1948, the New Yorker said it had ‘all the standard ingredients, from the closet in the hall which disgorges everything in it when the door is opened to the springs in the cellar that rise like the Mississippi without warning’. The critic James Agee added, ‘A bulls-eye for middle-class middlebrows.’

  By that time, Cary Grant had got his way. RKO had confirmed that Betsy Drake was to be his next co-star. And in late May, they started work together. Written, produced and directed by Don Hartman, who had written three of the Road films for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Every Girl Should Be Married was exactly the sort of comedy that Grant’s audience expected of him. He was to play a successful paediatrician, Dr Madison Brown, who has meticulously protected his bachelor status until a young saleswoman in the children’s department of a local store, to be played by Drake, mounts an elaborate campaign to capture him. He had taken a hand in polishing the script, along with Hartman and his collaborator Stephen Morehouse Avery, and there was an echo of his romance with Drake in the story. Like his film character, Grant wanted to be wanted by an independent young woman.

  Whatever the underlying emotions, the cinema audience loved the picture. Every Girl Should Be Married turned out to be RKO’s biggest box-office success of the year when it was released in December 1948, making more than $750,000 in profits for the studio. The critics, on the other hand, loathed it. Newsweek suggested it was ‘a light-headed little comedy’ which believed that ‘eligible bachelors are unsocial creatures who like to shut themselves up in fusty rooms full of stuffed fish and moose antlers’ and dismissed it as ‘contrived and overcute’. Time agreed: ‘Newcomer Betsy Drake seems to have studied, but not learned, the tricks and inflections of the early Hepburn. Her exaggerated grimaces supply only one solid laugh — when hero Grant mimics them cruelly and accurately. In the past, Cary Grant has shown a talent for quietly underplaying comedy. In the picture, he has trouble finding comedy to play.’

  After fifty-two films in just sixteen years, Cary Grant was established as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. In the past year alone he had earned more than $350,000 from his pictures, together with substantial profits from earlier successes. To confirm it, Fame magazine had just named him one of the industry’s top ten actors, alongside Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. Now he wanted to exploit his position by selling his talents to the highest bidder. Even though RKO was now owned by his old friend Howard Hughes, Every Girl Should Be Married was the last film that Grant was to make for the studio.

  Grant wanted fresh and richer pastures, but not fresh collaborators. He still preferred to work with people he knew and trusted. So the first picture he made away from RKO was for Howard Hawks. They had not worked together since His Girl Friday, but Hawks had sensed that Grant might like the opportunity to make a comedy in Europe, away from the American critics, and had suggested an idea to him. The story Hawks had in mind focused on a French army officer newly married to a female American officer. Prevented from consummating his marriage by her army commitments, he decides to dress up as a female officer to circumvent regulations. With a script by Charles Lederer, who had written His Girl Friday, together with Leonard Spigelglass and Hagar Wilde, and based on a story by Henri Rochard, the film was to be called I Was a Male War Bride. Hawks thought the idea of spending a good proportion of a film dressed up as a woman might appeal to Grant’s appetite for pantomime.

  IN 1948 GRANT PERSUADED RKO TO USE BETSY DRAKE, A YOUNG WOMAN HE HAD MET ON AN ATLANTIC CROSSING, AS HIS CO-STAR IN EVERY GIRL SHOULD BE MARRIED. SHE BECAME HIS THIRD WIFE.

  LEFT: HOWARD HAWKS BROUGHT OUT THE UNEXPECTED SIDE OF HIS STAR IN I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE IN 1949. GRANT SPENT MOST OF THE PICTURE DRESSED AS A WOMAN, WEARING A RIDICULOUS WIG(RIGHT).

  Before the project got under way, I Was a Male War Bride promised to be as successful as His Girl Friday, but not everything went according to plan. No sooner had Cary Grant arrived in Germany to start work in September 1948 than bad weather stopped production. Then his co-star Ann Sheridan caught pleurisy, which turned into pneumonia, and another crew member came down with jaundice. Grant was certain the production was jinxed. Within a few days, he had been taken ill with hepatitis and been transported to London, where a British doctor ordered him to stay in bed and rest. As Christmas approached Grant grew gradually weaker and weaker. It was as if he had lost the will to recover.

  Betsy Drake saved him. As he admitted later, ‘She nursed me back to health.’ It was a revelation to him. The young actress’s obvious concern for his health convinced him that he had at last found a woman who would give him the unquestioning affection that he had craved ever since his mother’s disappearance. Drake seemed to want nothing more than to make his life the most important thing in her own. By the end of February 1949, when he was well enough to travel, they decided to take a long sea voyage back to Los Angele
s, to give him time to recuperate. On the voyage, Cary Grant asked Betsy Drake to marry him.

  She refused to consider marriage for the moment. ‘If I should marry before I have at least two successful pictures,’ she later explained to the columnist Louella Parsons, ‘no matter how good I might be, I would simply be known as Mrs Cary Grant.’

  Hawks finished I Was a Male War Bride in the early spring of 1949, and as soon as the filming was over Cary Grant checked himself into the John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for a complete physical examination. But now, after waiting more than a year, Twentieth Century Fox were anxious to release the picture as quickly as possible, and the studio shipped the first prints to the cinemas for release in the first week of September. Though Bosley Crowther noted in The New York Times that ‘the flimsiness of the film’s foundations and the disorder of its episodes provoke the inevitable impression that it all fell together en route’, Newsweek called it ‘one of the most sparkingly original comedies of the year’. It was to become another box-office triumph.

  Grant’s illness had taken its toll, however, and he did not feel well enough to make another film during 1949. Instead, he and Betsy appeared in a radio version of Every Girl Should Be Married for the Lux Theatre on CBS, and he made another appearance on the show with Shirley Temple in a radio version of The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer. Radio was all that he would agree to — he was determined to take the rest of the year off to recover completely. He was also trying to persuade Betsy to become his wife.

  In the end Howard Hughes intervened. On Christmas Day 1949, he picked Grant and Drake up from Beverly Hills, drove them to Glendale Airport, north of Hollywood, put them into one of his own planes and flew them to Phoenix in Arizona. He had decided the time had come for them to get married, and they had agreed. Hughes was the best man at the five-minute ceremony. The bride was twenty-six and the groom almost forty-six. As a wedding gift he presented her with a string of pearls with a diamond clasp, along with a poodle named Suzie. There was no time for a honeymoon. Grant was to start a new film for MGM on 1 January 1950.