Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  The actor stared down at the page for several moments. “That’s very … nice,” he said, and continued to look down. “That’s … very nice,” he said again, and I realized he was crying. He put his arm around me unsteadily and thanked me for showing it to him. Then he turned and walked back down the aisle to his seat.

  When the picture was over, he and Mrs. Huston came out of the theater. I was standing outside. He waved to me gently and they got back in the Rolls-Royce and it was driven away. He made only two films more before he died five years later at the age of forty-six—a lost poet from Omaha, Nebraska, the most romantic and touching actor of his generation.

  Born Edward Montgomery Clift, October 17, 1920, Omaha, NE; died July 23, 1966, New York, NY.

  Selected feature films (with director):

  1948: The Search (Fred Zinnemann); Red River (Howard Hawks)

  1949: The Heiress (William Wyler)

  1951: A Place in the Sun (George Stevens)

  1953: I Confess (Alfred Hitchcock); From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann); Stazione Termini/Indiscretion of an American Wife (Vittorio De Sica)

  1958: The Young Lions (Edward Dmytryk)

  1959: Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

  1960: Wild River (Elia Kazan)

  1961: The Misfits (John Huston); Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer)

  6

  CARY GRANT

  “President Kennedy called me once from the White House for precisely that reason!” Cary Grant was answering a question of mine, grinning broadly, buoyant as a kid. We were in his Beverly Hills living room toward the end of January 1985, soon after he had turned eighty-one; though in no way looking much over sixty-five, he had only another year and a half to live. “My secretary told me the President was on the line,” Grant went on, cheerily, “so naturally I was curious why he was calling and picked it right up—said, ‘Hel-lo!’ The President said he was sorry to bother me—I said not at all—and he told me that his brother, the Attorney General, was on the line with us, too. So I said ‘Hel-lo’ to the Attorney General as well, and then I asked what I could do for them. ‘Well,’ the President said, ‘Bobby and I were just sitting here in the Oval Office talking, and we both decided that we wanted very much to hear Cary Grant’s voice—we wanted to hear you speak!’”

  Personally, over the twenty-five years I was fortunate enough to know this even then legendary star, I would phone him often on some pretext or other, sometimes with only the same motivation as the two Kennedys in the Oval Office. Not just his voice and Bristol-born English accent, but also his unique way of speaking, had an enormously invigorating effect—made you excited and happy—which generally was how he always sounded. I rarely heard him down, rarely negative.

  He was quick, too, and extraordinarily self-aware. I remember the night of March 31, 1973, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, when another President, Richard Nixon, was about to bestow the Medal of Freedom for the first time on a U.S. film artist, John Ford, during the American Film Institute’s first Life Achievement dinner—and Grant, Cybill Shepherd and I were standing on line at the ticket tables. Cary had come stag that evening—a nasty divorce from his fourth wife, actress Dyan Cannon, had finally quieted down—and so he appropriated my date, at least for the pleasant walk we had all just taken from a large hotel conference room, where a group of about two hundred luminaries shook hands with the President.

  Cary Grant, moving like a cat, as he escapes from the hospital in Hitchcock’s greatest innocent-man-on-the-run chase picture, North by Northwest (1959), among the most purely entertaining movies of all time. Hitchcock would say, “It’s a complete fantasy.”

  Cybill and I had arrived on that long receiving line coincidentally right after Grant, and I had introduced her to him. “Hel-lo, you beautiful girl!” he had said as only he could, and from that moment I lost her—for the next twenty minutes or so while we waited, and they talked to each other animatedly, mostly Cary being his most charming. Which was beyond words, because of the amazing sparkle of joy mixed with mischievousness he had in his manner, in his catlike movements, in his tears-of-mirth-filled eyes.

  We had shaken hands with the President, not all of us gladly—it was in the late stages of Vietnam and the early stages of Watergate—though none of the people in the room that night talked politics. There seemed to be a tacit understanding that it was Jack Ford’s night, period. So there was a general air of congeniality, and no one was more congenial than Cary Grant. He looked great, as always, ever young—though now almost fully gray and wearing dark-framed glasses—too dark and too narrow, I thought, but it didn’t matter. Hadn’t he worn much thicker lenses and less flattering frames in Bringing Up Baby and in Monkey Business? It was impossible for him to look bad, because he always had those darkly intriguing eyes, and especially that laugh, both intoxicating and infectious—with something remarkably naked about its joyful pleasure—more than he had ever revealed in movies.

  We’d been laughing by the ticket tables where three middle-aged women sat to collect the invitations or tickets—and as Cary stepped up for his turn, he smiled while saying, in that inimitable (though much imitated) way, “I am terribly sorry, I forgot my tick-et—may I get in, please?” One of the ladies, still looking down, said, “Name.” Grant leaned slightly closer, bending more—he was a couple of inches over six feet tall, though he always slumped his shoulders a bit: “Ca-ry Grant,” he said. Now the woman looked up, frowned just a touch as she appraised him and said: “You don’t look like Cary Grant.” To which he replied, quick as a wink, leaning closer still and shrugging his shoulders, “I know—nobody does.” Both Cybill and I burst out laughing and Cary turned to us briefly as he stood straight and then looked back sympathetically at the lady.

  Of course, he knew what she meant; he had had the same problem throughout his life—ever since he had adopted that name, Cary Grant, in exchange for his own, which was Archibald Alexander Leach. He once said even he wished he “could be Cary Grant,” by which he meant that there was no way on earth anyone could possibly embody all that his screen roles and screen persona exemplified or promised. (I would make that mistake with him a couple of years before he died, almost ruining our friendship.) Of course, he knew better than anybody how much of his image was created for him, or through him, by others. Directors, writers, photographers, co-stars, were all somewhat responsible—in lesser and greater ways—for what Cary Grant came to mean and be.

  He conveyed his awareness of this to me in several ways, most memorably perhaps that time I pressed him about the reason why he would never tell me when one of his staged interviews, An Evening with Cary Grant, would be scheduled so that I could go to see him telling anecdotes to a large audience and answering questions about his career. He had been about to do one of those in Iowa in late 1986 when he died suddenly of a stroke. For a few years I had been after him to invite me; he always said he would but never did. Finally, I mentioned it with light exasperation and he respected me enough to finally tell the truth: “Well, the thing is, I don’t really want you there! Because I would be telling some story about making a picture and it would be difficult for me with you sitting there knowing the truth of what really happened! I just don’t want you there!”

  How many actors with such a distinctive voice and manner are there for a President to call today? After Clint Eastwood, Jerry Lewis, Barbra Streisand, or Jack Nicholson, who’s left? Back in the original studio system (c. 1912–1962), Cary Grant was made to order to be a movie star: tall, devastatingly handsome, and he talked funny, with some kind of English accent you couldn’t ever quite place. His unmistakable voice and large, expressive dark eyes (“It’s all in the eyes,” Orson Welles used to say), were born to be recorded and photographed. Then a lot of very talented, creative, clever, brilliant people went to work with, and on, Cary Grant. A handful of superb picturemakers—among them Leo McCarey, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor—and a great many writers, had an enormous impact on this persona t
hat came to be world famous as Cary Grant. As an actor, which was all his own, he had the remarkable ability to incarnate entirely what numerous different viewpoints asked for, to become a virtually seamless, ideal romantic, comic, and dramatic leading man of amazing versatility. A career like Cary’s, from start to finish to forever, is totally impossible today. To examine the shape of it, is to understand why.

  The first important film director who picked out Cary Grant, in the actor’s first year as a Paramount contract player, was the legendary, enigmatic Josef von Sternberg, discoverer and “creator” of Marlene Dietrich. Sternberg cast Grant opposite Dietrich in the director’s fifth collaboration with her (out of seven), Blonde Venus (1932), only Cary’s own fifth role in features. I asked if Sternberg had directed him much. “Not really,” he answered, saying he could see what Sternberg and Dietrich “were up to” (they had a complicated Svengali-Trilby relationship) and he “wasn’t going to get mixed up in that,” then added that there was, however, one memorably useful direction Sternberg gave him. “The first day of shooting he took one look at me and said, ‘Your hair is par-ted on the wrong side.’” What had Grant done? “I parted it on the other side and wore it that way for the rest of my career!”

  The next person to have a constructive impact on Grant’s image was Mae West—just then getting started in films, having conquered Broadway long before. She saw Cary on the Paramount lot and requested him to co-star in her second and third pictures, both of which she essentially wrote herself, She Done Him Wrong (1933) and I’m No Angel (1933), the actor’s eighth and twelfth feature in less than two years. It was to Cary Grant that Mae West made her most famous (and often misquoted) sexual invitation, “Why don’t you come up sometime—an’ see me?” To which Grant’s missionary character responded that he didn’t really have the time, and West countered with, “Hey, what’re ya trying to do—insult me!?” Being the object of her attention gave him not only confidence but a certain air of inaccessibility and distance he would effectively exploit through the years.

  It wasn’t until his twenty-first movie, in 1935 (on loan from Paramount to RKO Radio Pictures), that Grant gave a truly solid and distinctive performance; until then he had been simply a very good-looking though fairly bland leading man. But for George Cukor on Sylvia Scarlett—the first of four times he would appear opposite Katharine Hepburn, three times directed by Cukor (and once by Howard Hawks)—Cary “felt the ground beneath his feet,” as Cukor described it to me. Playing a cockney con artist, Grant suddenly had a character for which he could draw from his youth, sink his teeth into, and with Cukor’s enthusiastic encouragement, he went all the way with the role, effectively “stealing the picture,” which is how Variety put it in their original review. However, the film was a dismal box-office failure; though it’s an interesting, quirky piece with Hepburn masquerading as a boy through much of it. Nevertheless, Grant’s confidence rose measurably.

  Five films later (his seven-year Paramount contract having run out), he had his first modest success in what is actually a pretty flat and labored, if popular, movie, Topper (1937)—with only one somewhat charismatic scene in which he sings a bit in a bar. But that same year came his triumphant breakthrough in the picture that gave birth to the Cary Grant persona we all came to know and love: director-producer Leo McCarey’s enduring comedy classic, The Awful Truth, co-starring Irene Dunne and Ralph Bellamy. The film was Grant’s twenty-ninth, and it turned him overnight into an A-list leading man, yet he had tried desperately to buy his way out of doing it.

  After only a few days of shooting, Cary was so thrown by what McCarey was asking him to do, and by the director’s unorthodox work habits, that he panicked, went to Columbia Pictures’ studio-head Harry Cohn and offered $5,000 to be let out of his contract or be allowed to switch roles with Bellamy, who had the square “other man” part. McCarey’s method was to improvise each scene, dialogue and all, shortly before shooting it, inventing all the moves and words as he went along. If he had a problem, he would sit down at the piano and play for a while until the solution came to him. As McCarey told me in 1969, shortly before his death, “A lot of times we’d go into a scene with nothing.” He gave Grant slapstick falls and numerous urbane and sophisticated moments, grunts, moves, bits.

  The late director-writer Garson Kanin, having worked with Grant and McCarey (who was producer-writer) on My Favorite Wife three years later, explained to me in the mid-seventies that most of what Cary did in The Awful Truth was to play aspects of McCarey himself. Leo had told me this in his own way by referring to the picture as “in a way, the story of my life.” Both McCarey and Grant were tall, dark and good-looking, McCarey being noted for his sophisticated wit and comic dexterity. He was, after all, the man who had paired Stan Laurel with Oliver Hardy to create the first great (and perhaps still best) comedy team in pictures. Before The Awful Truth, he had also very successfully directed such legendary screen comedians as Charley Chase, W. C. Fields, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Eddie Cantor, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers (in their best, Duck Soup), and Mae West, as well as having guided Charles Laughton two years earlier to his first great comic success, Ruggles of Red Gap.

  When I asked McCarey why Grant had wanted to get out, the director replied, “He had no sound judgment,” but since the performance is so superb, and since the two would work together three more times (most notably in the classic 1957 comedy-romance An Affair to Remember), the experience for Cary must have been something like the metamorphosis a caterpillar goes through to become a butterfly; and had to be scary in its way. Though McCarey on his deathbed seemed not really to have forgiven Grant, Cary always spoke fondly, if a little sheepishly, of McCarey. And when I expressed some misgivings to Grant about McCarey’s negative comments to me being published in a couple of places, Cary just said he understood how the director had felt, and didn’t contradict him.

  In the role that made Cary Grant one of the top leading men in light comedy pictures: Jerry Warriner in Leo McCarey’s perfect screwball comedy The Awful Truth (1937), co-starring Irene Dunne and Asta, the dog that made Grant suffer again the following year in Bringing Up Baby.

  The fact is that McCarey was perhaps chronically irritated because to his mind Grant essentially had appropriated everything McCarey had given him on that picture as part of his continuing screen persona, made it his own, so to speak, and became the foremost star in pictures of sophisticated yet physical comedy. Perhaps McCarey—who received the Oscar as Best Director for The Awful Truth—felt that Grant never gave him enough of the credit for basically handing him the characteristics he would play variations on throughout the rest of his career.

  But Cary—having found his footing, finally recognizing what he had been given, liberated now—never looked back. His very next two pictures, both 1938, both with Katharine Hepburn—Bringing Up Baby and Holiday, though neither hugely popular at the time and now considered classics—solidified and expanded brilliantly what McCarey had started. Never one to miss a trick, Howard Hawks (in his first of five films with Grant) pushed him even further with farcical business in Bringing Up Baby, suggesting he bray like a donkey when angry, having him wear outrageously thick lenses, do numerous falls, and put on ridiculous costumes, including one of Hepburn’s negligees. In Holiday, George Cukor also capitalized on Grant’s physicality, had him do a couple of acrobatic moves, and emphasized the sophisticated yet unpretentious side of his persona, his ability to be earnest, witty, vulnerable and debonair all at once.

  The following year brought the final strokes that made him among the most sought-after stars in pictures: George Stevens’ popular comedy-adventure Gunga Din—which had been largely developed for Grant by Howard Hawks, who was replaced before shooting started—and then, the coup de grâce, Hawks’ aviation drama, Only Angels Have Wings, in which Cary finally had a huge hit doing the lead dramatic role and getting the girl—or, since it was Hawks, the girl getting him. In this case it was Jean Arthur, though he also had some heated scen
es with a newcomer called Rita Hayworth. Her name in the movie was Judy, and the way Cary pronounced this came out, “Ju-dy.” The film’s popularity, and Grant’s success in it, can be measured by the fact that impersonators from then on started doing Cary Grant by saying, “Ju-dy, Ju-dy, Ju-dy,” though he never actually said this in the picture. In the seventies, he once told me he’d never figured out where the “Judy, Judy, Judy” business came from and when I told him my supposition, he got excited and said I was probably right.

  For the next twenty-seven years, from 1939 until he retired after his last film was released in 1966, Cary Grant was the epitome of sophisticated comedy while possessing as well the darker range of an expressive dramatic actor. With his matinee-idol looks, and despite a unique voice and accent, he became universally accepted as some kind of an American even though he never remotely sounded like one. Cary’s versatility within his own persona was striking. The bravura panache of his newspaper editor in Hawks’ classic comedy His Girl Friday was followed soon after by the ambiguously dangerous, possibly homicidal character he played in Suspicion, his first of four movies for Alfred Hitchcock. In 1940, he received top billing over Katharine Hepburn in her own hit stage comedy vehicle, The Philadelphia Story, and in 1941 was nominated by the Academy for the first time as Best Actor in his heavily dramatic performance for George Stevens’ sad love story Penny Serenade, again with Irene Dunne. I remember mentioning this picture to Cary one time in the late seventies and his saying, “Oh, yes, I just got a check on that one.” It was amazingly early for a star to have a piece of the movie—this didn’t become common until more than a decade later—but Grant was always a good businessman and never signed a long-term deal again after his one with Paramount.