Cary Grant (31 page)

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B
y the time
His Girl Friday
was released on January 18, 1940, to great reviews and tremendous box office, Cary Grant had all but disappeared from Hollywood's glittery nighttime social scene. Following his acrimonious split from Scott, he had reverted to his hermit ways, spending most of his time alone at the beach, and rarely visiting the new house he had rented for himself in Beverly Hills.
^*
He went out only for meals and had most of them alone, at Chasen's, in a red banquette in the rear, or at the Beverly Hills Hotel, or very occasionally at the Brown Derby, until he had to give that place up because of the relentless autograph-seekers. Everyone, it seemed to him, wanted his autograph, even if it were scribbled on a wet napkin, and he had come to resent it. He even went so far as to complain about what he called the “absurd practice” to Louella Parsons, with whom he had reconciled, and who continued to write about him, although in less sensationalistic ways, this time using one of her columns to put the world on notice
that should they be lucky enough to see Cary Grant in person, they should not dare to ask for his autograph.

A few months later Grant agreed to make the actual long-awaited followup to
The Awful Truth,
costarring Irene Dunne and directed by Leo McCarey.
My Favorite Wife
instantly became one of the most anticipated productions of the year—until McCarey got drunk and totaled his car in a collision on Sunset Boulevard that nearly killed him and caused RKO to consider canceling the film. McCarey recovered enough to supervise the production, with Garson Kanin taking over as director.

In
My Favorite Wife,
Nick (Cary Grant), whose wife Ellen (Dunne) has disappeared in a shipwreck, waits the mandatory seven years before going to court to have her declared legally dead so he can marry the new woman in his life, Bianca (Gail Patrick). Nick loves Bianca, but not with the same passion he did Ellen. She will, he believes, be an excellent replacement mother for his two young children. Just as Nick remarries, Ellen is miraculously rescued from the deserted island where she has been living and shows up, only to discover she has been declared officially dead and Nick has a new wife. To complicate things further, Nick discovers that Ellen survived on that deserted island with a hunky partner (played by, of all people, Randolph Scott). All of this gets sorted out in the last reel to everyone's satisfaction, and along the way some genuine laughs are dealt. But the real-life tension and chemistry between Grant and Scott supplied the vibrancy. As they vie for the affections of Irene Dunne, they priss and preen at each other, competitively show off their bodies, and then all but ride off into the sunset together.

By now Grant was arguably the biggest male star in Hollywood, while Scott was still essentially a B movie actor, and it was generally believed that Grant had done Scott a favor by arranging for him to appear in this film. In truth, Grant did it simply because he missed Scott and wanted to see him. During filming the two reportedly spent several nights together at the beach house.

There was talk among their friends that they might even be getting back together, but that wasn't what Grant had in mind. His loneliness was not eased by the temporary reprise with Scott, who left the beach house for good, again, when production on the film ended. Grant was looking for something
more, something better, something that would move him to the front of the trolley car.

“Plenty of room up front” was the way Grant answered anyone these days who asked how things were going. Sometimes he added, “Step to the front of the car,” a response that baffled most people. The car he was referring to was a streetcar, like the ones that still rode up and down Hollywood, Sunset, and Santa Monica Boulevards. He found them the ideal metaphor for what the relentless life of making movie after movie was when there was no one to come home to every night. The streetcars ran on circular tracks that started nowhere and always arrived at the same place, merry-go-round style. “There's only room for one car on the line, and so many passengers. The instant the car begins to move, the conductor takes up the chant, ‘Move up front! Plenty of room up front!’ At the next stop, when a new mob tries to scramble aboard, a handful of bruised, battered, and bedraggled actors get pushed off, landing with a hollow thud on the concrete of Oblivion Street!”

Clearly Cary Grant was ready to make some changes in his private life, even if he didn't have a clue as to what he wanted or how to go about finding it.

As it turned out, he wouldn't have to. Change found him, beginning in the spring of 1940 when—out of nowhere, or so it seemed at the time— Barbara Hutton appeared in Beverly Hills and immediately sought out the companionship of Cary Grant.

Hutton had gained a bizarre reputation as one of the so-called Beautiful People whom everyone loved to hate. Born in 1912, she had grown up with her name and pictures in the newspapers from the day she was five years old and her mother committed suicide, leaving little Hutton a one-third heir to her grandfather Frank Woolworth's estate; her share was estimated at the time to be in the $100 million range. Her father took personal charge of his daughter's inheritance and improved it by another $50 million, then predicted the collapse of Wall Street and got out of the market weeks before America was plunged into its Great Depression.

The Hutton name then became synonymous with greed and selfishness—
and that was before blond, blue-eyed, five-foot-two, eighty-five-pound Barbara met Prince Alexis Mdivani, a universally reviled fortune hunter whom the twenty-year-old Hutton, it was widely believed, paid $2 million to marry her. She tired of him three years later and paid him $1.5 million more for a noncontested divorce so she could marry Danish Count Haugwitz-Reventlow, reportedly paying
him
$1.5 million for
his
hand in marriage. In order to conform to Danish rules of royal heritage, Hutton had to renounce her American citizenship, which she did without a moment's hesitation.

Hutton's second marriage lasted little more than a year, just long enough for her to have a baby, after which she and the count legally separated. She then relocated to London, where she planned to raise her infant son, Lance Reventlow, until England's entry into World War II drove her back to the safety of the United States.

She bought a home in San Francisco and, at the suggestion of her friend the Countess Dorothy di Frasso, hired a public relations firm to try to improve her image. She made a series of huge donations to several charitable causes, including a much-publicized $100,000 gift to the Red Cross.

In 1940, while she was visiting di Frasso, who lived in Beverly Hills, the countess threw a large, celebrity-studded dinner in Hutton's honor at her home. One of the invitees Hutton had insisted on was that handsome actor she had met on her voyage to America a year earlier aboard the
Normandie.

It is not difficult to understand Hutton's attraction to Grant. Less obvious but no less compelling is why he was so receptive to her very public (and well-publicized) pursuit. While the moviegoing public adored him, he felt stuck on that streetcar. At the age of thirty-six he had already “divorced” twice, counting Scott, a relationship that in many ways had been more of a marriage than the one to Cherrill. His desire for a lasting, meaningful partnership churned beneath the surface of his emotional aloofness. Because the risk of being hurt by love was so frightening to him, he kept a careful distance from everyone for whom he felt anything—his onscreen persona of nonpursuit a reflection of the way he personally kept himself safely out of intimacy's reach. Grant's unrealistic notions of romantic love were conveniently
entwined with his unconsummated infatuations. After his disastrous marriage to Cherrill, the only women he was able to form long-term, meaningful relationships with were those wealthy enough for him to be certain they weren't after “Cash and Cary's” money or those to whom he wasn't sexually attracted, such as Phyllis Brooks, Jean Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, and Rosalind Russell. On those terms, Barbara Hutton was a perfect match.

There was all of that, and something else. Grant's relationship with Scott had always been highly competitive, as intense as any real sibling rivalry. In many ways, Scott was, to Grant, the embodiment of the older brother he was denied by the early death of John William Elias Leach. Grant was by far a bigger star than Scott. He was also better looking and in better shape. He had managed to keep the house they had both wanted. Scott, on the other hand, had more money, and an heiress wife. By marrying Barbara “Woolworth” Hutton, Grant knew, he could surpass his former lover and sibling substitute on both counts.

When Hutton made herself available to Grant, he began to see her but insisted her publicity firm not cover their relationship. He did not want to see their names together in print. If she was interested in publicity, Grant told her, she should find someone else. And, as for her high-end social life, he wasn't interested in that, either.

Grant had more than the fear of somehow being exploited by Hutton on his mind when he insisted on keeping their relationship a secret. The last thing he wanted was a confrontation with the always-volatile Brooks over the new woman in his life. He didn't see the need to hurt her or go through any unnecessary confrontations. He didn't have time for that, or for much of anything else, conveniently adding new movies to his schedule.

Although he was somewhat bored making them, besides serving as his emotional escape valve, he also feared that if he were out of work for too long, the government would no longer allow him to stay in the country on what was, after all, a glorified if strictly limited work permit. He had agreed to England's request to make patriotic movies, whatever they were supposed to be, and he couldn't very well do that if he were off on a beach somewhere in Mexico. For that matter, due to his residency permit restrictions, he couldn't even go to Mexico, any more than he could go to Dover,
Rome, Barcelona, or the French Riviera. The war was raging everywhere, it seemed, except in America. Around the world men his age were worried about catching a bullet between the eyes, while his biggest worry was landing a role in Hepburn's newest project, the film version of her hit Broadway play
The Philadelphia Story.

In the spring of 1940, at Cohn's suggestion, and because it seemed sufficiently “patriotic,” Grant accepted a role in Columbia's production of Frank Lloyd's
The Howards of Virginia.
Cohn believed the film would open Grant's range to an even wider variety of roles, but the film turned out to be one of the least successful of Grant's career.
The Howards of Virginia
was a favored project of Cohn, who had purchased the original novel on which it was based, a buckskin War of Independence drama entitled
The Tree of Liberty
by Elizabeth Page. He chose Frank Lloyd, who had won an Oscar for directing
Mutiny on the Bounty,
to produce and direct it.

The film was shot mostly on location in the recently restored “colony” of Williamsburg, Virginia (which John D. Rockefeller had paid for and now let Cohn use for free as a way to promote tourism). In the movie, a badly miscast, ponytailed Grant plays Matt Howard, a surveyor friend of Thomas Jefferson, who works for Fleetwood Peyton (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) and falls in love with his daughter Jane (Martha Scott). At Jefferson's encouragement, Howard enters politics, and when the Revolutionary War threatens to break out, he sides with the colonists and runs off to join the army, despite Jane's pleas not to get himself killed. He is joined by his two sons, one of whom he has been estranged from. They reconcile in the heat of battle and return home to the waiting arms of a tearful wife and mother.

The Howards of Virginia
is notable for being the first film in which Grant played “age.” Gray temples and grown sons were odd elements for the stillyoung actor, as were the strangeness of buckskin and muskets. Grant vamped through the film while he waited for production to begin on
The Philadelphia Story.

To no one's surprise but Cohn's,
The Howards of Virginia
laid a turkeysized egg at the box office and in so doing put an end to Grant's unbroken string of box office hits. No one wanted to see Grant with gray hair and grown children. Unlike his other “war” film,
Gunga Din,
in which Grant, Fairbanks,
and McLaglen
were
children, this film lacked humor and irony, as well as any trace of Grant's patented brand of urban sophistication.

Barbara Hutton had been planning to move to Hawaii with her son, Lance, for the duration of the war, but once her relationship with Grant became more serious, she decided instead to rent a place in Beverly Hills, while he worked on the long-awaited production of
The Philadelphia Story.

The Broadway version of the Philip Barry play, written especially for Katharine Hepburn, had been a huge hit, but Howard Hughes was having difficulty selling the film rights in Hollywood, where Hepburn—the toast of the Great White Way, having won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for her performance—was still considered something of a stomach-lining irritant. The handsome New York show that opened in the spring of 1939 costarred Joseph Cotten as C. K. Dexter Haven, Tracy Lord's (Hepburn's) divorced first husband; Van Heflin as Macaulay Connor, the sardonic gossip columnist (Heflin claimed, as nearly everyone else in the original cast did, that Barry had specifically written the part for
him—
in Hepburn's case it was true, in Heflin's it wasn't); and Shirley Booth. While the casting was perfectly suited for New York audiences, it did nothing to enhance the prospect of a film. Selznick said he wanted it, but as a vehicle for Bette Davis. MGM wanted it for Joan Crawford. The only decent offer Hughes got was from Warner Bros., which was willing to pay Hughes $225,000 if it could cast its star Ann Sheridan in the lead. The bottom line was, every studio was interested in the play, but none wanted Hepburn, and there was no way Hepburn would let Hughes sell the rights without her. When independent moviemaker Samuel Goldwyn, who according to his biographer Scott Berg was “mad for the material,” offered to put Gary Cooper in the starring role and get William Wyler to direct, Hepburn said no to him as well. She wanted George Cukor, and only George Cukor, to guide her through this film.