by Marc Eliot
Warner then approached Grant about the remake of Don Quixote he had for so long wanted to appear in, with Cantinflas, the Mexican comic star, playing Sancho Panza. Grant considered it for a while, then turned it down. David Lean wanted him for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957); the role he rejected eventually went to William Holden, and the movie won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He also turned down the lead in Billy Wilder's Sabrina (1954), which went to Humphrey Bogart (opposite Hepburn and William Holden), and the Sky Masterson role in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Guys and Dolls (1955), a role that Marlon Brando wound up playing.
During all of this, there was one project he wanted MCA to purchase for him. While in New York, he had seen the Broadway play Bell, Book and Candle, a light comedy about a man who unwittingly falls in love with a beautiful witch. Grant saw it as the perfect vehicle for himself and Drake. However, when he went to Jules Stein to have a package put together, he discovered that MCA had already bought it for James Stewart, who, Stein told him, was Lew Wasserman's favorite client. This angered Grant so much that he considered dropping Wasserman from his team of agents.
The only director able to lure Grant out of his second retirement was the one man whose movies and methods still stimulated and intrigued him, and for whom he believed he had done his best work. When Alfred Hitchcock asked to come to Palm Springs for a visit with a new script for Grant to consider, over Drake's somewhat muted advice to say no before it was too late, Grant told Hitchcock he would love to have him and his wife as his and Betsy's guests.
Drake was quiet but firm about her not wanting Grant to return to film. Their life together in the desert was, as far as she was concerned, nothing short of idyllic. Why, Drake wondered aloud, would he possibly want to give it up? She certainly didn't. Besides, they had each agreed to stay away from films in order to spend as much time together as possible. Wasn't that still enough for him?
The answer was no. Even though Grant had been strongly tempted by at least two projects, Wyler's Roman Holiday and Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai, he had turned down all film offers for the sake of his marriage. But that was about to change with the arrival of Alfred Hitchcock, who showed up in the hundred-plus-degree desert in his familiar black suit, white shirt, and tie, carrying a revised script under his arm that would prove irresistible to Grant.
Like Grant, Hitchcock had gone through a series of highs and lows after Notorious, scoring a bull's-eye with that one, hitting less well with its followup, The Paradine Case (1947), which starred Gregory Peck in the last of the Hitchcock/Selznick joint ventures. He then all but lost his audience with the experimental Rope (1948, made for Transatlantic Pictures, an AmericanBritish independent film production company), an excercise in single-take moviemaking, the story loosely based on the infamous Leopold-Loeb murder case, that starred Jimmy Stewart and Farley Granger. He followed it with another disappointment, Under Capricorn (1949), then with the murder mystery Stage Fright (1950, Warner–First National), which proved a split victory, getting a thumbs-up from the critics, but a thumbs-down from audiences. It wasn't until Strangers on a Train (1951, Warner–First National) that Hitchcock regained his magic touch. The film was a spectacular success on every level, bolstered with a (first-draft) screenplay by the great Raymond Chandler and featuring Farley Granger and Robert Walker Jr. in the best performances of their careers. It was this film that restored the lost luster to Hitchcock's career.
He then went down again with I Confess (1953, Warner–First National), which featured a miscast Montgomery Clift in the leading role as a priest who witnesses a murder, then came back strong with his highly popular version of the London and Broadway stage smash Dial M For Murder (1954, Warner–First National, originally shot in 3-D but widely released in flat screen when the fad quickly faded). Audiences loved Dial M for Murder, especially the alluring presence of its female star, Grace Kelly. Hitchcock followed that one with his first film under his new multiple-picture deal at Paramount, the awesome Rear Window (1954), which finally and irrevocably placed him in the top rank of movie directors. Hitchcock wanted something equally terrific to follow it, a feature that would keep him in the critical and financial stratosphere. That film, he believed, was To Catch a Thief, and as far as he was concerned, only Cary Grant could do justice to the role of the handsome catlike reformed jewel thief who manages to steal Grace Kelly's heart.
To Hitchcock's delight, Grant loved the brilliant John Michael Hayes screenplay adaptation of the original David Dodge novel. Hitchcock had discovered it in Paramount's archive of unmade properties, where it had been shelved when the studio deemed it unmakable. Before he left the desert, Hitchcock had a commitment from Grant to star in it.
Not long after, Hitchcock announced that he had signed the astonishingly beautiful Grace Kelly to costar in the film. Kelly, of High Noon, Dial M for Murder, and Rear Window, had become one the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood. While filming Rear Window, the always repressed Hitchcock, as he did with most of his blond leading ladies, had fallen completely in love with her and couldn't wait to pair her up with his favorite cinematic doppelgänger, Cary Grant. The fact that when production started Grant had just turned fifty while Kelly was just twenty-five only deepened Hitchcock's desire to see them romantically entangled on the big screen.
In To Catch a Thief, John Robie (Grant) is an especially agile jewel thief with the reputation of one of the best cat burglars in all the world before he proclaims himself both retired and reformed. He seemingly has the ability to leap over time itself into the passion of his own remembered youth after he meets the luscious heiress Frances Stevens (Grace Kelly), who, while vacationing on the Riviera with her mother Jessie Stevens (Jessie Royce Landis),* volunteers to be the lure to help “catch” the thief and, along the way, romantically catches Robie.
In one scene, showing off her jewel necklace, Frances all but thrusts her gorgeous, supple, sparkling breasts into Robie's mouth, holding them up from below (as close as the censors would allow), while murmuring to him with wet lips and laser eyes, “If you really want to see the fireworks, it's better with the lights off…I have a feeling that tonight you're going to see some of the Riviera's most fascinating sights… look… hold them… ever have a better offer on your plate?”
To which Robie replies, “You know just as well as I do this necklace is imitation.”
Frances replies, “Well, I'm not!” Robie cannot resist, they draw together in the darkness to kiss, and the camera cuts to the fireworks. In Hitchcock's view, Robie's greatest heist is the precious gem that is Frances's youth, the imagined conquest done by proxy, via Grant's Robie, because it is a theft in which Frances ultimately “catches” Robie in the Hitchcockian snare of dangerous, beautiful, slightly masochistic love.
Although Robie (robber?) insists he is retired, having repented for his crimes by doing service for the French underground during World War II, he nevertheless becomes the chief suspect when a series of jewel thefts takes place. Everyone in law enforcement believes he is the cat burglar. When he denies it, the authorities enlist him to catch the real cat burglar. In order to prove his innocence, he must, in effect, “become” the cat burglar in order to catch him. His stirred romantic attraction to Frances lures him back into the world of his passionate youth, with all its lawless and sexual abandon. In the end, Robie catches the real cat burglar, who happens to be a young woman, the daughter of one of his former colleagues.
While Grant threw himself enthusiastically into the part, Drake was less than thrilled that her husband would be doing love scenes with Grace Kelly, who, she'd heard, had a habit of sleeping with her leading men. When she told Grant of her concern before he left the States, his reply was to laugh— that was one thing she didn't have to worry about, he said. Drake likely did not understand the full implications and therefore could not accept his answer. Thus began an argument that would continue between her and Grant throughout the making of the film. By the time the two set sail in May 1954 for
the Côte d'Azur, where the film was to be shot, they were barely speaking to each other.
Drake's uneasy presence in France may have actually helped Grant connect his performance to the real-life focus he needed to play Robie. In the film, the so-called cat burglar insists he is retired, something the authorities have trouble believing. In real life, Grant had twice announced his retirement from film yet was making another one. In the film, Robie is attracted to Frances, a beautiful blonde half his age. In real life, Grant had married a beautiful blonde half his age. In the film, Robie, in order to prove his innocence, must go back and participate in one last robbery in order to catch the real thief. In real life, Grant came out of retirement to make one last movie to prove he was still a star of the first rank. Onscreen, the result of all this “doubling” would be a triumph. In reality, the consequences of that triumph would prove disastrous.
The by-now obligatory Grant/Hitchcock car scene happens when Kelly (eerily, on the very same road that, years later, would lead to her death) drives Grant down the famous long and winding Three Corniches along the Côte d'Azur. They are on their way to the picnic grounds (where she will offer him a choice of breast or thigh from her basket of goodies). It is the young, somewhat reckless and sexually aggressive Frances who is steering (leading, luring) Robie. He is content to let her do the driving for now, but we correctly sense it will be Grant in the driver's seat by the film's end. In a scene that recalls the one with Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and that anticipates the one with Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, Grant holds the “real” cat burglar by her wrists while he dangles her from a rooftop to force a confession out of her.
During the filming, Grant and Drake stayed at the famed Hotel du Cap for the entire shoot, while the rest of the cast and crew were housed at the Carlton, in Cannes (except for Kelly, who stayed with her lover, Oleg Cassini, in a private villa). Most evenings Grant and Drake joined Kelly and Cassini and the Hitchcocks for dinner at one or another of the many small candlelit restaurants along the hillsides of southern France. On weekends they would all go sailing. Grant hoped that Drake and Kelly would form a friendship that would defuse his wife's jealous fears.
It did not happen. Instead, Drake's dissatisfaction with her husband grew with what she perceived to be his increasingly amorous mood—not toward her but Kelly. Whether it was Grant's ritual leading-lady infatuation—the only acting “method” he ever relied upon (and a fetish he shared with Hitchcock)—or simply the fact that he felt more at home, more real, more in control, and therefore more comfortable with Kelly (an idealized version of Drake), the onscreen heat he generated with her was undeniable, palpable enough to enlist Drake into the artistic if neurotic jamboree of screen-to-life criss-crossing that was so much a part of any Grant/Hitchcock collaboration.
By the time the film was finished and Grant and Drake returned to the idyllic surroundings of the desert, both knew things had irrevocably changed between them. As far as Drake was concerned, she had lost parts of her husband to Kelly, Hitchcock, and the one lover she could never successfully compete with—“Cary Grant.” For his part, Grant found that he had nothing left to say to or teach Drake, or worse, to learn from her. Their moment, he knew, had passed. Alone together, he had been something of a father figure to Drake, the child he had never had; in her thirties now, she was too old to sit on Daddy's knee, while Grant, in his fifties, for the first time felt too old to want to keep on bouncing her there.
* Hutton married Rubirosa later that year. The marriage lasted seventy-three days and cost Hutton the $2 million she paid him for agreeing to an uncontested divorce.
* Four years later, Landis played Grant's mother in North by Northwest. In real life, she was a year younger than Grant.
26
“I had a theme in most of my movies—to take a fellow who seemed to dress rather well, who was moderately welleducated and sophisticated and should know his way around, and put him in a series of ridiculous and untenable situations. How is he going to get out of that? To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest come quickest to mind. The attraction then to the audience is this: If it can happen to him, it can happen to me. And the fact that it's happening to me and not to them is their relief. I tried to be myself on screen. I learned it was the most difficult thing to do. That's exposure of one's self. The hardest thing is to be yourself in front of 30 million people. By contrast, it is much easier to hide behind a character.”
—CARY GRANT
To Catch a Thief did not open for almost a year after shooting was completed, because Hitchcock had to work on his new TV series while editing the film. It was finally released in August 1955, a month before the official fall season, an indication of Paramount's lack of faith in the film's commercial viability, even as it touted Grant's “comeback.” The obvious age difference between Grant and Kelly was a concern to the studio's executives, who remained unsure if audiences would buy it. Besides, no one at Paramount could figure out the film's plot. “Was he really the cat burglar, or wasn't he?” became the question most asked after the screenings, even though the film had a fairly unambiguous ending. If the Paramount crowd couldn't stay with it until the end, the studio executives wondered, could audiences?
Grant personally attended the lavish “world premiere” at New York's Paramount Theater—a theater he had performed in as a young man when it was a legitimate playhouse some thirty years earlier. Despite all the fanfare and promotion, the film received mixed reviews: “To Catch a Thief is not the thriller it could have been,” wrote the Hollywood Citizen-News; “What else can I tell you? The dialogue is so bad that Cary looks embarrassed to be saying it,” opined The Saturday Review. In defiance of all the doubts, however, To Catch a Thief went on to become the biggest hit of the first half of the 1950s. It also reenergized Grant's desire to make motion pictures, even if it meant the end of his marriage to Betsy Drake. As far as he was concerned, that love ship had already sailed.
Eager as he was to get in front of a camera again, another year passed before Grant chose his next film. It was not for any lack of desire on his part, or a shortage of scripts. He just wanted to wait, to see if To Catch a Thief was his resurrection and not his epitaph. Once the film proved it had legs, he proceeded carefully, so as not to halt the momentum of his comeback. While in search of the right script, he was interviewed by Pix magazine about the secret of his longevity. A smiling Grant sang a new tune now about his seemingly ageless place in the ever-changing world of film. “The movies are like the steel business,” he told the interviewer. “An actor should be good at any stage and last forever.”
Among the offerings he turned down during this period was Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse. Preminger thought Grant perfect for the role of the father of waiflike Audrey Hepburn (with whom he would costar eight years later as her lover in Stanley Donen's Charade). Thanks, Grant said, but no thanks.* Fox wanted him for the lead in Can-Can. He said no again, and Frank Sinatra got the part. He thought about making a movie of Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brethren and wanted Clifford Odets to write and direct it. When that fell through, Grant asked Odets to consider writing instead the story of a brigadier general who commits suicide, after which it is revealed he had led several different, secret lives. It, too, went nowhere. Columbia then proposed a musical version of It Happened One Night. Grant said yes if they would somehow retool the script into a remake of His Girl Friday, in which he could star again with Grace Kelly. “I can be ready in ten minutes,” Grant told them. Not surprisingly, that project quickly died. Perhaps strangest of all was the offer made to him by Mae West, who wanted to redo She Done Him Wrong. Sorry, he politely told her.
Even Mike Todd, the grand impresario of motion pictures and the flamboyant husband of Elizabeth Taylor, sought Grant's services, to star in his lavishly planned film version of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. The film's gimmick was to have every major star in Hollywood play a cameo role—precisely why Grant did not take part. He was never one to share
the screen with too many other stars, afraid he would get lost in the crowd and wind up appearing smaller than life. The film would eventually be made with David Niven in the lead and win the Best Picture Oscar of 1956.
While Grant waited for exactly the right film, his relationship with Drake continued to deteriorate. They decided to sleep in separate beds, then in separate houses. The gossips somehow picked up on it, and as the couple quietly passed their fifth anniversary, rumors flew that the marriage was in trouble. Whispers of Grant's homosexuality resurfaced, augmented by those who claimed Drake was gay, as well. The highly idiosyncratic nature of their marriage added fuel to these rumors, however unfounded they might have been. For the most part, Grant took his return to the gossip columns as a sign that he had also returned to prominence.
The picture Grant finally chose as his follow-up to To Catch a Thief was Stanley Kramer's $4 million costume picture set in the Napoleonic Wars, The Pride and the Passion, based on C. S. Forester's novel The Gun. (Forester, at Kramer's urging, personally asked Grant to honor him by being in the film version of his novel.) In keeping with his often-puzzling and ultimately selfdestructive pattern, it would prove the worst of all possible choices.