Cary Grant (25 page)

When the same thing happened the next day, however, Grant turned on his heels, left the set, and went directly to Cohn's office to register his dissatisfaction. Cohn, who had no patience for temperamental and what he considered vastly overpaid actors—which meant all actors, as far as he was concerned—brushed him off by growling at him to go back, do his job, and for chrissake stop acting like a little old lady.

The next day Grant returned to Cohn's office and politely offered to switch roles with Ralph Bellamy and play the smaller, supporting part of the
rich oil heir, a character for which he claimed he was much better suited. Bellamy, he assured Cohn, was willing to trade places. Cohn asked him to please get lost.

The day after that Grant went back again to Cohn, but this time before he said anything, he handed him a neatly typed eight-page memorandum that he, Grant, had stayed up the whole night working on and that outlined exactly what he believed was wrong with the picture (the total lack of comedy, the absence of a completed script, McCarey's unstructured, improvisational style of direction). Along with the note, Grant offered Cohn $5,000 in cash as a bribe to be taken off the picture, on top of which he promised to star in another picture for Columbia
—any
other picture—for
free.
Cohn refused the money and once again told him to go back to work.

McCarey was infuriated when he heard what Grant had done (and for years told anyone who asked that when he showed Grant's note to Asta, the dog bit him). From that day on, except for giving him specific directions, he refused to talk to his star for the remainder of the shoot and, except for when they worked together, for the rest of his life. At one point, McCarey later claimed, he became so angered by Grant's attitude that
he
went to Cohn and offered to
double
Grant's offer to $10,000 if Cohn would
fire
the actor.

Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the friction between director and star, the performance McCarey got from Grant was nothing less than astonishing. It not only redefined Cary Grant's image as a leading man, it helped alter the public's notion of what a leading man in film was supposed to be.

Prior to
The Awful Truth,
a romantic male who was at once charming, intelligent, romantic, sensitive, witty, sexy, rascally, and as beautiful as a leading lady simply did not exist in American movies. Hollywood's first generation of leading men were, with rare exceptions, courtly Europeans with sculpted mustaches and slicked-back hair such as Ronald Colman; elderly leches like Adolphe Menjou, devilish hedonists like Rudolph Valentino, or all-American cowboys like Tom Mix.

As talkies became the standard, this image shifted more toward all- American image of the WASP, largely humorless rural hunks—Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, young Jimmy Stewart, and to a lesser degree Henry Fonda and John Wayne. Cooper and Stewart in particular specialized in the duped hick steeped in and therefore redeemed by his own moral self-righteousness.

Others, like the urbane William Powell as Nick Charles in the
Thin Man
series (1934–47) and the cartoonishly insane John Barrymore in Howard Hawks's
Twentieth Century
(1934), were a combination of the older, mustachioed European sophisticates and arrested (and extended) American adolescents, where intellect and wit replaced rather than led to any real sexual sparks.

In
The Awful Truth,
Cary Grant's Warriner was handsome, sexy, and urbane, with just a whiff of British sophistication, and not a hint of twofistedness to foul the funny air. His charismatic performance was, despite McCarey's methods, part Chaplin heartbreak—a wounded heart that must rise above the hurt—and part Keaton, imbued with an extraordinary physical grace that is at once attractive, elegant, and expansive. Ironically, McCarey's comedic skills and film smarts helped Grant, in spite of his resistant stance, merge his individual characteristics into a wholly realized character. As Jerry Warriner, his good looks were not just those of another pretty face but a personal come-hither invitation to stop by and look around, all the way to the inside of his soul.

With McCarey's assured direction, Grant had finally found a way to use physical humor to portray the essential humanity of Jerry Warriner. Grant's catlike physicality, which had brought him to the brink of lugubriousness in his earlier leading-heel roles, now translated into a youthful, rhythmic prance fueled by the high energy of light comedy. A bend of his knee became the equivalent of a punch line. A lifting of his palms expressed a lifetime's skepticism. A tilting of his head suggested a turning of the other cheek. Critic Andrew Britton pointed out, in one of the most insightful explanations of Grant's enormous appeal in
The Awful Truth,
that his performance was “remarkable for the extent to which characteristics assigned by those [traditional gender] roles to women could be presented as being desirable and attractive in a man.”

The film also caused a sensation for its inspired and at the time postmodernist depiction of women. As portrayed by Dunne, Lucy is an attractive, intelligent
equal,
able to hold her own in the eternal battle of the sexes. Dunne's brilliantly lunatic performance set the stylistic stage for such later comic film actresses as Judy Holliday and Audrey Hepburn, and in TV comedy the antics of Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and Gilda Radner.

In the film's unforgettable last scene, in their cabin hideaway, McCarey brilliantly reconciles his characters' relationship by resolving their emotional crisis. In a reconciling two-shot, McCarey shows Lucy in bed, a quilt covering her legs, her chin resting softly in her right palm, her face lit with the beauty of forgiveness, watching her man go through a visual cacophony of facial expressions and body movements—brow furrowed, eyes wide and damp, mouth and throat locked in gulp, his right hand cupped and pointed up. The unspoken reconnection between them provides the audience with a privileged and breathtaking moment of pure requited love.

When
The Awful Truth
premiered on October 21, 1937, at New York City's famed Radio City Music Hall (the first of twenty-eight Cary Grant movies that would open there, a record never broken), the critical and popular reaction was rightly unanimous in declaring it the best film of the year, if not the entire decade. Among the most enthusiastic reviews was the one that appeared in
The New York Times,
which called it “an unapologetic return to the fundamentals of comedy [that] seems original and daring!”

In less than a month,
The Awful Truth
earned its costs back and then some, surpassing the half-million-dollar profit mark while still in its first-run release. It would go on to become one of Columbia's all-time box office smashes. Thanks to Vincent, Grant's cut of the film included 10 percent of the gross on top of his contract fee, a deal that would, at the end of the film's initial domestic theatrical run (prior to rereleases, foreign distribution, and eventual television and video rights), put more than a half-million dollars into Cary Grant's pocket.

In one of the most spectacular career leaps in the history of Hollywood, Grant had gone from a position of relative unimportance only two years earlier, when he had received less than 1 percent of the annual votes cast in the Motion Picture Herald Poll (at the time the most popular and respected pre
–Entertainment Tonight
listing), to one of the top five male box office attractions of 1937. His inspired performance, the first to give the world a glimpse of the comic persona of “Cary Grant,” put him in the pantheon alongside Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Paul Muni, and Spencer Tracy.

At a still-youthful-looking thirty-three, Grant had already lived a lifetime
(by Hollywood's standards) of being miscast—“resplendent but characterless, even a trace languid, outrageously attractive if vaguely ill at ease—a slightly wilted sheik or a slightly fleshy cow-eyed leading man with a pretty-boy killer looks,” as Pauline Kael later observed. Indeed, after nearly a decade spent as a vaudevillian acrobat, another as a moderately successful but undistinguished Broadway leading and song-and-dance man, and an uninspired run as a humorless foil to the most glamorous leading ladies in Hollywood, he had, at last, discovered a director—or more accurately, he was discovered by a director, Leo McCarey—who helped him make the transition into the sophisticated, handsome, witty, and urbane leading man the world would come to know and love as Cary Grant. Suddenly, women were swooning over his handsome face and physique while men tried to comb their hair the way he did and put metal screws to their chins trying to drill themselves a Cary Grant cleft. Everyone, it seemed, had gone crazy over him.

Everyone, that is, except Cary Grant. While he gratefully accepted the accolades for his performance in
The Awful Truth,
he confided to close friends that he still intensely disliked the movie and especially his part in it. Indeed, no one was more surprised than he was by its success, mostly because he had no idea where the great performance he had given in it had come from. He was amused but not cheered by everyone's assumption that he was in real life the same affable persona he was in the film—the superbly handsome comic rascal, everyone's perfect fantasy.

In truth, he still had no clear image of who he really was. Whenever he saw himself onscreen, it was like looking at a gigantic mirror whose reflection was familiar, but one he could not quite identify with or relate to. The person up there, the idealized and romanticized character whose every move was dictated by an unseen director, whose every clever word and turn of phrase were put into his mouth by an unseen screenwriter, and who was lit and photographed by unseen experts who knew just how to make his skin glossy, his eyes bright, his hair shiny, his chin granite—that manufactured character, he believed, was more handsome and funny and clever and wise than he could ever be in real life, more smoothly graceful and impossibly svelte than
any man could ever be.
That was the man everybody adored
—that
was “Cary Grant.”

Back on his own real-life side of the glass, however, he could see all the shortcomings with crystal clarity. Without a producer, without a costar, and without a script, he didn't need a director to tell him what to do; he needed a god to show him who he was.

And sure enough, one was on his way, a fellow Brit who would know exactly how to redeem Cary Grant from the beautiful distortion of his own blinding starlight.

Cary and Hitch, Hollywood's oddest couple, here having lunch on location in France, on the set of
To Catch a Thief
(1955). Each looked at the other and saw the reflection of his inner self, reflections that lit up and set the silver screen on fire throughout their four-picture, eighteen-year collaboration.
(MacFadden Publishing/CORBIS)

14

W
henever Randolph Scott was away, either visiting his wife Marion duPont in Virginia or working on location on a film, Grant spent his evenings dancing at the Trocadero with “the Brooks.” After the success of
The Awful Truth,
Grant was riding high, and his newfound fame and fortune helped, at least for the moment, to bring him out of his normally reclusive shell, as did his blossoming romance with Brooks. For her part, she fully expected an offer of marriage from Grant, one she would unhesitatingly accept, even if he stipulated that she had to give up her film career. In truth, it wouldn't be much of a sacrifice, as she didn't have much of a career beyond a steady stream of B movies, the dubious highlight of which was a couple of Charlie Chan flicks. For her, the only part that really mattered was that of Mrs. Cary Grant. The problem was that Grant had no intention of ever getting married again, and to gently discourage Brooks from going down that path, he insisted she keep looking for more movie work and promised to help her find better roles.