Cary Grant (12 page)

A
t first, the decision to live together seemed perfectly normal. For eco- nomic reasons more than any other, unmarried actors (and actresses) shared housing all over Hollywood. It made sense since all they needed was a place to crash for a few hours between the days they spent working at the stu- dios and nights they spent on the Strip, unwinding along the two-mile slither of no-man's-land where they could hang till dawn having all the sex, drugs, booze, or any other illicit be-bop they could think of.

Except that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott hadn't crashed. They'd fallen into something that resembled conventional love and didn't give a damn who knew it. Randy (as he was called by everyone who knew him) first met Grant on the set of
Hot Saturday.
Six years older, he was born in 1898 into a Virginia family that had made its fortune in textiles. When he was still a very young boy, the family moved to Durham, North Carolina, where he was
raised in an atmosphere of traditional southern gentility. By the time he was a teenager, Scott was six foot four, lean, muscular, and tough, with enough athletic ability and social connections to get him into Georgia Tech. He became the star of the football team with a bright future in sports when an injury forced him to give up his dream of a professional playing career. He then transferred to the University of North Carolina, where he graduated with a degree in textile engineering and manufacturing, planning to follow in his father's footsteps. But he appeared in a school play, was bitten by the acting bug, and decided, against his parents' strong objections, that upon graduation he would go west and pursue a career in movies.

He arrived in Hollywood in 1927, at the relatively late age of thirty, and promptly looked up the son of one of his father's old friends, who was in a position to help him. Howard Hughes hailed from a southern family of wealth far greater even than the Scotts'. Born and raised in Houston, he moved to California while still a teenager to study engineering at the California Institute of Technology, until the sudden death of his father in 1923 left him the sole heir to the family's billion-dollar empire. While con- tinuing to oversee the family-owned industrial tool company, Hughes, with the help of his uncle Rupert, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, set up shop as an independent film producer.

At their first meeting, Scott handed the young billionaire a formal letter of introduction from his father. Hughes took an immediate liking to the actor and decided to take him under his wing, arranged for him to study acting at the state-funded Pasadena Playhouse, and used his influence to get him some extra work at Fox. A short time later Hughes made a personal phone call to Adolph Zukor that resulted in Scott's getting an audition at Paramount for Cecil B. DeMille's upcoming 1929 production of
Dynamite.
Although he lost out on the lead role to Joel McCrea, the studio hired him as Gary Cooper's dialect coach, because his speech still held traces of the British accent he had inherited from his parents. They wanted Cooper to sound more southern, the way Scott naturally did, for his role in Victor Fleming's scheduled western epic
The Virginian.
Scott managed to land a small role in the film and did well enough that he was awarded a five-year player contract, similar to the one Grant would sign two years later.

When Grant and Scott met on the set of
Hot Saturday,
the physical attraction between them was immediate and strong. Despite the six-year age differ- ence between them, they physically resembled each other to a startling degree. A short time later, when Charig told Grant he was moving out, Grant imme- diately asked Scott to move in, an offer the actor accepted without hesitation.

Cary enjoyed having Randy around the house, even more so when he dis- covered how much they liked the same things: drinking, smoking, and expen- sive clothes. They also shared a wicked sense of humor that allowed Scott to pick up on and guffaw at every understated joke Grant tossed his way.

They were also a good match sexually. Like Scott, Grant's physical needs and desires were not particularly overheated. Sex was almost an afterthought, a natural extension of the buddy-buddy British-schoolboy-type friendship they shared.

It wasn't merely the fact that Grant and Scott lived together that fueled the rumors that had begun to shadow Grant; it was the style in which they did it. While Grant was a material minimalist when it came to furniture and decor, never willing to waste money on such things, Scott was much more the homey type and enjoyed curtains and throw rugs and carved furniture reminiscent of the ornate environment of his childhood. He was in charge of decorating the place, and Grant made the decisions about what they wore and kept the wine and spirits closet well stocked.

Cary and Randy soon became well known in Hollywood as the Damon and Pythias of Tinseltown for their lack of caution in how they chose to dis- play their affection in public. They often attended parties dressed in similar harlequin costumes, and at one Halloween soirée, for a howl, they both arrived dressed as women. When word of their incautious public displays first reached the studios, and the innuendos in the columns grew louder, Schulberg commenced to impose the publicity-defined lifestyle on them that included the endless stream of Hollywood starlets photographed with either one or both men in or near their “Bachelor Hall.”

Nonetheless, it was often impossible for the studio to disguise the pres- ence of the “coupling” that neither felt compelled to hide. When magazine reporter Ben Maddox was dispatched to do a piece on two of Hollywood's “most eligible bachelors,” he wrote what he observed this way: “Cary is the
gay, impetuous one. Randy is serious, cautious. Cary is temperamental in the sense of being very intense. Randy is calm and quiet. Need I add that all the eligible (and a number of the
in
eligible) ladies-about-Hollywood are dying to be dated by these handsome lads?”

Another quote the studio attributed to, of all people, Carole Lombard that was widely circulated also didn't help. It was actually written by a PR writer for the studio and showed up in all the columns. It claimed that Lombard was a frequent visitor to “Bachelor Hall” (she wasn't), and “marveled” at the way the two men divided their chores: “Cary opened the bills, Randy wrote the checks, and if Cary could talk someone out of a stamp, he mailed them.” The quote did not amuse Grant. Moss Hart, a frequent houseguest, was another oft-quoted source. He remembered Grant's parsimonious brand of hospitality, noting that if he stayed more than a few days, he would receive an itemized bill for his laundry, phone calls, and incidentals. Grant didn't find any humor in this, either.

Nor did it help matters any that photos of the two men at home wearing aprons somehow found their way into the newspapers, causing Hollywood gossip hack Jimmie Fiddler to go against the personal request of Schulberg to ignore the gay angle and openly wonder in print and on his syndicated radio show if the two actors weren't “carrying this buddy business a bit too far.”

Grant and Scott reluctantly accepted the studio's insistence on what it called “protective publicity” as long as it didn't interfere with their private life. Whenever asked, Grant would say he did nothing special to keep himself in shape, that his body was just naturally the way it was, but in truth he and Scott were obsessed with physical fitness. To keep themselves in peak condition, they made a competition out of it: if either one ever exceeded his designated body weight, he had to pay the other $100 (later on it became $1,000 and would be given to charity). As it happened, neither ever had to pay off the bet. Grant remained a constant 180 pounds, while Scott always kept to 190. Whenever they were home together, they worked out for two hours every morning before breakfast. Their favored routine was barbell reps, after which they would take a quick swim in the ocean. They spent their free afternoons together riding horses, Scott's favorite physical pastime.

Grant's attraction to Scott's manly attributes and southern-bred ways was nicely burnished with the one quality Grant envied most in his partner
and that he considered requisite for anyone he would ever be involved with—financial security. Grant was particularly interested in Scott's family connections to Howard Hughes and often expressed his desire to meet the famous billionaire. Scott, for his own reasons, kept the two far apart. It was one thing to cavort in outlandish costumes in Hollywood and be linked to female starlets for the sake of public consumption. It was quite another to have a family friend get too close to the real deal. Polite caution, the spine of southern upbringing, was Scott's mantra, a way of life that he vigorously applied to his relationship with Grant.

Then, on the night of September 16, 1932, when Grant and Scott attended the gala Hollywood premiere of
Blonde Venus
together, everything between them became infinitely more complicated.

Grant had been asked by the studio to accompany one of its contract star- lets to the opening, and he agreed. He then slipped up and let it be known to one reporter that his “date” for the opening was actually Scott, a fact that found its way into print. Schulberg blew a gasket, but there was nothing he could really do about it. Grant refused to take the starlet if Scott could not also come along.

The premiere was a typical black-tie-and-klieg-light affair, with all the res- ident glitterati and paparazzi present for the occasion. Schulberg held his breath as Grant, his female date, and Randy all emerged from their limo and strolled up the red carpet awash in the
pop pop
of endless gunpowder flash- bulbs. After the screening, Grant quickly and quietly ditched the girl and went with Scott to the Brown Derby on Wilshire Boulevard for a light after- supper of hors d'oeuvres and iced champagne. At midnight they made a final round of handshakes and cheek-kissings, then stepped out into the warm September night to await the arrival of their limo. Grant lit a cigarette, filled his lungs with smoke, turned his head to exhale, and noticed for the first time the attractive woman standing nearby.

He recognized her immediately. It was Virginia Cherrill, the female star of
City Lights
who had been discovered, made into a star, and—it was rumored—romanced and rejected by Charlie Chaplin.

7

M
ost accounts of the relationship between Cary Grant and Virginia Cherrill depict him as the victim of a young and cold beauty emboldened by fierce ambition, a calculating Hollywood wannabe who, via a steamy, if opportunistic, romance with Chaplin followed by a brief and stormy marriage to Grant, managed to sleep her way to the forgettable middle. But the personal recollections of friends who knew her for most of her life and the pri- vate diaries she left behind reveal a far different and hitherto unknown side to the woman who was to become the first Mrs. Cary Grant.

Born and raised in Carthage, Illinois, at the age of eighteen the five-foot- five, blue-eyed, already-ravishing blonde caught the eye of prominent Hollywood agent Irving Adler. Always on the lookout for a pretty face he could represent, he first noticed Cherrill at a local beauty contest she had entered as a lark and won while in her sophomore year at Northwestern University. Adler managed to arrange to meet her and, after a year's proper courtship, proposed marriage. Cherrill, bored with school and looking for a way up and out, accepted. They were married in Chicago, after which he moved with her to his home in Beverly Hills.

The relationship was not a very good one; the gap in their age and the difference
in their lifestyles posed insurmountable problems; in less than a year they were divorced. Although she still had no interest in anything like an acting career (fearing he would lose her, Adler had forbidden Cherrill to look for film work, which had been perfectly fine with her), she thought it might be fun now to see more of Hollywood while still young and, happily, free.

She rented a little beach house for herself in Venice and summoned her mother, who had since divorced, to come and live with her. Then, one night in the spring of 1930, the twenty-one-year-old Cherrill had a chance personal encounter with the world's most famous film star, forty-three-year-old Charlie Chaplin, that was to profoundly change her life.

It took place in downtown Los Angeles at the American Legion fights (the same arena where Grant later claimed he first met Mae West). Chaplin noticed Cherrill, who was sitting nearby with her first husband's uncle (with whom she was still friendly and who was now wheelchair-bound—the reason she often accompanied him to the bouts, in which she otherwise had no inter- est). What caught Chaplin's attention was the way Cherrill squinted as she watched the action (being extremely nearsighted and too vain to wear her glasses in public). At the time, Chaplin was having trouble casting the lead for his new movie,
City Lights,
because he felt none of the actresses he had inter- viewed knew how to play “blind,” which the main female character, the flower girl, was, and he thought this beautiful girl might actually
be
blind.