Cary Grant: Dark Angel
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IN CRISIS (LEFT), GRANT PLAYED A BRAIN SURGEON. FILMING STARTED JUST DAYS AFTER HIS THIRD MARRIAGE, TO BETSY DRAKE, SEEN HERE WITH DIRECTOR RICHARD BROOKS.(ABOVE)
Dore Schary had left RKO the previous year to become production chief at MGM and he wanted to make a political thriller written by a young reporter turned screenwriter called Richard Brooks. A few years before, Brooks had collaborated with John Huston to write Key Largo for Humphrey Bogart, and now he wanted to direct himself. The story of a brain surgeon whose wife is kidnapped while on holiday in South America and who is therefore blackmailed into operating secretly on an ailing dictator, the film was to be called Crisis. Grant was to play the surgeon, with Jose Ferrer as the dictator, and Grant suggested that Brooks hire three silent stars for three Spanish-speaking roles: Ramon Navarro, the original Ben Hur, Gilbert Roland and Antonio Moreno. The only other stipulation was that shooting would take just thirty-six days. Brooks made sure that it did — after all, Cary Grant had given him the chance to direct.
As soon as Crisis was over, Grant retired to his house in Palm Springs. He remembered only too well the mistakes he had made the last time, spending day after day at the studio while Barbara Hutton languished at home. He did not intend to repeat them. Throughout the rest of 1950, he was hardly in Hollywood. He took Betsy to see his mother in England, and made a radio series from Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, which Betsy had written. He turned down an approach from David O. Selznick to make a film version of E Scott Fitzgerald’s Hollywood story Tender Is the Night, and another from Howard Hughes to make a film version of Terence Rattigan’s play O Mistress Mine, which had been a hit on Broadway for the Lunts. Betsy Drake introduced him to new kinds of music and diets, explaining the benefits of hypnotism and meditation, and he seemed quite content to let her do so. When Crisis was released on 4 July, he and his new wife barely noticed. In fact, the critics were admiring. The Los Angeles Mirror commented, ‘Crisis is a bold piece of movie adventuring.... Cary Grant is more brittle and diamond-brilliant than before as the enlightened doctor. His sincerity in the story’s guts is its premise for being believed.’ Unfortunately the audiences did not agree. Crisis became Grant’s first box-office failure in almost a decade.
BETSY DRAKE WROTE A RADIO SERIES, WHICH SHE RECORDED WITH HER NEW HUSBAND IN 1950.
It was Joe Mankiewicz, the young producer who had worked with him on The Philadelphia Story, who finally tempted Cary Grant back to work again. In the past two years Mankiewicz had become the most successful director and screenwriter in Hollywood. He had won the Oscar for Best Director and Best Screenwriter for A Letter to Three Wives and was about to win the same two Oscars again for All About Eve. Enthusiastic, intelligent and with a spectacular talent for crisp, often sarcastic dialogue, Mankiewicz wanted nothing more than to make a new film with Cary Grant. And Darryl Zanuck at Fox wanted nothing more than to cash in on the writer and director who had just won the studio a clutch of Oscars. If Mankiewicz wanted to make a film version of Kurt Goetz’s Broadway comedy-drama, Dr Praetorius, about a crusading doctor who marries a pregnant but unmarried girl who has just tried to commit suicide, that was fine with Zanuck. If Mankiewicz could also persuade Grant to play the doctor, all the better. Zanuck was even prepared to guarantee Grant $300,000. In the end, Mankiewicz, the fee and the script proved an offer that Grant could not afford to refuse.
When filming started in the early spring of 1951, Fox were so confident of success that they organized a rapid release for People Will Talk, as Mankiewicz had renamed the play, with a spectacular Los Angeles premiere in July. But, though Grant took elaborate professional advice from a leading heart surgeon and insisted that the sets be as authentic as possible, Mankiewicz did not work the same magic again. People Will Talk did not do for Cary Grant what All About Eve had done for George Sanders: it did not win him an Oscar, although it did bring him respectful reviews. Newsweek suggested he gave ‘one of the most intelligent performances in his nineteen-year Hollywood career’. The New York Times called it ‘a significant milestone in the moral emancipation of American films’ and complimented Grant on ‘the delightfulness and good sense of his performance’. The only drawback was that the cinema audience did not like it. The film became Grant’s second successive flop, and one of the four films he disliked the most in his career.
In the wake of his second failure, Cary Grant decided that it might be wiser to work with his wife again — perhaps that way he could repeat the success of Every Girl Should Be Married. Warners had come up with a script for them both, called Room for One More, and he was to be guaranteed 10 per cent of the gross receipts, with a minimum of $100,000, while Betsy was to be paid $25,000. Warners were also only too happy to give him the special dressing room that he liked, and to accept that he wanted to finish the picture quickly. After discussing it with Betsy, Grant agreed.
The story of a city engineer whose wife likes to look after unwanted children as well as her own, and based on a best-selling novel by Anna Perrott Rose, Room for One More was a gentle domestic comedy written by Jack Rose and Mel Shavelson. It certainly appealed to Betsy Drake, who wanted nothing more than to create her own new family and did not mind at all if the cinema audience began to see Cary Grant as a husband and father rather than the eligible bachelor of the past. As filming began in July 1951, with Norman Taurog as director, Grant told reporters, ‘Domesticity is a great invention, more people should relax and enjoy it.’ For her part, Drake told an interviewer, ‘We don’t always see as much of our friends as we should, but the truth of the matter is that we seldom entertain.’ The five children by whom they found themselves surrounded on set provided a surrogate family. Grant and Drake gave each of their screen children a present, and made home movies of them.
Warners were so pleased with Room for One More that they rushed it out just after the turn of the year. The Hollywood Reporter called it ‘a delightful domestic comedy’ and described Grant’s performance as “witty, debonair, but always real’.
Variety praised the film for being ‘happy’, and Time magazine admitted, ‘The movie’s handling of child behaviour is unusually sound for a Hollywood film, fairly free of obvious tear-jerking.’ As the film opened it looked as though it would be as big a hit as Every Girl Should Be Married.
But the audience, and the cinema itself, had changed in the three years since Cary Grant and Betsy Drake had last appeared together. Television had begun to make its presence felt in America’s living rooms, and with it had come lower box-office takings in the cinemas. The studios too had found themselves under threat. In 1949, the United States government had forced them to divest themselves of their chains of cinemas, in what was known as the Paramount decree, with the result that the studios could no longer be sure of as wide and significant a release for all their films. On top of that Hollywood was uncertain what made a box-office success. Now even Cary Grant did not seem to guarantee a hit. Room for One More was nothing like as successful for Warners in 1952 as Every Girl Should Be Married had been for RKO in 1949.
ROOM FOR ONE MORE IN 1952 WAS GRANT’S SECOND FILM WITH BETSY DRAKE. IT PROVIDED THEM WITH THE FAMILY THEY TOLD FRIENDS THEY LONGED FOR.
ABOUT: GINGER ROGERS WAS GRANT’S COu-STAR IN MONKEY BUSINESS, HIS FIFTH FILM FOR HOWARD HAWKS, BUT IT WAS THE YOUNG MARILYN MONROE(RIGHT)
A slightly perplexed Grant went back to Fox, to work with Howard Hawks for the fifth time. Once again Charles Lederer had written a screenplay, this time in collaboration with Ben Hecht and I.A.L. Diamond, called Monkey Business. The idea was straightforward. An absent-minded research chemist, to be played by Grant, accidentally discovers a formula for reversing the ageing process, and a chimpanzee with which he is working pours the formula into the laboratory’s water cooler. When the chemist takes a drink he becomes an adolescent, and when his wife, to be played by Ginger Rogers, takes several drinks she begins to act like a child. Marilyn Monroe was to play the secretary who helps the chemist rediscover his youth on the roller-skating
rink.
WHO CAUGHT THE EYE OF THE CRITICS.
Grant was not particularly impressed by Monroe. ‘I had no idea she would become a big star,’ he said later. ‘If she had something different from any other actress, it wasn’t apparent at the time.’ Grant felt she was ambitious, and a little calculating, but he could not fault her professionalism. Nevertheless, he preferred working with the other male lead in the picture, the veteran comedian Charles Coburn. ‘I learned how to steal a scene from Charles,’ Grant said afterwards. ‘He has screwed up more scenes for leading men than I would care to name.’ Typically, Coburn had taken care to see that he got one of the funniest lines in the picture, when he told Monroe, as his secretary, ‘Find someone to type this.’
There were echoes of Bringing Up Baby in Monkey Business. This time Grant was a chemist rather than a palaeontologist, and there was a chimpanzee called Peggy rather than a leopard called Nissa, but he again had to call upon his comic timing and his ability as an acrobat, just as he had opposite Hepburn fifteen years before. But by now the worldly character the cinema audience had come to know as Cary Grant did not look quite right as a befuddled scientist. Too many years, and too many Cary Grant pictures, had intervened. After the film was completed, Hawks himself was prepared to admit, ‘I don’t think the premise of the film was really believable and for that reason it was not as funny as it should have been.’
The critics agreed. ‘If youth is anything like the nonsense displayed here,’ the New Yorker noted, ‘maybe it’s just as well that nobody has really concocted anything that would force us older citizens back into it.’ Bosley Crowther in The New York Times added that it was a curiously old-fashioned picture, a ‘screwball comedy’ now strangely out of place. The year’s Oscars went to Vivien Leigh and Karl Maiden for A Streetcar Named Desire, and to Humphrey Bogart for The African Queen. Cary Grant’s brand of light romantic comedy no longer seemed to be what the audience wanted.
But there were still tempting offers. At MGM, Dore Schary was keen to repeat the success of The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer, and had asked Sidney Sheldon to write another screenplay specially for Grant. Sheldon and Schary had also misread the times, however. They too were assuming that Cary Grant alone could make an old-fashioned comedy work. Dream Wife, as the new film was called, was nothing more than a bit of fluff. The story of an executive who leaves his busy and successful wife for a sheikh’s daughter practised in the art of pleasing men, it had been created by Alfred Lewis Levitt, who had worked with Sheldon and Herbert Baker on the screenplay. But not even Deborah Kerr, who had recently been nominated for an Oscar for Edward My Son and was about to win with From Here to Eternity, could make the film feel contemporary. It was a relic from an earlier Hollywood age. When Dream Wife appeared in June 1953, the Hollywood Reporter dismissed it as ‘stretched out far beyond the value of its basic premise’, while Newsweek called it ‘an uneven mixture of sophisticated humour and downright slapstick moments’ which amounted to ‘little more than fairly amusing comedy’.
DREAM WIFE WAS CREATED SPECIALLY FOR GRANT BY SIDNEY SHELDON (RIGHT), BUT NOT EVEN THE SKILL OF HIS CO-STAR DEBORAH KERR COULD QUITE SAVE IT FROM THE CRITICS.
Realistic drama had taken the place of romantic comedy. The dinner jacket and the champagne glass had been cast off in favour of the vest and the beer can. The picture business was changing and the old stars, like the old-style movies, were fading. In December 1952, Cary Grant and Betsy Drake accepted the inevitable and set off for a long cruise to the Orient. Twenty years after he had first arrived in Hollywood behind the wheel of his Packard convertible, Cary Grant quietly disappeared, leaving what he called ‘the hypocrisies of Hollywood’ behind him.
A REFLECTIVE GRANT ON A VISIT TO LONDON AFTER HIS ‘RETIREMENT’ FROM THE MOVIES IN 1953.
CHAPTER SIX • LONELY HEART
SOPHIA LOREN WAS ONE OF THE WOMEN WHO REKINDLED HIS INTEREST.
‘ I give the impression of being a man without a care in the world it is because people with problems always try to give that impression. We are all the opposite of what we appear to be.’
In private, Cary Grant was never the relaxed, debonair man that he had so successfully created on the screen. Prone to profound self-doubt, and constantly frightened of failure, he could be both moody and irritable, but he would also take care to conceal those qualities in public — they were not the qualities a star was expected to demonstrate. Only his friends knew what he was really like. But now one old friend, Moss Hart, who had known him since his days on Broadway, had put part of his character into a screenplay.
Moss Hart’s Norman Maine was a star, a complex, introspective leading man given to fits of depression who is drinking heavily when he meets a young actress anxious to make her reputation. They fall in love and marry, but his career begins inexorably to wane as hers takes off. Finally, at the climax of Hart s screenplay, the ageing male star walks out into the Pacific and drowns himself.
The story was not entirely new. The columnist Adela Rogers St John had written an earlier version, which George Cukor had directed for RKO as What Price Hollywood? in 1932, and five years later Dorothy Parker had worked on another version, this time for the director William Wellman, when it was retitled A Star Is Born. But Hart had deepened his portrait of the ageing star for his screenplay, which George Cukor was going to make for Warners. Judy Garland was to play the young actress, and Hart, Cukor and Garland all knew exactly whom they wanted to play opposite her: Cary Grant. In the late summer of 1952, before Grant disappeared from Hollywood, Cukor had invited Cary Grant to his house and asked him to read a section of Hart’s script. Cukor tried everything he could to persuade Grant to play Norman Maine. Then Hart and Garland tried to persuade him. But Grant flatly refused. He was leaving for a trip around the world with Betsy, and he did not want even to think about movies. The more Cukor tried, the more stubborn Grant became. He would not do it. Both men knew the unspoken reason for his refusal. Norman Maine was too close to Cary Grant. He could not bear to reveal his own fears to the cinema audience.
On the steamer to Japan, Grant told his wife, ‘I feel free for the first time in my life’, and in the weeks to come they set about isolating themselves from the world they had known before. They invented their own private language. ‘You look thoughtative,’ he would tell her, before describing himself as ‘happily tearful’. They experimented with hypnotism. She wanted to use it to help him to give up smoking sixty cigarettes a day. ‘She put me in a trance,’ he remembered later, ‘and Planted a post-hypnotic suggestion that I would stop smoking. We went to sleep and the next morning when I reached for a cigarette, just as I always did, I took one puff and instantly felt nauseated.’ They tried self-hypnotism, to help themselves sleep. They experimented with health-food diets and yoga as ways of calming down. But this did not entirely obliterate the morose moods that would sometimes flood over Grant when he and Betsy were alone together. Nevertheless, the trip helped. Visiting US servicemen in army hospitals, seeing Japan and then Hong Kong, seemed to provide him with a fresh perspective.
EVEN AT FIFTY, GRANT MANAGED TO LOOK YOUNGER THAN EVER ON THE SET.
Back in his house in Palm Springs in the late spring of 1953, Grant started reading Plato’s dialogues and the Greek plays, as well as biographies of Albert Schweitzer and Sigmund Freud. He and Betsy even consulted Ernest Holmes, the founder of the Church of Religious Science. As he was to admit later, ‘I was a self-centred bore until the age of forty. I didn’t have time for reading. Now I’m reading, absorbing, listening and learning about the world and myself.’ In 1953 Grant’s search for himself — a search which was to continue throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s — was relentless. Yet he remained troubled, never quite at peace with himself. His preoccupation with money persisted, as did his craving for affection. He still longed for his mother to acknowledge how much he had accomplished. In the end only the movies could provide the recognition he craved, and as 1954 wore on Betsy Drake came to realize it.
No one understood Cary Grant’s ambivalence better than Alfred Hitchcock. He knew the demons that pursued Grant, and he also knew that he liked to be tempted, particularly by the right script and the right leading lady. Hitchcock had recently completed two films with Hollywood’s latest female star, Grace Kelly — Dial M for Murder and Rear Window, and she had just won her first Academy Award for The Country Girl. In an astonishing rise to prominence, she had made only six films in a screen career stretching back a mere three years. But Hitchcock had recognized the passion that lay beneath Kelly’s beautiful, glacial exterior, just as he had seen the menace beneath Grant’s smile. Now the irony of making one of the screen’s legendary charmers into the object of Grace Kelly’s desire fascinated him, and he suspected that it would be a temptation that Cary Grant would not be able to refuse.