Cary Grant (18 page)

He did some last-minute reshoots for James Flood's
Wings in the Dark,
a weeper with Grant as a blind man who learns to “see” through the love of a good woman, played by Myrna Loy, in many ways a reversal of Chaplin's
City Lights
scenario, but without any of
Lights
's humor, depth, or emotion. Grant showed up for the reshoots with his face deeply tanned and insisted the studio come up with light pancake to match the skin tone of his earlier scenes. Thus began what was to become a pattern for the rest of his moviemaking days, using the sun's rays for makeup.

After
Wings in the Dark,
because of Paramount's financial problems, Grant's next film was a long time coming. While waiting for a new script, he became involved in an odd relationship with a significantly older woman who called herself Countess di Frasso, a fifty-year-old heiress whose real name was Dorothy Taylor and whose New York–based family had become wealthy in the decidedly nonroyal leather goods trade. She had acquired her title by marrying an Italian count, her second unsuccessful foray into legal bliss. He turned out to be a deadbeat with no appreciable earning skills. Their fortune, such as it was, all came from her, and it was barely enough to pay the mortgage on their beautiful Italian villa.

Nevertheless, the count and countess loved to lavishly entertain at their villa, especially visiting Hollywood celebrities, one of whom, Gary Cooper, arrived in 1931 and returned to Beverly Hills with Countess di Frasso dutifully in tow. Cooper and the countess carried on an open affair in Hollywood until he surprised everyone, including her, by suddenly marrying socialite Veronica Balfe.

The jilted countess decided that rather than return to her villa she would stay in Hollywood and soon enough, after following the details of Grant's divorce in the newspapers, marked him as her next Hollywood paramour. While it is highly unlikely that he sexually serviced her with anything like the passionate fervor that Cooper did (if he serviced her at all), they met and somehow managed to become, if not lovers, good friends. Hovering over this new relationship was the ever-present professional rivalry and personal animosity between Cooper and Grant. This time Grant got to “replace” Cooper in a way he knew would annoy his heavily narcissistic competitor.

For the next several years, the countess occasionally blew through Grant's life like an unpredictable breeze, depending upon her availability and his. Their noticeable age difference (she was twenty-two years older), his great looks (she loved being seen with him in public), her financial generosity (she paid for everything), and his appetite for social status (she was, after all, a
countess) made him the ideal companion. On Grant's side, his serial melancholia about Elsie made the countess an ideal mother-surrogate: a doting older woman willing to spoil her precious and beautiful “little boy.” In the parlance of the
real
golden days of Hollywood, as one who was there at the time rather crudely recalled, “Cary was the perfect central-casting fag to Taylor, a rich, old, self-delusional hag.”

Meanwhile the studio, deep into reorganization and temporarily unable to get major bank funding for any new films, tried to raise cash by loaning Grant to Warner Bros. as a last-minute replacement for an ailing Robert Donat in that studio's big-budget production of Michael Curtiz's
Captain Blood.
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Grant, with his natural athletic abilities, would fit perfectly into the part of the swashbuckling British pirate. But when Zukor offered him to Curtiz, Warners unconditionally turned him down. According to one version, Grant was rejected by the studio for being “too effete.” Although the quote has been often repeated, it is rarely attributed. It was actually made by Warner Bros. contract director Michael Curtiz himself, his angry reply to Jack Warner for even making the suggestion. Curtiz—the “wild Hungarian,” as he was known—had little use for Grant and his “type.” Instead, he cast
über-
heterosexual Errol Flynn to play the role that would go on to make the handsome, rugged Australian a star.

With time on his hands and his skin cooked to a golden tan roughly the tone and consistency of a holiday turkey, Grant continued to ignore Scott's advice to get out of the sun, out of the house, and back into the social scene. To make that happen, Scott finally agreed to introduce Grant to Howard Hughes, one of the few Hollywood celebrities besides Chaplin he still wanted to meet. Scott figured if anyone could get Grant's head out of his own rear end, it was Hughes; after all, MGM may have had more stars than there
were in heaven, but Hughes had all the starlets. If Grant still wanted to play with girls, a couple of nights together out on the town, Scott believed, would make him forget all about Virginia Cherrill.

Scott's reasons for wanting to put Grant and Hughes together were not completely selfless. Already thirty-seven years old, Scott had a far less successful movie career than Grant, and even fewer prospects. He figured that if he supplied Hughes with something he wanted, Hughes might give him something more in return. Hughes loved beautiful women, and Scott knew that Cary Grant was the ultimate lure.

Meanwhile, to replenish his nearly depleted post-divorce bank account, Grant accepted radio work in New York. Appearing on radio was something he had previously been opposed to, believing that giving away a performance for free would make audiences less inclined to pay to see or hear an actor perform onscreen. Nevertheless, with no films in his immediate future, on May 5, 1935, he made his debut on the airwaves starring in a live broadcast of the Lux Radio Theater, opposite Constance Cummings, a thirty-minute onetime performance for which he was paid $1,750, plus airfare and hotel.

To his surprise, he quite enjoyed the whole experience. For one thing, no physical preparation was required, and for another, it exposed him to a new group of performers, mostly East Coast types who, for a while, dominated the prime time airwaves. Throughout the next twenty years, whenever he had the opportunity, Grant worked on the radio, either as a character in a drama or as a guest on a celebrity variety show, most often with Groucho Marx on his
Kellogg Show, The Eddie Cantor Show,
and George Faulkner's talk show,
The Circle.
Whenever Grant did Faulkner's show, he would find himself alongside other Hollywood luminaries, such as his good friend British actor Ronald Colman. One time he even recorded a full-length radio version of his blindman opus,
Wings in the Dark,
that, as it turned out, worked far better on the sightless medium than it had in the movies.

He returned to making movies after the dust settled around Paramount's 1935 reorganization. Paramount Publix became Paramount Pictures and emerged from bankruptcy. In some ways, at least as far as Grant was concerned, day-to-day operations at the studio had changed little; mostly it was
business as usual.
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Gary Cooper had recently scored a tremendous success starring in Henry Hathaway's
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer,
but when Zukor wanted to make a sequel,
The Last Outpost,
both Cooper and Hathaway rejected the idea, and the project fell to studio hacks Charles Barton and Louis Gasnier, who cast Grant in the Cooper role and told him to prepare for the role by trying to look more manly. Grant's response was to grow a mustache that made him a ringer for Douglas Fairbanks.

His costar in the film was Claude Rains, who upstaged everyone else in it, including Grant.
The Last Outpost
was released in October 1935 and quickly disappeared, after which Zukor lent Grant to RKO Radio Pictures to costar opposite a new up-and-coming actress by the name of Katharine Hepburn. The move would prove crucial to Grant's career and forge two professional relationships that would profoundly affect both his career and his personal life.

Katharine Hepburn, “the Magnificent Yankee,” had been born into a line of bluebloods of Scottish descent from West Hartford, Connecticut. Her father was a noted urologist and surgeon and an early pioneer in the fight against syphilis. He was tall, good-looking, and athletic, a highly skilled investor who had become wealthy from stocks and real estate. Her mother, known to everyone as Kit, was a Boston Houghton (accounting for all six of the Hepburn children having the same Houghton middle name) and a cousin of the ambassador to Britain.

Under her father's strict guidance, Hepburn became a superb athlete, with considerable skills in wrestling, tumbling, trapeze, water sports, and golf. She was intrigued by acting at an early age, a drive that became supercharged in a twisted way after her older brother Tom tried to duplicate a trick they had seen in a stage production of
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
and
accidentally—or as some claim, deliberately—hanged himself. She attended Bryn Mawr and, while exhibiting superior learning skills, nearly flunked out because she spent most of her time in the drama department.

Upon graduation she joined a Baltimore theatrical company and soon made the jump to Broadway, where she appeared in several shows, most of them flops. Then in 1928 she surprised everyone by marrying Ludlow Ogden Smith, a Philadelphia socialite. Upon her return from their honeymoon she agreed to understudy the Broadway star Hope Williams in the lead role of Philip Barry's
Holiday
(a role she would perform only once during its entire year-long run). That led to a starring role in 1932 in
The Warrior's Husband,
a contemporary version of
Lysistrata.
The part gave Hepburn the chance to showcase her considerable athletic skills and also to display a lot of her body, including her previously undisplayed gorgeous long legs.

Word of her audience-pleasing performance eventually reached Merian C. Cooper, the executive producer of RKO Radio Pictures, who sent his then production head, David O. Selznick, to New York, to offer the young actress an exclusive acting contract with the studio for $150 a week. When Selznick met with Hepburn, he asked what it would take to get her to come to Hollywood, and she pulled a figure out of her head that she was certain would send Selznick running. Through her agent, Leland Howard, she had demanded a starting salary of $1,500 a week. Selznick agreed without hesitation, and when
The Warrior's Husband
ended that summer, she flew to Hollywood to begin her film career.

Her first fearure was
A Bill of Divorcement,
in the leading role that every young actress in Hollywood had fought for. It was based on the New York stage play by Clemence Dane that had made a star out of Katharine Cornell in 1921. Once the studio had acquired the rights to the play, it was given to one of its hot new directors with a Broadway pedigree, George Cukor, who, because of his success with Cornell and his superior stage work with Ethel Barrymore, Laurette Taylor, and Helen Hayes, had developed a reputation as a “woman's director.” When film legend Dorothy Gish committed to making her long-awaited Broadway debut in
Young Love,
she'd insisted George Cukor direct her.

Even before Cukor officially took up residence at RKO, Selznick had purchased
What Price Hollywood?
for him, a film that in many ways anticipates
Cukor's later
A Star Is Born
(1954).
What Price Hollywood?
made a star out of its lead, the previously unknown Constance Bennett, and Selznick hoped Cukor would repeat his success by turning Hepburn into the studio's next female box office sensation. Selznick's instinct proved correct; on the strength of her performance in Cukor's
A Bill of Divorcement
(1932), Katharine Hepburn did indeed become the newest star of the silver screen.

In addition to reaffirming George Cukor's reputation as a “woman's director,” the film erased any lingering doubts about his talent and commercial viability. It also began what amounted to a half-century of continually successful film collaborations between Hepburn and Cukor.

After two more hits
—Morning Glory
(for which she won her first Oscar) and Cukor's
Little Women—
Hepburn completed her obligations to the studio in 1935 and was then hesitant to re-sign with RKO after Selznick left to join his new father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, at MGM. She finally accepted an offer of $300,000 from RKO for six films still to be chosen, with script approval and choice of role. Nevertheless, Selznick's absence proved as damaging as Hepburn had feared, and her next three films—John Cromwell's
Spitfire,
Richard Wallace's
The Little Minister,
and Philip Moeller's
Break of Hearts—
were major disappointments at the box office. The producer of all three was Pandro S. Berman, who had been given the nearly impossible assignment of replacing the legendary Selznick. His shepherding of the trio of Hepburn films was so disastrous, it nearly ended her film career as well as his own.

Her next film, George Stevens's
Alice Adams
(1935), another Berman production, was a standard Depression-era fantasy of a poor girl successfully climbing the social ladder. Fortunately for Hepburn (and Berman), the film hit a nerve with audiences and helped restore some of the luster to her Hollywood career. It not only proved a winner at the box office but earned Hepburn a second nomination as Best Actress.
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Once again she was the hottest female star in Hollywood.