Cary Grant

by Marc Eliot

  Drake attributed his quick recovery to the hypnosis and, thus encouraged, urged him to follow her lead again and enter psychoanalysis. At the relatively late age of fifty-three, in an attempt to save his marriage, for the first time in his life Grant agreed to see a shrink.

  As grant completed the filming of his next movie, Kiss Them for Me, both The Pride and the Passion and An Affair to Remember opened; the former proved another major box office disappointment for Grant, while the latter was among the biggest hits of 1957. The message from the public seemed clear. They preferred the modern, urbane, and romantic Grant rather than the costumed, exotic, and rural one.

  With his third film of the year already in the can, he was ready to start a fourth, Melville Shavelson's Houseboat, a light comedy that takes place aboard wealthy widower Tom Winters's (Grant's) houseboat, where a relationship with his maid, Cinzia Zaccardi (Sophia Loren), blossoms into true love amid a gaggle of children. Grant had committed to making the film before The Pride and the Passion, and it had been intended as a costarring vehicle with Betsy Drake. But, while in Spain, Grant had secretly arranged with Ponti's approval for Drake to be replaced in the lead by Sophia Loren.

  With production about to begin, Grant believed the time was right for him to make his big move on the Italian sex goddess. Unfortunately, it did not work out the way he had hoped. As a result, Grant vented his frustration and anger on Shavelson, who had to listen to him carp over the smallest of details. In reality, what upset Grant was that Loren showed up every day for shooting with Ponti attached to her side, especially after he learned— through Louella Parsons's column, no less—that one weekend during production Ponti slipped away with Loren, obtained a quickie Mexican divorce, and married her.

  Upon their return, at the end of that day's shooting, Grant kissed a beaming Loren on the cheek, shook a giggling Ponti's hand, and wished them both much happiness and health. The next day, in a beautifully fitting tux, Grant “married” a luminous Loren in the film's climactic wedding scene, while Ponti stood just off camera, intently watching every move both of them made.

  Later that night, alone and tipsy, Grant parked himself in his favorite booth at the back of Chasen's, pissing and moaning out loud that he had “lost Sophia forever.” To at least one friend, producer Bill Frye, the loss, like the romance, took place mostly in Grant's tortured imagination. “It was all just some sort of extended daydream that he made up,” Frye said. “Sophia Loren was never his to lose. It was just another one of his crazy romantic fantasies that could have had no other ending.”

  The day after that, Grant returned to the special, experimental therapy his wife had introduced him to, and was given his thirtieth consecutive weekly hit of LSD 25.

  * In a poll conducted by Popularity, the top ten were, in order, Rock Hudson, William Holden, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Glenn Ford, and Yul Brynner. Clark Gable and John Wayne placed eleventh and twelfth.

  28

  “In North by Northwest during the scene on Mount Rushmore, I wanted Cary Grant to hide in Lincoln's nostril and then have a fit of sneezing. The Parks Commission of the Department of Interior was rather upset at this thought. I argued until one of their number asked me how I would like it if they had Lincoln play the scene in Cary Grant's nose. I saw their point at once.”

  —ALFRED HITCHCOCK

  Cary Grant had begun his supervised use of LSD shortly after completing An Affair to Remember, at the recommendation of Drs. Mortimer A. Hartman and Arthur Chandler, two Beverly Hills psychiatrists pioneering the use of psychedelics as a way to medically enhance the benefits of traditional psychotherapy in the treatment of depression. They had performed a series of physical and psychological tests on Grant that he had submitted to at Drake's urging and afterward decided Grant was a prime candidate for their still-experimental treatment. One Saturday morning early in 1957, Grant took acid for the first time at Hartman and Chandler's Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills, together with approximately one hundred other patients, as he would continue to do so for the next three years. Although he has always gotten the most (and mostly unwanted) notoriety for it, Grant was by no means the only celebrity to participate in these LSD-laced sessions. The hundreds of other “name” experimenters working with the institute at the time included writers Anaïs Nin and Aldous Huxley, actor Jack Nicholson, actress Rita Moreno, comedian Lord Buckley, screenwriter Gavin Lambert, and musician André Previn.

  Grant's doctors had come to the conclusion that he was suffering from “prolonged emotional detachment” and had used acting as the way to try to “reattach” to his inner emotional self. Of all the directors Grant had worked with, only Hitchcock had succeeded in at least defining the parameters of that dark passageway, but movies were movies, and at the end of every film, Cary Grant always parted ways with “Cary Grant.” Only by taking acid was he finally able to achieve a meeting of mutually shared minds, bodies, and emotions.

  In his “autobiography” Grant touched lightly on some of his feelings regarding his experiences with LSD. He talked of the hallucinations the drug induced. He described them as dreams that relaxed the conscious controls he had imposed on himself, controls that were, he had come to realize, the result of a lifetime of neuroses that had prevented the truthful revelations from emerging. When he took acid, he said, these revelations were finally able to connect him to himself.

  During Grant's supervised sessions, he described in far more detail the hallucinations as they were taking place, pathways to his subconscious that were then analyzed by his doctors. For the entire three years, Grant kept a diary of his reactions to the drug. In it, he said he learned “to accept the responsibility for my own actions, and to blame myself and no one else for circumstances of my own creating. I learned that no one else was keeping me unhappy but me; that I could whip myself better than any other guy in the joint…I learned that everything is, or becomes, its own opposite…I learned that my dear parents, products of their parents, could know no better than they knew, and began to remember them only for the most useful, the best, the wisest of their teachings. They gave me my life and my body, the promising combination of the two and my initial strength; they endowed me with an inquisitive mind…it takes a long time for happiness to break through either to the individual or nations…as a philosopher once said, you cannot judge the day until the night. Since it is for me evening, or at least teatime, I can now look back and assess the day. In 1932, I sat in that Paramount studio office, took up the pen and wrote for the first time, ‘Cary Grant.’ And that's who, it seems, I am.”

  At one point he described what he saw as his “rebirth,” which he attributed to LSD: “I passed through changing seas of horrifying and happy sights, through a montage of intense hate and love, a mosaic of past impressions assembling and reassembling: through terrifying depths of dark despair replaced by glorious heavenlike religious symbolisms.

  “I was noting the growing intensity of light in the room and at short intervals as I shut my eyes, visions appeared to me. I seemed to be in a world of healthy, chubby little babies' legs and diapers, and smeared blood, a sort of general menstrual activity taking place. It did not repel me as such thoughts used to…

  “When I first began experimentation, the drug seemed to loosen deeper fears, as sleep does a nightmare. I had horrifying experiences as participant and spectator, but, with each session, became happier, both while experiencing the drug and in periods between …I feel better and feel certain there is curative power in the drug itself.”

  There can be no question that taking LSD profoundly changed every aspect of Grant's personal and professional life. With the start in November 1957 of his next film, Indiscreet, he began, for the first time, what he knew would be the real process of retirement, not just from the movies but from the make-believe world that he inhabited in the guise of a legend. He was ready, at last, for the “teatime” of his life, a civilized world in which he could actually live
in real time as a wholly realized, emotionally connected human being.

  That same month fifty-three-year-old Cary Grant was named in a national poll as “Hollywood's Most Attractive Man.”

  Indiscreet was the second film Grant made for producer/director Stanley Donen, the first being Kiss Them for Me, where the two first met. When it was finished, they formed an independent production company called Grandon. Their goal was to independently produce a series of films that they owned from the outset, and then acquire a distribution deal with one of the major studios—in effect, reversing the by now all-but-extinct autonomous Hollywood studio system. Rather than working for one of the majors, they would make the film themselves (funded by banks), which meant hiring the director, star, and producer, paying all production costs, including prints, obtaining distribution, and retaining full ownership of the final product. One of Grant's stipulations was that his deal with Donen be nonexclusive, so that if he wished, he could make movies outside Grandon; and he insisted on having total script approval, to ensure that no more The Pride and the Passion debacles would befall him. For Indiscreet, Grandon paid Grant $300,000 up front and a brand-new Rolls-Royce to be purchased and left for him in England, for his exclusive use whenever he was there.

  Donen and Grant had acquired the property while it was still running on Broadway under its original name, Kind Sir, with Charles Boyer and Mary Martin in the leads. It was a sophisticated “older couple” comedy staple of the Broadway theater party crowd, which tended to skew older. Grant and Donen then hired Kind Sir's playwright, Norman Krasna, to “modernize” (heat up) the film version by making both leads ten years younger. To costar, Grant chose his dear friend Ingrid Bergman. Donen then changed the name of the film to Indiscreet, a sexually suggestive title that in more ways than one echoed the single-worded Notorious that Grant and Bergman had costarred in twelve years earlier.*

  Because Bergman was still living in London, Grant had the script's locale switched from New York to England. This excited him for several reasons. The first was that he would get the chance to visit his mother, now in her eighties, and to do so without Drake, whom he no longer had any interest in introducing to Elsie.

  Ever since they had begun taking LSD, Drake had shown a greater desire to revitalize their relationship; the drug produced the exact opposite reaction in Grant. Under the influence, he had slowly come to realize that all three of his choices of wives had been wrong, disastrously so, and for one overwhelming reason: none of them had ever expressed the least desire to have his children. In his mid-fifties now, with mortality creeping into his thoughts and with LSD helping him to reconcile the issue of his connection to his own inner self, for the first time the notion of extending his own life through a child had become not just a desire but a priority. The unsolvable problem for Grant with Drake was that even if she suddenly decided that motherhood was for her, which she had not, this was not the woman Grant wanted to bear his offspring. That was a gift that would have to wait for a woman who better fit his new revised bill of requirements.

  In Indiscreet, Anne Kalman (Bergman), a star of the West End, decides to take some time off and rest. Her older sister, Margaret Munson (Phyllis Calvert), and her husband, Alfred (Cecil Parker), who works for NATO, arrive in London to attend a dinner in honor of Philip Adams (Grant), an international financial expert. Anne meets Philip at the dinner, and they begin a courtship, during which he informs her that he is married, although separated from his wife, and is having difficulty obtaining a divorce. They agree to remain just friends. In fact, Philip is lying; he has never been married and has used that excuse to keep from losing his cherished confirmedbachelor lifestyle. Anne finds out and decides to make Philip jealous—an unnecessary strategy, as he has already decided to take the plunge with her. The couple then go into a boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl (when Philip finds her with her chauffeur, as she has planned), and then boy-gets-girl-for-better-orworse, as the film ends.

  It is easy to see why Grant was attracted to this script, and how it was tailored for him from the original play, about two middle-aged loners trying desperately to make a connection, into a more conventional, 1950s-style battle of the sexes, centered on the male's reluctance to be “captured” and the female's increasingly desperate desire to “get married.” Philip lies, and deceptions are accepted as normal male defensive play in the service of freedom (bachelorhood), while Anne's lying and deceptions are taken as a gender defect, otherwise known as feminine wiles. In the end, the man succumbs to marriage, rather than celebrating winning his life's love.

  The similarities to Grant's and Bergman's real-life issues were hard to miss and purposefully emphasized to play on Grant's problems with Drake and his recent “affair” with Loren. In the film, Philip's ambivalence toward marriage— which, as in most films, is a metaphor for sexual intimacy—is writ large. Also, he is Roman Catholic and uses that as one of his excuses for not being able to easily obtain a Church-sanctioned divorce—a virtual copy of Ponti's longstanding excuse for not marrying Loren. In the film, Grant's charm, good looks, and enormous integrity, as always, lead him to do the right thing, to satisfy the audience's desire to see him happily married. As for Bergman, her longtime scandalous affair with Rossellini is reflected in Anne's willingness to romance a seemingly married man, also happily reconciled in the film to please the paying crowd.

  Most important, the chemistry of the Grant-Bergman pairing was nothing less than inspired, not only recalling the dynamics of Notorious but reflecting Grant's feeling that Bergman had been a victim of scandal. His acceptance of her as his leading lady helped make her acceptable to the audiences, and Indiscreet signaled the end of her years of self-imposed exile from Hollywood; such was the power of “Cary Grant.”*

  During the British shoot, Betsy Drake decided to fly over and spend Christmas with her husband. They went with Bergman to Italy for Christmas Day, after which Grant and Drake joined Prince Rainier and Princess Grace aboard Aristotle Onassis's yacht in the Mediterranean, where they stayed until January 1. Just before returning to the set for the final month of shooting, Grant left Drake in London to do some shopping, while he went alone to Bristol to visit his mother.

  Elsie, in her eighties now and suffering from increasing memory lapses, had difficulty more than ever recognizing Grant, something he found extremely upsetting and hard to accept.

  Filming ended on Indiscreet in February 1958, and the film was rushed into release by May, distributed by arrangement with Warner Bros., in order for Grandon to start to quickly earn back some of its investment.* Just as the film opened, Grant and Drake took a holiday junket to Moscow organized by producer Sam Spiegel. Upon their return to London, Grant was met by a reporter at the airport who asked why he would visit a Communist country. With a slight squint in his eyes, an offended Grant testily told the reporter, “I don't care what kind of government they have in Russia, I never felt so free in my life.”

  It was an unfortunate choice of words, as Grant was referring to his own state of mind, not to the benefits of the system of government. Nevertheless, Hedda Hopper—still hanging on as one of the most persistent of right-wing extremist William Randolph Hearst's political harridans—wrote in her column that if Grant loved the Red life so much, he ought to move to Moscow. Grant tried to respond by explaining to another reporter that when he said “free,” he meant not being hounded by autograph-seekers, but the minor tempest did not completely go away, and despite the waning HUAC hysteria, many in Hollywood still considered Grant too far to the left for his own good.

  Upon his return to New York, Grant continued to march to the beat of his own drummer. In a famous story that has been told many times, Grant, while staying with Drake in separate suites at the Plaza Hotel, always ordered two English muffins for breakfast, split into four halves. One day only three arrived. In a fury, he called room service to find out why. He was told that an efficiency expert had determined that most people eat only three, and that if the hotel held one quarter ba
ck, they could gain a full extra order of English muffins for every four orders.

  Grant blew a Humphrey Bogart Caine Mutiny gasket. He placed a call to the president of the Hilton chain (which at the time owned the Plaza Hotel) and vowed to start an “English Muffin Lovers Society” to “protect the rights of English-muffin lovers everywhere!” The next day he found four halves of his English muffins included in his morning order.

  Back in Hollywood, while planning his next film with Stanley Donen, Grant was offered the leading role in the screen version of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, to be directed by Stanley Kubrick. He angrily turned it down, describing the film as nothing more than a “degenerate” project. The role was then offered to Olivier, who also turned it down. It eventually went to James Mason, who gave one of the great performances of his career in a movie that has attained classic stature.

  Grant instead chose to play the lead in Alfred Hitchcock's next venture, North by Northwest, a film that Grant could not wait to make. After reading the script, he knew the main character was one he could completely identify with, and understood why Hitchcock had told him he was the only one who could do complete justice to the role.

  As usual, Hitchcock had gotten it exactly right.

  * According to critic Steven Cohan, “Indiscreet clearly functions as a reference to the earlier pairing of a younger and more sexually tense Grant and Bergman in Notorious; the comparison between these two films is historically revealing, not the least for understanding how 1940s notoriety can be transmuted into 1950s indiscretion. In Notorious, Bergman appears to confirm every one of Grant's suspicions about the duplicity of women, which he himself motivates since he is the one who repeatedly places her in that ‘notorious,’ not to say dangerous position of espionage and promiscuity …as others have said, the film indicates a dark, sadistic streak in the Cary Grant persona, especially since his manipulation of Bergman is in large part motivated by his character's desire to punish her active sexuality. By contrast, Indiscreet was made after Bergman's return to Hollywood's good graces and a second Oscar; though he does not marry her, this Grant is overly concerned with preserving her reputation.”