Authors: Marc Eliot
Without hesitation, he went over and politely asked her if she could see. When she laughed and said of course, he invited her to audition for the film.
Exactly one month later Cherrill found herself in front of Chaplin's cam- era, starring as the heartbreakingly beautiful blind flower girl. After Louella Parsons visited the set that day, in her next column she breathlessly described Cherrill as “Hollywood's greatest beauty.”
Although virtually every account has them involved in a passionate romance by the time the cameras started to roll, Cherrill always insisted she never had any romantic interest in Chaplin. In fact, when they met, she was already engaged to the well-known New York–based millionaire Rhinelander William “Willie” Stewart, and all during the filming of
City Lights,
she was regularly traveling east to join him on weekends. However, Stewart, like Adler, did not approve of acting as a suitable career for a married woman, and when she refused to quit the movie, he broke the engagement. The
timing of their split fueled speculation in the gossip columns that she and Stewart had parted because she had become involved with Chaplin.
Not that Chaplin would have minded, and not that he didn't try. But when she turned down his advances, he began to complain about her lim- ited acting abilities. According to Chaplin, she didn't even know how to hold a flower properly, or to mouth her one crucial line, “Flower, sir,” that Chaplin wanted to shoot in close-up. According to Cherrill, once he lost sex- ual interest in her, he no longer wanted her in his film. “Most of the actresses that worked for him became involved with him,” Cherrill said later. “He sud- denly thought I was too old. After all, I was twenty and had been divorced.”
Things got so bad between them that Chaplin actually fired Cherrill mid- way through
City Lights
and intended to replace her with Georgia Hale, the star of his 1925
The Gold Rush,
until he realized how costly the casting change would be. As the principal financier of his own movies, he found himself caught in a financial squeeze when Cherrill insisted that before she would return, her salary would have to be doubled, from $75 a week to $150. Chaplin reluctantly agreed.
Despite all the off-screen folly, advance word on
City Lights
was extremely positive, so much so that even before its 1931 release, Cherrill was signed to a contract by Fox studios and immediately cast opposite a young and still-unknown contract player by the name of John Wayne, in Seymour Felix's instantly forgettable 1931 campus comedy,
Girls Demand Excitement.
*
The night Cary Grant met her, because of
City Lights,
she was a bigger star than he was
.
He had recognized her outside the Brown Derby and— uncharacteristically for him—walked right up and introduced himself. As they both waited for their partners and their cars, he asked if they might have lunch together some time. Cherrill happily gave the handsome actor her phone number. By now she and her mother had moved to a small apartment in Hollywood, and it was there she received a phone call the next morning from Grant, inviting her that same afternoon for a bite to eat at the Paramount
commissary. Over coffee he asked Cherrill to dinner and she accepted. That night when he showed up at her apartment, she told him she hoped he didn't mind, but she had invited her mother along. Not at all, Grant said. In truth, he found the idea altogether delightful.
They began dating regularly and continued to see each other all during the making of
She Done Him Wrong,
a development that delighted Zukor, who arranged for photographers and reporters to follow the two whenever they were out in public. If all this media attention bothered Grant, he didn't show it. Again, uncharacteristically, he dutifully and happily posed for as many pictures as the paparazzi wanted. Scott, meanwhile, sat home and stewed with jealousy. While he usually found the women with whom the stu- dio provided for him and Grant to be a hoot, he found nothing amusing about Cherrill. He told Grant he didn't approve of her, that she was an oppor- tunist, and refused to socialize with the two of them. Grant calmly told him he was wrong about Cherrill, and then let it go at that.
Upon completion of
She Done Him Wrong,
after only a few days off that he spent with Cherrill, Grant returned to the studio at Zukor's insistence to begin shooting
Woman Accused,
his first film of 1933.
Woman Accused
was based on a highly popular magazine article that had been commissioned by
Liberty,
wherein ten famous authors of the day
*
combined their talents to write a murder mystery, each tackling a separate chapter.
He followed that one without a break by appearing in Stuart Walker's
The Eagle and the Hawk,
costarring opposite Fredric March in a World War I melodrama in which a heroic lieutenant (March) is destroyed by the ravages of war. Although March and a fellow officer (Grant) dislike each other at the start of the film, by the end, through March's moral humanitarianism, Grant's character comes to understand the true meaning of heroism. Strongly antiwar in its sentiment, Paramount hoped to cash in on the populist senti- ments of the so-called Lost Generation.
Schulberg, hired once again by Zukor to produce the film, had originally wanted Gary Cooper and George Raft to play the leads, but they considered the film's ending too downbeat—Raft's character commits suicide—and
both refused to be in it. The film was then recast with March in Cooper's role and Grant in Raft's, and Carole Lombard and a romantic story line were added to make March's character more appealing to women. Shooting was completed in four weeks.
Grant, despite suffering a back injury during an especially elaborate special-effect stunt-bomb explosion, was immediately put into yet another production the day after he finished his last scene. This time it was Louis Gasnier and Max Marcin's
Gambling Ship,
a sorry mishmash involving gam- blers, gangsters, and lovers, in which Grant played a character who was all three, opposite Glenda Farrell and Benita Hume. In the film, Grant had lit- tle more to do than look good in a tuxedo—something at which he was by now quite adept.
His schedule left little time for Cherrill and even less for Scott. None- theless, because of all the studio-encouraged publicity, Grant and Cherrill had become Hollywood's newest hot couple and were invited everywhere. Although, by necessity, they had to turn down most offers, one place Grant especially wanted to go to with her was Hearst's castle at San Simeon, where, despite Cherrill's history with him, he hoped to finally meet Charlie Chaplin. The first time Grant and Cherrill made the three-hour drive from L.A. up the coast highway to the castle, the silent-screen legend, who had been invited by Hearst specifically to meet Grant, failed to show.
The Grant/Cherrill relationship as presented to the public was a picture-perfect romance and, for a time, it actually was. Cherrill felt a strong sexual attraction to Grant from the first time she laid eyes on him, and eagerly looked forward to spending every weekend she could with him, soon charmed by his quick wit and polite manner as well as his astonishing good looks.
Early on, during a black tie dinner one night at the Mocambo, one of Grant's acrobatic partners from his early years with the Pender troupe hap- pened to walk in. Grant recognized him, called him over, and threw his arms around the fellow. He asked him how he was, what he was doing, where he was staying. At one point he asked Grant if he still remembered how to do a backflip. “Of course,” Grant said.
“I'll bet you fifty dollars you can't do it right here and now.”
Without hesitation Grant went up to the bandleader and asked if he could have a drum roll. The room quickly hushed, and everyone's focus shifted to the center of the dance floor, where Grant did a fast half-dozen backflips straight across it, after which the room broke out in whistles and applause. Smiling, Grant returned to his table and stuck his hand out to col- lect his fifty dollars. Cherrill, by now in hysterics, would often recall that night as one of the funniest and most enjoyable she had spent with Grant. For his part, for the rest of his life, Grant would tell friends that Virginia Cherrill had the best sense of humor of any of his wives.
However, according to Cherrill's longtime friend Teresa McWilliams, it was not all backflips and giggles between the two. Far from it. “From the beginning, they were inseparable, even with Scott around nearly all the time. Inseparable and, almost from the beginning, fighting with each other. The essential problem was Cary's incredible jealousy. Virginia had this lovely laugh, and a naturally flirty way, and he was absolutely nuts about her, but it was those very qualities that also drove him nuts whenever any other man paid the least bit of attention to her. And some of those who did were pretty formi- dable. She was always either at his studio or working on a picture somewhere in those days, or just hanging out at one of the studio commissary soda foun- tains where men like Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy were always after her. When Grant heard about these goings-on, he made time in his day no matter what else he was doing, even shooting a picture, to drop in to visit Cherrill without letting her know he was coming, and if she was working, he would stand off to the side and watch, for hours if necessary, to make sure no one got too close to her.
“Often, at night, when Cary was either away, busy rehearsing or, as it was most of the time he just didn't want to go out, she'd take herself to the Brown Derby, where every man would flock around her, and she'd have a drink or two, laugh, tell jokes, and be the lighthearted girl she really was.”
Every man, that is, except Randolph Scott, who, Cherrill couldn't help but notice, despite his obvious dislike for her, seemed now to always be pre- sent. Having realized that Cherrill was not going to go away that quickly, Scott had changed his tactics and decided he had better make himself a vis- ible factor in her relationship with Grant. He often came along whenever the
two of them went to dinner and would then hang around, waiting in the car until after Grant took her home. Studio executives noticed it as well, espe- cially in the publicity photos that usually included the three of them, and often offered to supply Scott with a female starlet to serve as his companion on these “double dates,” a suggestion the actor flatly refused.
Scott's jealousy was tempered by the fact that the studio had continued pressing him to counter the growing rumors about his “odd” relationship with Grant, who at least had a girlfriend. The last thing Scott wanted was a woman. Several years older than his partner, he was committed to their pri- vate way of life, less certain of a successful career in film, and wished to live out his years only with Grant.
To remind him of just that, midway through the filming of
Gambling Ship
the wealthy Scott gave Grant an expensive present—a house on the Santa Monica beach, one block south of Wilshire Boulevard, to use as their private getaway from the relentless Hollywood publicity scene (and Virginia Cherrill).
The house, adjacent to the fabled Malibu Beach, stood along an exclu- sive spit of waterfront known as Millionaire's Row. Scott had bought it from Norma Talmadge, a silent-screen star whose career had ended with her inability to make the transition to sound. He customized it with every luxury imaginable, including a private gymnasium, an indoor heated swimming pool, and a sumptuously appointed kitchen, and presented the keys to Grant as if to show him that he could provide him with the kind of good things in life that his actress girlfriend couldn't. Even though Scott gave the house to Grant, he put the lease in both their names, his only proviso being that if either of them got married, the other would have the right to buy out the rest of the property.
Grant immediately took to the place and brought in his favorite piece of furniture, in fact his
only
piece of furniture—his bed, which he installed in his own, separate bedroom. Eight feet long and six feet wide, it came with a headboard complete with bookshelves, lights, radio, clock, mirror, telephone stand, even a fold-down writing desk. At one point, he told a reporter lucky enough to get a personal tour of the beach house that his goal was to retire at sixty and spend the rest of his life in bed, as long as it was
that
bed.
Although he tried not to show it to either Scott or Cherrill, the growing
tension caused by their uneasy three-way relationship, on top of his nonstop work schedule, was starting to take its emotional toll on Grant. His one-pack- a-day smoking habit increased to two. He began drinking more than ever. He developed serious insomnia and took pills to help him drop off into an always fitful sleep.
After several months of their odd public threesome, stories began to appear in the press of Grant's impending marriage to Cherrill. When Grant con- fronted Zukor, he denied having anything to do with it. He then asked Cherrill if she was the source, but she vehemently denied that the rumor had come from her. She pointed the finger at Scott, figuring he was doing it to cause problems between them. (She was wrong. The source, in fact, was Schulberg.)
Scott blew up over the press releases and insisted Grant promise him he was not interested in anything long-term with Cherrill. To keep Scott happy, Grant told any and all reporters or columnists who asked that his schedule was simply much too busy at the moment to permit him to concentrate on something as important and life-changing as marriage.
These comments in turn infuriated Cherrill, who retaliated by openly revisiting one of her former Hollywood lovers. In 1930, shortly after divorcing her husband and arriving in L.A., and prior to her second engagement and working for Chaplin, she had had a passionate, if brief, affair with pianist and actor Oscar Levant. Throughout the making of
City Lights,
Cherrill, although engaged to Stewart, resumed seeing Levant. From the time she met Grant, she had carefully avoided a still-smitten Levant until Grant's com- ment about his being too busy to consider marriage was published. One night after Cherrill had left for the evening, Grant, who suspected she was seeing somebody else, followed her in his Packard to her house in Hancock Park, where she was now living, still with her mother, and became incensed when he saw Levant pull up a few minutes later in his green Ford. Grant waited until Levant went inside, then repeatedly rammed the back of the car with his much heavier yellow Packard. Years later Levant recalled this peculiar inci- dent by noting with bemusement, “The only thing I got out of [my] love [affair with Cherrill] was a bill for damages to my car. I thought it was a peculiar way of anyone's showing his strength, even though I sympathized with Grant's mood.”