Cary Grant (17 page)

That September, while they were out having dinner, Grant mistook Cherrill's familiar squinting at the menu for flirting with someone at another table. They bickered about it, an argument that continued until they got home, where it escalated until, according to Cherrill, Grant slapped her hard across the face.

The next morning she packed her things and returned to her mother's apartment in Hancock Park, vowing never to live under the same roof with a madman.

“She liked to flirt, there was no question about it, whether or not the incident that sparked the violence actually happened,” recalled Teresa McWilliams. “And he was incredibly jealous. She had this lovely laugh, and enjoyed men playing up to her, while Cary was just unbelievably possessive. I suppose it was his way of being nuts about her. What made her finally leave, though, was the night he hit her. She still loved him, but she became afraid of him, and because of that slap it was a fear that could never go away.”

Grant knew he had gone too far. The next day all traces of his anger were gone, replaced by a profound remorse. In the days and weeks that followed, he began to drink more heavily and was often seen at the studio during rehearsals or going over lines holding a paper cup of scotch that he tried to pass as tea.

At night he turned to Scott for sympathy, but got none. Scott was glad Cherrill had finally left. Besides the fact that she had managed to crash his private party of two, he simply couldn't stand anything about her. He con- sidered her pretentious, self-centered, boring, and ill-mannered, and her incessant laugh drove him crazy. He told Grant he ought to count his lucky stars he was rid of the woman.

Instead, Grant desperately tried to reestablish contact with Cherrill. The last week in September, he finally managed to get her on the phone and begged her to return to their apartment at La Ronda. She agreed to meet with
him at a party, believing she would be safe in a crowd. But once they were together, Grant could not control his rage. He angrily accused her of being unfaithful to him during their separation, demanding to know with whom she had been staying. He dismissed her moving back in with her mother as nothing more than a flimsy cover story.

They never made it back to his apartment. Cherrill stormed out of the party alone, and the next morning contacted gossiper Louella Parsons, with whom she had become good friends, to give her the “exclusive!” on “The Cary Grant–Virginia Cherrill Separation!” In Parsons's next column, she reported that Cherrill had told her the following: “Whether it is permanent or not is up to Cary. I will not discuss the reason for our trouble, but things have been going from bad to worse. I left Cary two weeks ago and consulted a lawyer, but we later patched things up, and I hoped we might make a go out of our marriage because I am in love with my husband.”

For Grant, who had no use for gossip columnists, especially after they had begun to write with annoying regularity about his relationship with Randolph Scott, this latest attempt on Cherrill's part, to use one to send him a personal message, was intolerable. Despite the hint their marriage might still be sal- vageable, Grant knew enough about how Hollywood operated to understand that Cherrill's interview had as much to do with her lawyer's building a case for a lucrative settlement than anything else.

To make matters worse, Scott was horrified at the appearance of Grant's marital problems in the columns (although it was something of a relief to have him linked with a woman rather than the usual innuendo about the two of them).

By the end of the following week Grant's drinking increased, his tele- phoned pleas to Cherrill became more desperate (and only made her more resolute), and he sank even further into twisted despair. On the evening of October 4, just after dining out alone, he returned to the apartment he had shared with Cherrill and called his closest friends, including Scott, who was right next door, offered rambling apologies for all his bad behavior, and made what sounded like nothing so much as vague farewells. He then placed one final call to Cherrill, begged her to come back, and when she refused, told her he was going to kill himself.

Following a few moments of silence, Cherrill, a seasoned player in the
ongoing emotional push-pull of their relationship, hung up, waited, and when the phone didn't ring, called Grant back. The phone was answered by Grant's part-time Filipino houseboy, Pedro, who conveniently just happened to be on duty that night. Cherrill told him she was worried that Cary himself had not picked up. Pedro said he would check on Grant, who was in his bed- room. He put the phone back in its cradle, entered the room, and found his boss stretched out on the bed, clad only in boxer shorts, with a pitcher of water and a large, nearly empty bottle of sleeping pills on the night table. In a panic, Pedro called the police emergency services, and at 2:28 in the morning an ambulance came screaming up to the front of the house, several med- ical personnel rushed in, hooked Grant up to a respirator, put him on a stretcher, and took him to Hollywood Hospital. There his stomach was pumped, his blood was tested, and despite Cherrill's initial fears that he had fatally overdosed, he quickly revived. Later on the doctors told her they had found no more than a single tablet's worth of sleeping medication in Grant's blood, but that his alcohol level had been dangerously high.

Somehow, the story of Grant's “attempted suicide” made headlines in the next afternoon papers, and working with the publicity department at Para- mount, he scrambled to come up with a story. He was instructed by the stu- dio to tell the reporters that “I had been at a party with friends, and when I got home they tried to play a joke on me. They called the police after I lay down. It was all a colossal gag.”

And a colossal lie.

There is absolutely no evidence that anybody was with Grant that night, but telephone records confirm the series of calls he made on the evening of October 4. Later on, in fact, Grant himself would change his story and describe the incident this way: “You know what whiskey does when you drink it all by yourself. It makes you very, very sad.” So much for being “at a party with friends.” He went on to say, “I began calling people up. I know I called Virginia. I don't know what I said to her, but things got hazier and hazier. The next thing I knew, they were carting me off to the hospital.”

The incident might have been more easily written off (as it has by most of Grant's biographers), if not for his mysterious and never fully explained hospital stay in England the previous December, immediately following Grant's discovery that his mother was, in fact, still alive. What had really
made Grant so ill back then that required several weeks of hospitalization? It is safe to say that the one thing it wasn't was rectal cancer. A truism says a single event is an incident, a series a pattern. It is difficult to see these two relatively close and emotionally traumatic episodes as unrelated. Curiously, all relevant hospital records in both instances have disappeared.

The divorce proceedings were not particularly lurid, but because they involved a handsome movie star and his beautiful ingenue wife, they were front-page news. Preliminary hearings began on December 11, 1934, in Los Angeles Superior Court, before the ironically named divorce court judge William Valentine. At the hearing Cherrill testified that in the three months since their separation Grant had almost completely cut her off financially, and because of it she had had to pawn her engagement ring and diamond watch and take a second loan against her car just to have enough money for food. In all that time, she claimed, Grant had given her a total of only $125. Now she demanded a thousand dollars a month, pending the finalization of their divorce, so she could properly prepare for her return to a career in films.

Grant, through his lawyer, made a counteroffer of $150 a month. When called to the bench by the judge to explain how he had arrived at his figure, Grant said, “She managed to [get along on that much] before we were married, so she could do it again.”

That was enough for Valentine. He ordered Grant to immediately start paying Cherrill $725 a month until the final settlement and subsequent dissolution of their marriage. In addition, Grant was required to post a $20,000 bond, to ensure his payment of both his and Cherrill's legal fees. Last, he was prohibited from selling any of his property.

A week later Cherrill amended her complaint to include accusations that, during their marriage, Grant “drank excessively, choked and beat her, and threatened to kill her.”

If Cary hit the roof, Zukor went through it. The last thing he needed was to lose his best and least expensive contract player to this kind of scandal. On Christmas Eve he brought the lawyers from both parties together in a secret meeting at the backlot, during which he warned Cherrill's attorneys that before any settlement could be reached, she would have to drop the charges
against Grant regarding his drinking and threats of violence. They agreed, knowing that at this point it didn't make much difference, as the columns had already headlined the accusations for the public's eager consumption.

By the time the divorce proceedings began, a still depressed Grant failed to show up in court, claiming he had to do last-minute reshoots of his two latest movies, Elliott Nugent's
Enter Madame
and James Flood's
Wings in the Dark.
It was a reasonable excuse, and Grant was allowed to have his lawyers stand in for him.

A single one-hour divorce session was held on March 26, 1935, and produced enough “revelations” from a well-rehearsed Cherrill for the next morning's papers. Her lawyer, Milton Cross, who specialized in Hollywood divorces, got her to claim, through her tears and in such a reluctantly soft voice that Valentine had to continually ask her to speak up, that her husband was “sulky, morose, took to drinking … and would argue with me on every point. He said I was lazy and ought to go to work, but when I tried to, he discouraged me and refused to let me work … he was tired of me and said he didn't want to live with me anymore.” To reinforce her claims, Cherrill's lawyers brought her mother to the stand, who testified she had seen Grant “mistreat” her daughter several times.

At Zukor's insistence, Grant had instructed his lawyers in advance not to cross-examine Cherrill or anyone else, including her mother, and to make no further comments of any kind on his behalf, either outside the courtroom to the press or inside before the judge. Grant agreed that the best thing to do was to get it all over with, even if he had to pay a premium price. In the end, the judge formally declared the eleven-month marriage over and awarded Cherrill half of Grant's property, estimated to be worth $50,000.

Less than a month later Cherrill left alone for an extended vacation in England.

Grant, meanwhile, reluctantly gave up the apartment at La Ronda and Scott quickly gave up his place next door. They returned together to the house under the hollywoodland sign on West Live Oak Drive. Scott was delirious to have Grant back and chose to pretend that nothing involving Cherrill had ever happened.

An inconsolable Grant didn't have to pretend. Nothing had, and he hated himself for it.

On the Columbia Pictures set of
The Awful Truth
(1937), Cary Grant mirrors the physical style of his director and first comic mentor, Leo McCarey.
(Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

10

O
nce he and Randolph settled back into West Live Oak Drive, Grant became something of a social recluse, refusing to leave the house for any reason except to go to the studio, fearing he would be laughed at by his friends because Cherrill had left him and because of the sordid details of her testimony. On weekends he took to sitting alone in the sun for hours at a time, with a glass of straight scotch in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other.