Authors: Marc Eliot
For her next project, she turned once more to her favorite director, Cukor, who this time had what he believed was the perfect Hepburn vehicle. It was based on a 1918 Compton MacKenzie novel,
The Early Life and
Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett,
loosely based on the sensational British Crippen case, which Cukor wanted to somehow turn into a comedy.
Once he had his star in place, Cukor hired the distinguished novelist Evelyn Waugh to write the script.
*
The story of the film begins in France and concerns the adventures of young Sylvia Scarlett, whose father is an embezzler and must flee the country to escape imminent capture and imprisonment. Arriving in London, Sylvia, disguised as a boy to throw off the authorities tracking the duo down, and her father meet up with Jimmy Monkley, a swaggering con-artist cockney lad with whom they team to roam and loot the countryside. Eventually, Sylvia's father marries a wacky servant girl named Maudie Tilt, while Sylvia meets a successful artist, Michael Fane, and must revert to being a “girl” in order to win his affections.
For the part of Henry, Sylvia's father, Cukor cast curmudgeonly Edmund Gwenn, and to play Michael Fane, he chose Brian Aherne, a well-known British actor who was nevertheless regarded as a standard-issue trunk-jawed Hollywood leading man. The one part he had the most difficulty casting was Jimmy Monkley. No one at RKO could master to Cukor's satisfaction the essential cockney accent of Monkley's self-proclaimed “gentleman adventurer.” It was Hepburn who suggested that Cukor try to borrow Cary Grant from Paramount for the part, something the director was at first, to Hepburn's surprise, reluctant to do.
Cukor's hesitancy was fostered by a longstanding skepticism about Grant's acting ability, based on the movies he had seen him in. “I could never get weak-kneed at the idea of Cary Grant,” he had told one studio head early on, when considering suggestions as to who should play opposite Hepburn in
A Bill of Divorcement.
The role eventually went to John Barrymore.
More than likely the real reason for Cukor's hesitancy had to do with the director's private life and the increasingly repressive atmosphere that surrounded and affected both Cukor's and Grant's social and sexual proclivities. Cukor was unabashedly homosexual, his reputation as a “woman's director” industry code for his own sexual sensitivities. Actresses, knowing they were never going to have to submit to a Cukor casting couch, adored him for
his manner as much as for his manners. He came from the theatrical world of Broadway, where the gay life was not merely tolerated but prevalent. Once he made the change to Hollywood, he found the atmosphere more restrictive, even more so after the onset of the Hays Code. The lavishly appointed living room of Cukor's Hollywood home became a kind of private if informal West Coast Algonquin room, which many of the industry's most interesting (and often, but not exclusively, gay) luminaries regularly attended, including Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Fanny Brice, Ferenc Molnár, Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo, Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, and Katharine Hepburn. These gatherings caused Joseph L. Mankiewicz to publicly characterize Cukor as “the queen of the roost.”
Cukor and Grant had both spent approximately the same decade working in the New York theater. It is therefore difficult to believe that they did not know, or at least know of, each other in some capacity, if only in passing, having crossed paths at one opening or another, or party, or social seasonal gathering. Yet both maintained that prior to Cukor's casting Grant in
Sylvia Scarlett,
they had never met. Moreover, Grant's longtime personal secretary, Frank Horn, whom he had hired in the early 1930s, was a Hollywood hillside neighbor of Cukor's, with a legendary collection of male pornography and, it was believed, extensive contacts in that field. Horn and Cukor were intimates, making it even more unlikely that Grant and the director were total strangers.
All of this suggests not so much that Cukor and Grant were ever romantically involved or that they had anything to hide, but how pervasive the gay fear factor was for so many of Hollywood's biggest actors and directors. Cukor especially was extremely afraid of risking his livelihood by going “above the line” in his unquenchable thirst for male lovers, and on more than one occasion his homosexuality did negatively affect his career (his notorious firing a few years later as director of
Gone With the Wind
at the insistence of Clark Gable, who refused to take direction from a homosexual).
Nevertheless, Hepburn insisted on having Grant as her costar, and in the end Cukor would not refuse her and went to Zukor to see if he could borrow
Grant for the film.
*
As far as Zukor was concerned, Grant was, these days, available for rental to whatever studio was willing to meet his premium fee. Paramount agreed to pay Grant a $15,000 bonus for the scheduled six-week shoot, about twice his normal salary, which had by now reached $2,500 a week, applied against what it received from RKO—about half—while Hepburn received $50,000
and
her regular contract salary.
Grant was understandably unhappy with this financial arrangement, as well as with the relatively small size of his role and what he considered the relatively uninteresting parameters of his character. The film, as he saw it, was nothing more than a star vehicle for Katharine Hepburn, and the only other real role was the part of her father.
When producer Pandro Berman became aware that Grant was upset, he in turn was miffed. He considered the casting of the actor in a Hepburn movie a gift, an automatic and much-needed boost for a career that, as far as Berman was concerned, had already fizzled and was not likely to reignite. Like so many Hollywood producers, he thought Grant largely uncastable— too old for young romantic leading roles (for which James Stewart and Joel McCrea were perfect), too “precious” for action parts (Fairbanks, Gable, Flynn), too pretty to play stubbled hard-edgers (McLaglen, Colman), too prissy for genre and period pieces (Laughton, Tone), and too weak for traditional heroes (Cooper, Gable, William Powell). Furthermore, Berman knew that Zukor had much the same opinion of Grant and because of it had given up on trying to turn him into a top-of-the-line star at Paramount. Grant, meanwhile, sensing his position at the studio was becoming increasingly shaky, accepted the role and the money despite his misgivings.
One of the people most pleased with Grant's being cast in the film was Randolph Scott, who used the opportunity to finally put Howard Hughes and Grant together. Scott convinced Grant that, with his contract nearing an end,
the time was finally exactly right for him to become friendly with the billionaire independent filmmaker. What's more, Hughes had lately become interested in Katharine Hepburn, and a friendship with Grant, Scott knew, would give him a reason to be on set while they filmed.
Grant and Hughes hit it off immediately and were soon fast buddies. Hughes appreciated Grant's understated sense of humor and lack of pretense. He particularly liked Grant's aloofness when it came to the press. And because Grant had little apparent interest in women, Hughes felt no competition for any of the ones he wanted, especially Hepburn. As far as Grant was concerned, Hughes was just the type of male whose social company he enjoyed. He found him unpretentious, rough-edged, nonjudgmental, and with a genuine taste for adventure tinged with danger that Grant found exciting. During the filming of
Sylvia Scarlett,
Hughes invited Grant to take a ride with him in his new H-1 plane over Los Angeles. Grant agreed, and soon they were soaring together above the coast, above the country, above the world.
For the first time since Randolph Scott, Grant felt he had found a kindred soul, someone who was interested in and liked him. Hughes felt the same way, his own reserve perfectly meshing with Grant's coolness, two sides of the same antisocial coin. Moreover, through his friendship with Grant, Hughes got to know Katharine Hepburn better, and they soon began a blazing affair.
Finally, the Grant-Hughes friendship solved one more problem for Scott, who had recently decided to get married. Unable or unwilling to break the news to Grant until almost the day of his wedding, Scott was relieved to have successfully passed Grant off to Hughes—if not in exactly the same fashion of friendship that he enjoyed, nevertheless in a way that benefited all three of them.
Scott had quietly been seeing his childhood acquaintance Marion duPont Somerville, daughter of William duPont, the man who had invented nylon and rayon and gone on to amass one of the greatest American fortunes. The day after his ex, Vivian Gaye, married film director Ernst Lubitsch in 1934, Scott had flown home to visit his family in Orange, Virginia, to lick his emotional wounds, and it was during this trip that he rekindled his friendship with Marion.
Scott and Marion shared two interests: horses and money. His fiancée had
a personal fortune estimated to be in excess of $100 million. Scott believed that marriage was a contract of shared wealth and mutual convenience as much as love, and on those terms he considered Marion the potentially perfect wife. She was certainly not the kind of gold digger he believed Virginia Cherrill was, and she was happy to continue on with her own non–show business life, separate and apart from his. The rumor that persisted throughout her life, that she was a whip-wielding lesbian (her horses was the reason she always gave for carrying a riding crop tucked under her arm), didn't bother Scott at all. Nor did it bother him that she had just been divorced from jockey Tom Somerville. If anything, Scott was amused by all of this and saw no problem with her “individualism.” Or with the fact that shortly before they married, Marion was rumored to have invested heavily in Paramount Pictures, the studio where Scott was a contract player.
Still, just as Grant had had with Cherrill, Scott began experiencing problems with Somerville from the moment he announced they were officially engaged. To begin with, she had an intense dislike of Hollywood. She considered it vulgar, an unseemly place for people of wealth to live. She made it clear to Scott that there was no way she would ever consider relocating to Los Angeles. Scott, on the other hand, was equally adamant about never permanently moving back to the South. To him, it was a place that represented repression, guilt, and loneliness. By contrast, Hollywood had allowed him to live out his greatest desires, with a man he loved and respected, in a way that would likely have gotten him lynched in Virginia. Of course, neither of these obstacles proved a deal-breaker, once both realized that Scott could simply stay in L.A. The impending marriage also solved Scott's ongoing “confirmed bachelor” problem with the studio. The one remaining obstacle that had stood in his way was the lonely and morose post-Cherrill Grant, a problem he solved finally by hooking him up with Hughes.
At a pre-release screening of
Sylvia Scarlett
open to the public, Cukor, Hepburn, and Grant slipped in through a side door, anticipating nothing but laughter and applause. Instead, they witnessed the film playing to a silent, bewildered audience. The biggest laugh the film got was a shot of the northern coast of Malibu, whose nearby mountain ranges were meant to
pass for the fabled white cliffs of Dover. Less than half the audience stayed for the entire picture. Those who departed early included B. B. Kahane, the new head of RKO.
Hepburn in particular was aghast at what she saw, and right up to the official opening implored Berman not to release the film, promising him a “free” performance in exchange. The picture's world premiere, which took place on January 3, 1936, at Radio City Music Hall, proved her instinct correct: it was soundly rejected by critics and public alike. Everyone seemed to intensely dislike the film for one reason or another; it did not fit easily into any specific genre, as its story was too difficult. Was it an adventure, a romance, a comedy, or a crime flick? And finally, the miscasting of Katharine Hepburn as an androgyne more boyish than Peter Pan did nothing to help either the movie or her career.
After its disastrous opening, Hepburn's movie career was considered to have reached a financial dead end. Her defiant (and confusing) crossdressing in the film was taken by some as a flaunting of her presumed lesbianism in those carefully morally coded Depression times. Other aspects proved equally suggestive, such as Brian Aherne's “crush” on the disguised Hepburn that causes him to say, “There's something queer going on here.” A bit later on in the film Hepburn, still dressed as a boy, is kissed by a maid and told she is “very attractive.” In yet another, Grant reaches for Hepburn (still in drag) and says, “It's nippy out tonight. You'll make a proper hot water bottle… but there's something that gives me a queer feeling every time I look at you.” And, at one point, a maid paints a mustache on “Sylvester” and kisses her.
Apparently, audiences weren't the only ones to read things into the film. Shortly after it opened, it was officially condemned by the Legion of Decency and would go on to earn the dubious honor of being RKO's biggest financial disaster of 1936. Pandro Berman was so humiliated by the magnitude of the failure that he tried to distance himself from it, Hepburn, and Cukor, insisting he would never work with them again (pointedly leaving Grant out of this declaration). In fact, the only one to come out of the film with any positive reaction was Cary Grant. His Cockneyed performance was the breakthrough that freed him from the endless run of stilted lovers and cardboard “tux” heroes he had suffered through, by his winning portrayal of a wholly realized
and thoroughly likable character. His quick wit and effortless physicality were a revelation for audiences. Cukor summed it up best later on, when he said of Grant's amazing performance, “Until then he was a successful young leading man who was nice-looking but had no particular identity… Suddenly, in
Sylvia Scarlett,
he blossomed. It was a well-written part, well directed, he knew what this character was, and he gave a marvelous performance.” For years, in fact, Cukor (as West did with
She Done Him Wrong
) claimed that he had discovered Grant and that
Sylvia Scarlett
had made him a star. Statements of such immodesty and exaggeration did nothing to endear him to Grant.