Filming did not prove easy. Grant was edgy. He was in love with Loren but frightened that she would never abandon Carlo Ponti, and only too aware that his third marriage was probably over whatever happened. Once again his screen life seemed mysteriously to echo his own. The climax of Houseboat was to be the wedding of Cary Grant and Sophia Loren, but suddenly, with only two days to go before the filming of the wedding itself, Louella Parsons reported that Loren and Carlo Ponti had been married ‘by proxy’ by two lawyers in Juarez, Mexico. Loren said later that her screen ‘marriage’ to Grant ‘was painful for me, too, his make-believe bride. I could not help thinking of all those lovely times in Spain.’ But when the film’s minister pronounced them man and wife, Grant simply said to her, ‘I hope you will be very happy’ and kissed her on both cheeks. The moment shooting was completed he walked off the set, and within a few days he had disappeared from Hollywood altogether, to find Betsy in England.
With Loren and Ponti now firmly settled in Beverly Hills, Cary Grant could not bring himself to return to California, and was only too happy to accept Stanley Donen’s suggestion of a new project which could be shot in England. Donen thought Grant had been wonderful opposite Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, and he wanted to put them together again. He also thought he could persuade his friend Norman Krasna to allow him to move the location of his 1953 Broadway play, Kind Sir, from New York to London, as the basis of his new Grant and Bergman movie. If he could do so, Warners had agreed to finance the production and guarantee Grant’s customary fee of $300,000.
Grant still admired Bergman as much as he had done when they finished Notorious. But his view was no longer shared by majority of the American cinema-going public. Bergman had not made a film in Hollywood since 1949, when her virtuous screen image had been shattered by the revelation that she had left her husband and their daughter Pia for the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, and that she was pregnant with Rossellini’s child. Though Bergman had subsequently married Rossellini, and had a son and twin daughters with him, ‘Suddenly the American public that elevated her to the point of idolatry cast her down, vilified her, and boycotted her films’, in the words of The New York Times. But Grant had remained a friend. Indeed, in March 1957, he had proved how much he cared for Bergman. He had broken one of his own strict rules and agreed to appear on television to accept an Academy Award on her behalf for her performance in Anastasia. Conquering his own stage fright, he had told the television audience, ‘Dear Ingrid, if you can hear me now or will see this televised film later, I want you to know that each of the other nominees and all the people with whom you worked on Anastasia, and Hitch, and Leo McCarey, and indeed everyone here tonight, send you congratulations and love and admiration and every affectionate thought.’
AFTER SOPHIA LOREN’S MARRIAGE, GRANT FLED HOLLYWOOD FOR LONDON TO MAKE INDISCREET FOR DIRECTOR STANLEY DONEN, WITH HIS OLD FRIEND AND CO-STAR FROM NOTORIOUS, INGRID BERGMAN.
THE AFFECTION INGRID BERGMAN AND GRANT FELT FOR EACH OTHER WAS ABUNDANTLY CLEAR ON THE SCREEN. INDISCREET BECAME ONE OF GRANT’S FAVOURITE FILMS, AND ONE OF THE BIGGEST HITS OF 1958.
So when Stanley Donen arrived in Rome a few months later to discuss the possibility of her making a film with Grant, Ingrid Bergman had told him firmly, ‘I’m going to do the picture. Just tell me what it is.’ By the time she got to London to start filming, however, she was back in the headlines. Her relationship with Rossellini had broken up. Once again Grant came to her rescue. At a press conference, he told the assembled reporters when they badgered her about her private life, ‘You can’t ask a lady that. Ask me the same question and I’ll give you an answer. So you’re not interested in my life? It’s twice as colourful as Ingrid’s.’ What the reporters did not realize was that Grant’s marriage, too, was once more on the brink of collapse.
Grant and Donen’s new film, for which they had formed a new company, Grandon Productions, was another light comedy. Norman Krasna had indeed adapted his Broadway play for the screen, and retitled it Indiscreet. Bergman played a famous actress and Grant a dashing American diplomat protecting his bachelor status by pretending to be married. Grant himself had suggested one of Bergman’s best lines of dialogue: ‘How dare you make love to me and not be a married man?’ He felt sure it would make every other line in the picture funnier. Indiscreet was to become one of his favourite films, and one of Warner Brothers’ biggest box-office hits when it was released in May 1958. ‘The actors volley Krasna’s ebullient dialogue with masterful adroitness and manage romance with a subtlety that detracts not for a moment from its ardour,’ as Newsweek put it.
EVA MARIE SAINT WAS NOT GRACE KELLY, BUT SHE WAS EVERY BIT AS GRACEFUL A FOIL IN NORTH BY NORTHWEST IN 1959. HE WAS ONE OF HOLLYWOOD’S BIGGEST BOX-OFFICE STARS.
Meanwhile Cary Grant was struggling to see whether he could save his marriage. It was no easy task. After the shooting of Indiscreet was completed in December 1957, he had taken Betsy to Monte Carlo to stay on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht and visit Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, but gloomy memories of the past had gradually overwhelmed them. So, in the New Year, he left Betsy in Europe and took a trip to Moscow with Sam Spiegel, Howard Hawks’s former wife Slim and the author Truman Capote. Then he set off back to California.
Alfred Hitchcock and he were planning their fourth film together. Ernest Lehman, who had just collaborated with Clifford Odets on the script of Sweet Smell of Success, had been working on Hitchcock’s idea of a movie about a chase across the United States which would culminate on the massive stone monument to four presidents at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. One of Hitch’s original titles had been ‘The Man in Lincoln’s Nose’, but he had amended it to ‘In a Northerly Direction’ before changing it again to North by Northwest.
Hitchcock wanted to make his new film the ultimate exploration of the character that he and Cary Grant had perfected: the man to whom terrible things happen but who nevertheless never seems to lose control. It was to be an American version of Hitch’s English thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, with Grant every bit as wrongly accused as Richard Hannay and just as determined to clear his name. For the woman who was to share the journey with him, Grant had suggested Sophia Loren, but she had turned the part down, deciding instead to return to Italy.
In Loren’s place Hitchcock had suggested Eva Marie Saint. Cool, blonde and attractive, she was closer to Grace Kelly than to Loren, but her calm exterior seemed to hint at Kelly’s passion and the director admired her performance in On the Waterfront, which had won her an Oscar. Nevertheless, Grant was irritated and unsettled when he started work with her in the early summer of 1958. No sooner had he begun than he decided the film would be a disaster, and tried, as he had done so many times before, to get out of making it altogether. Hitchcock and MGM, who were financing the picture, stood firm. Grant had signed a contract. Whatever he felt about the script, or the cast, or anything else for that matter, he still had to finish it. A reluctant Grant accepted defeat.
IN NORTH BY NORTHWEST ALFRED HITCHCOCK CREATED THE ULTIMATE VERSION OF HIS STAR’S SCREEN PERSONA: THE MAN TERRIFYING THINGS HAPPEN TO. NEVER MORE SO THAN IN THE CROP-DUSTER CHASE.
One reason for his nervousness was that his image as one of the cinema’s great lovers was about to be put in jeopardy. On 17 October 1958, while North by Northwest was still shooting, he and Betsy Drake announced that they had decided to live apart. ‘We have had, and always shall have, a deep love and respect for each other,’ their joint statement read, ‘but, alas, our marriage has not brought us the happiness we fully expected and mutually desired. So, since we have no children needful of our affection, it is consequently best that we separate for a while’ They concluded by insisting that there were no plans for divorce, but Alfred Hitchcock, like most of Grant’s friends, knew that was inevitable. It provoked him to insert a line of dialogue into the picture they were finishing together: he had Grant tell Eva Marie Saint, ‘My wives divorced me. I think they said I led too dull a life.’
Gra
nt’s attractiveness on the screen, however, had never been greater. When Houseboat opened in November 1958, the Hollywood Reporter described his performance as ‘just about flawless’, adding, ‘With sure artistry, he seems unconscious of the farcical nature of the ridiculous events that overwhelm him.’ It was a skill that had made him one of the highest paid actors in the industry, earning an average of $500,000 a picture after his 10 per cent gross profit participations were included. Only Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra could guarantee to make as much money as he did from films, and films were not his only source of income. He was also still investing carefully in stocks and shares, real estate and currency.
After the separation, Grant provided Betsy Drake with financial support and a house in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. She had become his closest friend, a confidante whom he felt he could always trust, rather than a lover. There had been none of the tempestuous quarrels between them that had coloured his relationships with Virginia Cherrill and Barbara Hutton. Betsy may have looked at him a little sadly as their marriage gradually ebbed away, but she never became his enemy. And it was Betsy who now introduced Grant to the psychotherapist who was to transform his life still further. Late in 1958, she started sessions with Dr Mortimer Hartman and soon afterwards recommended him to her husband. Grant was to become Hartman’s most famous and most controversial patient, the first Hollywood star to admit to using the hallucinogenic drug LSD.
GRANT HAD NOT BEEN ON A SUBMARINE SINCE DESTINATION TOKYO FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE, BUT UNIVERSAL TEMPTED HIM BACK ON BOARD WITH OPERATION PETTICOAT, DIRECTED BY BLAKE EDWARDS.
After Grant had taken LSD, Hartman asked him to lie on a couch in a darkened room, with his eyes masked and plugs in his ears, to ‘relive their past’. Each session could last up to six hours, and Hartman was convinced that the drug helped to ‘facilitate the progress of psychotherapy’. Grant would usually be delivered to his Beverly Hills clinic by a chauffeur on Saturday mornings, to be collected again in the late afternoon.’ I had become dissatisfied with me,’ he admitted later. ‘I took LSD in the hope it would make me feel better about myself.’
Cary Grant was to use LSD more than one hundred times before the drug was finally declared illegal by the United States government in 1965, and he was to insist that it never had any harmful effect upon him. ‘You become free of the usual discipline. I became happier for it, and the insights I gained dispelled many of the fears I had prior to that time.’ In the sessions, he talked through the despair of his childhood, and his relationships with his parents and his wives. ‘I found it extremely valuable. It did me a great deal of good. It brought up all those guilts, all the nightmares I’d been holding down.’
Indeed, Grant became so enthusiastic about the value of LSD and the benefits that it brought him that he extolled its virtues during the shooting of his next picture. Universal had approached him to make Operation Petticoat, written by Stanley Shapiro and Maurice Richlin, a romantic comedy about the exploits of a group of nurses on board a pink-painted submarine in the first weeks of the Second World War. The director was to be the thirty-seven-year-old former screenwriter Blake Edwards, and Grant’s co-star was to be Tony Curtis, who had just played a saxophone player forced to pretend he is a woman in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, giving in the process a perfect imitation of Cary Grant. The studio agreed to give Grant a bungalow on their lot north of Hollywood, and to pay him $300,000 plus 25 per cent of the profits.
GRANT’S CO-STAR JOAN O’BRIEN SCRATCHES HIS BACK ON THE SET OF OPERATION PETTICOAT IN 1959. ALSO STARRING TONY CURTIS, IT BECAME ONE OF UNIVERSAL’S BIGGEST HITS EVER.
No sooner had the shooting of Operation Petticoat got under way in Key West, Florida, in the spring of 1959, than Cary Grant gave two highly untypical interviews. The man who had made his Hollywood reputation by never talking about himself suddenly revealed to the Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams, ‘Each of us is dying for affection but we don’t know how to go about getting it. Everything we do is affected by this longing. I wanted people to like me, but I went about it the wrong way.’ He admitted that he had been undergoing psychotherapy and experimenting with LSD. By late April, the American newspapers were filled with reports that Cary Grant had been taking hallucinogenic drugs.
But these revelations did nothing to harm his appeal. When North by Northwest opened in July, Newsweek confirmed that he and Hitchcock were ‘two of the slickest operators before and behind the Hollywood cameras. Together they can be unbeatable.’ Variety added, ‘The mixture as before, suspense, intrigue, comedy, humour; but seldom has the concoction been served up so delectably or in so glossy a package.’ The film was to become one of MGM’s biggest box-office hits in 1959, taking more than $6 million in the United States alone.
Universal rushed out Operation Petticoat in December 1959 to capitalize on Grant’s popularity, and were rewarded with more than $9.5 million in receipts at the American box-office. The film became the biggest hit in the studio’s history, and made Grant over $3 million from his profit participation alone. Even the flimsy plot did not, for once, alienate the critics. Variety paid particular tribute to his performance: ‘Grant is a living lesson in getting laughs without lines.... It is his reaction, blank, startled, etc., always underplayed, that creates or releases the humour.’
There seemed to be nothing Cary Grant touched that did not turn to gold.
AGEING IS NEVER EASY FOR A STAR, ESPECIALLY NOT FOR ONE WHO HAS BEEN PURSUED BY BEAUTIFUL WOMEN LIKE DORIS DAY (ABOVE RIGHT] FOR THREE DECADES. GRANT CHOSE WALK DON’T RUN IN 1966
CHAPTER SEVEN • FINAL BOW
'You can never go back. It’s not possible. People are used to me as a certain kind of fellow, and I can’t make that kind of film any more.’
TO BRING HIS CAREER TO AN END, RATHER THAN RISK TARNISHING HIS UNIQUE SCREEN IMAGE.
When Cary Grant went to visit his mother during the first days of January I960, Elsie Leach was on the brink of her eighty-third birthday. Apart from her steel-grey hair, she showed hardly a sign of ageing. The small, fierce woman sat rigidly in front of her son, looking at him as she had always done, like an exhibit, a man whom she hardly knew.
One afternoon Grant took her out for a drive. ‘Archie,’ she said suddenly, ‘you should dye your hair.’ When he asked her why, she replied, ‘Because it makes me look so old.’
Elsie Leach also told him to patch up his marriage with Betsy Drake. It was time for him ‘to settle down’, she said, and for a time it almost seemed as if he might. Grant and Betsy had gone to Bristol together to see his mother, and from there had returned to London to stay in a suite at the Savoy overlooking the Thames. With Elsie’s words ringing in his ears, Grant took his wife for drives in the Rolls-Royce he had demanded from Warners for making Indiscreet. At other times Betsy would wander round London while Grant talked to Stanley Donen about a new production they were planning to do together in London. Betsy did not particularly want to return to California, and Cary Grant was happy enough to work in England again.
Grant and Donen were hoping to repeat the success of Indiscreet by making another film version of a stage play, this time one by Hugh and Margaret Williams called The Grass Is Greener. A romantic comedy, it called for Grant to play the baffled Earl of Rhyall, whose wife, the Countess, falls in love with an American taking a tour of their stately home. He and Donen wanted Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall as the other two leading characters, with Deborah Kerr in support. But Kendall’s sudden death, at the age of just thirty-three, had forced them to reconsider. Harrison withdrew, and eventually Donen suggested that Robert Mitchum should take his place, with Deborah Kerr playing the role intended for Kendall and Jean Simmons replacing Kerr as the fourth principal character.
Shooting began in April 1960 and progressed smoothly enough, although Robert Mitchum suggested afterwards that all he really needed was a girl at the side of the set to nudge him when Cary Grant came to the end of a speech, so that he could say ‘Why? Really?’ Deborah Kerr remained a devote
d admirer, however, paying tribute to Grant’s professionalism, but insisting that he remained as he had always been — ‘a very private person’. Grant, on the other hand, seemed a little distracted.
STILL WORKING, GRANT STARRED WITH DEBORAH KERR FOR THE THIRD TIME IN 1961 IN STANLEY DONEN’S THE GRASS IS GREENER.
No matter what his mother may have hoped, in the wake of his fifty-sixth birthday in January, Cary Grant had become obsessed with having a young woman on his arm wherever he went, even though Betsy was in London with him. Soon after shooting started on The Grass Is Greener, he was seen with the singer Alma Cogan, provoking one columnist to speculate that they were in love. A week later Louella Parsons reported that Betsy Drake had suddenly left London after her husband had been seen ‘holding hands’ with Cogan. As the filming continued, he was also seen in the company of a number of other beautiful young actresses, including Haya Harareet, Ziva Rodann, Jackie Chan and Nancy Kovack.
One American newspaper called his a ‘marriage on the instalment plan’, but Grant took no notice. He was more concerned that the owners of the Radio City Music Hall in New York, who had planned to use The Grass Is Greener as their Christmas film in 1960, had suddenly changed their mind when they saw the first cut. They did not like it, and the Hollywood press were equally unimpressed. When it finally opened, Variety called it ‘a generally tedious exercise’, and the Hollywood Reporter added, ‘The stars do not glitter, or even glow.... It is one of the year’s most disappointing films.’ The New York Times condemned Grant for looking ‘mechanical and bored’.
In a sense he was, but there was little he could do about it. He had been a romantic leading man for thirty years, and had burnished his carefully created mask with a skill that few other stars could match. There was no soul-searching in his performances, no desperation to appear to be ‘acting’. He had simply honed his talents until he played himself to perfection on the screen. His style was almost self-plagiarism, but he could not summon up the courage to change it. It was the reason he had turned down an approach from Fox to play the alcoholic Scott Fitzgerald in Beloved Infidel, and another from Warners to play the cheery confidence trickster in The Music Man. Neither was a ‘Cary Grant character’.
Cary Grant: Dark Angel Page 13
