Cary Grant (24 page)

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T
he surprising commercial success of
Topper
added luminosity to Cary Grant's screen image and bigger box office clout to his name, so much that Harry Cohn wanted him back at work on his next film as soon as possible, in a project he had already green-lighted, a comedy to be directed by Leo McCarey called
The Awful Truth.
Cohn decided to pair Grant with Irene Dunne, an extremely pretty southern-born actress who had come from nowhere a few years earlier to strike it big with a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance in Wesley Ruggles's
Cimarron
(1931). Cohn had recently signed her away from RKO for a long-term contract and wanted to put her to work right away.
The Awful Truth,
her twenty-third film, was the latest entry into the extremely popular, if ultimately short-lived, subgenre of comedy known as “screwball,” which emerged during the great 1930s economic (and emotional) Depression. It was Grant's twenty-ninth film, and the one that would finally propel him to superstardom.

Screwball
is a particularly apt term for a certain type of movie that, like the baseball pitch of the same name, travels a fast but unpredictable path before somehow managing to cross the plate for a perfect strike. The dialogue is sometimes delivered as fast as two hundred words a minute, and oftentimes the meaning of a character's lines is submerged by the rhythm of its delivery, to the point that the delivery itself becomes the meaning.

Another defining element of screwball is the relationship between its male and female leads. They are almost always young, rich, unattached or separated, at once hopelessly attracted to each other and facing a particularly zany path on the road to true and lasting love. By the early 1930s the cen- sorship of the Hays Office had helped to make a joke out of cinematic eroti- cism: the unfunny punch line of marriage always loomed at the final fade-out, the government-sanctioned metaphor for the end of guileless romance. As film historian Andrew Sarris points out, “Frustration [in screw- ball comedy] arises inevitably from a situation in which the censors have removed the sex from the sex comedies.” Perhaps that is why children almost never appear in screwball, lest they replace the often childlike (but rarely childish) behavior of the adult romantic leads.

As a staple of Hollywood for much of the second half of the 1930s, screw- ball comedies excelled both at satisfying the censors and at getting a rise out of audiences by teasing them with beautiful women who were in turn teasing their costars. And who better to depict the victim of this female scheming than the actor who did not like his characters to pursue women?

The Awful Truth,
based on a 1922 Broadway play by Arthur Richman, had already been filmed twice by the recently bankrupt Pathé Studios. Harry Cohn believed in recycling “sure things,” as he liked to call remakes, because he thought it gave his pictures “better odds.” When he acquired the rights to all of Pathé Studios' properties (for a onetime payout of $35,000), he found
The Awful Truth
among them and immediately commissioned an updated version of the 1929 Marshall Neilan film of the same name that he could make on the cheap.

From the outset Cohn wanted Leo McCarey to direct. McCarey had first
teamed Stan Laurel with Oliver Hardy (a credit that is usually and wrong- fully given to Hal Roach). After supervising, writing, and directing many of the best comedy duo's silent comedies, he then made a splash in sound pictures while a contract director at Paramount, with his 1933 direction of the Marx Brothers'
Duck Soup
and Charles Laughton's 1935
Ruggles of Red Gap.
Despite the success of both movies, McCarey languished for several years through a series of undistinguished Paramount assignments, including
Belle of the Nineties
(1934) that starred an already-fading Mae West, and a failed attempt at resurrecting Harold Lloyd's career with
The Milky Way
(1936). McCarey finally scored another hit with what was, for him, a major stylistic departure, the unsettling Depression-era family tragedy
Make Way for Tomorrow
(1937), the personal favorite of all his movies, which restored some critical luster to his career. But it was too little, too late: McCarey was handed his unconditional release by Paramount at approximately the same time Grant decided not to renew with the studio.

Cohn, meanwhile, thought McCarey's comic talents had been misused and overlooked and immediately signed him as a possible replacement for Frank Capra, who was threatening to walk out on Cohn and Columbia. Having brought prestige and several Academy Awards to the studio, Capra demanded a hefty raise from Cohn, who refused to renegotiate Capra's long- term contract. Instead, he offered McCarey a bare-bones $100,000 a year. Desperately in need of cash, McCarey accepted and signed on to Columbia.

During the Laurel and Hardy phase of his career, McCarey used Oliver “Babe” Hardy as his onscreen alter ego—it was always Ollie, and never Stanley, who looked directly at the audience to comment on his own predica- ments. But in real life McCarey was far more suave, sophisticated, and good- looking, with a degree in law and a witty sense of humor. He was, in brief, the real-life model for the comedic persona he was about to help Cary Grant refine in
The Awful Truth
.

After reading the original Pathé script, McCarey promptly threw it in the trash and, with the help of his friend and sometime freelance collaborator, Viña Delmar, rewrote it from beginning to end. In the McCarey-Delmar version, the story becomes one of marital deception and misconception that goes wildly out of control. A major breakdown in communication between a husband and wife leads to a breakup of their marriage, which sparks a series of
schemes and tricks as each tries to win the other back without admitting that that is what they truly want, until one final, romantic reunion allows love to conquer (and clarify) all.

The Awful Truth
is the epitome of screwball, what film critic Stanley Cavell described as “a comedy of
re
marriage.” No one seeing the film ever doubts that Grant and Dunne will eventually wind up together (that the ball will cross the plate for a strike); the comedy comes from the crazy pathway they each take to get there. Jerry Warriner (Grant), in a story line McCarey and Delmar more or less lifted from Laurel and Hardy's
Sons of the Desert,
tells his wife, Lucy (Irene Dunne), that he is going on vacation to Florida, when what he really intends to do is remain in New York. To ensure the success of his marital deception, he takes sun-lamp treatments to make his fake vacation seem more convincing. When he finally returns home, he is surprised to find that Lucy is not there waiting for him like the good little wife. In fact, she is out and about, enjoying the company of her handsome but lecherous voice teacher, Armand Duvalle (Alexander D'Arcy). Upon her return, Lucy is surprised to see Jerry's tan, since the weather reports out of Florida had been all rain. Soon each Warriner becomes convinced the other is a liar and a cheater (and in fact either or both may have been, as the truth, whatever it is, remains purposefully ambiguous). Communication continues to break down between the two until they decide that divorce is the only answer. After a nasty court proceeding, Lucy wins custody of their beloved pet dog, Mr. Smith (played by Asta of
Thin Man
fame), while Jerry retains limited visiting rights.

With the terms of their divorce settled, Jerry wastes no time resuming the bachelor life. To make Lucy jealous (although he won't admit it to himself), he begins dating one of his former flames, saucy nightclub entertainer Dixie Belle Lee (Joyce Compton). Lucy, meanwhile, becomes involved with extremely wealthy but extremely dull oil heir Daniel Leeson (Ralph Bellamy), realizes she still loves Jerry, and prior to the finalization of her divorce, asks Armand to help her salvage whatever is left of her marriage.

Even as she is explaining the situation to Armand, Jerry shows up unex- pectedly to make amends with his wife. Lucy, caught off-guard by his arrival, hastily stashes Armand in the bedroom. Soon Leeson arrives, and Jerry is given the hide-'em-in-the-boudoir treatment, where a slapdash tumult erupts
and Jerry leaves, angrier than ever. To complicate matters still further, Jerry then becomes engaged to socialite Barbara Vance (Molly Lamont). To try to stop the marriage from happening, Lucy shows up at a dinner party Barbara's parents are throwing, pretends she is Jerry's sister, and proceeds to get riproaring drunk (on ginger ale). Jerry takes her outside to try to sober her up and winds up driving to their mountain cabin, where they finally unravel all their romantic misunderstandings and, presumably, live happily (if not necessarily ever) after.

During the making of
The Awful Truth,
Cohn had not bothered to assign an office to McCarey—he didn't believe directors needed such extrava- gances—so the director was forced to do the majority of his daily rewrites by hand in the front seat of his car, with Delmar sitting next to him on the passenger side, scribbling down pages of dialogue in pencil. Then after trying out that day's pages, they kept what worked with the actors and rewrote what didn't for the next day's shoot.

It was a directing style Cary Grant loathed. He was not a spontaneous actor; the “magic” didn't happen for him when the camera rolled. He preferred to work from a completed script and rehearse his fixed lines with the other cast members over and over again until he had nailed every detail of his verbal and physical performance in advance, “freezing” it before a single foot of film ever passed through the camera's lens. This was Grant's standard method; with no formal acting training it was the only way he knew to approach a role.

Because Grant's pre-set approach was so radically different from McCarey's essentially improvisational style, it didn't take long for the two to clash and for Grant to start becoming emotionally unwound. His overall anxiety level soared, and he was noticeably on edge with the other actors.

To complicate matters further, Grant developed his by now familiar leading-lady crush on Dunne, whose projection of wholesome integrity made her wrong for the part of Lucy Warriner but an ideal candidate for one of Grant's chaste love-objects-from-afar. These infatuations were always the same—equal parts Leach and Grant, blended into whatever character was being cooked up. Besides whatever emotional tic they may have satisfied, these attractions also provided Grant with a valuable, if neurotic, focal point, the foundation for what came across as a smooth and sophisticated screen style.

Unlike Grant, his character was a womanizer, and while the written script left it purposely vague as to whether he actually committed adultery (so as not to rouse the Hays Office), his performance left little doubt that he had. This was something Grant found difficult to connect to, especially while in crush mode. Indeed, his infatuation with Dunne led him to believe that anyone lucky enough to be married to a woman like her (or Lucy Warriner), having blown it would not be able to get over it so easily, least of all by dating other women. So Grant at first felt no affinity for the kind of physical screwball comedy that McCarey's style demanded. He believed it substituted physical motion for emotional depth. His idea of film comedy was more Chaplinesque— humor as a reflection of tragedy, laughter happening between tears. To Grant, screwball's limits lay in the way it drove audiences to tears of laughter, in the absence of any intimations of tragedy that might otherwise deepen the story.

His insecurities and objections were not eased by McCarey's often rambling daily descriptions of what each day's scenes were supposed to be about; they only added to Grant's anger and confusion. On the first day of actual filming, someone handed him a series of notes handwritten on scraps of brown paper bag. Grant, as he read what McCarey wanted to get from him that day, thought the director was joking. And when none of the routines seemed to work, McCarey simply told his actors to make something up that sounded funny. Grant was appalled, but said nothing and did the best he could, believing things had to get better as the shoot developed.
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