Cary Grant (14 page)

On a drive to Santa Barbara the following weekend, Cherrill tried to dis- cuss with Grant what had happened, but his unwillingness to admit he had acted like a lunatic only angered her more. She then asked him to pull into a bus depot so she could go to the bathroom. He did, she got out, went to the ladies' room, and then slipped out a side door and boarded the next bus back to L.A. Grant waited nearly an hour before he finally realized what she had done. He irately turned the Packard around and gunned his way home.

Other times when she was angry or frustrated with Grant, Cherrill sim- ply left Los Angeles without telling him where she was going, or with whom. On more than one occasion she would go to the airport, get on a plane, and fly to New York to rendezvous with Stewart. She always made sure their liaisons made it into the columns, so that Grant could not help but find out. These actions sent him into romantic somersaults.

Grant began filming Wesley Ruggles's
I'm No Angel
in the summer of 1933. He had mixed feelings about returning to the screen in what was essen- tially another star vehicle for Mae West in which he had little more to do than feed her straight lines.

In
I'm No Angel
West plays Tira, a circus performer who specializes in lion-taming while hustling rich men on the side. Grant is Jack Clayton, a wealthy, sexually shy socialite who easily falls for Tira's calculated charms. He asks her to marry him but then breaks up with her, she sues him for breach of promise, he lets her win, and in the final reel true love provides the real settlement. They reconcile, at least for the time being, with neither one having changed in the least.

In real life, the relationship between Grant and West was anything but loving. He resented what he considered her on-set star trips, in which she dic- tated everything from camera angles to light focus, and this time around she made Grant's character, as she insisted he portray him, as exciting as a wet mop. Lacking the inner fire and passion needed to play against each other, the film's conflict fell flat.

West was so dissatisfied with Grant that she refused to film her love scenes with him. Instead, she had them shot in single isolated takes, so that her face and dialogue would be shot one day, and his the next, edited later on to make
it seem as if they had played the scene together. Grant was humiliated and told the studio in no uncertain terms that he would never work with West again.

For the public, however, Grant appeared gracious. When a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
asked him if the legendary West sexual “magic” had worked on him, he said, carefully choosing his words, “I can't say that I'm in love with Miss West, or that she is in love with me, but I don't hesitate to admit that her screen loving really gets to you. Mae is a great actress because she is so thoroughly genuine.”

Despite all the on-set problems, their pairing once again struck box office gold, and Schulberg, who had produced the film, despite knowing how much they disliked each other, hoped to make them a permanent screen team, on the order of Sternberg and Dietrich, or Chevalier and MacDonald. Completed in September (at a cost of $225,000),
I'm No Angel
reached the- aters in November, in time to catch the Christmas holiday rush, and proved an even bigger hit than
She Done Him Wrong,

Audiences packed houses to see the spectacular scenes in which West wickedly played with the lions, cracking leather whips like a professional dominatrix to keep them in their places, and to hear her familiar double entendres:

The script was written by West, who of course gave herself the best lines.

In its first eight weeks of release
I'm No Angel
grossed more than $4 million.
In New York City it opened at the Paramount, where it set a new record for attendance, with 180,000 people buying tickets the first week alone.

WHILE GRANT WAS FILMING
I'm No Angel,
Cherrill took a role in a small independent film, Lois Weber's
White Heat,
shot on location in Hawaii.
^*
According to Cherrill, during this period of enforced separation Grant hired private detectives to spy on her. To make matters worse, while Grant spent more and more time at the Hollywood apartment to be closer to the studio during filming, Scott preferred to remain at the beach house with a new girl- friend all his own—studio contract starlet Vivian Gaye. Grant tried to take Scott's new involvement in stride. He knew he couldn't complain, with Cherrill having become a permanent part of their relationship, and he knew Scott wasn't seriously involved with Gaye. In those uncertain financial times at Paramount, Zukor had stepped up the pressure on Scott to once and for all put an end to his relationship with Grant. If they didn't, Zukor warned Scott, the studio was willing to lose him before his more popular cohabiting partner. Soon after the studio's ultimatum, Scott became involved with Gaye.

A beauty of Swiss and Russian ancestry, Gaye had fallen hard for the tall, handsome, square-jawed Scott after being personally assigned by the studio to be his date one evening in 1933 (she replaced Sari Maritza, who had become his regularly assigned companion for public double dates with Grant and Cherrill when Maritza became involved with another actor).

Although he never actually proposed to Gaye, Scott thought it wise to let her believe, for his own sake, that there was a possibility of marriage in the future, and he did not object when she told friends they were going to get married, not even when it reached the gossips. As Scott knew it would, it pleased Zukor and—for the moment at least—the heat was off.

Meanwhile, Grant was hard at work on yet another movie role, this time playing the Mock Turtle in Adolph Zukor's last-ditch effort to save the studio from going under: an all-star musical production of
Alice in Wonderland.
By now bankruptcy appeared all but inevitable, and Zukor, who had managed
to wrest total control of the studio from cofounder Jesse Lasky, put everything and everyone he had into
Alice,
hoping its success would save them for at least one more year.

Serving once again as producer, Schulberg assigned Norman McLeod to direct the Joseph L. Mankiewicz and William Cameron Menzies script, based on the Lewis Carroll classic, and he had McLeod cast every available Paramount star in it, including Gary Cooper as the White Knight, W. C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty, Sterling Holloway as the Frog, Edward Everett Horton as the Mad Hatter, Roscoe Karns as Tweedledee, Jack Oakie as Tweedledum, and Baby LeRoy as the Joker. Grant, not included in the orig- inal cast, was inserted at the last minute to play the Mock Turtle, after Bing Crosby angrily turned down what he considered an insult of a part. The film opened to mixed reviews and was taken by the public for what it was, a top- heavy novelty.

Shortly afterward, an exhausted Grant, having made five pictures in 1933, thirteen in two years, suffering from a variety of physical ailments made worse by his shattered nerves, decided it was the perfect time for himself and Cherrill—who had completed her film and returned to L.A.—to take a vacation. Now was as good a time as any, he figured, to show her England. Scott believed this choice of locale was no accident, and correctly figured Grant was taking Cherrill home to meet his family and get married.

To Grant's surprise, Cherrill was less than thrilled at the notion of a long cruise to London; not because she didn't want to make the trip—especially since Cary had begun to hint the end result would indeed be marriage—but because he insisted on waiting for Scott to finish acting in a film he was making called
Broken Dreams
so he could come along. When she asked him why Scott had to be there, Grant replied with a smile that every fellow needed a best man. Cherrill did not find it at all amusing.

The next day she accompanied Grant to Monogram Studios, where Scott was filming, all the while continuing to try to persuade him to leave his “pal” home. Their disagreement exploded into a furious argument on the set that interrupted shooting; it was a dust-up that made the local gossip columns.

The next day Scott announced his engagement to Vivian Gaye.

The day after that Grant booked passage for three on the French liner
Paris,
set to depart from New York, destination Southampton, England.

And the day after that, an enraged Cherrill flew by herself to New York City, from where she wired Grant that she was not going if Vivian Gaye wasn't. Grant wired back saying that under no circumstances was Gaye going to join them. Cherrill's response was to book passage for herself on the next liner bound for England.

And so it was that on November 23, a distressed and heavily sedated Cary Grant, accompanied by Randolph Scott, flew to New York City, headed straight for the pier to board the
Paris,
and set sail for England, where he hoped to find Cherrill and salvage their relationship.

Romantic salvation, however, would serve only as the point of departure, for upon his triumphant return to England after thirteen years in America, awaiting Grant was nothing less than a miraculous resurrection, one far more unexpected and shattering than anything he could ever have imagined or dreamed of.

Virginia Cherrill and Cary Grant arrive in Hollywood after their tumultuous wedding in London, February 1934.
(Courtesy of the private collection of the Virginia Cherrill Estate)

8

C
ary Grant was miserable because Virginia Cherrill had not come on the trip to England with him, and Scott was miserable because Grant was. So they locked themselves inside their first-class cabin and stayed drunk for the entire voyage. They never even bothered to get dressed, preferring to stay in their silk pajamas, flannel robes, and ascots while they ate, drank, and chain-smoked. All day every day Grant loudly and mournfully played the grand piano the captain had installed as a courtesy.

Grant crucified Bach while he rambled through his besotted mind and
put together a rescue plan. Should he be able to find Cherrill, he would immediately ask her to marry him, believing now that that was what it would take to get her back.