Cary Grant (11 page)

No one was more surprised than Grant at how successful he was opposite the voracious West. As in the past, he had tried to mask what he thought of as his own lack of any true acting style by emulating his performing idols, Chaplin, Noël Coward, Jack Buchanan, Rex Harrison, and Fred Astaire. Years later Grant perceptively and graciously summed up his acting in
She Done Him Wrong
as a combination of pose and impersonation. “I copied other styles I knew until I became a conglomerate of people and ultimately myself,” he told an interviewer. “When I was a young actor, I'd put my hand in my pocket trying to look relaxed. Instead, I looked stiff and my hand stuck in my pocket wet with perspiration. I was trying to imitate what I thought a relaxed man looked like.”

Nevertheless, the physical image of Cary Grant seemed even more per- fect on the big screen than it had on stage. In his early movies especially, the camera quickly discovered and magnified the perfection of his features, the beautiful dark and sharp eyes that sat carved beneath his thick black brows, the handsome nose, the flawlessly smooth skin, the thick, slick hair always perfectly cut and parted, and that remarkable cleft in his chin, whose two smooth and curved bulges resembled nothing so much as a beautiful woman's naked behind while she was on her knees in sexual supplication before the godlike monument of his face.

Opposite West, Grant's arched body language seemed to react with bemused distaste, an apparent product of calculated wit. He smartly held his own by not allowing himself to get engaged in a competition he could not win. In the silvery sheen of sharp black and white, all Grant had to do was show up and let his irresistible face be photographed in shadowed cuts, as if caught in the flash of lightning. Holding his own, however, was not enough.

Working with West had taught him a valuable lesson. As long as he was the pursuer, the focus was always going to be on the object of his affection. The thing to be in any movie was the one pursued. It was what all front-rank stars in Hollywood benefited from, and why he was not yet in their league. Should he ever have the opportunity to call the shots, as West had, he promised him- self, he would make himself the object of his co-stars', and by extension the audience's, heated pursuit. Eventually this decision would come to define the essence of, and the reason for, Cary Grant's superstar persona.

The enormous profits generated by
She Done Him Wrong
were enough, for the time being at least, to save Paramount from impending bankruptcy. Costing what was then a risky $200,000, the film earned more than $2 mil- lion in its initial three-month domestic run, making it one of the highest- grossing and most profitable films Hollywood had ever produced. It would go on to gross an additional million dollars worldwide in first release (despite being banned in Australia after its premiere and in several other smaller mar- kets), and it remains to this day one of West's few films still shown on the theatrical revival circuit and on cable TV's classic movie channels.

For her next movie, Paramount agreed to pay West $300,000 plus writing royalties to star in
I'm No Angel.
^*
Grant was once again assigned to costar, and in appreciation for his contribution to the success of
She Done Him Wrong,
Paramount raised his salary from $450 to $750 a week. By contrast, he knew, West was being paid a mint. Not because she was a better actor than he was (although that might have been the case), but because she was a bet- ter businessperson. Like his idol, Chaplin, she had managed to remain a per- picture independent, able to demand and get her price, one that, unlike Broadway money, could be parlayed into a real fortune. In the theater, an actor (with rare exceptions, such as run-of-the-play contracts) was paid for a single performance, or number of performances, and if asked to go on the road, paid again. An actor in film was also paid once, but the film could earn residual money as long as it could be run and rerun. The only way, Grant realized, to get some of that money was to do what Chaplin and West had done, to find a way to own a piece of the pie.

Even before production began on
I'm No Angel
(during which time Grant made three more nondescript studio “quickies”),
^*
he had already begun to formulate a plan for his own financial emancipation.

SHORTLY AFTER THE SUCCESS OF
She Done Him Wrong,
as if on the studio's cue, Cary Grant's steady ride to stardom was threatened by rumors that were being spread by the studio-controlled gossip columnists. Everyone in the business knew these journalists-cum-rumormongers were organs of the industry, used to keep their players in line. Hedda Hopper, Sheilah Graham, and Louella Parsons owed their success to easy access behind the studios' iron gates, where all the “good” stories were. The hard truth was, no matter how talented a director, screenwriter, or producer, no matter how crucial they may have been to the suc- cess of their movies, no one cared about them or went to see a film because of them, at least not knowingly. The only real attraction factor in the studio era was star power. For this reason the studios carefully stroked the egos of their stars and at the same time sought to control them by resisting union movements, never grooming noncontract players for stardom, and most effectively, imposing the so-called morals clause. The public, the studios knew, would tolerate a lot, was in fact titillated by the endlessly reported bouts of drinking, fighting, illicit but consentual sex, and even, for a while, subversive politics (like liberal Hollywood's romance with the Lincoln Brigade). Everyone, however, drew the same line in the moral sand when it came to the three absolute no-nos: het- erosexual rape, child molestation, and male homosexuality.

No star, however big, ever completely escaped the gossip rumor mill— those who had affairs, those who didn't, those who weren't gay, those who were, those who were suspected, and those targeted by a rival studio. Gary Cooper, known in the industry for the size of his penis (huge) and his love of gorgeous women (insatiable), because of his extremely pretty face and enormous box office clout was a favorite target of rival studios, who used to continually hint that he really preferred men to women (ridiculous).
^†

But the same stories about Grant—who, unlike Cooper, had never been romantically attached to any woman during his New York years and now not in Hollywood—made the heads of Paramount a bit nervous. Their anxiety grew after their biggest female star, Marlene Dietrich, who made a habit of literally taking the measure of her male costars—during the filming of
Morocco
she raved about the size of Cooper's sex organ and his ability to use it—let it be known among her inner circle, who then informed the gossips, that in the love department, Grant got an “F for fag.” He was, she claimed, “a homosexual.” Grant's angry and unconvincing response was to hint at Dietrich's well-known penchant for women, saying, “If women want to wear men's clothes, let them do men's work.” He didn't mean construction.

The niggling rumors about Grant's sexual preferences, generated by com- peting houses and spread by the gossips, took a giant step into the public's consciousness when Tallulah Bankhead, his costar in
Devil and the Deep,
who had tried and failed to bed Grant, publicly echoed Dietrich's evaluation of his lack of sexual interest in women. Next to give him the failing grade was his
Sinners in the Sun
costar Carole Lombard. This landslide of negative evaluations that began to show up in the gossip columns became increasingly difficult for either the studio or the public to ignore.

To counter the running rumors, Paramount arranged for a torrent of sanc- tioned newspaper “interviews” and “inside stories” to be published about Cary Grant—“The Lover,” “The Ultimate Ladies' Man,” “The All Around Athlete”—and flooded magazines with photos of him taken with every leading woman it had under contract. Grant, for his part, seemed willing to play the publicity game, hoping that in the end it would result in his greater value to the studio, and therefore to himself. Another reason he was reluctant to rock any boats was that Neale's Smart Men's Apparel—in which he had invested, hoping it would turn into a nationwide franchise and make him a millionaire—had turned into a bottomless money pit and sucked him dry of nearly every penny he had before it finally went under.

On the other hand, much to Paramount's dismay, the rumors about Grant's standoffishness with women failed to induce him to behave with caution. A few months earlier, in the fall of 1932, Grant and Phil Charig had moved out of their small Sweetzer apartment into a larger, although still cozy house by Hollywood-movie-star standards, on West Live Oak Drive in
Griffith Park, nestled just below the giant-lettered hollywoodland sign, a place that afforded them a fabulous view of the night-lighted sky of Tinseltown.
^*
Then, just before Grant began shooting
She Done Him Wrong,
Charig sat his roommate down and broke the news that he was giving up trying to break into the motion-picture-scoring business, had packed his things, and was returning to New York City to work on Broadway.

If Charig thought Grant might try to convince him to change his mind and stay, he was mistaken. Instead, Grant told him he understood, thought he was doing the right thing, wished him well, and asked him how soon he could leave.

One week after Charig's departure, Grant put out a permanent welcome mat for his new roommate: the young, single, handsome, and athletic con- tract player he had met during the filming of
Hot Saturday,
Randolph Scott.

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