Cary Grant

by Marc Eliot

  Grant panicked. He did not want to undergo a deposition, knowing full well that things might come out that were far worse than anything that had already appeared. To prevent that from happening, days before Grant's scheduled appearance before Hyams's lawyer, Stanley Fox offered the writer a generous settlement. He could ghostwrite Grant's “autobiography,” with complete access to Grant, sell it for whatever he could get, and keep all the money it made. It was a deal that was too good to resist. Grant's only stipulation was that it could run only once, as a magazine piece, and never as a book. Hyams agreed, if Grant would allow the byline to read, “By Cary Grant as told to Joe Hyams.”

  The two then spent a great deal of time together taping discussions that were, for the most part, Grant's usual interview material. It gradually became clear to Hyams that this was going to be less an incisive, revelatory selfexamination than a pleasant recounting by Grant of his well-trod, occasionally romanticized memories—“Cary Grant's” memoir, not Cary Grant's. Still, he told his stories in such a disarming way and included enough interesting material to make the rather fanciful “autobiography” alluring to Ladies' Home Journal, which bought it for an astonishing $125,000.

  When Grant found out about how much Hyams was making, he angrily threatened to cancel the entire deal. Fox then called Hyams and suggested the writer give Grant a $22,000 Rolls-Royce as a gift. Hyams did the math and decided 20 percent was not a bad amount to pay to avoid any further legal fees. He purchased the car for Grant324 and had it delivered bearing the license plate CG-1.

  There the whole curious affair should have ended, except it didn't. Hedda Hopper, who had been after Grant for years to let her write his life story, was so angered he had given the assignment instead to Hyams that she wrote a vicious letter, not to Ladies' Home Journal but to one of the editors of Look magazine, where Grant had made his own lucrative deal, in which she “outed” Grant, claiming that everyone in Hollywood knew his upcoming “autobiography” was nothing more than his cheap attempt to cover up the truth about his lifelong homosexuality. Look decided not to print Hopper's letter (which is reprinted in Charles Higham and Roy Moseley's hasty postmortem Grant biography).

  Instead, the magazine went ahead and ran its lengthy contracted LSD story, written by Laura Bergquist, entitled “The Curious Story Behind the New Cary Grant,” in which Grant agreed to be interviewed and talked of his experiences in discovering the joys of taking LSD. Early on, Bergquist set the tone for the piece by quoting David Niven, who described Grant in a way no one in his circle had ever dared do before in public, alluding to all the quirks of Grant's personality, and even, very indirectly, to his homosexuality. “I've known Cary for twenty-five years,” Niven said, “and he's the most truly mysterious friend I have. A spooky Celt really, not an Englishman at all. Must be some fey Welsh blood there someplace. Gets great crushes on people like the late Countess di Frasso, or ideas like hypnotism, then moves on. Has great depressions and then some great heights when he seems about to take off for outer space.”

  In the piece, Grant responded, “I am through with sadness. At last, I am close to happiness. After all these years, I'm rid of guilt complexes and fears.” He then went on a reverie of rambling, sharing such interesting details with Bergquist as his new-found, post-acid ability to “think” himself thin without benefit of exercise or diet. At the end of the piece he addressed his feelings about acting and shared this startling revelation: “Acting isn't the most essential business in the world…Personally, I think I'm ready at last to have children. I'd like to have a whole brood cluttering around the dining room table. I think my relations with women will be different too. I used to love a woman with great passion, and we destroyed each other. Or I loved not at all, or in friendship. Now I'm ready to love on an equal level. If I can find a woman on whom I can exhaust all my thoughts, energies and emotions, and she loves me that way in return, we can live happily ever after.” To this Bergquist insightfully concluded, “There are Hollywood skeptics who wonder if the ‘new’ Grant may not be the best character part he has ever played.”

  By comparison, Hyams's “autobiography” (which took two years to appear in the Ladies' Home Journal) was extremely tame, with most of the unsightly blemishes carefully airbrushed from Grant's life, like wrinkles from a publicity photo, in deference to the afterimage that still burned so brightly in the eyes of his legions of fans. Nevertheless, it became the “factual” reference point for so many of the lasting misconceptions surrounding the life of Cary Grant.

  After her letter to Look magazine and the publication of his authorized autobiography, Grant never spoke to either Hopper or Hyams again.

  Instead, as he moved into the 1960s, fifty-six-year-old Cary Grant preferred to look ahead, to a new life that, as far as he was concerned, was just beginning.

  * It was not, however, the disaster many people think. It cost $2.5 million to make and grossed $3.2 million in its initial domestic release, nearly a million-dollar profit. Nevertheless, it disappointed the studio bottom-liners because it made only half as much profit as Rear Window, Hitchcock's biggest money-maker for Paramount.

  * Stewart desperately wanted to star in North by Northwest, but from the start Hitchcock had his sights set on Grant. Rather than coming right out and telling him so, he diplomatically waited until Stewart began work on Bell, Book and Candle, a film he was contracted to do, and then told the actor that he was sorry, it was his (Hitchcock's) loss, and wished him well.

  * Hitchcock would have the last laugh when he turned that conventional assumption on its head two years later, in Psycho.

  * Following him in order of selection were William Holden, Yul Brynner, Rock Hudson (the previous year's number one choice), Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, Gary Cooper, Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra, Kirk Douglas, James Stewart, and Clark Gable.

  * Other unsuccessful candidates for the title included TV star and Grant look-alike Craig Stevens, TV's Peter Gunn; TV star and Grant look-alike John Vivyan, TV's Mr. Lucky; and TV star and Grant look-alike, cleft-chinned David Janssen, star of Richard Diamond, Private Detective and later The Fugitive. Universal was hoping to talk Curtis out of Cary Grant because the film would have been much more profitable for them with any other actor in the role of the captain. When they acquiesced, it meant they also had to use Granart, Grant's production company, as the only distributor and therefore received a much smaller percent of the profits.

  * Not to be confused with Charles Higham, one of Grant's unauthorized biographers.

  Cary Grant, fourth wife Dyan Cannon, and Grant's only child, three-month-old Jennifer, in 1966, during the brief period of time the couple appeared to be happily married. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

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  “I was a self-centered boor. I was masochistic and only thought I was happy. When I woke up and said, “There must be something wrong with me,' I grew up. Because I never understood myself, how could I have hoped to understand anyone else? That's why I say that now I can truly give a woman love for the first time in my life, because I can understand her.”

  —CARY GRANT

  At Drake's insistence, Grant tried a reconciliation that he knew couldn't possibly work. Even before he finished North by Northwest, Grant was preparing himself for his permanent exit from the marriage and once again rushed into the protective safety of another movie. Emotional separation had always been difficult, and nothing else in his life could occupy him so completely and take his mind off his personal woes as making movies. In his capacity as filmmaking “tycoon, bargaining with a mind like an IBM machine,” and in a deal he negotiated on his own, Grant turned the tables on Universal Studios by insisting it guarantee Grandon 75 percent of the profits or 10 percent of the gross, whichever was greater, with a guarantee of $1 million up front and outright ownership of the negatives after seven years.

  It was still a good deal for Universal, but a great one for Grant, who had become more actively involved in the financial planning of his motion pictures after he summarily di
spatched Lew Wasserman and MCA. With the huge financial success of North by Northwest, the agency had begun to press him to move into television, something he had openly resisted ever since the little flickering box first began to appear in living rooms across the country. In his biography of Wasserman, Dennis McDougal describes how the Wasserman-Grant split happened: “The final outrage [after MCA's failure to acquire Bell, Book and Candle for Grant] came when Grant was summoned to appear at Wasserman's Beverly Hills office for a career discussion. There, several executives told Grant he ought to follow his triumphant appearance in North by Northwest by doing his own TV series. Grant immediately became hostile. He asked again whether they really believed that he should appear in television and MCA replied, ‘Yes.' Grant asked who would produce the show and was told it would be MCA, of course. He stood up, scanned the roomful of Wasserman clones, all clad in dark suits, white shirts, and black ties, and said, ‘Our contract is over as of now,’ walked out and never returned.”

  Grant had every reason to be outraged. It was clear to him now that MCA was far less interested in prolonging his giant film career than reducing it to twenty-one black-and-white inches, in a medium where they would have complete control of the vehicle, the talent, the advertising, and the profits. Wasserman had done the same thing with Alfred Hitchcock in the mid1950s, giving him a half-hour drama anthology series, then using it as a way to bolster Revue, Universal's TV unit. (The director, however, was smart enough to ensure that he would be allowed to continue to make movies and maintain creative control over the show's content as well as long-term ownership of all its episodes. Wasserman was not going to make that mistake again. Grant would not have been offered creative input, profit participation, or ownership.)

  As always, Grant's timing was perfect. He left Wasserman and MCA just as the government was tightening its long-term investigation into the alleged monopolistic practices and mob influence at the powerful management and talent agency.*

  RELEASED IN DECEMBER 1959, in time for the lucrative holiday season, OperationPetticoat, Grant'ssixty-seventhfilm, became the most successful of his career. It outgrossed North by Northwest by more than $3 million and in doing so elevated Grant into the rarefied air (of the time) where independent producers of films that surpass the $10 million gross mark (in their initial domestic thea trical release)we refe wand far between. A sproducerandstarofOperationPetticoat, he earned a personal net gain of $3 million, the most he had ever made from a single picture. A month after the film's opening, on the strength of his powerhouse box office, Cary Grant became the first star in film history to have his films gross more than $10 million in a single theater. He had already had a record twenty-four movies of his premiere at the cavernous 3,200-seat art deco Radio City Music Hall auditorium in the heart of New York City. Operation Petticoat pushed Grant's collective Music Hall gross over the $10 million milestone.

  AS HE CROSSED THE MID-FIFTIES line on his life's journey, each tick of the biological clock sounded more and more like a soundtracked funereal bass. His continued regular weekly doses of LSD were the best reminders of who he really was and what he still needed to do, even as he sensed that time was running out to salvage his own childhood by creating his own child. In February 1961, just after his fifty-seventh birthday, Grant told an entertainment reporter from The New York Times that “there is no doubt that I am aging. My format of comedy is still the same as ever. I gravitate toward scripts that put me in an untenable position. Then the rest of the picture is spent in trying to squirm out of it. Naturally, I always get the girl in the end. It may appear old-fashioned. There seems to be a trend toward satirical comedy, like The Apartment. Perhaps it is because young writers today feel satirical living in a world that seems headed for destruction.”*

  Grant's notion that his films could somehow save the world was a macro fantasy of fatherhood as wild and expansive as it was appealing to him. That month Grant quietly began spreading the word among friends that he was offering a bounty of a million dollars in cash for “the right woman willing to bear him a son.” That bounty would be resurrected periodically for the rest of his life.

  GRANT DECIDED TO COMPLETE ALL his outstanding film commitments to his own and Donen's film companies and take on no new projects. That winter he finally began work on The Grass Is Greener. The film was based on a successful British stage play by Hugh and Margaret Williams, shot on location in London and directed by Stanley Donen. Grant had insisted the film be shot there because he wanted to return to England. Thrifty as ever, he had found a project that would finance the entire trip without interfering with his nonmoviemaking affairs. The Grass Is Greener was, in that sense, the ideal project. With the exception of one or two scenes, it is essentially a one-set project; much of the action takes place in Lynley Hall, the stately mansion of Victor, Earl of Rhyall (Grant), who for financial reasons—he's flat broke—has opted to turn the place into a tourist attraction.

  Grant cast Deborah Kerr to play his wife, Hilary, although she wasn't his first choice; the earthier Jean Simmons was. Simmons, however, was on the verge of divorce and because of it asked for and got the smaller role of Hilary's girlfriend, Hattie Durant. Donen recommended Robert Mitchum to play Charles Delacro, the wealthy young American who, while taking the tour, meets and falls in love with Kerr. In the key role of the butler, Grant dearly wanted Noël Coward, but Donen preferred Moray Watson, who had created the role onstage at the West End—the only original cast member to make the transition to film. Grant acquiesced.

  The plot centers on Charles's efforts to woo Hilary away from Victor. The sex mess is treated in a veddy Briddish manner, meaning much civilized talk with little physical action, until the two men agree to resolve their differences in a duel. Victor is wounded, Hilary realizes she still loves him, and everyone lives happily ever after, including Charles, who somehow winds up with Hattie (with whom Victor had faked a romance in the hopes it would make Hilary jealous and win her before any shots were fired).

  Grant had, at one point, considered not being in the picture at all, and unofficially offered his part instead to Rex Harrison, who agreed to do it— until the death of his wife, Kay Kendall, forced him to drop out. To avoid an expensive delay, Grant then agreed to play the role after all, one he knew he could do with his eyes closed. Mitchum, on the other hand, stood out like an American sore thumb, cast against type in the guise of an articulate, understated wealthy American urbanite. Grant okayed Donen's choice of Mitchum because he had already starred in two films with each of The Grass Is Greener's female costars, and thought their experience would produce a familiar chemistry well suited for this ensemble piece.*

  As it happened, Grant felt early on that Mitchum's acting was too understated, and that because of it he, Grant, would be seen as overplaying his part. Mitchum saw things differently. He complained that his role was underwritten, consisting mostly of reactions like “Really?” and “Oh?” amid long stretches of dialogue from either Grant or Kerr. Moreover, Mitchum found Grant a bit old-man stodgy, both in the part and in real life, and he later told friends that he didn't appreciate Grant's “humor… sort of old music-hall jokes. ‘What's that noise down there? They're holding an Elephant's Ball? Well, I wish they'd let go of it, I'm trying to get some sleep,'” adding somewhat facetiously, “I guess that was when he was coming off his LSD treatment.”

  Donen remembers the film as a milestone of sorts, marking the end of a certain type of sophisticated British comedy, before the antic humor of Peter Sellers arrived and dominated the English cinematic 1960s: “Cary played a titled Englishman, and [in several scenes] was wearing what an earl would wear at night in his country house—a dark green velvet smoking jacket. Halfway through making the picture, he got terrified. ‘I don't want to be in a smoking jacket,’ he said. He was afraid that by playing that kind of man he would lose people's interest. A certain sort of polish in films—the way people moved and spoke—vanished then. And it never came back.”

  DURING FILMING, GRANT
SPENT EVERY weekend in Bristol visiting his mother, for the first time enjoying the occasional flash of genuine wit that emerged from her diminished capacities without the overlay of guilt that had long plagued their relationship. Grant loved treating Elsie to shopping sprees in search of the antiques she loved to collect.

  Less blissful was a visit he received from Drake, who, as part of yet another of her futile attempts to reconcile with Grant, flew to England to be with him for several weeks while he was shooting. During her stay she and Grant were invited by Princess Grace to go sailing with her and Prince Rainier off the shores of Monaco—something that caused the prince no little amount of consternation. Not only had he absolutely forbidden his wife to return to filmmaking, he didn't even like being reminded of that part of her life, which, as far as he was concerned, was, like all of Hollywood, cheap and tawdry (and threatening). No doubt he both envied and feared his imagined (and in some cases real) Hollywood rivals for Kelly's affections. He was especially jealous of Grant, who was much taller and far more fit than the pudgy prince, who could not get out of his head the images of the passionate kisses and sexual flirtation between Grant and his wife in To Catch a Thief. (He nevertheless screened the film frequently at the palace, when guests from America stayed with them, always by request. Of all her films, it remained the only one he refused to allow to be shown publicly in Monaco.)

  According to one who was there, throughout Grant and Drake's visit “the prince did not hide his bad humor during their stay at the palace. He spoke to no one. He sulked… the princess, meanwhile, was cool—her usual attitude to her husband's moods.”

  For her part, Drake mistook the princess's coolness for well-founded jealousy and in turn became jealous herself. The resulting criss-crossing of tensions made everyone less comfortable than they otherwise might have been. Princess Grace and Grant both knew what was taking place and did their best to ignore their spouses' suspicions and just enjoy themselves.