Cary Grant

by Marc Eliot

  Directed by Norman Taurog, Room for One More concerns the plight of “Poppy” Rose (Grant), a struggling civil servant, and the unrealistic generosity of his “goofy” wife Anna (Drake), who takes to bringing home orphaned pets and child misfits unwanted by their own families. Inevitably, the cranky Grant, who complains they can't afford to be so benevolent, sees the errors of his ways and not only saves the lives of the children (one boy becomes an Eagle Scout) but gets back in touch with his inner, better self. Released in January 1952, it had been held back until after the Christmas season, a sure sign of how little Warner Bros. thought of its box office potential. And although Drake received the best notices of her career—the Hollywood Reporter review called her “superb”—for a genuinely funny and charming performance, she would not make another picture for five years.

  Apparently neither Grant nor Drake was the least bit concerned about the film's failure. Grant in particular insisted to everyone that he couldn't care less; the only role that interested him now was playing the student to Betsy Drake's one-on-one tutor in the art of self-hypnosis, which he hoped would help him give up smoking. They went so far as to have no-smoking weekends. As for making films, Grant steadfastly maintained that he had once and for all retired, the reason being, as he told a reporter from the Star Weekly, a Hollywood fanzine, “Heavy romance on the screen should be played by young people, not middle-aged actors.”

  No sooner had Grant convinced everyone that his filmmaking days were over than he signed on with Howard Hawks to star in Monkey Business, a fountain-of-youth comedy with a terrific script by the veteran team of Ben Hecht, I.A.L. Diamond, and Charles Lederer, two of whom had worked with Hawks or Grant before.*

  What attracted Grant to the film was precisely what had kept him away from A Star Is Born. Both films deal with essentially the same theme—the “perils” of aging—but they handle it in completely opposite stylistic ways. Monkey Business concerns the experiments of an aging all-my-joints-ache research chemist, Dr. Barnaby Fulton (Grant), who stumbles upon the formula for eternal youth that causes him to become sexually responsive to his secretary, Lois Laurel (rising-starlet Marilyn Monroe), much to the consternation of Mrs. Fulton (Ginger Rogers, in one of her brightest and most relaxed performances).

  The film portended future youth mix-up comedies like Penny Marshall's Big (1988) starring Tom Hanks (an actor who many thought might become his generation's Cary Grant). Grant's performance is pure delight; his athletic abilities come into clever play when he takes the drug and turns into a gangling, superfit teenage lover-boy. Under Hawks's clever and speedy direction, the film manages to celebrate middle age by defining it in terms of mature love, inevitability preferable to the energetic emptiness of adolescent passion. It also spoofs Grant's longstanding refusal to chase women in his films. Only when he is under the influence of the youth drug does he pursue Monroe. When he recovers, he reverts to his mature, i.e., passive, married and happy self.

  The film also put Hollywood on notice that its next reigning sex goddess was as troubled as she was talented. In her few brief scenes, Monroe flashed her delectable beautiful-but-dumb-blonde character's thighs in a way that could make dead male audiences sit up and take notice. For her part, Monroe all but stole the female spotlight from the aging, staid, if equally unnaturally blond, Ginger Rogers. As perfect as Monroe appeared onscreen, however, on the set she had been a completely different story.

  During filming, front-page headlines revealed that as a teenager Monroe had posed nude for a calendar to make money after her mother was committed to an insane asylum. Monroe had a near breakdown when the story was revealed. While most of the others involved with the film were angered by her seemingly erratic behavior, Grant, however, felt empathetic toward her. Both “news flashes” were familiar touchstones for Grant, who had done time as a male escort—something he was never comfortable talking about— and had also suffered through the twisted tangle of his own mother's early fate. When Monroe was briefly hospitalized for “nerves” during production, the production company released a cover story to the press that she had had a sudden attack of appendicitis. Meanwhile, Hawks wanted to fire her over the delay that her “illness” caused, until Grant persuaded him to keep her on the film. Monroe's future in Hollywood owed a debt to the compassion of Cary Grant, at a time when she was considered to be just one more dumb blonde in an industry that purchased them twelve at a time for ten cents a pack. Had she been fired at this early juncture, she would most likely not have been given another chance in Hollywood.

  Still, not everyone appreciated Grant's concern for the young starlet. Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee slugger, had just begun to date Monroe, and one time she had invited him to come to the set to watch her work. When he showed up, studio publicity photographer Roy Craft was promptly dispatched to take DiMaggio's picture with her and the film's star, Cary Grant. The next day the photo appeared in a slightly altered version in nearly every newspaper in the country. In the original version Monroe is seen with a smile as wide as the Hollywood Freeway, and Grant showing a lot of teeth as well. Only DiMaggio seems ill at ease. In the published version, Grant, at DiMaggio's insistence, was carefully cropped out.

  Monkey Business opened on September 15, 1952, to surprisingly good reviews. John L. Scott, in the Los Angeles Times, thought the film hilarious:

  “Ever catch a film comedy that made you double up with laughter even though you knew it was silly, ridiculous, and even preposterous? It's a pleasure to report that Monkey Business, starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Charles Coburn, is just such a movie.” Despite its generally favorable critical reception, however, the film did not do well, prompting Grant to look to make one more. Because his last three, People Will Talk, Room for One More, and Monkey Business, had all failed at the box office, he didn't want to retire on a triple down note.

  In his search for a surefire hit movie to go out on, he turned once more to Dore Schary (now firmly ensconced at MGM) and screenwriter Sidney Sheldon (who had written The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer and was now directing as well as writing) to develop a comedy for him. They came up with something they called Dream Wife, a film about a businessman, Clemson Reade (Grant), married to a State Department official, Effie (Deborah Kerr), who is too preoccupied with her position to pay any attention to him. He decides to leave her for a Bukistani woman he meets, schooled in the art of “pleasing men.” Princess Tarji (Betta St. John) comes to the United States but learns the ways of American female emancipation (such as it was in the early 1950s) from who else but Effie. In the end it all works out—Clem returns to his wife, and everyone lives happily ever after.

  Except for introducing Deborah Kerr into Grant's world of leading women, the film was yet another creative, critical, and financial disappointment, and Grant believed it was the handwriting on the wall he would not, after all, be able to erase. To his way of thinking, in an industry and art form that revered youth, he could no longer lay claim to be the ultimate Hollywood pretty boy. He worried that his long bout with hepatitis had irrevocably pushed him past his full physical bloom of just six years earlier, when his star had shone so brightly in Notorious. The intervening seasons had drawn his face taut and had made the veins stick out in his thick neck. His hair, once shiny black, had taken on the cool gray tones of salt and pepper. He feared the industry now considered him a has-been, and that many of the old guard were more than eager to celebrate his professional passing with the shouted epitaph of good riddance.

  He was not completely wrong. Despite his enduring reputation as Hollywood's eternal golden boy with the Midas touch, by the early '50s the reality was that Cary Grant was no longer that much in demand. His glorious acting career had been reduced by the unavoidable trivialization that comes with the crime of aging in L.A. The only award he was even considered for these days came from Igor Cassini (“Cholly Knickerbocker” to his syndicated newspaper column readers) for “Best-Dressed Actor” of 1952 (Irene Dunne won for best-dressed actress). Ever the g
entleman, when interviewed on the subject he smiled to hide his humiliation and obligingly explained in earnest detail that the secret of his good looks was really his clothes—custom-made suits and shirts—and advised men who wanted to emulate him to never wear suspenders, belts, or garters but instead to go with hidden waist-tabs to keep their pants up and straight. Not exactly the acceptance speech he had long envisioned delivering on Oscar night.

  Late in 1952 Grant and Drake slowly began their reemergence from Palm Springs into Hollywood's social scene. They had been appearing in a radio series based on Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, and one night they invited the show's producer, William Frye, to a black-tie dinner at Perino's, which many considered to be the best restaurant in L.A. That night Grant was reminded of the age difference between himself and Drake, which he had assumed nobody cared about. As Frye remembered, “Cary was being very mysterious, and all he would tell me was that he would let me know at the right time what we were going to do after. Well, it was quite a guest list—Cary, Betsy, Leslie Caron and actor Richard Anderson, and my date was the daughter of Sharman Douglas, the ambassador to Great Britain. I arrived at Cary's house, and we all went down to the restaurant in a limo. Cary sat in the front, and Richard and I sat on the jumpseats, with the women in the regular back.

  “The dinner was fabulous, all pre-ordered, the way Cary always arranged, and after, we got back in the limo, and were taken to the little Biltmore Theater to see one of the most remarkable ‘comebacks’ in show business history, the closing night of Mae West's one-woman show. What can I say, she moved like she had a motor attached to her, all gyrations under flashing lights, etc. After, Cary took us backstage to say hello to her.

  “And there she was, in the dressing room, still in costume, rhinestones, feathers, a great big hat, and a cane in her hand. She had positioned herself near an electric fan so that the feathers would move a certain way. She looked like she had been wound up. ‘Cary, baby,’ she said to him, with a big smile on her face, ‘come and see mama!'

  “‘I want you to meet my wife, Betsy,’ Grant said. Mae looked at her for several seconds and said, ‘Well, where in the world did you find this one?'”

  A few weeks later Grant canceled the radio series when two writers on the show filed a lawsuit to recover $25,250 in monies they claimed they were owed for scripts written that were never produced. Having done thirty-nine episodes, Grant was bored and wanted out. He quickly settled and the show went off the air.

  The majority of films coming out of the new, postwar Hollywood—torn by its own political paranoia fed by the vengeful HUAC and beaten into submission via self-flagellation—were reflective exercises in doom and gloom, tic-tac-tortured visions filled with beautiful young zombie antiheroes, the slouching Brandos, the mad-eyed Clifts. Mainstream Hollywood film had turned fully in the direction of Kazan's Method acting, a world in which Grant felt supremely uncomfortable. He decided to finally and officially announce to the world that he had irrevocably retired from motion pictures. “It was the period of blue jeans, the dope addicts, the Method,” he would say later on, “and nobody cared about comedy at all.”

  Early in February 1953, a month after his forty-ninth birthday, Grant held a press conference to formally announce his retirement and used the opportunity to speak out in defense of Charlie Chaplin. The State Department had just revoked Chaplin's visa for suspected Communist involvement while the great comedian was vacationing overseas—not long after Howard Hughes had refused, for political reasons, to exhibit Chaplin's latest film, Limelight, despite a longstanding agreement the screen legend had with RKO theaters in place years before Hughes had acquired the chain. Grant was enraged by all this and wanted the world to know that he supported Chaplin and was adamantly against the blacklist, even if it meant speaking out against Howard Hughes.

  In an extraordinarily brave statement, a display of courage all too scarce in the Hollywood of the early 1950s, Grant, after saying he would make no more movies and that he and his wife were about to embark on an extended vacation, told the gathering of reporters, “[Chaplin] has given great pleasure to millions of people, and I hope he returns to Hollywood. Personally, I don't think he is a Communist, but whatever his political affiliations, they are secondary to the fact that he is a great entertainer.” After a pause he added in a low but firm voice, “We should not go off the deep end.” The silence of the crowd of reporters hung like wet laundry on a windless day, as they wrote down the words of this star of the first magnitude who, until now, had survived in Hollywood by always managing, in public at least, to stay above the public political fray.

  Having said his piece, Grant bid the reporters farewell, after which he and Drake took a slow boat to China.

  * The double back-to-back awards made Mankiewicz the only person in Hollywood to ever win four major-category Oscars in two successive years.

  * The film was nominated for a total of six awards. Mason lost Best Actor to Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront, and Garland lost Best Actress to Grace Kelly in George Seaton's The Country Girl.

  * Hecht had written much of Notorious and the Grant/Russell version of His Girl Friday; Lederer had collaborated with Hecht on His Girl Friday and had written I Was a Male War Bride.

  25

  “The results of living in reality are more satisfying than living in unreality. Larry Olivier said, “An actor spends his life being somebody he is not. We are not ourselves. We are the product of the writers, directors, and producers.' I find reality more interesting.”

  —CARY GRANT

  For the next several months, Cary Grant and his wife, Betsy Drake, traveled in glorious simplicity around the world, seeing the sights and seeking out the various religious, mystical, and psychological figures who were far more important to them than any heads of state. If it had been up to Grant, they would have lived like this for the rest of their lives.

  While in the Far East, they toured Hong Kong and Tokyo, where, without publicity representatives, press, sponsors, or TV crews, they spent several days visiting American soldiers wounded in the Korean conflict and hospitalized in Japan. After doing the same in Singapore, Grant chose Tangier as their next destination because, he told Drake, he wanted to visit his ex-wife, Barbara Hutton; he missed her son, Lance, whom he hoped to spend some time with. Drake said she didn't mind at all.

  During the visit a surprisingly friendly Hutton offered to finance an independent movie for Grant, the subject of which could be of his choosing, as long as it was shot entirely in Tangier. It was an offer he found tempting but ultimately turned down. His mood then took a nosedive when Hutton told him she planned to marry international playboy Porfirio Rubirosa.*

  Grant and Drake left Tangier, and while working their way through France, their eventual destination being England and Bristol, Grant received a telegram from Dore Schary asking about the possibility of his returning immediately to Hollywood to film a sequel to the as-yet-to-open Dream Wife. By this time Grant, still depressed over his visit to Hutton, was more than ready to cancel the rest of the “endless honeymoon” and the promised, longdelayed meeting between his wife and his mother. He informed Schary via return telegram that he and Drake would arrive back in Los Angeles by March 20, after which he would be delighted to discuss the new project.

  The film that had lured him back to America and out of retirement was tentatively titled The Honeymoon Is Over.

  No sooner had they arrived in Hollywood, even before meeting with Schary, than the emotionally seesawing Grant wanted to leave again. This time he purchased a spacious Mexican adobe-style vacation villa in Palm Springs that he intended to make his and Drake's permanent residence. The outdoor patio had what he referred to as the “conference table,” a large area with a tamarisk tree in the center of it, around which Grant could read scripts and Drake could read, write, and paint. The daily desert routine they established—what Drake called their excursion into the art of living in simplicity—was to get up early, ride acro
ss the desert to see the sun rise, then return to the house and prepare a breakfast of coffee, eggs, and bacon. Most days Grant spent at least an hour swimming. He hadn't done regular laps since his days living at the beach house with Randolph Scott, and now he could feel his body starting to tighten up and return to the superb physical condition he had kept it in for so many years. Often at night they would take long rides to see the sunset, cook steaks and vegetables under the desert moon, and finish off pastries or pies especially prepared by their cook, one of only two part-time staffers they employed. Drake occasionally played her guitar and sang for Grant and in her private moments continued her spiritual studies. On nights when he couldn't sleep, he let her practice hypnotism on him. And, at least once every two weeks, he liked to take her on the three-hour drive to Las Vegas, not to gamble, which he had no interest in, but to see the live shows. (His itinerary was always arranged for, and his hotel suite comped, by Hughes.) Grant loved the town's live nightclub entertainment, as it reminded him of his early days in live vaudeville.

  He eventually got around to reading Schary's script, which had been delivered by messenger and sat on a table in the living room for weeks without being opened. He got through about half of it before rejecting the intended sequel to Dream Wife. The reason, he told Schary, was that it just wasn't funny.

  As the weeks and months passed, Grant continued to get offered major movies that, for one reason or another, he rejected, much to Drake's delight, who preferred he stay at home with her and explore the adventure of their private life together. Among those films he turned down during this period were William Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953), opposite Audrey Hepburn. The role eventually went to Gregory Peck and won three Oscars. Selznick had wanted Grant for the leading role in his filmed version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's celebrated novel Tender Is the Night, opposite Jennifer Jones. Grant had actually wanted to do this one, but turned it down out of loyalty to Irene Selznick: he knew he would not feel comfortable acting with Jones. The film was shelved, and ten years later Fox made it, directed by Henry King, with Jason Robards playing Dick Diver, and Jennifer Jones playing his wife, Nicole.