Cary Grant: Dark Angel

by Geoffrey Wansell

  In 1925 and 1926, Archie Leach painstakingly worked on his accent, slowly transforming it into the distinctive mixture of Cockney and upper-class English, tinged with what seemed like mock Australian, that would eventually become his hallmark. And as his accent and timing improved on the stage, so his confidence grew off it. It gave him the courage to turn himself into a musical-comedy star. In the summer of 1927, it was no handicap to sound English in musical comedy. Jack Buchanan had taken Broadway by storm the year before in Andre Chariot’s London Revue of 1924, and Archie sensed that if he could emulate the clipped English tones and apparently nonchalant style of Buchanan — which Noel Coward was also using to great effect on Broadway in his own play The Vortex — he would have a chance of success. As Grant himself put it, ‘Archie Leach, the drop-out runaway from Bristol, studied men like Jack Buchanan and Noel Coward, and became Cary Grant.’

  A friend introduced him to the stage director Reggie Hammerstein, whose elder brother Oscar was the lyricist of Sigmund Romberg’s hit The Desert Song and whose uncle Arthur was one of Broadway’s greatest impresarios. Reggie Hammerstein urged the twenty-three-year-old Archie Leach to take more voice lessons as well as singing lessons, and shortly afterwards took him to meet his uncle, who was about to stage a new operetta called Golden Dawn, with lyrics by his nephew. The story was hackneyed, but there was a good part for a handsome young juvenile. Hammerstein offered him a contract at $75 a week for ‘the rest of the 1927/28 season’. The impresario also kept an option to renew for a further five years, guaranteeing a weekly salary of $100 in 1928/29, rising to $800 in 1932/33.

  In October 1927 Golden Dawn, with Archie Leach as the juvenile lead and Louise Hunter as the star, duly went on tour before Broadway. When it opened in New York on 30 November the critics were cool. Almost the only thing they liked was the ‘pleasant new juvenile’, the ‘competent young newcomer’ Archie Leach. In spite of the reviews, however, the name of Hammerstein was enough to sustain it for five months and 184 performances.

  Immediately after the closure of Golden Dawn, Hammerstein offered his new juvenile lead a better part — that of the young man in Polly, a musical version of the comedy Polly with a Past. It was the part Noel Coward had played in London. No sooner had rehearsals begun, however, than Archie Leach started to fret. His clothes weren’t quite right, his lines didn’t work, he couldn’t make the audience laugh. He niggled and fussed, fretted and complained for six weeks until finally he was dropped from the cast before Polly even reached Broadway.

  HOLLYWOOD HOPEFUL: EXACTLY WHAT THE STUDIO WAS LOOKING FOR.

  ‘ONLY ONE THING. YOU’LL NEED TO CHANGE YOUR NAME.’ ARCHIE LEACH BECOMES CARY GRANT AND CHAINS HIMSELF TO PARAMOUNT IN 1932.

  Archie Leach’s good looks saved him. Marilyn Miller, the musical comedy star, chose him to replace her leading man in Rosalie, and Arthur Hammerstein’s arch-rival, Florenz Ziegfeld, the show’s producer, asked the impresario if he would release him. Hammerstein flatly refused, and retaliated by selling Archie’s contract to the brothers Lee and JJ. Shubert, Broadway’s biggest theatrical producers. Within weeks the Shuberts had cast him as the villain in Boom, Boom, a new musical starring Jeanette MacDonald.

  ‘The heavy in our show,’ MacDonald remembered later, ‘was a dark-eyed, cleft-chinned young Englishman who, in spite of his unmistakable accent, was cast as a Spaniard.... He was absolutely terrible in the role, but everyone liked him. He had charm.’ Archie’s charm did not save Boom, Boom, which closed after seventy performances, but it did bring him and his leading lady one benefit. They were invited for a screen test together by Paramount Publix Pictures at their Astoria studios in New York.

  Movies were news. The talkies had just happened, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Broadway Melody had caused a sensation. A screen test was an opportunity no young actor wanted to miss, a first step on the ladder that could lead to Hollywood. But Archie Leach was destined to miss it. Paramount loved Jeanette MacDonald and asked her to go to California at once to make The Love Parade, opposite Maurice Chevalier, but they told Archie Leach that his neck was ‘too thick’ and his legs were ‘too bowed’.

  To console himself he went out and bought a 1927 Packard sport phaeton. It was the first car he had ever owned. The Shuberts, determined not to pay him for sitting around doing nothing, quickly put him into another musical, A Wonderful Night, a new version of Johann Strauss’s opera Die Pledermaus, but the show opened two days after the great Wall Street Crash of October 1929, and New York’s theatre-goers had other things on their mind. It closed after 125 performances.

  Sporting a new raccoon coat and living in an apartment in Greenwich Village with three friends, Archie Leach should have been a young man about town. He was twenty-five, dazzlingly handsome, fairly comfortably off and distinctly eligible. But, somehow, he never seemed at ease with women. As he was to admit later, ‘That was my trouble. Always trying to impress someone. Now wouldn’t you think that with a new, shiny, expensive, open car, an open-neck shirt, with a pipe in my mouth to create a carefully composed study of nonchalance, sportiveness, savoir-faire and sophistication, I would cut quite a swathe amongst the ladies? Nothing of the sort. In all those years in the theatre, on the road and in New York, surrounded by all ; sorts of attractive girls, I never seemed able to fully communicate with them.’

  Undeterred by the fate of A Wonderful Night, the Shuberts put him into the touring version of the musical The Street Singer, opposite Queenie Smith. Archie Leach found himself spending the winter of 1930 crossing provincial America watching the unemployment lines grow longer. In the afternoons he would take long bus rides, or drive off into the countryside by himself. When The Street Singer came to the end of its tour in the spring of 1931, the Shuberts immediately offered him the summer in St Louis, where they were responsible for programming the open-air Municipal Opera. Rather than relinquish $400 a week, most of which he had been saving carefully, he accepted. But the depression was beginning to bite, and the summer season had hardly begun when the Shuberts asked everyone in the company to take a pay cut. Everyone agreed to do so — except Archie Leach. Even at this early stage of his career, he was unwilling to accept the idea that his value could be cut. The Shuberts duly fired him when the season came to an end.

  But St Louis brought Archie Leach one benefit. A glowing piece in Variety had caught the eye of the impresario William Friedlander, who was looking for a handsome young juvenile to play the romantic lead in his new musical, Nikki. Friedlander sent a man to St Louis to see the ‘new young juvenile’, liked what he heard and offered him the part of Cary Lockwood. Archie Leach gratefully accepted. A story about young airmen in Paris after the First World War, written by John Monk Saunders, who was married to the show’s star, Fay Wray, Nikki opened in New York on 29 September 1931. But even the musical theatre was not immune to the depression that was starting to grip America. Nikki closed after just thirty-nine performances.

  Now, ironically, Archie Leach was offered a film role at the Paramount Publix studios at Astoria. The thick neck and bow legs that had been such a handicap two years before did not seem to matter any more, and he was paid $150 for six days’ work, playing an American sailor in a short to be called Singapore Sue. He enjoyed the experience and began to wonder whether perhaps the movies might be the only part of the entertainment business that would be ‘recession proof. Fay Wray, who was already packing for Hollywood to play the lead in King Kong, urged him to follow her and take a chance. And Billy Grady of the William Morris Agency also encouraged him to think about the movies: ‘You must become a leading man. Why don’t you go to California?’

  Finally, in early November 1931, Archie Leach took their advice. Together with his friend Phil Charig, who had written the music for Nikki, he packed the open-topped Packard and set off across the United States for Hollywood. They arrived shortly before Thanksgiving and booked themselves into a suite at the Chateau Elysee. Billy Grady had arranged for Archie to see an agent at William Morris, who in
turn introduced him to Marion Gering, a Broadway stage director now directing films. Gering liked Archie and invited him to a dinner party given by B.P. Schulberg, the head of production at Paramount.

  At Schulberg’s dinner, Gering told Archie Leach that he was to direct a screen test of his wife the next day. Schulberg interrupted. ‘Why don’t you make it with her? She’ll need someone to act against. You only have to feed the lines. Nothing too difficult.’ There was nothing that Archie Leach wanted more. Driving back to his hotel down Sunset Boulevard, he resolved to make sure the camera caught his right profile and did not make his size seventeen and a half collar seem too big. Hollywood was the dream factory, a city where anyone could become anything they wanted. He did not intend to miss the opportunity.

  The test at Paramount Publix’s studios on Marathon Street, just in front of the Hollywood Cemetery, went exactly as he had planned. Mrs Gering was a little too flustered to make the most of her screen test, but the young man opposite her was very careful to keep his nerve, and his eye on the camera. A week later Archie Leach was offered a five-year contract by Paramount, starting at $450 a week. ‘Only one other thing. You’ll need to change your name.’

  CHAPTER TWO • DARK VENUS

  ‘Becoming a movie star is like getting on a streetcar. Call it Aspire. Actors and actresses are packed in like sardines. There’s only room for so many, and every once in a while, if you look hack, you’ll see that someone has fallen off.... Gary Cooper is smart, he never gets up to give anybody his seat.’

  HOLLYWOOD’S ‘NEW GARY COOPER’, OPPOSITE JEAN HARLOW IN SUZY IN 1936 (LEFT), AND ONLY TOO HAPPY TO POSE FOR HIS FIRST FAN MAGAZINE PHOTOGRAPH (ABOVE RIGHT).

  When Archie Leach walked on to the Paramount lot in January 1932, Hollywood’s streetcar was certainly packed with stars. Creta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert, Mary Pickford, Adolphe Menjou, Gloria Swanson and Gary Cooper all had their seats. He was simply to become one of the standing passengers, one of the studio’s contract players, but he knew he could not even be that as Archie Leach. Universal had just proved the importance of a good name with the release of Frankenstein, starring another Englishman, William Henry Pratt, whom the studio had rechristened Boris Karloff. Paramount’s chief, Adolph Zukor, had told Frank Cooper that he needed a new Christian name, and suggested a town in Indiana — Gary. Archie Leach simply had to have a new name.

  Fay Wray’s husband John Monk Saunders suggested he call himself Cary Lockwood, after his character in Nikki, but Paramount pointed out firmly that there already was a Harold Lockwood in Hollywood. ‘We need something short, sharp and easy to remember, like Garbo,’ the studio told him. ‘A secretary came in with a list of surnames and put it in front of me,’ he recalled later, ‘Grant jumped out at me, and that was that.’ Cary Grant became the name at the top of Archie Leach’s first Hollywood contract.

  B.P. Schulberg particularly liked the new name, but not simply because it was short and sharp. It was also uncannily close to Gary Cooper, and he planned to use his latest contract player as a new version of his most popular leading man. Schulberg also hoped that Grant would make Cooper just a little nervous. The six-foot-two-inch former cattle rancher, who had made twelve pictures for Schulberg the previous year, was giving Paramount trouble. He had stomped off on safari to Africa and was refusing to come back unless he got the right to choose which pictures he made. Cooper had been gone four weeks when Paramount announced that they had signed Cary Grant. As the fan magazine Photoplay noted, ‘Cary looks enough like Gary to be his brother. Both are tall, they weigh about the same and they fit the same sort of roles.’

  VARIETY’S ‘POTENTIAL FEMME RAVE’ IN 1932: WITH THELMA TODD IN THIS IS THE NIGHT (ABOVE) AND CAROLE LOMBARD IN SINNERS IN THE SUN (BELOW).

  Paramount did not delay launching their new signing on the screen. They cast him as the tall, dark and handsome hero in a film version of a Broadway play, Avery Hopwood’s Naughty Cinderella, which they had decided to retitle This Is the Night. Grant was to play an Olympic javelin thrower whose frequent travels left his young blonde wife, played by Lili Damita, plenty of time for romance with his other co-star, Roland Young. The experience of filming, however, filled Cary Grant with dread. As soon as the movie was finished, he called a friend to say, ‘I’m checking out fast. I’ve never seen anything so stinkeroo in my life, and I was worse.’ It was not to be the last time that he would fear the worst before a film opened, nor was it the last time he was wrong. When Variety saw an early preview, it called him ‘a potential femme rave’.

  A relieved Cary Grant joined the cast of Sinners in the Sun, supporting Carole Lombard. This time he was required to wear white tie and tails. He looked suitably glamorous, but even that could not save the picture. One critic summed it up as ‘a weak picture with an unimpressive future before it’. But even before it was released Grant was making Merrily We Go to Hell, with Fredric March, another story of unrequited love in luxurious surroundings. This time Grant played the leading man in a Broadway play. The critics were equally unimpressed.

  FOREVER IN BLACK TIE OR WHITE TIE AND TAILS: HERE IN BLACK WITH CHARLES LAUGHTON AND TALLULAH BANKHEAD IN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP IN 1934.

  While Cary Grant had been making three films in five months, Adolph Zukor had been patching up his differences with Gary Cooper, and in May 1932 Paramount’s biggest star made a suitably regal return to Hollywood, sporting a monkey he had bought in Africa on his shoulder. To celebrate, Schulberg decided to use him in a submarine adventure, The Devil and the Deep, opposite Tallulah Bankhead and Charles Laughton in his Hollywood debut. Cooper was to play one British lieutenant on board; the other was to be Cary Grant.

  As Photoplay pointed out, ‘They know that they’re pitted against each other and when the final gong sounds one of them will be on the floor.’ In the event neither was. The film simply marked Cooper’s triumphant return. ‘The best dramatic talkie we have yet seen,’ claimed one reviewer when it opened in August 1932, and Variety described its star as ‘looking better than he has in a long time’. The critics barely noticed Cary Grant. In the years to come he was to count it as one of the handful of his films that he loathed.

  B.P. Schulberg, however, was delighted. To celebrate he decided to make Grant the male lead in a film with his new female star, Marlene Dietrich, to be directed by her lover, Josef von Sternberg. The couple had just finished Shanghai Express for him, with another Englishman, Clive Brook, and both had expressed a preference for ‘Britishness’ in their leading men. In fact, von Sternberg and Paramount were locked in a bitter argument over the film, which was to be called Blonde Venus, because the director wanted one ending and the studio another. When Paramount threatened to fire von Sternberg, he stormed out of Hollywood, only for Dietrich to insist that she would not work with another director. Finally, the dispute settled, filming began in July 1932.

  On the first morning von Sternberg suddenly stopped work and took his leading man to one side. As Grant remembered later, ‘He grabbed a comb, and parted my hair on the ‘wrong’ side, where it’s remained ever since.’ It was the last part of the transformation of Archie Leach into Cary Grant. Now he looked thinner and a little frailer on the screen, and von Sternberg encouraged his natural diffidence to surface for the first time, making him seem gallant rather than simply flashily handsome. The German director won Grant the best reviews of his career to date. Though not every critic liked the film itself, with its story of a mother who becomes a prostitute to support her only child, they all liked Cary Grant. The New York Times in particular suggested he was ‘worthy of a much better role’.

  JOSEF VON STERNBERG GAVE GRANT A NEW PARTING FOR HIS HAIR IN BLONDE VENUS WITH MARLENE DIETRICH IN 1932. BELOW: CAROLE LOMBARD, GRANT, DIETRICH AND RICHARD BARTHELMASS PARTYING SOON AFTERWARDS.

  The $450 a week Cary Grant was earning was beginning to mount up. He and Phil Charig had moved into a house in West Live Oak Drive, just below the Hollywood sign, and he was investing his money
in a men’s clothing shop on Wilshire Boulevard called Neale. The investment turned out to be a financial disaster, but the experience taught Grant an important lesson: never to have any debts. Meanwhile, his Hollywood friendships were also beginning to blossom. At Paramount he had been introduced to one of the studio’s other contract players, a relaxed, Virginia-born former football star called Randolph Scott, who was a year older than he was. A few weeks later, when Phil Charig decided to go back to New York, Scott came to live with Grant in West Live Oak Drive. The two men’s friendship was to last for the rest of their lives.

  Randy Scott introduced Cary Grant to another young man who was to remain a friend for forty years. Scott’s father had given his son a letter of introduction to a family friend, the young motion-picture producer Howard Hughes, who had arrived in Hollywood in 1925. It had been Hughes who encouraged Scott to settle in California and try his hand at being an actor. And it was Randolph Scott who introduced Hughes to Cary Grant.

  On the surface, the three men could hardly have been less alike. The maverick, self-confident Hughes, who had lost a fortune making Hell’s Angels in 1928, but come back to make another with Scarface and The Front Page; the softly spoken, easy-going Scott; and the self-conscious, wary Cary Grant. But, whatever the outward appearances, the three were remarkably alike. All were distinctly careful with their money, and all were a good deal less comfortable in the company of young women than young men, no matter how it may have appeared to the gossip columns.