Cary Grant: Dark Angel

by Geoffrey Wansell

  Like Leslie Caron, Samantha Eggar, who had just given birth to her first child, was fascinated by her co-star. ‘Cary insisted that I had to change my hair, and he chose my dress just as he bought his own props. He was on top of everything.’ But she too realized that he seldom revealed much about himself. ‘He really didn’t open up personally at all, even though I was a friend of Dyan’s.’ Cannon had opted to stay at home in California for her pregnancy, so what spare time Grant had was spent with Japanese industrialists, such as the President of Sony.

  As soon as filming was finished in Tokyo, however, he took off for Los Angeles. He had hardly had time to unpack before Dyan felt the first labour pains. On the morning of 26 February 1966, he ushered his wife into the car and drove her to St John’s Hospital in Burbank. At eight that evening Cannon gave birth to a four pound eight ounce baby girl. Within hours, a jubilant Cary Grant had announced that she would be called Jennifer. ‘If she wants another name, she can add it herself.’

  From that moment on, Grant’s fascination with the business of making movies was replaced by a fascination with his new daughter. He became as obsessed with the details of her upbringing as he had been with the details of his own scripts and sets. He would visit her room at 7.30 each morning, to supervise the warming of her bottle. He would be sure to be back from editing Walk Don’t Run in time to see her at the end of the day, and to put her to bed. ‘She is my greatest production. The most winsome, captivating girl I’ve ever known,’ he told the Los Angeles Times. Even the launch of his last film hardly concerned him. When it opened in July 1966, Cary Grant was more interested in taking his daughter to England to see his mother than in the first weekend’s takings at the box-office. He set off for England on the liner Oriana only days after the opening. As he and Dyan walked up the gangway, he was holding Jennifer. It was the first time he had allowed his daughter to be photographed.

  Walk Don’t Run did not match the commercial success of Charade, but it underlined Grant’s enduring appeal. ‘Mr Grant has never looked handsomer or in finer fettle,’ the New Yorker commented, while Newsweek added he ‘could not be unfunny if he tried’. But the magazine went on to echo his own feelings: ‘Though Grant’s personal presence is indispensable, the character he plays is almost wholly superfluous. Perhaps the inference to be taken is that a man in his 50s or 60s has no place in romantic comedy except as a catalyst.’ In fact, Cary Grant had already settled into the only role he intended to play in future: the doting father.

  ‘I retired when I became a father because I didn’t want to miss any part of my daughter’s growing up,’ he was to say later. ‘I could have gone on acting and playing a grandfather or a bum, but I discovered more important things in life.’ But that did not leave a great deal of room for his wife. Dyan Cannon was quickly made to feel almost irrelevant as a mother. Indeed her life with Grant had not turned out to be at all what she had expected. Even before Jennifer’s birth, he had not liked her going out in the evenings, preferring, as he had always done, to eat in front of the television and clip articles that interested him from the newspapers. Like Betsy Drake, Dyan had discovered the rapid swings of mood that could overtake him, and their trip to England together had done nothing to help. Seeing his mother and introducing her to her first grandchild had done little to improve his temper. By the time she got back to Hollywood in November, Dyan Cannon was convinced their marriage could not survive.

  Three days after Christmas, and barely seventeen months after their wedding, Cannon and Grant separated. She took Jennifer and moved out of their house. ‘Cary is a very demanding man,’ Cannon was to explain later. ‘In a peculiar way, he’s such a perfectionist, and has such strong ideas of his own about everything — even about things that women are ordinarily concerned with — that he meddles in what should be women’s work.’ They had only been apart for a few days, however, when Grant tried to persuade his wife to try again. ‘The thought of being separated from your child is intolerable,’ he told his friends. ‘I don’t want to miss a bit of her.’ He started telephoning Cannon several times a day, insisting that they had ‘to stay together for Jennifer’s sake’. But his wife was adamant. ‘When there’s dissension and heartache in the house you stay apart. Otherwise it’s just a cop-out.’

  Cary Grant was not to be deterred. He offered to start work again, if Cannon would appear with him, providing she brought Jennifer home. Cannon refused, and accepted a part in a play in New York instead. But when she and her daughter turned up to catch the flight, she found he had booked a seat on the same plane. When they checked into their hotel, she found he had booked a suite down the corridor. When she went out to dinner, leaving Jennifer with a nanny, Grant would mysteriously turn up to ‘keep an eye on you’. Cannon was furious. But for the next nine months Grant stayed in New York to be within sight of his daughter.

  LEFT: ‘MY GREATEST PRODUCTION’ – GRANT’S DAUGHTER JENNIFER.

  RIGHT: SHOWING HER OFF TO HIS EIGHTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD MOTHER ON A VISIT TO BRISTOL WITH DYAN CANNON IN SEPTEMBER 1966.

  In September 1967, Dyan Cannon’s initial petition for divorce came before the Los Angeles Domestic Relations Court. Her lawyers claimed that she needed a maintenance payments of $5,470 a month, and insisted that her husband could well afford it as his annual income was $500,000, and he was worth at least $10 million. Neither she nor Grant was in court, however. She was still appearing on Broadway, and he was nearby, staying at a friend’s apartment. Their arguments raged on throughout the winter. She wanted a divorce. He tried to persuade her to think again. She refused, insisting that if he would not accept her terms she would tell the world exactly how difficult life had been for Mrs Cary Grant.

  A week before Cannon was due to make her first appearance in court, Grant was hurt in an accident on the way to the airport to return to Los Angeles for the hearing. Forced to remain in hospital, he was not in the Santa Monica Superior Court in March 1968 to hear his wife explain that living with him had turned into ‘a terrifying, unromantic nightmare’. Sparing not a single detail, Cannon told the court that Grant had not only beaten her up but also regularly locked her in her room, because he was given to ‘fits of uncontrollable temper’. When her lawyer asked if she could explain his behaviour, she answered, ‘I attribute it to LSD’, and then explained that he had been taking it for ten years and had ‘suggested I try it’. Cannon’s catalogue of her husband’s failings did not end there. The next morning she added that he would ‘yell and scream and jump up and down’, and that, during the Academy Awards on television, he had become particularly violent. ‘I couldn’t please him, no matter what I’d do or say,’ she went on. ‘He criticized everything I did — the way I carried the baby, the way I dressed the baby. I couldn’t do anything right.’ It was some of the most damaging public criticism ever levelled against a movie star.

  A HOLLYWOOD LEGEND, GRANT ADMIRED ACTORS OF THE NEW GENERATION, SUCH AS PAUL NEWMAN, HERE WITH HIS WIFE JOANNE WOODWARD ON THE SET OF WINNING.

  To rebut Cannon’s evidence, Cary Grant’s lawyers called two psychiatrists to prove that although he had taken LSD it had caused no ‘organic defects’ in his brain, and that ‘there are no irrational effects to prevent him from being a loving father or to make him endanger his daughter’. In a final statement, his lawyers explained, ‘He, at the age of sixty-four, wants to devote the rest of his life to making his daughter happy.’ Judge Robert Wenke was impressed. He saw no reason to deny Grant reasonable access to his daughter, however much LSD he may have taken in the past. The judge ruled that he should be allowed to see Jennifer ‘sixty days of each year’ and to keep her overnight at reasonable times.

  When Grant left hospital in New York, a few days later, he flew directly to Los Angeles in a private jet owned by George Barrie, the founder of the Faberge cosmetics company, whom he had just met. On the flight across the United States, Barrie suggested that Grant should become a director of his company and act as ‘a sort of informal ambassador for us’. For his
part, Grant was fascinated by the intense little man, who had started life playing the saxophone for a living. Seven weeks later, to the amazement of Hollywood, he became a director of Faberge, and over the next decade he and Barrie were to become close friends. Faberge became his new ‘studio’, and the company provided him with a private plane, expenses and a small annual fee, as well as stock options. It was an association that was to last for the next eighteen years. ‘Somehow,’ one friend admitted later, ‘Cary seemed to think the life of a businessman was more respectable — or admirable — than acting.’

  OUT OF ‘THE PICTURE BUSINESS’, GRANT INCREASINGLY DEVOTED HIS TIME TO THE FABERGE COMPANY, EVEN TO THE EXTENT OF MODELLING THEIR CLOTHES.

  NOW IN HIS MID-SIXTIES, BUT HARDLY LOOKING IT, GRANT WAS IMMENSELY PROUD TO HAVE BEEN PART OF WHAT HE CALLED ‘HOLLYWOOD’S MOST GLORIOUS ERA’.

  Not that the film offers stopped coming. Throughout 1968 and 1969, every Hollywood studio tried to persuade Cary Grant to return to the screen. But he steadfastly refused them all. He did not want to risk losing touch with Jennifer, and in October 1969 he even managed to persuade the court to revise the visiting arrangements. Now his daughter was to be allowed to stay with him on alternate weekends from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon, as well as every Monday afternoon from three until six. She was also to be allowed to stay for half the Christmas holidays, all the Easter holidays in alternate years, and for one month of each summer holiday. It was all he wanted. There was simply no time to make another film.

  In the first months of 1970 Hollywood itself recognized that Cary Grant had brought his career to an end. On 7 April the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally gave him an Oscar. The citation for his special honorary award read, ‘To Cary Grant for his unique mastery of the art of screen acting with the respect and affection of his colleagues.’ The gold statuette was presented to Grant by Frank Sinatra, who said simply, ‘It was awarded for sheer brilliance of acting.... No one has brought more pleasure to more people for many years than Cary has, and nobody has done so many things so well. Cary has so much skill that it makes it all look easy.’ The applause was thunderous, and the tears in Cary Grant’s eyes were only too clear.

  His voice was almost a whisper as he started to speak. ‘Probably no greater honour can come to a man than the respect of his colleagues,’ he said. ‘You know I may never look at this without remembering the quiet patience of the directors who were so kind to me, who were kind enough to put up with me more than once — some of them even three or four times.... Well, I trust they and all the other directors, writers and producers, and leading women, have all forgiven me what I didn’t know.’ As the audience rose to its feet to give him a standing ovation, he concluded, ‘You know, I’ve never been a joiner or a member of any — of a particular — social set, but I’ve been privileged to be a part of Hollywood’s most glorious era.’

  It was Cary Grant’s last Hollywood performance.

  TWO WOMEN WERE TO PLAY A VITAL PART IN THE LAST YEARS OF GRANT’S

  CHAPTER EIGHT • JENNIFER AND BARBARA

  LIFE: HIS FIFTH WIFE BARBARA HARRIS (LIFT) AND HIS DAUGHTER JENNIFER (ABOVE RIGHT).

  ‘Women are instinctively wiser and emotionally more mature than men. ’

  Like Garbo before him, Cary Grant slipped out of pictures and took refuge in his privacy. For most of the remaining years of his life, producer after producer, studio after studio, would send him scripts or suggestions for movies that he might make. But he would politely refuse them all.

  George Barrie of Faberge even created a film production company with him in mind. One of Barrie’s first scripts, A Touch of Class, in 1972, Grant turned down without a moment’s hesitation, telling his friend, ‘If the script had been given to me ten years ago I’d have made it in a second.’ The role went to George Segal, thirty years Grant’s junior.

  In the same year, another old friend, Joe Mankiewicz, tried to persuade him to play the lead in the film version of Anthony Shaffer’s stage play, Sleuth, but again Grant declined. When MGM asked him if he would play John Barrymore’s role in a remake of Grand Hotel, once again he said no. In the last sixteen years of his life, Cary Grant’s only real interest was Jennifer. The man who been denied a childhood himself was intent on ensuring that his daughter was not denied one. Nothing was not denied one. Nothing was to allowed to interfere.

  It was the reason Grant wanted to help Dyan Cannon get her career started again. The more time she spent on set making a film, the more time he would be allowed with Jennifer. Shortly after their divorce he had suggested she should be considered for Columbia’s film Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, and the studio had agreed. But eventually his attempts to help his ex-wife were to lead to a new public battle between them. In March 1972, Dyan agreed to appear in Shamus opposite Burt Reynolds, and decided to take Jennifer with her to New York for the filming, even though Jennifer had only just started at the Montessori School in Malibu. Grant was enraged, and seized the opportunity to ask the Los Angeles court for joint custody of his daughter, so that when his wife went away for long periods she could stay with him. After another bitter courtroom argument, the court ruled that six-year-old Jennifer Grant should remain in California, but that her father should take her to New York for at least two visits during her mother’s filming. Cary Grant was jubilant.

  When he was not looking after his daughter, however, he occupied his time much as he had done in the past. He would attend to his investments and reply to correspondence during the morning, and in the afternoon would either stay at home or go to the races at Hollywood Park. If he placed a bet, however, it would never be more than $2, for he was still as careful with his money as he had always been. Shortly after winning the right for Jennifer to spend more time with him in California, he sold the rights to some of his last films with Universal, including Operation Petticoat, That Touch of Mink, The Grass Is Greener and Charade, for $2 million and invested the money in property, including one development in southern Spain and another in Ireland. He travelled to Europe with George Barrie for Fabergé, and went to Las Vegas from time to time as a new director of MGM, but Jennifer was his consuming passion.

  RIGHT: HIS ATTRACTION TO BEAUTIFUL WOMEN HAD NEVER DIMMED, AND IN THE EARLY 1970S GRANT EMBARKED ON A RELATIONSHIP WITH A YOUNG BRITISH PHOTOGRAPHER, MAUREEN DONALDSON.

  Not that he had lost his appetite for the company of pretty young women. In 1971, he embarked on an affair with Maureen Donaldson, a young reporter turned photographer, and in the middle of 1972 she went to live with him in Beverly Hills. But the contradictions in his personality had not disappeared. ‘The dark and the light live side by side in Cary Grant,’ Donaldson wrote later, suggesting that his mother’s desertion of him as a child had instilled a distrust of women that he had never shaken off. She sensed the ambivalence that permeated his life: a desire for privacy, and yet ‘not wishing to be forgotten’; a fortune of many millions of dollars, ‘which he would never let himself enjoy’; a distaste for talking about the past but an archive of memorabilia in his house. Donaldson agreed with Pauline Kael that Grant ‘drew women to him by making them feel he needed them, yet the last thing he’d do would be to come right out and say it’. Kael was describing his screen appearances, but Donaldson insisted the same was true of his private life.

  LEFT: DURING THEIR FIVE-YEAR AFFAIR, GRANT AND MAUREEN DONALDSON OFTEN WENT HORSE-RACING AT HOLLYWOOD PARK.

  RIGHT: A PORTRAIT TAKEN BY DONALDSON.

  On 22 January 1973, just two weeks before her ninety-sixth birthday, Elsie Leach died in her Bristol nursing home. She fell asleep after being given her afternoon tea and never recovered consciousness. Two days later, her only son went back to the town of his birth and buried her alongside the other man she had never made happy, his father Elias. They had hardly been together during their life, but Grant wanted to reunite them in death.

  Even in her last years, Elsie Leach had found it impossible to accept her son’s success. ‘One time I
took her some fur coats,’ Grant once recalled. ‘And I remember she said, ‘What do you want from me now?’ I said, ‘It’s just because I love you.’ And she said something like, ‘Oh you...’ She wouldn’t accept it.’ It took Grant six months to gather up the courage to clear out his mother’s house in Bristol. ‘To do it sooner,’ he said, ‘would have seemed like hurrying her away.’

  Grant eventually took his mother’s belongings back with him to Hollywood and stored them in a fireproof vault which had been specially constructed in his house. Here he kept meticulous records of his past, photographs of his parents and his friends, details of his life in vaudeville and on Broadway, his old marriage certificates and divorce papers, passports and press cuttings, contracts and publicity stills, posters and lobby cards, together with presents from Noel Coward and Cole Porter. All were neatly stacked, often tied together in rubber bands. There he put his mother’s rings beside his father’s pocket watch.

  On Jennifer’s eleventh birthday in February 1977, Grant wrote to her to tell her how proud he was to be able to watch her swim, ride and play tennis. ‘You are the dearest daughter a man could have,’ he wrote. ‘You have never caused me a moment’s anguish or disappointment.’ When Warren Beatty approached him later that year to play the part of the ghost in a remake of the 1940 classic Here Comes Mr Jordan, which Beatty wanted to retitle Heaven Can Wait, Grant again turned the idea down. Movies were things of the past.

  RIGHT: WITH THE PRESSURES OF MAKING PICTURES BEHIND HIM, GRANT RELAXED AND ALLOWED HIMSELF TO INDULGE HIS PASSION FOR HORSES, SOMETIMES TAKING HIS DAUGHTER JENNIFER ALONG.