Cary Grant: Dark Angel
Page 16
Cary Grant’s retirement was not a desperate search for seclusion, however. He did not hide behind sunglasses and try to avoid the photographers, as Garbo did. He still did not care for crowds, and had the same aversion to autograph hunters that he had always had, but he was happy enough to visit MGM’s hotels, go to Fabergé sales conferences and turn up for board meetings at the Norton Simon Museum and the Hollywood Park racecourse.
ON A TRIP TO LONDON FOR FABERGE IN 1977 (ABOVE), GRANT MET BARBARA HARRIS, THE YOUNG LONDON PUBLIC RELATIONS OFFICER WHO WAS TO BECOME HIS FIFTH WIFE (RIGHT).
He was also not anxious to be alone. His relationship with Maureen Donaldson, which had lasted for almost four years, was gradually to be replaced with another. On a trip to London for Fabergé in 1976, he was introduced to Barbara Harris, a young public relations officer working at the Royal Lancaster Hotel. Born in Dares Salaam in September 1950, the brown-haired and brown-eyed Harris was one of three daughters of a much decorated army officer. Though he was forty-six years older than she was, Grant was beguiled by the calm young woman, who delighted in driving him round London in her Mini.
Over the next two years, Cary Grant kept in constant touch with Barbara Harris, sending her flowers and telephoning her almost every day; as his interest in her grew, so his relationship with Donaldson gradually drew to a close. When he travelled to England, he took care to spend as much time as he could with Harris, and regularly invited her to visit him in California, although she always refused. But in June 1978, Grant invited her to join him in the South of France, where he was to be a guest at the wedding of Princess Caroline of Monaco. To his delight, she agreed, and soon afterwards she went to California with him for a three-week visit. The person above any other whom Cary Grant wanted Barbara Harris to meet was his daughter Jennifer.
The two young women, one just twelve, the other twenty-eight, could almost have been sisters. Both had wide open smiles and wore their brown hair drawn back from their foreheads. They liked each other at once. Within a few weeks of her first trip to California, Harris had given up her job in London and moved into Grant’s house in Beverly Hills. ‘I was absolutely terrified of the age difference,’ she admitted afterwards. ‘But I decided to go through with it because, otherwise, you don’t enjoy the time you do have, which is precious.’
GRANT FINALLY PLUCKED UP THE COURAGE TO ASK BARBARA HARRIS TO MARRY HIM IN APRIL 1981, FOUR YEARS AFTER THEIR RELATIONSHIP HAD BEGUN. HE WAS FORTY-SIX YEARS HER SENIOR.
Barbara Harris brought Cary Grant a serenity that he had never experienced before. One friend explained later, ‘It was only when he met Barbara that he found what he had been searching for: the everyday happiness that lasted all day, all night, day after day, month after month, year after year.’ She also brought order to his life. It was her efforts that saw the workmen finally complete the redevelopment of his house, with its wing for Jennifer, with which he had been struggling for six years. She too managed to persuade him to let her organize their trips, and allow her to look after him.
But the passing years brought the death of many of his friends. In 1976, Howard Hughes, whom he had hardly seen in almost a decade, and had spoken to on the telephone only from time to time, died a recluse in Texas. The same year his friend and former co-star Rosalind Russell succumbed to cancer, and the following year brought the death of their director in His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks. In the summer of 1979, Lord Mountbatten, another friend, was killed in a terrorist bombing, and a year later Alfred Hitchcock died at the age of eighty-one.
Finally, at the age of seventy-seven, Grant plucked up the courage to marry again. The first person he confided in was his daughter. ‘When I first told Jennifer that I was going to marry Barbara,’ he said later, ‘her eyes filled with tears. For a moment I thought she was upset. She was just the opposite. She was thrilled for me.’ He told her, ‘For goodness sake, don’t say anything to Barbara, I might not have the courage to ask her.’ But on 11 April 1981, Cary Grant did indeed marry Barbara Harris on the verandah of his Hollywood home, watched by his daughter Jennifer, then aged fifteen. As soon as the ceremony was over, the fifth Mrs Cary Grant led the small group of witnesses inside the house for a wedding lunch she had prepared herself. She had not hired a caterer, she explained, because, ‘we didn’t want to let our secret out’. Nor were they anxious for the world to know. It was to be almost eight days before anyone discovered. By that time the new Mr and Mrs Cary Grant were staying with Frank and Barbara Sinatra on their estate in Palm Springs, where Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier were holding their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebrations.
Cary Grant’s life hardly changed after the wedding. He and Barbara would stay at home most of the time with their two cats, swimming occasionally and sitting on their patio looking out across Los Angeles. On most weekdays, they would have a light lunch together on the verandah after he had finished on the telephone. In the afternoons, he would sunbathe while she gardened, and they would practise French together before tea. As dusk fell they would play backgammon, card games or Trivial Pursuit, and then have dinner in front of the television. At the weekends, she would cook for him.
If they went out, it was usually only to a charity dinner, to Hollywood Park or Dodger Stadium, although he would sometimes take her to the Magic Castle, a magician’s club just off Hollywood Boulevard. They would drive to Palm Springs for the weekend and return to England regularly to allow her to see her mother in Devon. For her part, Barbara Grant made clothes for everyone. She knitted pullovers for Jennifer and sewed brightly coloured shirts for her husband, which he wore over white trousers with only slippers or sandals on his feet. She also made caftans for them both, which he took great delight in wearing — to the astonishment of some of his friends.
THE NEW MRS CARY GRANT WITH HER EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD STEPDAUGHTER JENNIFER AND HER HUSBAND AT A CHARITY DINNER IN LOS ANGELES IN 1984.
TO HER FATHER’S DELIGHT, JENNIFER GRANT STUDIED AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN SAN FRANCISCO (LEFT). BUT NOTHING COULD RELIEVE HIS SADNESS AT THE SUDDEN DEATH OF GRACE KELLY IN 1982 (ABOVE).
Only a year after his fifth marriage, Cary Grant’s two favourite leading ladies died within a few months of each other. Grace Kelly was killed in a car accident on the French Riviera and Ingrid Bergman died of cancer. The sense of a passing era, which he had mentioned at the Oscar ceremony in 1970, was gathering pace, though somehow he never seemed part of it. Not for one moment did he look or seem almost eighty. His hair may have turned white, and his skin wrinkled with the years, but in the words of one friend, ‘Cary never became an old man.’
Grant may not have made a film for more than fifteen years, but he was not forgotten. His friends the Reagans invited him to the White House in the autumn of 1981, and two months later he was back in Washington to be honoured at the Kennedy Centre for his lifelong contribution to the cinema. At MGM the studio named their largest preview theatre after him, provoking him to remark that no one had ever named anything after him — ‘except my mother, who once called her dog Archie’. Shortly afterwards, Hollywood Park named a pavilion in his honour.
RECOGNIZED FOR HIS LIFELONG CONTRIBUTION TO THE MOTION-PICTURE INDUSTRY, GRANT ACCEPTED THE GOLDEN LION AWARD AT THE AGE OF EIGHTY.
Barbara Grant slowly encouraged her husband to accept the affection that so many people felt for him. She gently persuaded him to consider the offers he was getting to talk about his life, and in particular one from Nancy Nelson, who ran a New York lecture bureau. It was Nelson, with Barbara’s assistance, who cajoled Grant into giving the first of what were eventually to become thirty-six public appearances called ‘Evenings with Cary Grant’, in which he would sit on a stool in the centre of the stage answering questions from the audience. For a man who had spent his life trying to conceal himself from the world, and had refused an offer of $5 million to write his autobiography, it was a remarkable change of heart. In October 1984, he suffered a mild stroke, but went on with the lecture series nevertheless. The knowledge that
vast numbers of cinema-goers and movie-lovers had not forgotten him, even at the age of eighty, seemed both to surprise and to delight him. As the series progressed, he refined the lectures, introducing each evening with an eight-minute montage of his films, but he never once prepared a speech, and refused to have any questions planted in the audience. The years in vaudeville, watching the comics from the wings, had not forsaken him. He still liked to ad-lib.
It was while Cary Grant was preparing for one of these evenings, in Davenport, Iowa, that he was taken ill. Complaining of a headache and feeling sick, he left the technical rehearsal shortly after five o’clock to go back to his hotel suite. Two hours later he was rushed into intensive care at St Luke’s Hospital after suffering a massive stroke At 11.22 in the evening of Saturday 29 November 1986 Cary Grant died at the age of eighty-two.
Ronald Reagan was among the first to pay tribute to his friend’s talent: ‘His elegance, wit and charm will endure forever on film and in our hearts.’ Eva Marie Saint described him as ‘the most handsome, witty and stylish leading man, both on and off the screen’, and Elizabeth Taylor compared him to a ‘great fireplace.... He warmed you and made you feel super. He was what one would hope a movie star would be like.’ Alexis Smith, his co-star in Night and Day, called him ‘the best movie actor that ever was’, adding, ‘There’s a term ‘romance with a camera’ and I don’t think anybody ever had as great a ‘romance with the camera’ as he did.’ In The New York Times, Vincent Canby suggested that ‘like Cole Porter melodies, he seems simply to have happened’, while in the Los Angeles Times Charles Champlin described him as ‘the supreme romantic figure.... There was never anyone else quite like him.’
Cary Grant had become a Hollywood monument. Fay Wray, his co-star in Nikki all those years before on Broadway, spoke for most of his colleagues in Hollywood when she said, ‘When he died, not only was Cary gone, but an era had disappeared.’
People magazine called him ‘the King of Hearts, the mirror of charm, the most glamorous leading man of his generation...the grandmaster of the graceful exit’, adding, ‘The face alone was overpowering: strong sexy mouth, glittering brown eyes, rotisserie tan, chin-cleft you could crack a nut in. Then there was the whip-taut body, the deft movements, the caressing twang, the what’s-it accent. Was he serious? Was he joking? Was the joke on him? On you? You could never be sure. He approached, avoided, dodged definition, baffled — yet always entertained.’
Two weeks later the critic Richard Schickel expanded the point in an eloquent obituary in Time magazine. He described Cary Grant as ‘a perfectly beautiful man...with a singular style of speech. He is confident without being overbearing, confidential without being intrusive, quite irresistible despite the fact...that he had one of the most imitated voices of the century.’ No one, on screen or off, ‘had any alternative to bedazzlement as a response to him.... Some distant day,’ Schickel suggested, ‘audiences may even come to agree with a minority of Grant’s contemporaries that he was not merely the greatest movie star of his era, but the medium’s subtlest and slyest actor as well.’
The obituary’s headline would have appealed to Grant. It read, ‘The acrobat of the drawing room’.
So great was the affection felt for Cary Grant in Hollywood that in October 1988, almost two years after his death, a dinner in his honour was held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, at which more than 940 guests paid $1,000 each in donations to the Princess Grace Foundation, raising almost $1 million to assist young people in theatre, dance and film. The audience included almost every surviving member of Hollywood’s aristocracy — among them the Reagans, Sinatras, Stewarts and Pecks, Robert Mitchum, Sammy Davis, Liza Minnelli and Walter Matthau. Sophia Loren filmed her own tribute, and Deborah Kerr composed a poem in memory of the man she called a friend. It was the only public ceremony that Barbara and Jennifer Grant sanctioned in his memory. There was no public grave. Cary Grant’s will had insisted that he be cremated.
IN HIS LAST YEARS, BARBARA ENCOURAGED HER HUSBAND TO PRESENT ‘EVENINGS WITH CARY GRANT’ THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES.
WHEN ASKED IN A TELEGRAM ‘HOW OLD CARY GRANT?’, HE REPLIED, ‘OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?’. THOUGH HE LATER DENIED HAVING SAID IT, NO ONE COULD DENY THAT AT EIGHTY-TWO HE LOOKED AS FINE AS EVER.
His wife and daughter were also to help to preserve his memory in the years after his death. Barbara Grant donated her husband’s papers to the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science in Los Angeles, and his daughter followed in his footsteps, first taking acting lessons and then appearing in episodes of the television series Beverly Hills 90210. The two women remained friends, and shared the fortune that Grant’s caution had amassed — an estimated $80 million. Barbara Grant waited almost seven years after her husband’s death before marrying again, doing so just a few weeks after Jennifer Grant had married for the first time, in the early summer of 1993.
In its own memorial the Los Angeles County Museum of Art screened every one of the seventy-two films that Cary Grant had left behind, and called him simply ‘the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema’. There was no hint of hyperbole in the title. In each and every one, the man whom the feminist Camille Paglia called ‘almost supernatural, a magnificent male animal’ shone from the screen, projecting the incandescent image that he had created for the audience to know and love.
As Cary Grant himself put it, ‘I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, and I finally became that person, or he became me. Or we met at some point. It’s a relationship.’ Although few people outside Hollywood knew it, it was also an act of the most painstaking professionalism, marking him out as one of the cinema’s most remarkable actors. ‘I’ve often been accused of being myself on the screen,’ he once explained. ‘But being oneself on the screen is much more difficult than you would suppose.’ No matter how troubled he may have been in private, Cary Grant made it look easy, and by doing so created a screen persona that is unmistakable. A decade after his death, it is a legacy that no one who loves the cinema can ever forget.
Filmography
1932
This Is the Night,
Director: Frank Tuttle
(Paramount Publix)
Sinners in the Sun
Director: Alexander Hall
(Paramount Publix)
Merrily We Go to Hell
Director: Dorothy Arzner
(Paramount Publix)
Devil and the Deep
Director: Marion Gering
(Paramount Publix)
Blonde Venus
Director: Josef von Sternberg
(Paramount Publix)
Hot Saturday
Director: William Seiter
(Paramount Publix)
Madame Butterfly
Director: Marion Gering
(Paramount Publix)
1933
She Done Him Wrong
Director: Lowell Sherman
(Paramount Publix)
Woman Accused
Director: Paul Sloane
(Paramount Publix)
The Eagle and the Hawk
Director: Stuart Walker
(Paramount Publix)
Gambling Ship
Directors: Louis Gasnier
and Max Marcin
(Paramount Publix)
I’m No Angel
Director: Wesley Ruggles
(Paramount Publix)
Alice in Wonderland
Director: Norman Z. McLeod
(Paramount Publix)
1934
Thirty Day Princess
Director: Marion Gering
(Paramount Publix)
Born to Be Bad
Director: Lowell Sherman
(United Artists)
Kiss and Make Up
Director: Harlan Thompson
(Paramount Publix)
Ladies Should Listen
Director: Frank Tuttle
(Paramount Publix)
1935
Enter Madame
Director: Elliott Nugent
(Paramount Publix)
Wings in the Dark
Director: James Flood
(Paramount)
The Last Outpost
Directors: Charles Barton
and Louis Gasnier
(Paramount)
1936
Sylvia Scarlett
Director: George Cukor
(RKO Radio)
Big Brown Eyes
Director: Raoul Walsh
(Paramount)
Suzy
Director: George Fitzmaurice
(MGM)
Wedding Present
Director: Richard Wallace
(Paramount)
The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss
(US title, Romance and Riches)
Director: Alfred Zeisler
(Garrett-Klement Pictures)
1937
When You’re in Love
(GB title, For You Alone)
Director: Robert Riskin
(Columbia)
The Toast of New York
Director: Rowland V. Lee
(RKO Radio)
Topper
Director: Norman Z. McLeod
(MGM)
The Awful Truth
Director: Leo McCarey
(Columbia)
1938
Bringing Up Baby
Director: Howard Hawks
(RKO Radio)
Holiday
(GB titles,
Free to Live; Unconventional Linda)
Director: George Cukor
(Columbia)
1939
Gunga Din
Director: George Stevens
(RKO Radio)
Only Angels Have Wings
Director: Howard Hawks
(Columbia)
In Name Only
Director: John Cromwell
(RKO Radio)
1940
His Girl Friday
Director: Howard Hawks
(Columbia)
My Favorite Wife
Director: Garson Kanin
(RKO Radio)
The Howards of Virginia