When Hitchcock had first sent Grant the script for To Catch a Thief, he had received the customary refusal. But the director was not put off. He just kept on explaining his plans. The film was to be shot in the South of France, the hero was a retired cat burglar caught up in a string of robberies which he did not commit, and he was to become involved with a young woman who believed he was a thief but who fell in love with him nevertheless. Finally, Hitchcock told Grant that his co-star was to be Grace Kelly. As Grant admitted later, ‘I didn’t want to do the film. It was only when Hitch told me I’d play opposite Grace Kelly that I did accept.’
HITCHCOCK FINALLY TEMPTED GRANT BACK TO WORK IN 1955. THE DIRECTOR’S OFFER OF HOLLYWOOD’S NEW PRINCESS, GRACE KELLY, AS HIS CO-STAR IN TO CATCH A THIEF PROVED IRRESISTIBLE.
TWO YEARS AWAY HAD MATURED GRANT’S CHARM. NOW HE WAS EVEN MORE ATTRACTIVE AND MORE RELAXED ON THE SCREEN, A QUALITY HITCHCOCK SUBTLY EXPLOITED IN THEIR THIRD FILM TOGETHER (ABOVE).
So, in November 1954, two years after he had left the set of Dream Wife and set off for the Far East, Grant left Palm Springs for the French Riviera. There had been some agonizing discussions with Betsy, but Hitchcock’s bait had proved too tempting. Besides, Paramount had guaranteed that he would never have to film after six in the evening and that he would be staying in the most luxurious surroundings, the Hotel du Cap in Antibes. They had also guaranteed him a percentage of the film’s takings.
As filming got under way, Grant became steadily more impressed with his twenty-six-year-old co-star’s ability, both as an actress and as a comedienne. Kelly concentrated as much as he did while they were shooting, and she could not only ad-lib as quickly as he could, she was also never afraid to do so. ‘She really listens, she’s right there with you,’ Grant would say admiringly to Hitchcock. Kelly seemed to embody everything that he most admired in a woman — style, elegance, grace and a certain mystery. ‘She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever known and she had the most incredible ESP about me,’ he would admit later. ‘She could almost read my thoughts.’ Grace Kelly was to become Cary Grant’s favourite leading lady. ‘She was the most memorable and honest actress I’ve ever worked with.... Grace had a kind of serenity, a calmness, that I hadn’t arrived at that point in my life. She was so relaxed in front of the camera that she made it look easy. She was astonishing.’
WITH GRACE KELLY REHEARSING A SCENE IN TO CATCH A THIEF. RIGHT: ‘HERE, HOLD THEM... THEY’RE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING IN THE WORLD.’ GRACE KELLY WAS REFERRING TO HER DIAMONDS. NOT EVERY MOVIE-GOER BELIEVED HER.
The screen relationship between Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief became the most openly sexual of any of his films. And, like Bergman in Notorious, Hitchcock made her the aggressor. When Kelly first kisses Grant in the corridor of their hotel, Hitchcock said later, ‘It’s as though she’d unzipped Cary’s fly.’ Shortly afterwards, Hitchcock had her look up at him, wearing a magnificent necklace and a distinctly low-cut gown, and murmur, ‘Here, hold them...they’re the most beautiful thing in the world, and the one thing you can’t resist.’ She was referring, of course, to the jewels. But Kelly’s own sense of humour also came out in the picnic scene, when she ad-libbed part of her dialogue. Offering him a piece of chicken she asked, ‘Do you want a leg or a breast?’ ‘You make the choice,’ he replied, and she went on, ‘Tell me, how long has it been?’ ‘Since what?’ There was a delicate pause. ‘Since you were last in America.’
But when the film opened in New York, in late August 1955, it looked as though Grant might have been mistaken to come out of ‘retirement’. The critics dismissed it. Variety particularly disliked John Michael Hayes’s screenplay, based on David Dodge’s novel: ‘Billed as a comedy-mystery, it stacks up as a drawn-out pretentious piece that seldom hits comedy level. As a mystery it fails to mystify, though it does confuse.’ The magazine concluded, ‘This film won’t enhance the prestige of either the stars or the producer-director.’ Meanwhile Bosley Crowther in The New York Times suggested it ‘does nothing but give out a good exciting time’. That, however, was exactly what the audience wanted. To Catch a Thief became one of Paramount’s biggest box-office successes in 1955.
Mike Todd wanted to exploit Cary Grant’s return to the screen without a moment’s delay. Ebullient, imaginative and a born showman, Todd was planning to assemble the largest collection of stars ever seen in a single film. The story he planned to use was Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and the single star among the forty-four with whom he wanted his audience to identify was Cary Grant, as the indomitable hero, Phileas Fogg.
Grant was flattered, but far from certain. The more Todd described the project, with its exotic locations all over the world, the more it seemed to him to be a travelogue rather than a film. There did not seem much room for him to create a character, even though the script was being written specifically for him by S.J. Perelman, John Farrow and James Poe. Grant was not ‘sure that he could make it work’. Even Todd’s offer that he could own half the film himself, together with half its profits, did not convince him. Eventually Grant turned it down, and Todd offered the role instead to his old friend David Niven. Around the World in Eighty Days went on to become one of the highest-grossing films in Hollywood history.
IN 1957 GRANT WORKED WITH THE WOMAN WHO WOULD BECOME A GREAT PASSION, SOPHIA LOREN.
It was not the only successful film that Grant was to turn down in 1955. Another producer, Sam Spiegel, was getting together a picture for Columbia based on the story of the British prisoners of war forced by the Japanese to work on the notorious Burma Railway. The English director David Lean, who was working on the script with Carl Foreman, had already cast Alec Guinness as the English officer obsessed with building The Bridge on the River Kwai, but he and Spiegel both wanted Grant to play the American sent to destroy the bridge. Once again, Grant was not sure. He did not know whether he wanted to spend quite so long on location in Ceylon. He was not being offered the leading role. The jungle sounded as though it might be taxing. Irritated by his dithering, Columbia sent the script to William Holden, who accepted without hesitation. As Grant recalled later, ‘By then, of course, I realized what a great part I’d lost.’
Betsy Drake had given up her own career when her husband ‘retired’ at the end of 1952, and his return to work on To Catch a Thief had not been exactly what she had planned. In fact, she had been prepared to allow him to go back to filming only on the understanding that there would still be time for them to spend long periods away from Hollywood. But even that had become a fantasy. Their quiet evenings in Palm Springs were a thing of the past. By the time Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco in April 1956, it had become abundantly clear to the third Mrs Cary Grant that there was little point in her sitting at home waiting for her husband. Grant could not even go to the wedding — he had already started work on a new film.
Stanley Kramer, the producer of High Noon, wanted to win Grant an Oscar, just as he had done for Gary Cooper, and he had decided to use a C.S. Forester story about the Napoleonic Wars, The Gun, to do so. Four years earlier, Spiegel and John Houston had won Bogart an Oscar with a Forester story, The African Queen, and Kramer thought that lightning might strike twice. With a screenplay by Edward and Edna Anhalt, the film was to be called The Pride and the Passion, and Kramer was convinced that the historical drama would be a good opportunity for Grant to break away from his familiar style. His principal co-star was to be Frank Sinatra, as the leader of the Spanish guerrilla forces, and Kramer had decided to cast the almost unknown Italian actress Sophia Loren as the leading lady. It was to be her first film in English.
Kramer had also decided to shoot the film entirely on location in Spain. It was a mistake, making it almost impossibly arduous. The heat of the Spanish summer, and the need for thousands of extras as a backdrop to the huge cannon that played a central role in the story, slowed filming down persistently, and proved too much for Frank Sinatra. With five weeks of shooting still to go, he walked off the s
et and left for the United States. Cary Grant and Sophia Loren were left to carry on alone. By that time they had become close friends.
At first Grant had been determined not to reveal too much of himself to Loren. But as the weeks had passed, he had confided in her more and more. ‘It disturbed him that although he had been married three times, he had never really sustained a relationship with a woman,’ she explained later. He had talked about his self-doubts and his early life. ‘I was fascinated with him, with his warmth, affection, intelligence and his wonderfully dry, mischievous sense of humour,’ she remembered. He showered her with flowers, and they fell in love.
AFTER THEY HAD MET FOR THE FIRST TIME ON THE SET OF THE PRIDE AND THE PASSION, SOPHIA LOREN ADMITTED, ‘I WAS FASCINATED.’ IT WAS A FASCINATION THAT ALMOST LED TO MARRIAGE.
That did not make the shooting of The Pride and the Passion any easier. Grant was suddenly intent on trying to persuade Loren to marry him, telling her that he was ready ‘to renounce everything’, even though both his wife and Loren’s married lover, Carlo Ponti, were due at the location at any moment. When Betsy arrived it did not take her long to realize that her husband’s attitude towards her had changed. Deeply hurt, she set off back to California, to start work on a film for Fox called Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Her journey took her across the Atlantic on board the Italian liner Andrea Doria. On the night of 25 July 1956, in patchy fog off the Newfoundland coast, the ship was rammed by the Swedish liner Stockholm, and nearly 1,200 passengers and crew were forced to abandon ship within half an hour. Forty-three people lost their lives. Betsy Drake was not one of them, but, as she put it afterwards, ‘I don’t think I have ever loved Cary quite as much as I did the night I thought I would never live to see him again.’
NO MATTER HOW HARD HE TRIED, GRANT COULD NOT QUITE PERSUADE SOPHIA LOREN TO MARRY HIM. ‘I WISH I WEREN’T SO MIXED UP,’ SHE TOLD HIM AS THEY PARTED ON THE LAST DAY OF FILMING.
Grant did not immediately abandon The Pride and the Passion to be with his wife. Instead he remained on location, apparently more convinced than ever that in Sophia Loren he had found a woman he could ‘commit himself to’. ‘I never doubted for a second that Cary loved me as much as I could hope to be loved by a man,’ Loren was to explain later. On the last night of filming, she told him, ‘I wish I weren’t so mixed up and confused. One day I am pulled one way and the next day another. I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ Grant said simply, ‘Why don’t we just get married and discuss all this afterwards?’ A trembling Sophia Loren left the next morning, on her way to Greece to appear with Alan Ladd in Boy on a Dolphin. Her co-star meanwhile began the long trip back to Hollywood, hopeful that she would finally agree to become the fourth Mrs Cary Grant.
The passions that raged during the shooting of The Pride and the Passion were not reflected on the screen. Sinatra’s abrupt departure had hurt the picture, and not even the most determined efforts by Grant and Loren could save it. ‘The whir of the cameras often seems as loud as the thunderous cannonades,’ commented Time, when it opened in July 1957. ‘It evidently takes more than dedication, co-operative multitudes and four million dollars to shoot history in the face.’ In spite of the unfavourable reviews, the film turned out to be a box-office success. And it put Cary Grant back on the list of Hollywood’s top ten male stars.
On the surface, life seemed to go on as before in the Grants’ homes in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs, but underneath everything had changed. Betsy Drake was working again, opposite Jayne Mansfield and Tony Randall at Fox, and Grant was sending flowers to Sophia Loren. Their attempt to remove themselves from Hollywood had failed, and both now sensed that their marriage had failed with it. For the moment, however, neither wanted to be the first to acknowledge it. That would have been too painful.
A failing marriage did not prevent Grant playing the romantic lead on the screen, however. In February 1957, he went back to Fox to do precisely that, and to work with Leo McCarey for the third time. The director’s health had been poor, but the studio wanted him to make another romantic comedy with Cary Grant and, after some thought, McCarey had decided to remake his own 1939 hit, Love Affair, which had originally starred Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne. The story of a couple who fall in love while crossing the Atlantic, then agree to part for six months while the man tries to establish a new career as a commercial artist, McCarey called it his ‘favourite love story’. When the woman fails to keep their rendezvous after six months, the man assumes she has changed her mind, although, in fact, she has been hurt in an accident. In An Affair to Remember, as McCarey’s new version was to be called, Grant was to appear opposite Deborah Kerr, his co-star on the disastrous Dream Wife.
When shooting started, McCarey noticed a significant change in the ‘tortured worrier’ he remembered from The Awful Truth. Grant seemed far more assured and relaxed than he had done in the past, and that communicated itself in his performance. ‘The difference between Love Affair and An Affair to Remember,’ McCarey explained, ‘is very simply the difference between Charles Boyer and Cary Grant. Grant could never really mask his sense of humour —which is extraordinary — and that’s why the second version is funnier.’ But the director also marked his star’s old habits by inserting a carefully planned ad-lib for a cabin boy: ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’ When Grant asked what the boy had heard, McCarey gave him the response, ‘I don’t know. Whenever they start to talk about you they make me leave the room.’ It was McCarey’s way of telling the audience ‘the opinion people had about Grant without having to underline it’.
SADDENED, GRANT TOOK REFUGE WITH HIS FRIENDS DEBORAH KERR AND DIRECTOR LEO MCCAREY IN 1957 TO MAKE AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER.
TIME CALLED IT ‘A SACCHARINE TRIFLE’, BUT AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER REMAINS ONE OF HOLLYWOOD’S BEST-LOVED ROMANCES, AS SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE WAS TO BE THIRTY-SIX YEARS LATER.
When An Affair to Remember was released in July 1957, a week before The Pride and the Passion, some critics carped at its old-fashioned quality. The New Yorker dismissed it as ‘awfully maudlin’, while Time commented, ‘Only sensitive acting from Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant saves this saccharine trifle from suffocating in its sentimental wrappings.’ By contrast the Los Angeles Times was full of praise, both for the picture itself and for McCarey: ‘To bring back to the screen within twenty years an enormously appealing picture subject, and cause it to appear as effective, if not even better than the original, is a true achievement in film-making.’ The paper complimented McCarey for doing so ‘movingly and impressively’. It was this second version of the story that was to inspire a fresh passion for romantic comedy in 1993 in Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle, with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
By the time An Affair to Remember was released, Grant was shooting again. He had started work in May on Kiss Them for Me, another comedy for Fox, this time directed by the thirty-three-year-old Stanley Donen. Donen had started his career as a dancer and choreographer, going on to co-direct a string of MGM musicals, including On the Town and Singin’ in the Rain. Written by Jules Epstein and based on Frederick Wakeman’s novel Shore Leave, his new film was an inconsequential romp depicting the adventures of three navy pilots on shore leave in San Francisco. Fox’s latest contract star, Jayne Mansfield, and Suzy Parker, a twenty-year-old model newly turned actress, were Grant’s co-stars, and the whole shoot was designed to take just ten weeks. As soon as it was over, Grant and Betsy were planning to take another trip to England to see his mother. Things did not go according to plan, however. While Grant was filming Sophia Loren arrived in Hollywood. Now when the cast of Kiss Them for Me went to see their rushes each evening at 6.30, Sophia Loren suddenly took to appearing and Cary Grant proceeded ‘to fall in love with her all over again’. It did not make life any easier for Stanley Donen. But no matter what emotional crises Grant was facing, the young director did everything he could to make the filming easy. Sadly, his efforts did little to help his film. When it was released in November 1957, Bosley Crowther remarked i
n The New York Times that Grant ‘seems somewhat over-age for this kind of assignment’.
IN KISS THEM FOR ME, WITH SUZY PARKER, GRANT ONCE AGAIN FOUND HIMSELF PURSUED BY HOLLYWOOD’S LATEST SEX SYMBOL, JAYNE MANSFIELD - EVEN THOUGH HE WAS NOW FIFTY-THREE.
Over-age or not, at fifty-three Cary Grant was most certainly in love, and, just as he had with Betsy Drake, he was determined to appear on the screen with Sophia Loren. Suddenly, a chance presented itself. Jack Rose and Mel Shavelson, who had written Room for One More for him and Betsy, had worked up another story about children, called Houseboat. This time, instead of being orphans, the children had lost their mother and were trying to remake a relationship with their father. When the project had first been discussed Betsy had been keen, not least because she was eager to appear with her husband again. Now Paramount wanted to make the film, with Shavelson as director and Rose as producer — but they did not want it to star Betsy Drake, especially as they had just signed Sophia Loren to a four-picture deal.
SOPHIA LOREN CAME TO HOLLYWOOD IN 1958 TO MAKE HOUSEBOAT, AND RE-IGNITED GRANT’S PASSION. THE MOVIE’S -CLIMAX WAS THEIR WEDDING
BUT OFF THE SET LOREN MARRIED CARLO PONTI. THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER STILL CALLED GRANT’S PERFORMANCE ‘JUST ABOUT FLAWLESS.’
Paramount pointed out that The Pride and the Passion had demonstrated just how successful a combination Cary Grant and Sophia Loren could be at the box-office, and, after lengthy heart-searching, Grant reluctantly accepted their suggestion. A desolate Betsy Drake left Hollywood with her husband for their long-planned trip to see his mother, but when Grant returned to Los Angeles to start work on Houseboat, he was alone.
Cary Grant: Dark Angel Page 12
