Cary Grant

by Marc Eliot

  During production Grant took a weekend off and traveled to Bristol, and this time he was able to convince Elsie, who had just turned ninety, to check into a nursing home, all expenses paid, after promising he would keep the house in her name should she ever want to return to it. Just before he left for Paris, she told him to dye his hair. It was too white, she said, and if he didn't do something about it, he'd never find a suitable girlfriend.

  Charade opened at Radio City Music Hall on Christmas Day 1963, the twenty-sixth Cary Grant picture to open there. Despite mixed reviews, the film took in more than $170,000 in its first week of release. Nevertheless, it was hard to avoid the age factor. Critic Andrew Sarris wrote the inevitable emperor-has-no-clothes review, in which he said that while the film had its moments and was “consistently better than ordinary without ever being extraordinary,” it had “a plot that smelled of red herrings [and] the saddest news of the year is that Cary Dorian Grant is finally beginning to look his age.”

  Grant agreed. Watching himself onscreen in Charade convinced him that he was simply too old for the kind of movies audiences wanted to see him in, no matter how much they were willing to pay for that privilege.

  Not long after, the “pluperfect leading man,” as critic Charles Champlin described Grant, found himself at a Malibu party for Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, watching Shirley MacLaine frugging with Nureyev to a rock quartet in the host's living room. “I don't know,” Grant said. “When I dance with a girl I like to hold her. That's the pleasure of it.”

  Cannon's career, meanwhile, had taken off. She went out on a nationwide tour of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying for much of that year and the next. To occupy his time waiting for her to return to Los Angeles, Grant, who had little outside interest in anything these days other then horseracing, formed another new production company, Grandox, to produce one film to be distributed by Universal. What convinced him to return to the screen was the movie's concept. His seventy-first film, he believed, had all the qualities needed to bring him the big prize, an Academy Award. He couldn't resist one more run for the elusive golden child of his dreams.

  The film was Father Goose, whose original screenplay by Frank Tarloff was, at Grant's insistence, rewritten by Peter Stone. The film concerns the wartime adventures of Walter Eckland (Grant), a grizzled South Pacific loner forced to become a reconnaissance spy for the U.S. government during the early days of World War II, as the Japanese army is advancing on the Allies' positions in the Pacific. Alone on an island, the cranky, boozy, unshaven Eckland finds himself the involuntary caretaker to Catherine Freneau (Leslie Caron), the very proper and (of course) single schoolmarm and her seven little girl students, all trapped with him after a bombing raid and forced to share his single recon hut. At first Eckland refuses to have anything to do with either Freneau or her children, but he gradually falls in love with her and them and at the film's climax performs a heroic rescue and saves the whole bunch with the promise of marriage to Freneau on the horizon. Familiar Hollywood moral of the story: a wife and children will turn a meaningless existence into one filled with meaning and joy.

  Not surprisingly, the chance to play against type held great appeal to Grant. He was happy to shed the custom suit and perfect haircut of the suave über-urbanite in favor of the dirty, disheveled garments of a boozy old geezer (who somehow still manages to have the thirty-four-year-old Caron pursue and fall in love with him). All of it was carefully calculated by Grant to court Oscar.

  If the Academy favored any one type of performance, it was one in which an actor went against image. Bing Crosby had done it when he switched from bebopster to priest in Going My Way (1944), Ray Milland did it by going sloppy drunk in The Lost Weekend (1945), José Ferrer did it disfiguring his face in Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), Humphrey Bogart did it going from suitand-tie tough guy to unshaved alcoholic in The African Queen (1951), Gary Cooper did it playing over-the-hill in High Noon (1952), William Holden did it as a crewcut POW cynic in Stalag 17 (1953), Marlon Brando did it as a punch-drunk fighter in On the Waterfront (1954), Ernest Borgnine did it as a mama's boy in Marty (1955), Yul Brynner did it being bald and barefoot in The King and I (1956), and Alec Guinness did it losing his mind building The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).

  Production on Father Goose began on April 9, 1964, and finished in time for the film to be released for a gala Christmas opening at the Music Hall, which Grant attended personally. While in New York he appeared at the fourteenth annual Chanukah Festival for Israel at Madison Square Garden. (Some Hollywood cynics derided this as Grant's attempt to win a few extra Jewish votes for the upcoming Oscars, apparently unaware of Grant's years of extensive work for several Jewish charity organizations.)

  Father Goose was a smash holiday hit and continued Grant's streak of box office winners, grossing more than $6 million in its initial domestic theatrical release. It was, however, a bit of a financial disappointment to Grant, because it did $150,000 less than Charade, $2.5 million less than That Touch of Mink, and $3 million less than Operation Petticoat. He was still big box office, but the message he read in the diminishing returns was that his popular appeal was softening. Because of it, he became unusually accessible to the press, engineering and guiding his own campaign to win over the voters of the Academy.

  His efforts seemed to pay off. Even before the film's big open, Hollywood was buzzing with Oscar talk for Grant's need-a-shave performance. In her column in the Hollywood News, syndicated gossip Sheilah Graham declared that, having seen an advance screening and getting him to do a rare sit-down, she was proud to announce that “Cary Grant's latest picture, Father Goose, is the very best of his whole career. And he plays it with dirty sneakers, shabby clothes, a beard and I was just about to say, no glamour, but that's not true. It's there and it always will be.

  “I chatted with Cary during his twenty-four hours in New York after the preview of the picture and he corroborated something about success. It does not happen haphazardly. Every step is as carefully planned as those of an architect building a good house. I'll come to that in a minute.

  “First of all I have to make a correction in my Academy Award prediction for the best actor of the year. I stated yesterday that Rex Harrison stood alone, far out in front [for My Fair Lady]. That isn't true anymore…In my crystal ball I see an Oscar for Mr. Grant.”

  Despite, or perhaps in defiance of, Grant's big push, the aging majority of Academy members had long memories of Grant, few of which were positive. That February when nominations for the 1964 Oscars were announced, Father Goose, despite Grant's concentrated PR campaign, was noticeably absent from most of the major categories, amid an unusually strong roster of films. The Best Picture nominations included Peter Glenville's Becket, Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Robert Stevenson's Mary Poppins, and Michael Cacoyannis's Zorba the Greek. Best Actor nods went to Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole (Becket), Anthony Quinn (Zorba), Peter Sellers (Dr. Strangelove), and the eventual winner, Rex Harrison.

  Father Goose received three nominations, all in nonperformance categories—Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, which it won (S. H. Barnett, Frank Tarloff, and Peter Stone), Best Editing, which it lost to Mary Poppins, and Best Sound, which it lost to My Fair Lady.

  According to close friends, Grant was crushed to have not even been nominated and vowed once again not to attend the Awards ceremony. Instead, he put all his efforts on dream child number two.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1965 Grant decided the time had come for him and Cannon, who had concluded her national tour of How to Succeed, to get married. Grant had proposed marriage several times in the three years they had been seeing each other, but Cannon had remained noncommittal. Then in June she quietly informed Grant that she was pregnant, prompting him to once more pop the question. This time she said yes, she would marry him, right then and there, before the weekend was over.

  They obtained a marriage license at G
odfield, a small desert town two hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas, where no press hounds lurked, then drove to Vegas. To ensure privacy, Grant once again called upon Howard Hughes to make the final arrangements. Hughes hired James Prennen, a local Las Vegas justice of the peace, to perform the top-secret ceremony at the Desert Inn, the Vegas hotel that Hughes now owned. Immediately afterward the sixty-one-year-old Grant whisked his twenty-eight-year-old bride to Bristol, England, via private plane provided by Hughes, to meet his mum.

  While away, rumors of his “impending” marriage to Cannon began to appear in the American press. To avoid any unnecessary hounding, Grant chose Roderick Mann of the British Sunday Graphic (pointedly snubbing his cobiographer Joe Hyams, who had been trying to reach Grant for confirmation of the rumor spreading through Hollywood) to announce that he had indeed married Dyan Cannon. “I'm only telling you now because you asked me. So many people have been hinting that we were thinking about marrying, were about to marry, or were actually married—but nobody actually came right out and asked.”

  The story ran in the following Sunday's Graphic and immediately made headlines around the world.

  When they returned to Los Angeles, Cannon revealed to the press that she was pregnant. That night Grant celebrated his wife's public announcement by taking her to a luxury box at Dodger Stadium, where the two dined on Dodger dogs, chips, and sodas while they root, root, rooted for the home team. Grant later told a friend he was never happier.

  Unfortunately, the feeling would not last for very long.

  * A disapproving Academy denied Audrey Hepburn even a nomination for the role of Eliza. Ironically, the Best Actress Oscar that year was awarded to Julie Andrews for Disney's Mary Poppins.

  32

  “I don't like to see men of my age making love on the screen … Being a father will make me more free than I have ever been. It will be a great experience. I can't wait.”

  —CARY GRANT

  As much as he claimed to be excited by the prospect of becoming a father, something of the old, pre-acid Cary Grant remained terrified at the thought; no scar, physical scrape, or emotional blow ever heals completely. Shortly after his wife announced to the world she was going to have his baby, Grant suddenly signed on to make another movie, telling Cannon she should stay home and rest while he was in Japan on location. When she protested, telling him she was only in her first trimester and was perfectly capable of traveling with him, he would hear none of it. The last thing he wanted, he said, was to in any way cause her to have a miscarriage, not at this stage of his life. Besides, he told her, not winning an Oscar for Father Goose had taught him a lesson. “Cary Grant” was dead. Therefore, why not kill him off for good?

  Cannon must have wondered how her pregnancy had somehow become all about his career.

  After turning down a multimillion-dollar deal to play the lead in the film version of the hit stage musical The Music Man, Grant formed Granley Productions, with producer Sol C. Siegel, and signed on Columbia Pictures to serve as the distributor for his next film. The company then acquired the rights to a 1943 George Stevens wartime comedy, The More the Merrier, which had starred Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur and character actor Charles Coburn. In it, the chronic wartime housing shortage causes Coburn to wind up sharing Jean Arthur's apartment. He then splits his half with McCrea, the premise that sets up the comic unfoldings and the eventual romance between McCrea and Arthur, helped along by Coburn's gentle guidance. The film had been nominated for Best Picture and lost to Casablanca, but Coburn as the elder Cupid figure had walked away with the Best Supporting Oscar in an upset over the overwhelming favorite, Claude Rains, Bogart's foil in the fabled North African adventure romance. The role Grant now wanted was Coburn's, in a remake to be called Walk, Don't Run.

  Whatever subconscious motivations may have been at work, Grant envisioned his seventy-second film, his last hurrah, as a farewell kiss to his audience. To ensure that this message wouldn't get lost, for the first time since his earliest days at Paramount when he lost Dietrich to Herbert Marshall in Blonde Venus, he would not get the girl—in this instance Samantha Eggar, a ravishing British redhead who had caused a sensation the year before as the gorgeous victim opposite Terence Stamp's schizo kidnapper in William Wyler's The Collector. Grant personally selected her to play the romantic lead. Jim Hutton, also cast by Grant, was a tall, slender, charming, and athletic actor in whom Grant saw a clear reflection of his younger self. Veteran non-boat-rocker Charles Walters (Easter Parade, High Society) was chosen by Siegel to direct.

  The production was on location in Japan in time to shoot during the 1964 Summer Olympics, but problems slowed the filming down and kept Grant in Tokyo for nearly six months after the Games ended, allowing for only three brief trips back to the States. Not until late in February did Grant get to shoot his last scene in the movie and the last of his career. In it, he gets into a limo and instructs his driver to take him home to his wife and two children, “who are almost grown.” Taking one last look through the window, the camera then pulls back and rises slowly as Grant, with all the majesty of a king, slowly rides off into his final cinematic sunset.

  Back home he had barely unpacked when Dyan Cannon went into labor. On Saturday, February 26, 1966, Grant drove his wife to St. John's Hospital in Burbank, where just eighteen minutes later she gave birth to a four-pound, eight-ounce baby girl they named Jennifer Diane Grant.

  A day later, Grant, still at the hospital, met with the gathering press corps and had this to say: “One does join in the stream of life with parenthood. There's an advantage to being older, wiser and more mature when you become a father for the first time, and there are disadvantages, too. A person can never fully understand a child until he understands himself.”

  From the moment of Jennifer's birth, Grant eagerly assumed the role of adoring father. He awoke promptly each morning at seven-thirty to kiss her good morning and supervise her feeding before leaving for the studio to work on the final edit of Walk, Don't Run, after which he rushed home to spend more time with the child he happily described to friends as “the most completely perfect baby in the world.”

  When Jennifer was barely three months old, Grant insisted that he and Cannon take her to Bristol, to meet Elsie. Fearful that his mother did not have much longer to live, he was determined that she meet her granddaughter.

  In England, Grant doted on Jennifer and spent nearly all his time with Elsie. Years later Grant would recall the visit this way: “I was sitting up front in the car with the chauffeur, and [Elsie] was sitting behind with my cousin. Mother tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Darling, you should do something about your hair.' I asked her what should I do about my hair, and she explained, ‘Well, dear, it's so white. You should dye it. Everybody does these days.' ‘But why should I,’ I asked. ‘Because it makes me look so old.'” Whenever she talked to Cannon, Elsie referred to her as Betsy.

  Grant happily squired his mother and daughter around town, accepting the congratulations from the crowds that followed them wherever they went. Cannon, feeling a bit left out, asked Grant if he minded her going to London by herself for a few days. She was surprised when he told her no, she couldn't go, and shocked when he took away her keys to the car. When she asked why, he explained that the trip was being paid for by Columbia Pictures, in exchange for some personal appearances he was to make in connection with the upcoming release of Walk, Don't Run, and therefore she had to stay with him so as not to run up any unnecessary charges. Cannon could not believe what she was hearing. From then on, to pass the rest of her time in Bristol, she kept to herself, read a lot, walked through the town's many churches, and spent afternoons chatting with Grant's friendly relatives.

  When at last they did get to London, it was for the studio's arranged press junket, which he had insisted Cannon accompany him on. When a reporter asked if he had any plans to star in a film with his wife, the question seemed to visibly annoy Grant, who responded that he thought he had made it clear to the world th
at Walk, Don't Run was his last movie. The rest of the press crew laughed out loud when Cannon nodded her head vigorously up and down in response to the same question, indicating that she very much wanted to make a movie with her husband. Grant did not appreciate the gesture and openily and angrily glared at her. The incident was reported as a “disagreement” in the next morning's papers.

  GRANT WAS OPPOSED not only to continuing his own career but to Cannon's continuing hers, something that did not sit well with her. He didn't care. He insisted his wife be a stay-at-home mother and devote herself to the full-time job of raising their daughter. A few days later, speaking to a luncheon for Columbia executives attended by the British press, Grant, out of nowhere, suddenly changed the subject to marriage and declared that the institution was dying. By the year 2066—one hundred years from now, he emphasized—it would be outmoded. Why? Women were more in competition with men than ever before.

  By the time they returned to Los Angeles, in October, Grant had become angry and bitter about Cannon's unwavering decision to keep acting, and she began to suspect that because of it her marriage to Grant might actually be in trouble. Ever since her head-shake joke at the London press conference, he had seemed a completely different person from the one she married. Now, whenever she tried to get his attention away from the baby, even for a moment, he become verbally abusive. A month later he locked her out of his bedroom and put a lock on the outside of hers to keep her in it at night. And when she insisted she was ready to go back to work, Grant threw a fit, angrily complaining that her proper place was at home taking care of Jennifer.