by Marc Eliot
A few weeks later they attended the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration of Grant's old friends Rosalind Russell and Freddie Brisson, hosted by Frank Sinatra and his wife, Mia Farrow, at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Cannon was startled when Grant suddenly and inexplicably broke down in tears, something Cannon found not only embarrassing but a sure sign that her husband had gone completely off the deep end. Later that day Grant took his friend Bill Frye aside and asked him to arrange a flight for him and his wife back to Los Angeles.
As soon as he and Cannon returned home, she packed her bags, took Jennifer, and left, she said, for an extended stay at her parents' home in Seattle. Grant was disturbed and frightened, and when he got Cannon on the phone he tried to get her to come back home by promising he would, after all, costar with her in a film. He already had a project picked out, he said, a script called The Old Man and Me that he had optioned a while back but never pursued.
Cannon would have none of it. A few weeks later, when she finally did return to Los Angeles, it was to a small rented apartment in Malibu. Not long afterward word of their separation reached the press. On August 22, 1967, just seventeen months after their wedding day, Cannon sued Grant for divorce on the grounds that he had treated her in “a cruel and inhuman manner.” In her court papers she stated that the couple had been living apart since the previous December, which was technically true, as Grant had been in Japan during that period filming Walk, Don't Run. Cannon's suit estimated Grant's worth in excess of $10 million and demanded “reasonable support” for her and their baby daughter. Also in her papers Cannon stated that she had begun psychiatric treatment, presumably due to Grant's “cruel and inhuman” treatment.
He was at first devastated. Losing his wife and his baby was too much for him. Then his rage kicked in. If Cannon wanted to leave, fine, but he was going to fight to keep Jennifer. He put together a powerhouse team of lawyers and filed a countersuit in which he described Cannon as an unfit mother and demanded sole custody of his daughter.
Against the advice of his legal team, Grant tried to call Cannon several times a day. At first she refused to talk to him, but after a while she responded, especially when he agreed to provide her with an interim allowance of $4,000 a month, which she desperately needed. By September they were seen together around town, at restaurants, at Dodger Stadium, in Las Vegas, always with baby Jennifer in tow. Things appeared better between them, but despite Grant's pleas that she come home, Cannon insisted on staying in her own apartment, and demanded that they both attend marriage counseling. Grant resented the suggestion, but agreed in order to keep seeing his wife and daughter. (But he never paid for the sessions. The doctor eventually sued him to collect $7,000 in uncollected bills.)
Even so, Cannon refused to rescind her suit for divorce. That November she left for New York to star on Broadway in The Ninety Day Mistress and took Jennifer with her. Grant found out about when she was going, followed her to the airport, and got himself booked on the same flight. In New York he booked a room at the Croydon, the same hotel where she was staying. This last move proved too much for her, and through her lawyers she advised him she was about to obtain a restraining order unless he checked out. Reluctantly Grant—who did not wish to go to another hotel, where he knew he would surely be hounded by the press—took up an invitation to stay with one of his old friends from Hollywood, Robert Taplinger, who had recently moved to New York to run a major public relations firm.
Taplinger, whom Grant had met on one of his earlier films, was a notorious ladies' man, best remembered for his torrid affair with Bette Davis. He now had a huge bachelor pad on East 49th Street, where, for business, he entertained clients every night. That did not bother Grant at all, who was grateful for all the familiar faces that came by. Another thing that Grant appreciated was the close tabs Taplinger could keep on Cannon. As a bigtime PR executive, he was able to get advance warning on virtually every New York social and PR move Cannon made and happily passed them all along to Grant, who made it his business to show up at the same functions as his wife.
Taplinger, like many of Grant's friends, worried about his increasingly obsessive behavior toward Cannon and thought it might be good to distract him before he got in serious trouble for it. He began throwing small dinner parties in his friend's honor and made it a point to always include three or four young, single, and beautiful women, in the hope that one of them might catch Grant's eye.
One did. Her name was Luisa Flynn, a tall, slim, dark-haired Argentine beauty who was living in New York to represent a British-based firm with ties to Argentina specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Among all the hopeful beauties who paraded in front of Grant like so many finalists in the Miss America pageant, only Flynn, a divorcée with a six-year-old child who had kept her married name, paid no attention at all to Grant. In her early thirties, her first impression of him was that, while he was extremely good-looking, he was also quite old. After he had introduced himself to her, she asked someone his real age. Told he was sixty-three, she dismissed any and all further thoughts about him.
Grant, however, took a liking to her and struck up conversations at subsequent Taplinger parties. Flynn later recalled the extreme bitterness that punctuated all his talks: “He struck me as an angry and bitter man, and said awful things about his wife, from whom he was separated at the time. He always had a drink in his hand, and I thought that was probably fueling the level of his anger.”
There was something else Flynn noticed about Grant: he always mentioned Mae West. West had grown old and lonely, he said, and whenever he was in New York, where the aging onetime sex goddess was, he made it a point to visit her and talk about the old days. Flynn found that side of Grant endearing and thought to herself that West was far more suited to be his mother-surrogate than she.
As Cannon's Broadway stay lengthened, Grant began to look for reasons to remain in New York. He signed on with Columbia Records to make a Christmas album of readings from classic material, with Peggy Lee singing backgrounds. Unfortunately, the recording sessions left him maudlin and melancholy, and he started calling Cannon again, daily, sometimes hourly, begging her to at least spend Christmas with him so that he wouldn't have to be alone over the holidays. She agreed, and they all had fun, but she still would not budge on her decision to pursue the divorce.
In January 1968 a disconsolate Grant returned to Los Angeles, but soon afterward began to commute weekends to New York to be near his wife and child. He always stayed with Taplinger, and whenever Flynn showed up tried to engage her in conversation.
To one of Taplinger's dinner parties, attended by such luminaries as Kirk and Anne Douglas, Aristotle Onassis and Maria Callas, Rosalind Russell and Freddie Brisson, Irene Mayer, and several of the upper echelon of international banking, Flynn decided to bring along her six-year-old son. Grant was immediately drawn to the boy and marveled at how physically beautiful he was. At one point Grant took Flynn aside and offered her a million dollars in cash to have his baby. Flynn brushed off the suggestion as a joke.
Also at the party that night were several film producers trying to get Grant to return to movies. More than one approached Flynn and asked her to use her influence, such as it was, to get him to consider their scripts. A famous French director said he would put up millions for the chance to work with Grant. Flynn merely directed them to the actor, made the appropriate introductions, and stayed as far away from the situation as possible, believing what Grant had told her so many times, that he had no intention of ever returning to film.
One other person he met while at one of Taplinger's soirées was Paul Blackman, the president and CEO of Fabergé. Blackman was a client of Taplinger who was assigned the job of finding celebrities to represent the company's products.
March 20, 1968, was the date the Los Angeles Superior Court had set to begin hearing testimony in Cannon's suit for divorce. As the day approached, Grant grew more apprehensive. On March 12 a few New York friends of his got together and threw
a dinner party at Delmonico's in his honor, to try to cheer him up prior to his leaving for the airport to catch an evening flight for Los Angeles. He planned to leave from the Manhattan restaurant and go directly to Kennedy Airport. One of his friends offered to send him in a limousine. Grant accepted. Gratia von Furstenberg, a young, good-looking woman in charge of special events at Delmonico's, went along for the ride to make sure a slightly inebriated Grant safely made it onto his flight.
The 1968 stretch Cadillac never made it to the airport, colliding with a truck on the Long Island Expressway. Ambulances quickly arrived with lights flashing and sirens screaming, then took Grant and Furstenberg to St. John's Queens Hospital, where he was treated for minor cuts and bruises, the worst being a nasty slash across his nose. Furstenberg suffered a broken leg and collarbone.
The accident couldn't have occurred at a worse time, and the presence in the limo of a pretty twenty-three-year-old, Grant knew, did nothing to help his upcoming court battle. The next morning his worst fears came true, when details of the accident, including the presence of Furstenberg in the limo, made front-page news across the country. Worse, everyone except Grant seemed to revel in their fifteen minutes of fame. A hospital spokesman told a hastily called press conference that his patient had only suffered surface wounds and that “Grant is as good-looking as he was yesterday. The only problem is that the nurses may kill him with kindness.”
That same kindness wasn't extended to him by the Los Angeles Superior Court, which refused to delay the start of the hearing and warned Grant's lawyers they had better deliver their client on the twentieth as scheduled, or it would start without him. Grant chose to remain in the hospital.
During her extraordinary testimony, Cannon delivered a nightmarish account of her marriage to Grant. Grant had always claimed that his intake of LSD was limited to the hundred trips he had taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s before the drug was declared illegal, but she testified that he had secretly continued to use it on a regular basis and that during these “trips” he had at various times screamed at her, physically beaten her, and publicly humiliated her. He often tried to get her to go on LSD trips with him, she added. One time, she testified, she went to a party without his permission, and upon her return he gave her a hard spanking, laughing as he administered it. When she threatened to call the police, he told her the press would have a field day with it, so she didn't. Another time, while watching the Academy Awards, he got so upset with the winners that he “danced on the bed” and “went out of control.” When she wanted to wear a dress that he felt was too short for the public to see her in, she testified, he took away her car keys and locked her in her room. One time while locked up she called her agent, and Grant picked up an extension phone to listen. “Addie,” she claimed he said (referring to her agent, Adeline Gould), “stay out of my marriage. I'm going to break this girl. She's not going to leave until I break her.” Gould was called upon to testify and confirmed this conversation. Cannon also testified that Grant accused her of having a sexual relationship with her psychiatrist.
One of Grant's witnesses was Dr. Sidney Palmer, an associate professor at the University of Southern California Medical School, who testified that Grant had come to him the previous September to have his emotional state evaluated in preparation for the divorce hearings. During their visits, Dr. Palmer said, Grant admitted that he was still taking LSD but only under strict medical supervision. “I found nothing irrational or incoherent about him,” the doctor said. He added that Grant showed great concern for his daughter's welfare and had “deep love and affection” for Jennifer. “I found nothing indicating his behavior would be dangerous to a child.”
Another witness for Grant, Dr. Judd Marmor, his psychiatrist for a brief period of time, testified under oath that Grant had told him that he had spanked his wife, but for “reasonable and adequate causes.”
All the while, Grant convalesced in the hospital. Even before his lawyers conferred with him, he knew from the newspapers the damage that had been done. Some of Grant's friends suggested to the press that Cannon had set him up, that she had married him only to advance her own career, but this kind of unprovable speculation sounded defensive and gained scant attention alongside the sensational revelations of Cannon's sworn testimony. Grant had prepared a rebuttal statement to the court, but after her testimony, he quickly withdrew it.
On March 22, two days after the trial had begun, Dyan Cannon was granted a divorce from Cary Grant and was given custody of two-year-old Jennifer. Grant was allowed sixty days of visitation rights per year, a “reasonable” number of overnight visits, with a nurse or governess to be present for all extended visits. Presiding Judge Wenke noted in his decision that Grant's continued use of LSD had made him “irrational and hostile,” but he also cited a stipulation—entered by the actor's attorneys and agreed to by Cannon's, presumably with the understanding that the joint entry would prevent a long, drawn-out appeal—that Grant had not used LSD in the past twenty-four months. The Grant mystique evidently held some sway when the judge awarded Cannon the relatively modest sum of $2,000 a month child support and thirty-six months of alimony to begin at $2,500 a month and gradually decrease to $1,000, and use of the beach house. He followed his final words, “This is now over,” with a single pound of the gavel.
The next day, a haggard-looking Grant checked out of the hospital, ashen and still heavily bandaged. He had no comment for the phalanx of press awaiting his discharge, other than to say that he hoped “to keep breathing in and out.”
Later that day he flew back to Los Angeles aboard the private plane of George Barrie, owner and president of the Rayette-Fabergé Corporation. Barrie and Grant had spoken by phone several times after being introduced to each other in person by Blackman at one of Taplinger's parties. Barrie then offered to fly Grant back aboard his personal aircraft. Taplinger's introduction was no happy accident. He wanted Barrie to somehow convince Grant to join such other Fabergé luminaries as Joe Namath, Muhammad Ali, and Margaux Hemingway to pitch their company's products.
Taplinger had cannily put Barrie and Grant together, hoping their show business backgrounds might help put them in business together.* Born in New York City, Barrie fancied a career as a musician and during his early songwriting years supported himself by using his charismatic personality to sell hair-care products for a company called Rayette. By the '60s, he was half owner, created the Brut line of cosmetics for men, and came up with the idea of name endorsements as a way to sell the cologne. The formula worked, sales skyrocketed, and Brut became ubiquitous, with celebrities pitching it in numerous television ads and in magazines all over the world. Barrie then sold Brut to Fabergé for a reported $50 million and continued to run the promotional side of the company while writing songs for Hollywood movies.
During the flight, alone with Grant, Barrie proposed that the actor consider joining the board of Fabergé, a position that offered only a token annual salary of $15,000 (with stock options) but would require nothing more than the occasional personal appearance. As part of the deal, Fabergé would provide a permanent suite at the Warwick Hotel in New York, unlimited use of the corporate jet for business and personal reasons, limousines and drivers everywhere around the world, and any and all expenses incurred promoting Fabergé to be paid for by the company.
Barrie did not think he had much of a chance of getting the actor to accept the deal, but to his surprise, shortly after returning to L.A., he received a phone call from Grant saying he would love to be associated with the worldfamous cosmetics firm as its “Good Will Ambassador.” The next day Barrie formally announced Grant's assignment to Fabergé's board of directors. The day after that the company's stock rose two full points.
As Grant later told reporter Cindy Adams, he was delighted to represent Fabergé because “The use of my name doesn't harm the company and I'm permitted to do whatever I choose. They ask can I be someplace and I say yes or no. People flock to actors.”*
The Fabe
rgé deal gave Grant something to do with all the time he now had on his hands. Instead of making movies where he played rich, sophisticated tycoon bachelors, as in That Touch of Mink, he could now be that rich, sophisticated tycoon in real life. Shortly after he joined Fabergé, Grant accepted another, even more surprising corporate invitation, this time to become a full member of the board of directors at MGM. Even though for most of his professional life he had been considered an outsider to the studio system, he jumped at the offer because the package allowed for unlimited accommodations at the entertainment conglomerate's new hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. To celebrate Grant's assignment to the board, the studio named the main screening room at its Culver City headquarters the Cary Grant Theater.
That same year he purchased his first stock in the Hollywood Park Race Track from his good friend, proprietor Marje Everett. The track had a storied history as the locale for the famous Hollywood Turf Club, formed in 1938 under the chairmanship of Jack Warner. Its six hundred original club members were a roster of 1930s greats, including Al Jolson, Raoul Walsh, Joan Blondell, Ronald Colman, Walt Disney, Bing Crosby, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Ralph Bellamy, Hal Wallis, Anatole Litvak, and Mervyn LeRoy. It was LeRoy who had first brought Grant to the track and introduced him to the so-called Sport of Kings.*
For a while he considered moving back to London to stay with his mother for the rest of her life. He decided against it, however, when his lawyers told him the courts would never allow Jennifer to travel abroad with him. Instead he bought a new and bigger home on five acres of land in Beverly Hills that he designed himself, with Eastern, Hebrew, and Mediterranean-inspired interiors, to accommodate Jennifer on her overnight and every-otherweekend visits. He gave her the biggest bedroom and always made sure it was stocked with lots of toys and dolls.