Authors: Marc Eliot
What is remarkable about this otherwise soapy film, besides the lumi- nous cinematography that captured Dietrich's always extraordinary beauty and overt sexuality, is the undeniable flash of dark brilliance Grant brought to his first substantial role. Von Sternberg usually allowed Dietrich to intim- idate her male costars (Emil Jannings, Victor McLaglen, Warner Oland, Adolphe Menjou, and Clive Brook; only Gary Cooper managed to come off as heartless, clever, sexual, and charming, a first-class womanizer too good- looking for his—or Dietrich's—own good). But Grant was able to deflect Dietrich's brute force—and play to the audience's sympathies—by showing compassion for Marshall's plight. He came off more noble and forgiving than weak and heartless. Audiences, women especially, loved it when Marshall took his wife back in the final scene (a plot turn hotly contested by Sternberg, who thought the studio-imposed ending was neither happy nor realistic, and that Dietrich should have wound up alone in the gutter where she belonged).
The trickiest aspect of Grant's character, and what also made his playing of it so convincing, was his ability to sustain an evil yet appealing irresistibility.
For the first time Grant showed the blueprint from which he would con- struct his style of acting—the suggestion of an emotional darkness beneath the brightness of his surface attractiveness. In the end, Grant managed to make Townsend's broken heart not merely comprehensible to audiences, but brood- ingly compassionate, all conveyed through a single last look on his wounded beautiful face that became even more beautiful
because
it was wounded.
Throughout the filming of
Blonde Venus
(and throughout his career), Sternberg maintained his brilliant if eccentric sense of visual perfectionism. During the filming of Grant's first scene, Sternberg took a comb and parted his star's hair on the right side rather than the left, the way Grant had always combed it before. The change gave Grant's already remarkable face an added symmetrical beauty. For the rest of his life Grant would comb his hair in the manner first prescribed by Sternberg. The director also lit Grant in his trade- mark shadow-and-light stylistics, which kinetically enhanced his emotionally textured performance.
Blonde Venus
came very close to being rejected by the censorial Hays Office for its depiction of Dietrich's character having an adulterous affair with Cary Grant,
enjoying
it, and then returning to her husband and child to live happily ever after. With enough alterations to satisfy the censors,
Blonde Venus
was released, and while it didn't make Grant a star, it did well enough to solidify his reputation as one of Hollywood's new crop of fast-rising actors, one of the band of British “colonists,” as they were known in Hollywood, that included C. Aubrey Smith, Ronald Colman, Basil Rathbone, Victor McLaglen, Boris Karloff, John Loder, David Niven, Charles Laughton, and of course Grant's longstanding idol and role model, Charlie Chaplin.
Grant finished out 1932 making his sixth and seventh films, William Seiter's
Hot Saturday
and Marion Gering's
Madame Butterfly.
That same year, for economic reasons Paramount eliminated many of its highest-paid performers, among them Tallulah Bankhead, George Bancroft, Buddy Rogers (who was unable to make the vocal transition to sound), the Marx Brothers (who would be picked up by Irving Thalberg at MGM and become the most successful comedy team of their era), Richard Arlen, Jeanette MacDonald, and Maurice Chevalier. This bloodletting created a casting vac- uum that helped suck surviving newcomer Cary Grant into the vacancies left by the studio's decimated top-of-the-line stars.
When trouble erupted over the casting of
Hot Saturday,
the story of a love triangle, Grant was perfectly positioned to step in. At Schulberg's directive, he took over the starring role of Romer Sheffield when Gary Cooper refused to play it on the advice of his friend Fredric March, who had also flatly turned down the part, believing the supporting role of Bill Fadden was the more sympathetic one. Schulberg then cast another studio newcomer, Randolph Scott, in the supporting role of Fadden, which had originally belonged to Grant.
Hot Saturday
wasn't much of a movie but did have a profound effect on Grant's personal life, as it marked his first meeting with Scott and the beginning of one of the longest, deepest, and most unusual love relationships in the history of Hollywood.
Grant's satisfaction at being cast in the lead of
Hot Saturday
was tempered by the studio's having to shelve its planned big-budget sound remake of its 1922 silent blockbuster
Blood and Sand,
in which he was to have played the role that the late Rudolph Valentino had created. Schulberg had been the driving force behind the remake and wanted Grant to star because of his dark-haired, tall, sleek, and sexually appealing screen presence. Schulberg, whose huge $6,500 weekly salary had afforded him far too much time to gam- ble, drink, and bed every starlet on the lot, had also caused him to lose sight of the financial realities that were closing in on Paramount. When, in 1932, Paramount could no longer make its mortgage payments on the studio's expansive real-estate holdings, and even after firing so many of its star play- ers could not make payroll, Zukor, whose studio now hovered on the brink of bankruptcy, blamed Schulberg's philandering for much of Paramount's problems, fired him, and canceled
Blood and Sand.
Grant was extremely dis- appointed at both the firing, as he had come to like Schulberg a great deal, and a lost opportunity to become the logical successor to the still manically worshiped and so far irreplaceable Valentino. Grant feared such a star- making role might never come his way again.
His next film seemed to bear this fear out: a musical version of
Madame Butterfly,
whose script he found all but incomprehensible. The thankless role of Lieutenant Pinkerton, who drives Cho-Cho San (Sylvia Sidney) to suicide, was yet another that Cooper had flatly refused to play.
Madame Butterfly
was one of many Hollywood films of the 1930s that catered to the country's growing interest in Eastern culture. Unfortunately,
to make the film “comprehensible” to the general public, Paramount chose to Westernize the Japanese characters, giving all the leads to well-known Anglo Hollywood actors and actresses. The film captured Grant's already dated singing style in his solo “My Flower of Japan,” a music-hall hiccough that infringed on his thin, reedy tenor. It remained to the very end (along with
Singapore Sue
) one of the films that Grant most detested. In later years he actually tried to buy the negative in order to destroy it.
WHILE THE FORWARD THRUST
of Grant's early film career seemed to have been stalled by
Madame Butterfly,
Zukor decided to bet the studio's future on one final extravaganza, a film version of Mae West's 1928 scandal- splattered Broadway stage hit,
Diamond Lil,
the sequel to her 1926 self- written stage smash, unsubtly titled
Sex,
very loosely based on Somerset Maugham's short story
Rain.
The project had originally been signed by Schulberg, who believed its sensational star and vehicle couldn't help but make a fortune for the studio. In New York the stage version had caused many highly publicized police “raids” for “lewdness, nudity and profanity.”
*
What worked on Broadway was one thing; turning it into a hit movie would prove to be quite another. With the Hays Office gaining power in Hollywood, the major studios had become increasingly hesitant to make movies that Will Hays deemed too controversial, too antisocial, or too sexu- ally explicit. Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, was the first to consider a screen version of
Diamond Lil
but was ultimately pressured by Hays into giving up the idea, even after signing West to a generous contract.
Indeed, West's persona as a fleshy, smirky sex goddess without modesty or morals had made her as pervasive a pop culture phenomenon as Chaplin's celebrated “Little Tramp.” One of West's favorite publicity stunts was to allow herself to be photographed in her famous “swan” bed, whose headboard looked like nothing so much as the bare upper thighs of a Victorian woman with skirts hiked high up the front. Her enduring popularity—her audiences wanted to know everything about her, including what she wore in the
boudoir (“a black lace nightgown, sometimes with black stockings”)—trans- lated into money, a lot of it, and her talent for making it finally convinced Zukor to greenlight Schulberg's offer to West of a $5,000-a-week salary (above the negotiated rights for
Diamond Lil
) to star in the movie version of her play for Paramount.
Less than six weeks after her arrival in L.A. in the fall of 1932, Zukor, eager to see some return on his investment, put West into a quickie film role as Maudie Triplett, opposite another Paramount Valentino-hopeful, song- and-dance man George Raft, who bore a slight physical resemblance to the dead actor but lacked his charm, mystery, and heat.
The seventy-minute film,
Night After Night,
proved a huge winner at the box office, and West received rave reviews, while Raft was all but ignored.
Photoplay,
one of the most influential film magazines of the time, said, “Wait till you see Mae West. An out-and-out riot!” Zukor then hired Schulberg back on a freelance basis to produce
Diamond Lil,
having promised the Hays Office a complete rewrite of the original stage version and a cleaned-up, san- itized film version, not just of the play but of the West persona, as well. After changing the project's name to
She Done Him Wrong,
the film was added to the fall production schedule. George Raft, originally cast by Zukor as the love interest, was at Schulberg's directive replaced by Cary Grant, who had always been the producer's first choice to play opposite West.
One of the most erroneous yet persistent myths about Cary Grant is that he was discovered by Mae West while both were strolling the Paramount backlot, that she took one look at him and said, “If that guy can talk, I'll take him—he's the only one who could do justice to the role of ‘The Hawk.'” Several versions of this “moment of discovery” exist; the most popular comes from West's own memoirs.
*
Here she recalls visiting the Paramount lot one day in 1932 prior to signing on to film
Diamond Lil
and seeing “a sensational- looking man walking along the studio street… the best thing I'd seen out
there.” According to West, she then insisted that Grant be her costar or there wouldn't be a film.
*
Grant himself flatly denied the story many times, always claiming, “It wasn't true. Mae West didn't discover me. I'd already made four pictures before I met her.”
†
In an interview he gave to
Screen Book
in December 1933, he gave this version of the story: “I had met Miss West one night at the [American] Legion [Friday night] fights at the Hollywood American stadium. I understand that she had already seen me and asked for me to play ‘The Hawk’ in her picture. It seems that during her search for a suitable leading man, she had seen me getting out of my studio car and decided I was the type to play opposite her. I suppose it was because she is blond and I am dark and we make a suitable contrast. Another factor in my getting the role in
She Done Him Wrong
was that Lowell Sherman, the director, had liked my work with Miss Dietrich in
Blonde Venus.
”
In fact, both West's and Grant's version were likely made up, and for good reason. Grant and West had appeared on Broadway at the same time for sev- eral seasons and became quite well acquainted during this period. As it hap- pens, while West was developing her sex goddess stage image, she was also running a highly successful male escort service. One stresses that there is no smoking gun, but because of how perfectly the timings mesh (West was run- ning her service before, during, and after the two-year period when Grant “disappeared”), it is tantalizing to wonder if Grant worked for her, and if she was, in fact, the otherwise unknown, unidentified “Marks.”
Because of the studio's financial difficulties, the film was given an eighteen-day shooting schedule (instead of the fifteen to twenty weeks nor- mally allotted a “big” picture). Filming began on November 21, after the full seven-day rehearsal period that West had insisted upon. Set in a Bowery bar at the turn of the twentieth century, the sanitized but still raunchy story cen- ters on Lady Lou, the proprietor of the Dance Hall (a standard euphemism
for a house of prostitution), corun by West's husband (Noah Beery Sr.), which sells beer to the boys while also dealing in a little white sexual slavery on the side. Captain Cummings, aka “The Hawk” (Grant), is an undercover cop running a nearby missionary and is bent on “saving” her. One of the most famous (and often misquoted) lines in all of film history is uttered in
She Done Him Wrong
with a moistness hard to misinterpret, when Lil meets Cummings for the first time and says, “Why don't you come up sometime, see me. I'll tell your fortune.” By the end of the film, after a series of bizarre plot twists, love changes and redeems them both. In the final scene, Cummings leads her away, with the strong suggestion he is going to reform her first, then marry her. They get into a cab and Grant removes all the rings on her fingers so he can slip a single small diamond on one. Lou looks into his eyes and murmurs, “Tall, dark, and handsome,” to which he replies, “You bad girl.” “You'll find out,” she says, sucking in her cheeks and smiling wickedly as the film ends.
*
She Done Him Wrong,
West's second film, was, in retrospect, the best per- formance of her career. It was loosely based on her own early experiences in New York, the saloon being a substitute for the stage, white slavery a refer- ence to her (and possibly Grant's) escort days, and her arrest at the end rem- iniscent of the legal troubles her shows had run into with the city's moral squads.
It was also the eighth and final film Grant made in 1932 and, after this highly productive year, the one that brought him closer than ever to the first rank of Paramount's leading men.
†
Ironically, it was Grant's approach to playing
the romantic lead in
She Done Him Wrong
that did it. His onscreen aloof- ness, a reflection of nothing so much as his own uncertainty as to how to play a love scene opposite the voracious West, was taken by the public to be just the opposite—manly, moral resistance to Lil's many charms—and created a new type of romantic sophisticate, not only for Grant but for the legions of actors who would thereafter try to imitate him. Grant's “Hawk” was under- played and always gentlemanly, resistance translated into self-assurance and moral righteousness, all highly glossed with what would become his trade- mark shimmering elegance.