Cary Grant: Dark Angel

by Geoffrey Wansell

  AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF HIS MARRIAGE TO BETSY DRAKE, GRANT LIKED TO SURROUND HIMSELF WITH BEAUTIFUL WOMEN SUCH AS DINA MERRILL (ABOVE) AND KIM NOVAK (LEFT).

  That was the reason Grant accepted an invitation from Universal and Robert Arthur, his producer on Operation Petticoat, to make another romantic comedy. Universal wanted to use him opposite the studio’s latest princess, Doris Day, whose hits included Pillow Talk, and had asked Stanley Shapiro to write a suitable script. They also offered Grant a minimum of $600,000 against 10 per cent of the gross receipts to appear in a part that was definitely a ‘Cary Grant character’. The director was to be Delbert Mann, who had won an Oscar for his first feature, Marty, in 1956. Grant did not hesitate.

  AN EYE FOR A PRETTY GIRL NEVER DESERTED HIM. IN 1961 GRANT MADE A POINT OF TALKING TO MARGO MCKENDRY IN THE UNIVERSAL COMMISSARY WHEN SHE WAS BROUGHT OUT FOR A SCREEN TEST.

  But neither Doris Day nor Delbert Mann ever felt that they knew the star they worked with on That Touch of Mink. ‘Cary Grant was very conscious of every detail,’ Mann said later. ‘And I’d never come across an actor like that before.... The challenge of acting seemed to have gone out of things for him. He was just playing Cary Grant.’ Once again Grant was playing a millionaire, a bachelor uninterested in marriage until his Rolls-Royce splashes a small-town girl in the rain in New York. And then, in the best tradition of Cary Grant comedies, he has to persuade the girl that he is not such a wicked seducer after all, and that it is quite safe for her to marry him. It was a well-worn formula, and the critics wasted no time in pointing that out. ‘Too often there’s a hampering second-hand air about situation and joke,’ Variety suggested, a gloss which did not obscure ‘an essentially threadbare lining’. But that did nothing to lessen the film’s success. When That Touch of Mink played at the Radio City Music Hall in the summer of 1962 it became the first film to take more than $1 million in a single cinema. It also earned Cary Grant more than $3 million from his profit participation.

  NOT EVERY WOMAN FELL AT HIS FEET. DORIS DAY TOOK A LITTLE TIME TO SUCCUMB IN THAT TOUCH OF MINK [LEFT)

  IN 1962, WHILE AUDREY HEPBURN DIDN’T GIVE IN TOO QUICKLY IN CHARADE [RIGHT).

  He was now, unquestionably, one of the biggest box-office stars in the world, but his screen image had not brought him happiness. His use of LSD had come to an end, because Dr Hartman’s experiments with the drug had been banned by the California Board of Medical Examiners. By the time That Touch of Mink was released his third marriage was over. Betsy Drake had decided that there was no point in trying to keep it alive any longer. Grant’s latest relationship with a young actress, Greta Thyssen, had been the final straw, and Betsy had filed for divorce. At the hearing in August 1962, she claimed, just as Barbara Hutton had done before her, that Grant subjected her to mental cruelty. He ‘left home for long periods’, was ‘apparently bored’ with her, and ‘preferred watching television to talking to me’. ‘I was always in love with him and still am,’ she told reporters. She then put Cary Grant and Hollywood firmly behind her, and turned instead to studying psychotherapy and teaching drama. Grant wrote to his mother to explain that the divorce was inevitable and ‘probably the best for both of us. At least I shall try to think so.’ He signed the letter, ‘Always, Archie.’

  Cary Grant may not have cared for ‘being married’, as his newly divorced wife had told the Santa Monica Supreme Court, but he was utterly fascinated by courtship. There was a new object for his affections, a twenty-three-year-old actress called Dyan Cannon. Grant had first seen her on the television set in his bedroom when she made an appearance in a television series called Malibu Run. The next morning he went to considerable lengths to track her down, and he courted her as relentlessly as he had once courted Betsy Drake.

  No sooner had his third divorce been finalized than Grant left Hollywood again for Europe and another film with Stanley Donen. But on his way to Paris to meet the director he stopped in Philadelphia to catch the touring version of a Broadway comedy called The Fun Couple, in which Dyan Cannon was appearing. With tawny blonde hair and hazel eyes, Cannon was the daughter of a deacon in the Baptist Church and had arrived in Hollywood at the age of seventeen to find work as an actress. Instead she found herself working as a model and a beautician until a screen test had resulted in more than 200 parts on television. Suddenly, Cary Grant was fascinated by her.

  AUDREY HEPBURN BECAME ONE OF HIS FAVOURITE CO-STARS, EVEN THOUGH THEY WORKED TOGETHER JUST ONCE, ON CHARADE FOR UNIVERSAL, RELEASED IN 1963. SHE CALLED HIM ‘A MYSTIC’.

  No matter how much he may have pursued beautiful young women off the screen, however, he was utterly determined not to allow the screen image of Cary Grant to become a lecherous old man. Indeed he insisted that in Charade, the new film Donen was planning, he would not appear as a seducer. Instead, he wanted the young screenwriter, Peter Stone, to make sure that it was his female co-star who was the sexual aggressor. Stone, on his first feature, was only too happy to oblige, and made sure that Grant told his leading lady, ‘I’m too old for you’ and ‘I’m old enough to be your father.’ For the woman who had set her sights on Grant, Donen had cast the inimitable Audrey Hepburn. Fragile yet intensely feminine, she had won an Academy Award in her first Hollywood picture, Roman Holiday, in 1953, and had almost starred alongside Grant the following year when Paramount wanted him to make Sabrina. In Charade she was to play a translator who returns home to find her husband murdered and turns to Grant for help. Filming started in October 1962.

  Hepburn, thirty-three to Grant’s fifty-eight, later described her co-star as ‘a mystic’ and ‘vulnerable’, adding that she found an ‘indefinable quality’ to him which made him ‘both expressive and reserved’. His pernickety behaviour on the set had certainly not disappeared, however. He still questioned each one of his lines and argued vehemently that he should not have to do too much ‘exposition’. But his professionalism never deserted him once the cameras were running. One scene called for him to take an orange from underneath a stout lady’s neck using only his own head and neck. ‘It was one of my favourites,’ he said later. ‘I did it with such concentration that it looked like my life depended on it.’ It was filmed on the day that President Kennedy blockaded Cuba, bringing the world to the brink of war.

  Exactly as Cary Grant had planned that it should, Stanley Donen’s new film burnished his screen image still further. Audrey Hepburn’s passion for him on camera almost equalled Grace Kelly’s eight years earlier in To Catch a Thief. Once again he was the object of a woman’s desire. Not many other men nearing sixty would have Hepburn suggesting to them, ‘Won’t you come in for a minute? I don’t bite, you know, unless it’s called for.’

  IN ONE OF CHARADE’S MOST FAMOUS SCENES, GRANT TOOK A SHOWER IN HIS SUIT, HE ONLY CHANGED INTO A BATH ROBE AFTER SHOOTING WAS OVER.

  Charade became the twenty-sixth Cary Grant film to play New York’s Radio City Music Hall. It opened there in December 1963, and once more it gave the audience the man the New Yorker’s critic Pauline Kael described as appearing ‘in radiantly shallow perfection’. Newsweek called the film ‘an absolute delight’, complimenting it for ‘civilized and witty fun’. But not every critic was as generous. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times warned, ‘Mr Grant does everything from taking a shower without removing his suit to fighting with thugs with all the blandness and boredom of an old screwball comedy hand.’ But that carping did nothing to affect the film’s success. In its first week Charade took more than $180,000 at Radio City, a house record, and went on to gross more than $6 million in the United States alone.

  The moment the film was released Grant left for Europe, to visit his mother. She was eighty-seven now, and her doctors doubted whether she should continue to live alone in the house that he had bought for her in Bristol. But when they met, she acted as she had always done, friendly one moment, criticizing him for his grey hair and wrinkles the next. He would never complain, accepting the criticism like a child, sitting quietly beside her. Age had not
made her any more affectionate, it had not warmed the chill that seemed to colour her attitude to the world. Elsie Leach, who was now to be moved into a nursing home, still frightened her son. As it had always been, his refuge was in the character he had created for the screen.

  Back in Hollywood shortly after his sixtieth birthday, however, Cary Grant began to wonder how much longer he could realistically remain a leading man. Certainly when Jack Warner approached him to play Professor Higgins in the screen version of the Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady, he hesitated. The part would allow him to age on the screen, but he was not sure he would be able to make it a Cary Grant role. Finally, after a long period of thought, he turned it down, even though Warner was offering him Audrey Hepburn as his co-star again and was prepared to pay him $1.5 million. ‘No matter how good I am,’ he said firmly, ‘I’ll either be compared with Rex Harrison, and I don’t think I am better than he is, or I’ll be told I’m imitating him, which isn’t good for him, or for me.’

  GRANT WANTED AUDREY HEPBURN TO BE HIS CO-STAR IN FATHER GOOSE FOR UNIVERSAL IN 1964, BUT SHE WAS COMMITTED TO MY FAIR LADY. LESLIE CARON ABLY REPLACED HER.

  Whatever his fears about ageing on the screen, in private he was increasingly besotted with twenty-five-year-old Dyan Cannon. He had paid for her to fly back to Hollywood at weekends while she was in the touring version of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, and in April 1964 he persuaded her to leave the cast altogether and move into his house in Beverly Hills with him. Not that he was considering getting married again. ‘He didn’t want to,’ Cannon said later. ‘He thought if we did it would ruin our relationship.’ Instead he took to making lists of Hollywood’s older stars who had relationships with younger women, and showing them to her triumphantly, to prove that age did not matter.

  Finally, he decided to experiment with a part that would allow his age to show through on the screen. He told MGM that he might be interested in playing the ageing poker player in a film they were preparing from Ring Lardner and Terry Southern’s screenplay The Cincinnati Kid, but at the last moment he changed his mind and decided instead to make a film of his own to alter his image. Peter Stone, his screenwriter on Charade, had come up with an idea which called for him to play an elderly history professor who decides to become a bum on a South Pacific island during the Second World War, only to be persuaded to look out for Japanese planes and troops for the Allies. His character was to be an eccentric with a passion for alcohol: instead of a dinner jacket and a smooth smile, Cary Grant was to wear a work shirt and several days’ growth of beard. The idea appealed to him enormously. ‘That’s what I’m really like,’ he told Stone enthusiastically. ‘It’ll be the first time I’ve ever appeared as I really am.’ Stone suggested the film’s title: Father Goose.

  WITH GREY HAIR AND A BEARD RATHER THAN HIS USUAL DARKLY POLISHED SMILE, GRANT HOPED FATHER GOOSE WOULD HELP HIM TO AGE GRACEFULLY ON THE SCREEN. BUT THE CRITICS HATED HIM AS A BUM.

  Grant’s first choice for a co-star was Audrey Hepburn, but she was committed to My Fair Lady, and he turned instead to a young actress who looked uncannily like her, Leslie Caron. As slight and gamine as Hepburn, Caron had just been nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in The L-Shaped Room, and when she and Grant met she was captivated, describing him as ‘like a jaguar, ready to pounce... exactly as he is on the screen, only more so’. Once again, Grant decided that Universal could release the film, and he asked Robert Arthur to produce it. He and Arthur then chose Ralph Nelson as director, and decided that the location should be Jamaica rather than the South Pacific. Grant wanted the film to be ready for Radio City Music Hall that Christmas.

  When shooting began in April 1964, the French-born Caron found her co-star a mass of contradictions, in the best of moods one moment, but given to sudden flashes of anger. ‘He electrified the set,’ she said later. ‘It was essential to have a quality far above the average. You had to be as bright and brilliant as possible.’ Ever attentive to every detail, Grant took as much interest in the musical score as he did in the performances, choosing Cy Coleman to compose the music and encouraging him to write one particular song for the picture, ‘Pass Me By’. He wanted the film to add an extra dimension to his career, to prove that he could age gracefully — and convincingly. His only fear was that it would fail.

  In spite of his anxiety, the experiment worked. The cinema audience loved him in jeans and a beard, and they did not mind at all that he had become an unkempt beach bum. In its first week at Radio City in December 1964, Father Goose broke Charade’s record, taking more than $210,000, and it went on to take another $6 million in film rentals in the United States alone. The critics, however, did not care for Grant as a bum. Brendan Gill noted sourly in the New Yorker, ‘Father Goose offers us a surly, slatternly, unshaven and hard-drinking Cary Grant in a part that would have suited Bogart to a T but suits Mr Grant only to about a J.’ Bosley Crowther in The New York Times suggested that Grant’s was ‘not a very deep character or a very real one’. Nevertheless the film went on to win Stone and Frank Tarloff an Oscar for the screenplay.

  THE TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD DYAN CANNON BECAME THE FOURTH MRS GRANT IN JULY 1965. NOW SIXTY-ONE, HE HAD BEGUN WEARING THE GLASSES HE CAME TO DEPEND ON IN PUBLIC.

  Sadly, the box-office success of Father Goose did not satisfy Cary Grant. He had wanted his performance to be a spectacular success with the critics as well as the audience, and the reviews only served to feed his insecurity. The critics put into words what he had privately feared, that the audience did not really want Cary Grant in anything except a Cary Grant film playing a Cary Grant part. Ignoring the film’s enormous commercial success, he convinced himself that he had failed to make the transition to character actor that Bogart had made in The African Queen. In his own mind he had not managed to shake off the persona of Cary Grant.

  Early in 1965, he was back in England, this time accompanied by Dyan Cannon, whom his mother insisted on addressing as ‘Betsy’. Cannon thought that Elsie Leach had ‘a psyche that had the strength of a twenty-mule team’, and was in no doubt that she could still intimidate her son. Cannon knew that Grant would not consider marrying again if his mother did not approve. To her relief, Elsie Leach rather liked her.

  Just five months later, on Saturday 22 July 1965 a Justice of the Peace in Las Vegas pronounced Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon man and wife. Only a dozen people were present, each one of them sworn to secrecy. Grant did not intend anyone to know that he had married for a fourth time until he had told his mother. As soon as the six-minute ceremony and a brief party afterwards were over, he and Cannon set off for Bristol. But his plan backfired. News of the wedding broke while they were flying across the Atlantic, and when they arrived in England they were besieged by reporters. In desperation, Grant and Cannon climbed out of their hotel room windows at three o’clock in the morning to escape the press. Over the next two days, they managed not only to avoid the reporters, but also to see Mrs Leach.

  The fourth Mr and Mrs Grant had hardly settled back into his house in Beverly Hills in August when Dyan announced that she was pregnant. Cary Grant was overjoyed. After years of heart-searching with Barbara Hutton and Betsy Drake over whether or not to start a family, the young woman whom he had married only a matter of weeks before was suddenly to become the mother of his first child. The pregnancy was the sign he had been looking for. Within a month, he had decided to retire. He would make one more picture, but then he would devote himself to a role he had never played before — husband and father. Father Goose had convinced him that he would never be allowed to age on the screen, and he did not want to play a romantic lead any longer, it was not ‘believable’. No, he would retire as Garbo had done, and slip quietly away, leaving behind the golden image that he had created.

  There was just one last project. Grant had already agreed to remake George Stevens’s romantic comedy The More the Merrier, which had been nominated for an Oscar as Best Picture in 1943 when it had starred Jean Arthur and
Joel McCrea. The story of a young woman who decides to share her apartment with two men, only to fall in love with the younger one, it had originally been set in Washington, but Columbia wanted to change its location to Tokyo during the Olympic Games. Grant was to play an English industrialist, Sir William Rutland, who is unable to find a room in the city until he meets a young British Embassy secretary. Walk Don’t Run, as the remake was to be called, was to be written by Sol Saks and directed by the veteran Charles Walters. Grant’s co-stars were to be Samantha Eggar and Jim Hutton, but, at his insistence, he was not going to end up getting the girl. Instead, Grant was to arrange for her marriage to the young American athlete, played by Hutton. ‘I honestly think that young people, who are the bulk of the movie-going public, prefer young men to make love to young women,’ he told the columnist Sheilah Graham before filming began in October 1965.

  FATHER GOOSE HAD CONVINCED GRANT THAT THE AUDIENCE DID NOT WANT HIM TO GROW OLD ON THE SCREEN. WALK DON’T RUN IN 1966, WITH JIM HUTTON, BECAME HIS LAST MOVIE.

  ON THE VERGE OF BECOMING A FATHER FOR THE FIRST TIME, AT THE AGE OF SIXTY-TWO, GRANT URGED HIS LEADING LADY ON WALK DON’T RUN, SAMANTHA EGGAR, TO TAKE SPECIAL CARE OF HER OWN NEW BABY.