by Marc Eliot
* Bergman's next film, Mark Robson's The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), was her first American production made for a major studio—20th Century–Fox—in ten years, since her appearance in Lewis Milestone's Arch of Triumph. Under Capricorn, made by Alfred Hitchcock in 1949, was a British production, and Stromboli, the film that caused her exile, was wholly Italian, shot in 1949.
* This explains why it came out before Houseboat, which was actually made before Indiscreet but was not released by Paramount until November 1958, as its big holiday film.
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“I've heard the fag rumor for years. Look at it this way. I've always tried to dress well. I've had some success in life. I've enjoyed my success and I include in that success some relationships with very special women. If someone wants to say I'm gay, what can I do? I think it's probably said about every man who's been known to do well with women. I don't let that sort of thing bother me. What matters to me is that I know who I am.”
—CARY GRANT
In 1957, as the next to last of a multiple-picture deal with Paramount (Psycho would be the last), Alfred Hitchcock had made Vertigo, the most personal movie of his career. Although many consider it among his best work, Vertigo was something of a box office disappointment and would not gain its rightful reputation as a classic for many years to come.* It starred James Stewart, one of the two screen alter egos Hitchcock most preferred, the other, of course, being Cary Grant. If Grant is unthinkable driven to immobility as the temporarily insane hero gone mad over the haunting image of costar Kim Novak, Stewart remains likewise impossible to conceive as the athletic, unflappable, seemingly invulnerable Roger O. Thornhill, the “hero,” for lack of a better term, of North by Northwest.*
To ensure a better deal for his next series of films, Hitchcock signed with Lew Wasserman, who had conceived Hitchcock's TV show, which was by now one of the biggest hits in MCA-Universal's TV roster. Hitchcock wanted to make an out-and-out mainstream hit and knew that Cary Grant's enormous star power was the best guarantee he could get. Wasserman made a one-picture deal for Hitchcock at MGM to serve as a bridge until a new multiple-picture deal at Universal could be worked out. He paired Hitchcock with Ernest Lehman, the successful screenwriter (Sweet Smell of Success, Somebody Up There Likes Me, The King and I, and Sabrina are a few of his better-known movies), at the time under contract to MGM.
Hitchcock and Lehman already knew each other well. They had first met during the filming of Rear Window, a film that so impressed Lehman that when the opportunity came to work with Hitchcock, he jumped at it. During the making of Vertigo, Hitchcock had come across a novel by Hammond Innes called The Wreck of the Mary Deare that for a while he considered filming. Lehman had done a first draft for the film that Hitchcock liked but ultimately decided it was not a subject he wished to take on. Hitchcock still wanted very much to work with Lehman and instructed him to try to come up with a script that would fit Cary Grant as well as one of his custom-made suits. Lehman then began working on something he called In a Northerly Direction, later on Breathless, before it had its final title, suggested by MGM story editor Kenneth MacKenna: North by Northwest.
The story of the film, described by Donald Spoto as “a superbly paced comic thriller about mistaken identity, political depravity, sexual blackmail, and ubiquitous role-playing,” was a self-homage to Hitchcock's favorite film format, an emotional criss-cross over the physical landscape of a hero and his girlfriend thrown together by something that resembles, in Hitchcock's world, the religion of fate. The director had used this landscape scenario several times before, in The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Young and Innocent, and Saboteur and with some variation in Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, and To Catch a Thief.
Hitchcock offered Grant $450,000 up front, a full one-third more than his normal asking fee, 10 percent of the gross profits on all earnings over $8 million, plus an extra $5,000 a day seven weeks after the contract was signed, no matter what unforeseen delays might take place. Those seven weeks quickly came and went before a single foot of film was shot, which raised Grant's actual salary closer to $750,000.
Having signed Grant, the rest of the casting went smoothly, once it became clear to Grant that Hitchcock was not going to be able to get Sophia Loren as his costar. Hitchcock had initially agreed with him that their pairing would work for the film, but Ponti said no. He had had enough of Grant and absolutely refused to let his new wife appear with him again. MGM pushed for its contract star Cyd Charisse, but she left Hitchcock cold. He preferred blond beauty Eva Marie Saint, a Grace Kelly look-alike who had won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work on Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). If Grant could not have his obsessive desires met, Hitchcock could satisfy his own. He saw in Saint, who had played mostly working-class women onscreen (Waterfront, A Hatful of Rain [1957]), something glamorous and mysterious that made her the perfect romantic lure to ensnare Grant into her world of sex and spy games.
Filming on North by Northwest took place on locations across the country, beginning in New York at United Nations Plaza, the first of the film's many monuments that spread the canvas of the screen, from New York to Chicago, to South Dakota, and finally to California. The interior of the Plaza Hotel, the CIT Building at 650 Madison Avenue, Grand Central Terminal, the Phipps estate in Old Westbury, Midwest cornfields, and Rapid City's Mount Rushmore—all showed off the physical beauty of the rolling American landscape that became, in Hitchcock's view, a metaphor for the beauty of endless freedom, both the country's and the leading characters' quest to defend it.
The story centers on an innocent man who is caught in a web of deceit and intrigue, then is drawn into it until, through a series of increasingly bizarre misadventures, he turns into the very man he has been mistaken for and falls in love with a beautiful woman far guiltier than she appears to be. Roger O. Thornhill (Grant) is kidnapped by foreign spies who mistake him for the CIA operative George Kaplan. Thornhill narrowly escapes death when he is forced to drink a bottle of bourbon, then is put behind the wheel of a car at the top of a winding road. This time, in North by Northwest, the mandatory car scene is played early on, with a comedic tone rather than a suspenseful one, primarily because no one would ever believe Hitchcock would kill his star this early in the film.* Instead, the car ride signals the beginning of a far more precarious journey to self-discovery, personal freedom (from the clutches of a domineering mother and two previous wives who left him “because they thought I led too dull a life”), and ultimately romantic redemption in the beautiful guise of Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). Ingeniously, Hitchcock (and Lehman) have Thornhill chase himself, in his pursuit of “Kaplan,” across the country.
Unknown to him, Thornhill has been misidentified by the enemy as a CIA operative who doesn't actually exist, a creation of the agency to throw the “bad guys” off the trail of the real counterspy they have embedded in their evil midst. After Thornhill is set up as the assassin of a UN representative, he goes on the run, fleeing from the authorities while pursuing the “real” Kaplan. Complicating matters, he becomes involved with a beautiful blonde on a train, Eve Kendall, who as it turns out is not only the lover of the enemy ringleader, Vandamm (James Mason), but also the secret CIA operative whom “Kaplan” was created to protect. Somehow along the way, between several of the film's best-remembered set pieces—Thornhill doing battle with a lowflying crop-duster, his ingenious escape from the auction, his faked “murder” by Eve at the base of the presidential monuments—he is at last let in on the various subterfuges by CIA chief (and Hitchcock surrogate) “the Professor” (Leo G. Carroll). Thornhill eventually tracks Eve to the cliffhanger home of Vandamm, which sets up the film's glorious climax. Thornhill literally scales the angular side of the house like a human spider, gets inside, and overhears Vandamm and Leonard, his second-in-command (Martin Landau), planning Eve's murder. The scene culminates in both Thornhill and Eve dangling off the face of Mount Rushmore, where he rescues her by grasping her wrist and seemingly pulling her
back to safety. The camera cuts from a close-up of Grant to one of Saint and back to Grant, and this time a pull-back reveals the two on a train, traveling east, married, and in love. Once again, as with Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, Grant's rescue of Saint is a redemption, an elevation from the pedestrian world of loners to the poetic landscape of lovers. The famous final shot of North by Northwest that always gets a laugh for its sexual metaphor—a train plunging into a tunnel—suggests something darker as well: a nearly religious ritual of the inevitably joyless sexual industrialization that is, in Hitchcock's world, the unhappily-ever-after of the dutifully, if no longer romantically, married.
The key to the film is Grant's duality, as Hitchcock allows Grant, in the guise of mama's boy Thornhill, to once again play his character's subtext as text, the subconscious as conscious, the unleashed id as ego. This makes the real “chase” of the film the repressed Thornhill's desire to invade and inhabit the adventurous, brave, physical, clever, aggressive, and finally romantic world of the idealized (and mythic) hero George Kaplan, the man Thornhill secretly (subconsciously) wishes he could be. The genius of Hitchcock lies in how he gets the audience as well as Thornhill to believe in the existence of George Kaplan, until by the end of the film, it is Kaplan who survives, while Roger Thornhill simply ceases to exist (although the final shot suggests that Kaplan may already be turning back into Thornhill).
Even as Hitchcock's cameras were rolling for North by Northwest, Grant's secret, ongoing LSD sessions had allowed him to turn his own pursuit inward, to make the vital connections between the persona of “Cary Grant” and the private Cary Grant. In that sense, the film celebrates as much as it reflects the success of that union and turns Hitchcock's orchestrated Thornhill-to-Kaplan into the most personal, revealing, moving, and ultimately profound screen performance of Grant's long and brilliant movie career.
During the filming of North by Northwest, Grant, fifty-four, and Drake, thirty-five, made public what had been a de facto reality for years: that they were officially separated and headed for divorce. On October 16, 1958, they issued a joint statement that said, “After careful consideration and long discussion, we have decided to live apart. We have had, and shall always have, the deepest respect for each other. But, alas, our marriage has not brought us the happiness we fully expected and mutually desired. So, since we have no children needful of our affections, it is consequently best that we separate for a while. There are no plans for divorce and we ask only that our statement be respected as being complete and our friends to be patient with, and understanding of, our decision.”
Grant provided scant more information even to his closest friends, offering only the familiar litany of reasons he had given for his first two divorces: that he had become bored, that he wasn't suited to domestic life, and that he and Drake had simply run out of things to talk about.
In February 1959, one month after his fifty-fifth birthday, Grant, for the first time in his career, reached the top of Box Office magazine's annual popularity poll, as it named him the number one film star of 1958.* Six months later North by Northwest was released to critical and commercial success. It grossed $7 million in its initial domestic theatrical release, nearly twice what it cost to make, and would go on to become Hitchcock's highest-grossing film ever, as well as the third highest of Grant's career.
While Grant was in New York to attend the Radio City Music Hall opening of North by Northwest, an ugly and unsubstantiated story broke in newspapers across the country that detailed his former British chauffeur's revelations of having had a love affair with Grant. In the story, twenty-fiveyear-old Raymond Austin claimed that he expected to be named “the other man”—Grant's lover—in Drake's impending divorce action against him.
An outraged Grant immediately contacted his attorney, Stanley Fox, to issue an angry written denial. A month later Austin tried to commit suicide in London by taking an overdose of pills. Although he survived, it was the last anyone heard of him or his claim.
As soon as his publicity obligations for North by Northwest were completed, Grant flew to Key West to begin production on his next picture, Blake Edwards's Operation Petticoat, a light sex comedy involving the crew of a submarine and the ship's unlikely cargo of female nurses during World War II. Granart was yet another company he had set up (with this-time-only partner Robert Arthur, through their jointly owned Granart Company Productions) to independently produce the picture. During filming Grant became close with costar Tony Curtis, one among many new Grants-inwaiting, whose career was sizzling after the success of Some Like It Hot and who was responsible for bringing Operation Petticoat, via Universal Pictures, to Grant. According to Curtis, “I was doing so swell those days that Universal asked me what kind of movie I wanted to make next, and I said, ‘A service comedy about submarines.' They said, ‘Fine, we'll get Jeff Chandler or Robert Taylor to play the captain.' I said, ‘No, I want Cary Grant.' They got back to me later and said, ‘Robert Taylor wants to play that part very much, and he'll give you five percent of his ten percent of the gross.' I said, ‘No, I want Cary Grant.’ That's what I wanted, and that's what I got.”*
Grant jumped at the opportunity to work with Curtis. He loved the young actor's onscreen charisma and likely saw something of his younger self in the handsome, dark-haired romantic leading man. When they met, he was completely charmed by Curtis's humor as well. Grant told him he found his onthe-money impersonation the year before in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot absolutely hilarious. According to Curtis, “I never worked it deliberately as a Cary Grant imitation… [but] so much the better if the Cary voice makes it a little funnier for some people.”
Grant always loved young female costars, believing they made him look younger when he played opposite them; in a similar fashion, he believed acting with Tony Curtis might make him more accessible to younger male and female audiences.
During filming an incident occurred between Grant and respected veteran Hollywood syndicated columnist Joe Hyams, who had, after years of trying, eventually got Grant to agree to a series of sit-down interviews.* Throughout his career, Grant had cultivated his dealings with the press into something of an art form, giving essentially the same interview every time he wanted to publicize a new movie: he was born in Bristol, he joined the Pender troupe, he traveled with them to New York, he got his taste in clothes from his father, he loved women, he loved acting, he loved life, he loved everything about life, he was grateful for all that he had been able to achieve in life, etc., etc., etc. This time, for some reason known only to Grant, he told Hyams things that he had never told any interviewer before. When he saw his words in print, they horrified him.
One likely theory of why Grant suddenly became so loose-lipped is that his sessions with LSD had given him a new sense of self-confidence—one of the first things he discussed with Hyams was how uplifting his experience with the drug had been. Up until this time he had always denied that he had ever so much as seen a psychiatrist, let alone been one of the early experimenters with LSD. According to Hyams, Grant readily confessed to him that “I hurt every woman I loved …I was an utter fake …a self-opinionated bore… until one day, after weeks of treatment [with LSD], I did see the light…now for the first time in my life, I am truly, deeply and honestly happy.” These statements left Hyams open-mouthed with astonishment and sent him rushing for his typewriter.
However, before Hyams's series of articles based on the interviews appeared, another journalist, a Brit by the name of Lionel Crane, published an article in a London newspaper that contained virtually the same “revelations.” Hyams was angered and puzzled by the timing, especially when, after interviewing Grant, he had received a phone call from the actor asking him as a personal favor not to print anything they had talked about, at least for the time being. Hyams, who had a reputation as a Hollywood insider who could be trusted, reluctantly agreed.
But once the Crane piece appeared, Hyams quickly published a two-part nationally syndicated article that quoted Grant's
every last word concerning his psychiatric treatment, his acid-taking, his attitude toward women, and his lifetime of self-loathing. Needless to say, it caused a sensation that sent Grant into a rage. Without thinking the situation through, he publicly denied ever having been interviewed by Hyams, a claim Louella Parsons breathlessly repeated as gospel fact, without so much as making a single phone call to check with Hyams.
The journalist angrily rebutted both Grant and Parsons by publishing the details of the events that led up to the series of interviews, along with a photograph of himself conducting them with Grant taken at the Florida naval base during the shooting of Operation Petticoat. Hyams's rebuttal drew even more attention to the story, and a livid Grant, through Stanley Fox, threatened to sue him, the newspaper syndicate that distributed the articles, and the newspapers that carried them.
Hyams could not understand why Grant had so vehemently turned against him, until he learned that, shortly after Crane's piece appeared, the actor had sold the “complete and exclusive” story of his taking LSD to Look magazine for a substantial amount of money—a deal that, because of his interview, was now in danger of being canceled. Hyams then double-jumped Grant and sued him for slander to the tune of $500,000 for claiming that he had made up the entire interview and never met.