Authors: Marc Eliot
Following
Sylvia Scarlett,
Cukor had gone on to direct
Camille
at MGM, starring the already-legendary Greta Garbo, the young and handsome Robert Taylor, and the venerable screen icon Lionel Barrymore.
Camille
confirmed Cukor's reputation as a “woman's director,” both in his handling of difficult movie stars and in the huge appeal his films usually had to female audiences. He was still under contract to Selznick International Pictures (SIP), in anticipation of his directing the much-delayed film version of
Gone With the Wind,
waiting for production on the film version of the popular novel to begin. Two years had passed since
Camille,
during which time Cukor had turned down several plum SIP assignments, including 1937's
A Star Is Born,
which starred Fredric March and Janet Gaynor and won an Oscar for Best Screenplay for William Wellman and Robert Carson, and nominations for Selznick (Best Picture), William Wellman (Best Director), and both March and Gaynor. The other big picture Cukor turned down was 1938's
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
directed by Norman Taurog (although some uncredited scenes were in fact directed by Cukor as a personal favor to Selznick, who was dissatisfied with Taurog's work).
Early in 1938, when Cohn approached Selznick about the possibility of borrowing Cukor, Selznick quickly agreed. So far that year SIP had paid Cukor $155,000 for his services just for the month of January for some preliminary
Wind
research and location scouting in the South. That was why Selznick, who was always strapped for cash, agreed to loan Cukor to Cohn at the rate of $10,000 a week, to be split evenly, according to the terms of Cukor's contract, between the director and SIP.
While Cohn was delighted to have snagged Cukor, his glee was dampened when Cukor flat-out rejected doing another Grant/Dunne film, telling Cohn it felt too much like a sequel to McCarey's
The Awful Truth,
something he felt doing would be beneath his current level of success. He insisted on using Hepburn, telling Cohn he would not work with any other female star.
Cukor had his reasons for wanting Hepburn. For one thing, she was his first choice to play Scarlett O'Hara, something he was having trouble selling to Selznick, who didn't think she had the looks, the talent, or perhaps most important, the box office clout to merit the world's most coveted film role. Hepburn offered to take a relatively small salary of $80,000 for the role, but Selznick remained unconvinced. Instead, to cover all bets, he signed her to a $1,500-a-week option on her services for the film. This convinced Hepburn she was going to get the part, and because of it she delayed her stage production of
The Philadelphia Story,
a project she had commissioned from the same Philip Barry who had written the stage version of
Holiday,
using Howard Hughes's money to do so.
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Once he heard that Hepburn was in contention to play Scarlett, Cohn changed his tune and allowed Cukor to cast Hepburn and signed her at what he thought was a bargain payout to Selznick, unaware that Hepburn was already in the process of buying herself out of her deal with SIP. Had he played harder ball, Cohn would likely have gotten Hepburn for nothing. Instead, he happily paid her several thousand unnecessary dollars.
As for Dunne, when Cohn informed her she was not going to be in the picture he had supposedly promised her, she reportedly stayed home and cried the entire weekend. Despite having been nominated for Oscars in each of the previous two years (for Richard Boleslawski's
Theodora Goes Wild
in 1936 and
The Awful Truth
in 1937), she was summarily dismissed, at Cukor's
insistence, for his favorite actress and close friend, the far less popular Hepburn.
The plot of
Holiday
reprises the best element of
The Awful Truth—
the two protagonists' reluctance to admit the existence and ultimate power of mutual love—and its atmosphere anticipates the peculiar charm of
The Philadelphia Story,
with its eventual switching of partners that leads them to the big dance. Also like
The Philadelphia Story
would have,
Holiday
has a wellpolished veneer that gives its dark tale of sibling rivalry an appealing sophistication—what Cukor's biographer Patrick McGilligan defined as playwright Barry's stock-in-trade “see-saw of wit and despair.”
The screenplay adaptation was done by Sidney Buchman, a Columbia contract writer, and Donald Ogden Stewart, who had starred in the original Broadway production as Ned Seton, the alcoholic son of the Seton family, and whom Cohn wanted for the movie until Cukor said no. The director preferred Robert Benchley, the popular middle-aged humorist. The role eventually went to Lew Ayres, the star of Lewis Milestone's 1930 Oscar-winning Best Picture,
All Quiet on the Western Front.
For the key role of Johnny Case, the fiancé of the rich and spoiled Julia Seton (played in the movie by Doris Nolan), Cukor's first choice remained Cary Grant.
Shooting on
Holiday
had begun on February 28, the same day
Bringing Up Baby
was released, and a week after the Academy Award nominations for the previous year were announced.
The Awful Truth
was nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Irene Dunne), Best Supporting Actor (Ralph Bellamy), Best Film Editing (Al Clark), and Best Director (Leo McCarey, who would become the only Oscar winner of the group). Conspicuously missing from the list was the name Cary Grant.
Despite his not being nominated, Grant, at Cohn's insistence, attended the Awards ceremony. At the time the Oscars were still little more than an industry banquet, held that year at the Biltmore Bowl of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The coolness Grant felt toward him that night was
palpable. A large majority of the Academy's executive members still harbored a grudge against him for having successfully broken the hitherto ironclad contract system.
Even at this very early stage, Grant had few supporters in Hollywood. Most actors were unnerved by the thought of existing without a studio contract, and creatively those like McCarey had no professional reason to try to improve relations with him. In truth, with the exception of fellow rebels like Howard Hughes, very few wanted to openly align themselves with Grant on any issue. In his acceptance speech, McCarey, still annoyed with the actor and smarting over his firing by Zukor for
Make Way for Tomorrow
's box office fizzle, was greeted warmly by the studio-studded audience. After being handed his Oscar, he said, “Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.”
Grant said nothing as the audience cheered and applauded, the smile on his face as stiff as the tails of his tuxedo.
Holiday
opened on June 15, 1938, and proved a critical and commercial failure. If
Bringing Up Baby
suffered from a lack of character depth,
Holiday
's problem was its excess. Talky, insular, cranky, and only spottily sublime— Cary Grant's somersaults are a metaphor for his shifting romantic focus from Julia to Linda—the film was less screwball than three-fingered curve ball, slow, steady, with a decided dip in delivery.
Holiday
's end-of-the-world-solet's-party message celebrating the nonmaterial joys of life was one of Hollywood's favorite Thirties “messages”: the rich are unhappily trapped by their wealth, while the poor are free to love. But this message left lateDepression audiences more puzzled than charmed, and they were not at all charmed by Hepburn's strident throwback-style performance as Linda, Julia's somewhat cynical sister, whose role is to help Johnny (and the audience) come to the realization that in cynical families, the true cynic is the only romantic.
The reviews for
Holiday
were mixed.
The New York Times
noted that “Hepburn's intensity is apt to grate on a man, even on so sanguine a temperament as Cary Grant's Johnny Case.” Otis Ferguson's
New Republic
review called the film “mechanical” and “shrill” and advised audiences to “save your money and yawn at home”—advice they heeded.
Cohn had come up with the tag line for the advertisements—“Is it true what they say about Hepburn—that she's Box Office Poison?”—and a more misguided sell would be hard to find.
Holiday
also proved a major factor not only in costing Hepburn the role of Scarlett in
Gone With the Wind
but in driving her once again out of Hollywood. After the picture's poor showing, she returned to the Broadway stage, where with Hughes's help she finally mounted
The Philadelphia Story
and set about to try once again to resurrect her moribund career.
On a more positive note, for Cary Grant, in every way except financially,
Holiday
was a personal triumph. He liked the film's downbeat romance (more realistic to him than the lunatic look at love in both
The Awful Truth
and
Bringing Up Baby
) and especially the fact that Johnny, as written, is something of a ruthless heartbreaker (miserable and conniving, according to McGilligan) whose darker desires and impulses are masked by the charm of his somersaulting wit. The way Grant played him he was indeed a “case,” but a likable one.
Nonetheless,
Holiday
did nothing to alleviate Grant's fear that, despite his winning performance, he had somehow lost the upward momentum of his career. Like
Bringing Up Baby,
it was a financial flop, his second in a row after the spectacular success of
The Awful Truth,
and significantly, he had no one to blame for being in those films but himself, having chosen them as the free-lancer he wanted to be. While he himself had made out well, the hard fact was that his first two films for RKO and Columbia respectively had lost money for the studios. His personal fan mail now ran in the thousands every week, but he still could not sleep at night worrying about how long he could remain an employable actor in a town where the studios greeted his name with hostility rather than awards.
On June 27, just twelve days after
Holiday
's dismal opening, Grant began working on
Gunga Din.
Even though Hawks had been fired from the production, Grant had no hesitation in signing on to what was now a George Stevens movie, seeing it strictly as a matter of survival—his own. Although Grant had never worked with Stevens, he had met him socially while making
Bringing Up Baby—
Hepburn had introduced them one night over dinner at
a Hollywood restaurant—and Grant liked him. Another reason he wanted to appear in the two-hour “adaptation” of Kipling's epic poem glorifying British imperialism was his desire to work with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., whom he had personally approached to be in the film, and the hugely popular Victor McLaglen, who had won an Oscar in 1935 for his performance in John Ford's
The Informer.
Grant wanted an ensemble male cast for the film so that if it failed, there would be plenty of “glory” for everyone to go down in.
It is difficult to discern what, if anything, remained of Hawks's original concept for the film in Stevens's version of
Gunga Din,
which today looks like nothing so much as a glorified Saturday-morning TV action serial. One reason is the lack of women. Except for the barest of subplots involving Joan Fontaine and Ann Evers, there is an almost total absence of love interest in the film, replaced by the romance of war and the hard-to-avoid erotic Three Musketeers style of male bonding common to “buddy” action adventure films.
Gunga Din
is one of the very few films in which Grant appears in a military uniform, and the only one in which he actually engages in hand-to-hand combat. The film was, for all intents and purposes, a thinly veiled attack on Hitler's Nazi war machine—the Fuehrer is represented in the film by Eduardo Ciannelli's evil Guru, leader of a malignant cult bent on wiping out the British forces. Even as
Gunga Din
was in production, Hitler was threatening England with mass invasion (and its leader, Winston Churchill, with swift execution). But Pearl Harbor was still more than three years away, and Hollywood, like the rest of the country, remained severely divided about whether America should enter the war. Grant, a British citizen whose politics today would be described as liberal, was always careful to keep his views to himself and may not have immediately seen the parallels between the soldiers in
Gunga Din
and the plight of the British people. (The film was not shown in England until 1946, after World War II ended.)
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But while the British were building up their military, drafting anyone who wasn't wheelchair-bound, serving His Majesty in any way but on the screen was not something Grant was particularly eager to do. There were those who even
suspected that Grant—like many other members of the unusually silent Beverly Hills colony of British acting expatriates, including Sir Cedric Hardwicke, David Niven, Merle Oberon, Christopher Isherwood, Ray Milland, Sir C. Aubrey Smith, and Boris Karloff—had so deeply entrenched himself in Hollywood's elite celebrity society that he did not want to give up his life of luxury to return home to go to war.
Angry articles began appearing in the British press that those actors who chose to stay in America to avoid conscription should be considered traitors. In some cases the accusations were uncalled for—many expat Malibu Brits were simply too old for military service. But, among those who were not, only David Niven (five years older than Grant) voluntarily chose to give up his Hollywood life and career—he joined the British army in 1939, when England formally declared war against the Axis forces.
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The decision would take him away from Hollywood for six years and cost him untold millions in earnings. Grant was not eager to follow in Niven's footsteps, and that summer he quietly reactivated his lapsed application to become an American citizen.
Grant was not acting out of unfounded fear or paranoia. Earlier that year the British government had begun requesting his return and may have enlisted the assistance of the FBI to get him to come home (presumably to put on a uniform). Even before the completion of
Gunga Din,
which took 114 days to shoot, twice as long as originally scheduled, at a cost of nearly $2 million that made it the most expensive movie RKO had ever made, Grant had begun an elaborate chess game with the American and British governments to win the right to legally remain in the United States.