Authors: Marc Eliot
The loan-out was to Harry “King” Cohn, the iniquitous, self-styled-toughguy head of Columbia Pictures, the so-called Poverty Row of the majors. Zukor may have done it at least in part as an act of vengeance against Grant, for Cohn's reputation as a vulgarian, womanizer, and tantrum-throwing tyrant often overshadowed and undervalued the quality of the films his studio produced, at times to the detriment of the actors, producers, and directors who made them.
Cohn wanted Grant for one movie, Robert Riskin's
When You're in Love.
Vincent, however, saw an opportunity to make a unique deal for Grant and offered Cohn and Columbia a nonexclusive four-picture deal that came reasonably close to the magic figure that had sent Zukor running for the medicine cabinet—a guaranteed $50,000 for the first two pictures (above Paramount's fee) and $75,000 for the final two. The only proviso Cohn wanted, and it was a smart one, was that Grant had to make at least one movie a year for Columbia. To Grant, who had been averaging five films a year at Paramount (for approximately one-tenth of the money), that seemed the easiest part of the bargain. Then Vincent showed what he was capable of, why he was regarded as one of the best agents in the business. Before the ink was dry on the Columbia deal, he went to RKO Radio and struck the same nonexclusive four-picture deal, guaranteeing them as well a Grant movie a year for the next four years.
Vincent knew what he was doing when he chose these two studios with
which to negotiate Grant's future. Both Columbia and RKO desperately needed a new leading man to compete with the big guns locked in at Paramount, MGM, and Warners, and in Cary Grant he had one of the best candidates. Still, it was an avant-garde deal in many ways, not the least of which was financial. Because of the standard contract system, it was unheard of for actors to simultaneously sign with more than one studio for more than one picture, and everyone in the business
except
Vincent and Grant felt the risk was too great. Grant's take was, in fact, just the opposite; he felt he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by making this daring attempt to resurrect his stalled career. As far as Vincent was concerned, Grant had the talent and looks to become Hollywood's number one leading man. And if he succeeded, Vincent knew, no one would care anymore about the multiplecontract deal.
To complete the transition from contract player to freelance actor, Grant resigned from the studio-controlled Academy, which did not look favorably upon actors signing contracts with two studios at the same time. It was something he was delighted to do.
The plot of
When You're in Love
involves a “wealthy tramp artist” (played by Grant, in a role that once again echoed his idol Chaplin's great screen persona), a characterization often evoked by studios during the 1930s to romanticize the grim reality of the Depression. For a fee, the tramp marries a Mexican entertainer (Grace Moore, at the time one of Columbia's biggest female stars) to bring her legally into the country. Once they cross the border, they part, only to meet again later on and realize they are, after all, truly in love. Fade to gold.
Or so Cohn hoped. He made the picture to break out Robert Riskin, for several years Frank Capra's screenwriting partner on a series of enormously popular (and populist) movies that had helped keep the studio in business. After the success of Capra's 1936
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,
Riskin, believing his writing collaborator/director had always gotten too much of the credit for their films, was eager to branch out on his own (a move that, not surprisingly, caused a lifelong rift between him and the egomaniacal Capra).
Unfortunately, the Riskin/Capra magic could not be generated by Riskin
without Capra, and despite a few glowing reviews—such as
Time
magazine's, which declared, “Following the pattern of
It Happened One Night
and
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,
in which Director Capra established Clark Gable and Gary Cooper as comedians, Director Riskin herein does the same thing for Cary Grant”—Grant's first film as a freelance actor flopped badly and became another in an increasingly long line of his pictures that failed to make back their costs. While his four-picture deals with Columbia and RKO were technically solid, he knew that without a hit, they could very well become the last films he would ever make in America.
Grant then went directly into Rowland V. Lee's
The Toast of New York
at RKO, but despite a sharp script by Dudley Nichols, top costars Edward Arnold and Jack Oakie, and leading lady Frances Farmer, this bloodless biography of robber-baron Jim Fisk, effectively denatured by the Hays Office, featured Grant shoehorned into yet another standard-issue tuxedo romance.
Nevertheless, Grant wanted to properly celebrate his freedom from Paramount and his deliverance into the Hollywood nouveau riche. To do so, he asked Scott to cohost a series of parties at the beach house, a place where previously very few “outside” celebrities had been invited. For the next several months, they turned the place into a weekend salon filled with actors, actresses, writers, directors, the San Simeon set, and dozens of leading ladies and starlets from Grant's two new studios. Among the most frequent guests were Howard Hughes, playwright Moss Hart, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Laurence Olivier (Larry O. to friends), and one of Grant's favorites, Noël Coward.
Grant and Scott quickly became the most gracious and charming hosts in Malibu. Grant's dazzling charm was the talk of the town, and his understated but barbed commentary about everything from Cohn's addiction to sturgeon to the lack of panties worn by Jean Harlow during the shooting of
Suzy
kept everyone in stitches, while Scott kept the champagne flowing. Caviar was consumed by the bucketful. Coward, a well-known homosexual, usually stayed over at the beach house on party nights, and his flamboyant, silk-robed presence always started the beach set buzzing with good-natured comments like “The queen has returned to her colony.”
Coward was actually one of very few allowed to stay overnight, and whenever he did so he loved to play tricks on his two hosts, especially Grant, the more sensitive and therefore vulnerable of the two. Coward was aware that
Grant had costarred with some of the most famous women in Hollywood, and that it would therefore be difficult to “throw” him with star quality; there was, however, one he knew who would bring Grant to his knees. After arranging for her to come by the house, Coward called Grant at the studio and informed him that Greta Garbo was in Malibu and wanted to meet him. Garbo happened to be a friend of Dorothy Lamour, who, despite his newlywed status, had lately been “romantically linked” with Scott, and was eager to see his and Grant's bachelor lair that she had heard so much about. Coward knew that Garbo had been an idol of Grant's since his Broadwaymatinee-idol days. One time back then, Grant had once confessed to Coward that he had spotted the actress at the Astor Hotel on Forty-fifth Street and silently and carefully followed her all the way back to her own hotel, unable to work up enough courage to walk up to her and introduce himself.
Grant went dry-mouthed as he hung up the phone, and headed directly for his car. When he got to the house, he was greeted by Coward, who had a mischievous grin on his face as he made the formal introductions. At first Grant was too stunned to speak. At last he stuck out his hand and said, “Oh, Miss Garbo, I'm so happy you met me!”
Howard Hughes, on the other hand, was someone Grant, from their first meeting, felt extremely comfortable around. Hughes, like Grant, had a profound mistrust for the film industry. His mania for total control rivaled that of Chaplin without the accompanying artistic genius or business acumen. Like Chaplin, he loved women, and he loved the fact that they loved Grant. Beautiful bathing-suited babes were never scarce around the weekend soirées—young juicy girls with thick red lips, blue eyes, and hopeful breasts who were there because of Grant, and upon whom Hughes feasted like a frog on crickets.
One of the first things Grant did with his newly enriched bank account was to add a second, outdoor pool to the beach house that was only twenty-five feet from the sands of the Pacific. Oceanside pools were Hollywood's latest status symbol, and Grant insisted to Scott, an Olympic-level swimmer, that they had to have one. It quickly became a magnet for girls in bathing suits. One of the women Hughes swept off the Grant/Scott poolside was Ginger Rogers, at the time one of RKO's most popular screen “princesses.” This produced a slightly awkward situation for Grant, who had been caught in the middle of Hughes's
increasingly strained relationship with Katharine Hepburn, both of whom he considered his friends. Moreover he had a secret crush on Rogers himself from the time he had been introduced to her while visiting the set of
Roberta,
the musical starring Rogers, Fred Astaire, Irene Dunne, and Scott.
Still, as far as Grant was concerned, he was not going to make any moral judgments about Hughes's behavior, especially so soon after the sudden, shocking death of his first great discovery and former lover Jean Harlow (Grant's costar in
Suzy
) at the age of twenty-six, after complications from uremic poisoning. If anything, he wanted to be there for Hughes, and therefore wore his unrequited love for Rogers as a badge of friendship.
Despite his new attempts at sociability, Grant much preferred solitude and found something close to it with, of all people, the otherwise flamboyant Hughes. Like Grant, Hughes was a man of few words, perhaps due to the shyness he had developed growing up in the shadow of his empire-founding father, whose early death left an emotional void that Hughes would have trouble filling for the rest of his life. Grant admired Hughes's extraordinary physical and social advantages—his tall, muscular physique and handsome face, his inherited wealth, and his resistance to socializing in crowds larger than the number of fingers he had on one hand. Scott, on the other hand, was always up for a good time, a quick laugh, cocktails at five, parties that lasted until dawn, early-morning swims, long luxurious sunbaths, and thiswill-fix-everything massages. Grant much preferred going to bed early, getting up early, reading the paper with a cup of coffee by the pool, listening to classical music on the radio, and on afternoons when he wasn't working, reclining on a canvas lounge on the sand with his feet hanging over either side being lapped by the cool incoming saltwater tide.
Not long after they met, whenever they were both free Grant and Hughes would spend afternoons that sometimes lasted until the evening sitting silently together in Hughes's massive mahogany den while he studied blue- prints for his various self-designed airplanes, and Grant smoked a cigarette, sipped a scotch, read a book. As Grant later remembered, “Howard was the most restful man I have ever been around. We could sit for hours together and never say a word.” According to Hughes's housekeeper, Beatrice Dowler, whenever the two dined together, most often only a few sentences were spoken between them during the entire meal.
But when they did speak about something important, it was usually Hughes giving advice, and Grant listening respectfully to what he had to say—mostly about women. To Hughes, who was likely unaware of Grant's homosexual desires—he either didn't know or didn't want to know—Grant seemed, if anything, too much in awe of women to see through what they were “selling” men and calling it love. Hughes often told Grant that he was a sucker for what he called “women's moneymakers.”
As they got closer, Hughes continued to enthrall Grant with the thrill of flying. Although he had no desire to get behind the stick himself, Grant was impressed by Hughes's virile hobby and was gratified to have a friend who actually lived the kind of adventurous life, filled with women, danger, and excitement, that he, Grant, only portrayed onscreen. With Hughes, no twitching flicker separated fantasy from reality.
When, early in 1937, Hughes announced that he was going to fly his H-1
Winged Bullet,
as he called it, out of Burbank nonstop to Newark, Grant, along with the rest of the country, held his breath while following the entire escapade on radio and was greatly relieved when Hughes safely landed seven hours, twenty-eight minutes, and twenty-five seconds after takeoff, establishing an aviation record that would last for many years. This was the flight that made Hughes an American flying folk hero, nearly as popular as one of his own idols, all-American aviator Charles “Lucky” Lindbergh, whose 1927 solo flight from New York to Paris had brought flying into the forefront of the world's consciousness. On his return trip, Hughes stopped in Washington, D.C., where President Roosevelt greeted him at the White House and awarded him the Harmon International Trophy. When he arrived in Los Angeles, Grant threw a huge party for Hughes at the famed Trocadero nightspot on Sunset Boulevard.
Noticeably absent was the fellow who had introduced the two, Randolph Scott. Indeed, the more time Grant spent with Hughes, the less he saw of Scott. It was an odd juxtaposition: Scott had always been the wealthier of the two and the more sociable, and although Grant had gotten married first, Scott was the one who had made marriage work by finding a wealthy woman who conveniently happened to live two thousand miles away. He very much embodied what Hughes had been trying to explain to him about women, “love,” and “playing it smart.” And while Scott was not a complainer and
never openly fought with Grant, he was extremely judgmental, especially about Grant's “folly” with Cherrill, something that had left a scar on the relationship between the two men.
Hughes's friendship also gave Grant perspective on the intensity of his sometimes smothering relationship with Scott, which now seemed at times more like a marriage than … whatever it was that neither could exactly define. Even during the very occasional visits by Scott's wife, who would always ask why Grant was still there, the answer to that question was never discussed between the two men.
One morning while grant was sunning himself by the pool, his next- door neighbor, legendary comic film director Hal Roach, dropped by for a noontime swim. The two had become good friends, and Grant had given Roach a standing offer to come by anytime he felt like going for a dip.