Cary Grant

by Marc Eliot

  Dancing in the Dark opened shortly after Grant's return to Los Angeles in the spring of 1949 to scathing reviews, many of which once again focused on Drake. To keep her from directly packing her bags and boarding a plane back to the East Coast, Grant arranged for her to appear with him on the Lux Radio version of Every Girl Should Be Married. The show was broadcast June 27, and proved so popular (like every show Grant did on the radio) that it was repeated April 17 the following year, and afterward Grant agreed to do a radio serial based on Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, costarring Betsy Drake as his wife. He had been able to get the radio serial rights from Selznick, who always needed money, and Howard Hughes, who put up the money to buy them.*

  Broadcasting was a medium Grant felt particularly comfortable in. According to his producer, William Frye, “He was very meticulous, exact, charming, funny, and sweet. Difficult, too, but I found working with him a lesson in professionalism. He would go over the scripts word for word, and if there was one that affected the character's point of view, he would insist that we change it to make it better.”

  This proved to be not as easy as it sounds. The show's principal writers, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (who would later go on to write several Broadway shows, including Inherit the Wind, and numerous television serial dramas), made it difficult for Grant to change so much as a single word. Not long after production began, he stopped speaking to them and they to him. “One problem with the show,” Frye recalled later on, “was that Betsy, a lovable actress onscreen, had problems in radio because she had a slight stammer, and that held production up for hours on end because she needed special editing and reediting.”

  Another thing Grant did to keep Drake with him was to bring up the subject of marriage.

  That stopped Drake packing for good.

  In June 1949 word from “unnamed sources” began appearing in the Hollywood gossip columns that Grant and Drake were secretly engaged. This produced a burst of fan hysteria and media frenzy that made the forty-fiveyear-old Grant and his twenty-six-year-old bride-to-be the number one subject on everyone's lips. It actually wasn't until July that Grant officially proposed to Drake, but his continuing health problems, related to a slowerthan-expected full recovery, forced them to leave open the date of their marriage. Grant spent much of the remainder of the summer undergoing tests at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, including the most comprehensive physical checkup he had ever had, to make sure nothing was lurking in his system that might be the reason for his inability to completely shake the lingering effects of his recent illness.

  To his and Drake's relief, he emerged with a clean bill of health, although he did receive a warning to cut down on his drinking and give up smoking, neither of which he did. Satisfied that he was in good enough condition to get married, he and Drake secretly set the date.

  I Was a Male War Bride opened on September 2, 1949, and Grant and Drake attended the gala New York premiere together. If the making of the film had been unexpectedly difficult for Grant, standing at the back of the Roxy Theater (where it had been moved from Radio City due to scheduling conflicts caused by its delayed opening), he felt completely gratified as he listened to the black-tie audience roar with approval several times throughout the screening. At the party afterward Grant was asked by a reporter from The New York Times for his reaction. “Having just seen the picture,” he said, “I was amazed how the audiences laughed themselves sick…I honestly feel it's the best comedy I've ever done.”

  The film's first run lasted through October and grossed more than $4.5 million, making it by far 20th Century–Fox's biggest hit of 1949, its most successful comedy, and the third-biggest Hollywood release of the year by any studio, in a virtual tie with Anatole Litvak's Academy Award–winning The Snake Pit, and surpassed only by Henry Levin's lavish musical Jolson Sings Again and Elia Kazan's racially controversial Pinky. I Was a Male War Bride would eventually rank as the third most successful film of Howard Hawks's entire oeuvre, just behind Sergeant York and Red River. It not only restored his reputation as a bankable Hollywood director, it allowed the forty-five-yearold Grant to close out the 1940s on a note of high professional achievement and unprecedented popularity.

  As the day of their wedding—December 25—approached, to ensure privacy Grant called upon the ultimate expert at it, who was, once again, happy to help. Howard Hughes handled all the details. On Christmas morning the billionaire personally picked Grant and Drake up in his car, drove to the airport, and then flew them all to Phoenix in one of his private planes to a small hacienda owned by a friend of his, real estate baron Sterling Hebbard. There, a brief, nonreligious ceremony was performed by Methodist minister Reverend Stanley H. Smith. Hughes served as Grant's best man; Drake had no maid of honor. Immediately following the ceremony Hughes flew them both back to L.A. and then drove them home, where waiting for Drake was her wedding present from Grant, delivered by one of Hughes's trusted assistants while they were gone: a white poodle that she immediately named Suzie. As he carried her over the threshold, Drake told Grant she couldn't be happier.

  The press, effectively locked out of the whole affair, managed to get a story out of Grant's wedding to Drake anyway by wondering if he, like so many others in show business, was being love-laced by something queer in the American air. As one of the most tumultuous decades in American history came to a close and Hollywood was sinking into political turmoil, the rich and famous, not only in Tinseltown but in Washington and New York as well, were suddenly marrying each other in a frenzy unseen since the last, giddy days of the Roaring Twenties. What's more, the older the groom, the younger the bride. Besides the hitching of 45-year-old Grant and 26-year-old Drake, that December no less than the Vice President of the United States, 71-year-old Alben Barkley, married a 38-year-old St. Louis widow; 59-yearold William O'Dwyer, mayor of the City of New York, married a 33-year-old ex-model; Tyrone Power, 35, married Linda Christian, 24; 41-year-old Jimmy Stewart married 31-year-old Gloria Hatrick; 45-year-old Greer Garson remarried, this time to 58-year-old cattle baron E. E. (Buddy) Fogelson; 39-year-old ice-skating sensation Sonja Henie married for the second time thrice-married New York blueblood 55-year-old Winthrop Gardner Jr.; the King of Hollywood, 48-year-old Clark Gable, married his fourth wife, 39-year-old Douglas Fairbanks's widow Lady Sylvia Ashley; and 47-year-old David O. Selznick, his divorce from Irene official, finally married 30-year-old Jennifer Jones.

  But of all of them, it was the Grant/Drake marriage that dominated the headlines. The morning of December 26, the day after their hushed-up wedding, the front page of the Los Angeles Examiner, in a headline worthy of the start of the next world war, screamed out the news that “CARY GRANT, BETSY DRAKE ELOPE IN HUGHES' PLANE.”

  It was the spinsterish Hedda Hopper, herself rumored to be hopelessly in love with Grant, whom she routinely dubbed “the handsomest leading man in Hollywood,” who got in the last, slightly cynical but still insightful word on Grant's marriage to Drake. Quoting screenwriter Lenore Coffee, she put it this way in her concluding column of the month, the year, and the decade: “When a man of forty falls in love with a girl of twenty, it isn't her youth he is seeking but his own.”

  * Hughes, eager to return to Grant's good graces, was more than happy to provide the funding.

  24

  “Selectivity always suggests art and, in the case of the very few stars who achieve the magnitude of Cary Grant, art of a very high and subtle order. Indeed the evidence both of our eyes and of such testimony on the point that the star himself has offered, suggests that Grant went further than most in that the screen character he created, starting some time in the mid-1930s, drew on almost nothing from his autobiography, his characters created almost entirely out of his fantasies of what he would like to have been from the start, what he longed to become in the end.”

  —RICHARD SCHICKEL

  Cary Grant was feeling youthful and benevolent. His third marriage had reinvigorated his spirit and given him the feeling that he was o
nce more solidly in control of his career and his life; and of Betsy as well. They did everything they could together and seemed to enjoy each other's company more than anyone or anything else. Early in 1950, with neither of them committed to making a movie, Drake suggested they board a tramp steamer and travel around the world. Grant rejected that idea, his last trip home from England having eliminated any lingering romanticism he had about the open seas. Instead, he introduced Drake to one of his favorite pastimes, the daytime races at Hollywood Park. Grant loved horses and often described their physical motion as an act of pure elegance. And he loved betting on them, although throughout his life he remained strictly a two-dollar man. What he loved was the action of the race, the stable smell of the horses, the sunshine he basked in along with the rest of the crowd, always flecked with the faces of some of the biggest Hollywood stars, who met at the specially reserved part of the park on a daily basis to lunch, talk, drink, eat, flirt, date, hustle, and occasionally even bet on a horse or two.

  That spring Grant signed on to make one or two more movies, strictly to help out those he cared about, including Drake, after which he planned to formally announce his retirement and take his wife on their long-overdue journey to Bristol. He agreed to play a brain surgeon in Crisis, Dore Schary's first film at MGM, where the writer/director had landed after Hughes forced him out of RKO. Grant knew that his appearing in the movie was the kind of hit insurance Schary needed to commercially revitalize his career, even if the script was less than spectacular, which it decidedly was.

  In Crisis, the directing debut of Richard Brooks, brain surgeon Dr. Eugene Ferguson (Grant) and his wife Helen (Paula Raymond) are kidnapped while visiting an unnamed South American country. His captors force him to operate on dictator Raoul Farrago (José Ferrer), and they warn him that if their leader dies, so will Ferguson and his wife. The good doctor operates and saves Farrago's life; a revolution then breaks out, and Farrago is killed, during which the Fergusons are rescued and set free.

  Despite his good intentions, Crisis was a poor choice for Grant's first film of the 1950s. It was cheaply made; its poor production values and black and white cinematography made it look more like an episode of an early actionadventure TV series than a big-screen movie. Grant, still underweight from his illness, looked gaunt and noticeably older than he had in I Was a Male War Bride. For the first time he let his close-cropped hair show substantial gray around the temples. Still, his haggard appearance fit the overall character, and with Grant's name above the title, Crisis was successful enough to accomplish what he had wanted it to, which was to firmly establish Schary at MGM. The film also gave Brooks his first hit, for which he was grateful to his star. Brooks and Grant became good friends during the making of the film and remained so for the rest of Grant's life. On numerous occasions Brooks would ask him for his opinion on scripts. It is a little-known fact that Grant was one of the better script-doctors in Hollywood, able to break down a film into its component parts and analyze characters as well as the personal style of any producer or director he had ever worked with.

  During the making of the film, Grant, way ahead of his time, had strongly urged Schary to see to it that all the South American roles in the film were played by authentic Latin actors, which resulted in the casting of José Ferrer, Ramon Novarro (the original Ben-Hur of silent films), Gilbert Roland, Vicente Gómez, and a dozen others. At least part of Grant's heightened awareness in this area came from Drake, who had taken it upon herself to educate the already liberal Grant in the unfair ways of Hollywood typecasting. At a time when Hollywood was drawing ever-deepening political lines in the sand and demanding to know which side someone was on, Grant, with Drake proudly by his side and urging him on, stepped up publicly to the left.

  While Grant was starring in Crisis, Drake appeared in Warner Bros.' Pretty Baby, a role she got due to Grant's quiet insistence to Jack Warner that he use her in the film. Pretty Baby was a nondescript comedy costarring Dennis Morgan and Zachary Scott, two contract leftovers from the war years, when actors in Hollywood were scarce and anything that moved in pants, stood over five foot five, and had a military deferment qualified as leadingman material.

  Grant next agreed to appear in People Will Talk for Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a Fox film produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. It was Mankiewicz's first film after his dazzling All About Eve (1950), for which he won two Oscars—Best Director and Best Screenplay (and two the year before for A Letter to Three Wives).* Based on a German play by Curt Goetz that Mankiewicz adapted, People Will Talk depicts the growing paranoia at the heart of the McCarthy era. Grant plays another doctor, Noah Praetorius, with a “mysterious” background who teaches at a university. He comes under an administrative investigation led by Professor Elwell (Hume Cronyn), during which he marries Deborah Higgins (Jeanne Crain), a single pregnant young woman, to save her from committing suicide. Afterward he is exonerated from whatever it was the committee thought he might have been guilty of.

  The script played better than it sounds and reflected Mankiewicz's style of multilayered story lines. Despite Grant's gem of a performance, remembered mostly for the final shot of the film showing him ecstatically conducting a symphony orchestra, the film did not find an audience. After its poor opening, it disappeared quickly from the screen (and has rarely been seen since). At about the same time, Pretty Baby opened and also flopped at the box office, after which Grant and Drake decided to take a break from Hollywood and spend some time in Palm Springs. While there, Grant was visited by another old friend who had fallen on hard times and needed his help to resuscitate his career.

  Even though Grant had not exactly set the world on fire so far in the 1950s, dozens of scripts continued to come his way. One in particular was hand-delivered to him in the desert by visiting neighbor George Cukor, who had a film he felt was perfect for the actor. Grant had already heard about the script at the track, where producer Sid Luft had brought it with him every day for weeks, trying to convince Grant to at least read it, which he had steadfastly refused to do.

  The screenplay, by Cukor's old friend, Broadway playwright Moss Hart, was an updated musical adaptation of the original William Wellman/Robert Carson screenplay for the 1937 A Star Is Born, which had starred Fredric March and Janet Gaynor. This dark-side fable of the film industry was a modern retelling of Shaw's Pygmalion. The original film was loosely based on the life of actor John Gilbert, one of Hollywood's greatest silent movie stars, whose career was destroyed by the industry's switch to sound, for which Gilbert's voice was not suited. While on top, Gilbert had married a young actress, Virginia Bruce, whose star did indeed rise as his fell. The movie also had elements of B. P. Schulberg's struggles at Paramount, the sudden early deaths of Rudolph Valentino and Irving Thalberg, and the alcoholism and tragic decline of John Barrymore. A Star Is Born was one of the highestgrossing films of 1937 and won writing Oscars for Wellman and Carson, Academy nominations for March, Gaynor, Wellman (director), and David O. Selznick (producer), and an honorary award to W. Howard Greene for his innovative use of color photography.

  Selznick had always wanted to remake the film, but after SIP, awash in debt, was dissolved in 1951, the project seemed out of reach. He eventually traded the rights to it to Warner Bros. in exchange for $25,000 and the film rights to Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Jack Warner had been eager to acquire the project and turn it into a musical vehicle for Judy Garland. Once he had control of the property, he hired Hart to do the rewrite and chose Cukor to direct.

  Cukor managed to convince Grant to keep an open mind long enough to at least read the screenplay. If he read it and still refused, Cukor said, he would never bring it up again. Under those terms, the next night at Cukor's nearby desert home, Grant read aloud the part of Norman Maine, with Cukor doing all the others. It took several hours to get through, and when they were finished, Cukor smiled and said to Grant, “This is the part you were born to play!”

  “Of course,” Grant agreed. “That is why I won't.”

&nbs
p; His primary reason for turning down A Star Is Born had to do with the obvious similarity of the script to his own life, something he had always carefully managed to avoid onscreen. The character of Norman Maine is an older leading man; so now was Grant. Maine is married to a much younger, talented actress, who is unknown at the time they wed but is a star by the time the film ends; Grant was married to the much-younger Betsy Drake, whose career he was mentoring, even as he felt himself edging toward retirement. Maine is a cold, narcissistic, self-involved actor with a serious drinking problem; Grant was considered by many in Hollywood to be too aloof and narcissistic, and while he wasn't an alcoholic, at least not by the definition of the day, he definitely drank too much.

  The script, then, provided a direct bridge to his inner self without the essential redemptive resolution that Hitchcock had managed to bring to the characters Grant played in both Suspicion and Notorious. In these films Hitchcock had taken him and the audience to the brink and then, at the last possible moment, brought them back to the safety of literal solid footing and moral redemption. In A Star Is Born, Maine commits suicide.

  Having said his piece, the evening came to an end, and Grant left. For the rest of his life Cukor never forgave him for turning him down. He felt at the very least, Grant owed him something for having cast him first in Sylvia Scarlett and then in Holiday and The Philadelphia Story. (James Mason eventually played the role of Norman Maine, opposite Judy Garland, both of whom were nominated for Oscars for their performances in the film's 1954 release, one of the highest-grossing films of that year.)*

  Instead, Grant next chose to do a film version of Cervantes's Don Quixote for Warners, but the project never even made it to the script stage. One former studio executive described it as “one of those periodically increasing episodes after he married Drake when he enjoyed the thought of chasing windmills.” When it fell through, Jack Warner convinced him to costar with Drake in something called Room for One More, a domestic can't-miss comedy that would also complete the studio's two-picture obligation to her.