Cary Grant (32 page)

MGM's Louis B. Mayer finally put an offer on the table that she felt she could live with—$175,000 for the rights, and $75,000 for her to reprise her Broadway performance as Tracy Lord. The studio envisioned Clark Gable or Spencer Tracy (whom she had not yet met), or possibly even Robert Taylor,
as the male lead, and Mayer wanted to feature Jimmy Stewart in a supporting role.

MGM hit its first brick wall when Gable, Tracy, and Taylor turned the film down. Each was running hot at the box office and did not want to take the risk of starring opposite “box office poison” Hepburn, and besides, none of them particularly liked the script. Gable in particular thought it was too wordy, and Tracy was much more interested in playing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Victor Fleming's upcoming production of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic.

Mayer then offered her Cary Grant, and Hepburn jumped. (Grant had agreed to make the film for Mayer if he got top billing over Hepburn and a bump in his usual salary to $137,500—double what Hepburn was getting.) She was eager to work with him again, not because their previous outings together had been so great, but because he was now indisputedly the hottest actor in Hollywood. If he gave her Grant, Mayer said, she would also have to take Stewart, which was fine with Hepburn. Most important to Hepburn, and what sealed the deal for her, Mayer okayed George Cukor to direct. Upon hearing the news, a disappointed Goldwyn sent Hepburn a wire at the Shubert Theater in New York, where she was still appearing in the show: “I am heartbroken and I hope what I have heard is not so.”

Gary Cooper was upset about losing out to Grant and publicly complained that Grant was too pretty to play Dexter, that no one would believe Hepburn could ever throw him out. On the other hand, he said, he, Cooper, would have been perfect for the role.

With the casting in place, Hepburn ended the play's Broadway run in May 1940, and production on the film began that July in Hollywood. On the first day of shooting Grant's high salary was reported in the gossip columns. Grant immediately announced that he was donating his entire salary to the British War Relief Fund, a gesture for which he was grandly applauded.
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From the famous opening silent prologue, in which Tracy breaks Dexter's golf club over her knee as he is leaving her, and he retaliates by covering her face with his palm and shoving her backward through the front door,
The
Philadelphia Story
is simply one of the greatest sound comedies Hollywood has ever produced. It opened in December 1940 and broke box office records everywhere, including at Radio City Music Hall, where it beat the venue's previously all-time highest-grossing film, Walt Disney's
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937).
^*

In many ways,
The Philadelphia Story
is really the last great film of the 1930s. With traces of slapstick, melodrama, verbal wit, and manners, it represented nothing so much as the last, innocent days of an America that faded into history in the wake of the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Here is a wealthy family so self-absorbed and isolated from the outside world that the only hint of gathering clouds is those on the outside of the iced champagne glasses. The Lords' house, for all intents and purposes, exists in a place where time and space serve only to elongate comic situations and airily glide into happiness-ever-after. As Grant told one reporter, regarding what he considered the film's irresistible charm: “When I go to the movies I want to forget the dirty dishes in my sink, and what's on my mind. I want to forget my troubles, get out of myself. I want to laugh a little.”

Everyone in the cast of
The Philadelphia Story
gave what many critics consider the best performances of their careers. Bosley Crowther, writing in
The New York Times,
said it “had just about everything that a blue-chip comedy should have, a witty romantic script derived by Donald Ogden Stewart out of Philip Barry's successful play, the flavor of high society elegance, in which the patrons inevitably luxuriate, and a splendid cast of performers.”

The film went on to become the second-highest grosser of the year, just behind the Warner Bros. release of Howard Hawks's World War I reluctanthero, sleeping-giant-awakened hagiographic look at the all-American boy at (the coming) war,
Sergeant York—
starring—Gary Cooper.

In November, Grant returned to Harry Cohn and Columbia to begin work on his third movie of 1941, the soapy
Penny Serenade,
to be helmed by
Gunga Din
's George Stevens.

What had attracted Grant to this project was the chance to work again with Irene Dunne, his favorite costar, in a serious drama rather than another screwball comedy. He told one reporter shortly after production began, “Irene and I sit here and worry a half-hour a day, regularly, about the people who are laughing already, in anticipation of another mad marital mix-up. Oh, they're going to get chances to laugh, but the concentration in this film is on human drama. There isn't any other man and there isn't any other woman. We're married, and the story is about the trials and tribulations of two ordinary people and the things that might happen in any marriage.”

The title
Penny Serenade
refers to the records played by Julie Gardiner Adams (Dunne) as she prepares to separate from her husband, Roger Adams (Grant). In flashbacks, we see their courtship unfold. Adams is a newspaperman who meets and woos Gardiner, a music shop sales clerk. They fall in love, marry, and move to Japan, where Roger has a job as a news correspondent. Julie becomes pregnant but is caught in an earthquake that provokes a miscarriage. She is subsequently told she can never have children again, and so they decide to adopt a baby daughter. They struggle through six years of financial hardship, only to suffer the death of their adopted daughter just as they appear to have finally become solvent. The marriage is almost destroyed but is saved when the couple agree to adopt another child.

Grant let Stevens guide him through a part he could play with his eyes shut and his hands tied behind his back, until on January 25, 1941, he was informed on the set that five of his relatives on the Leach side—Mr. and Mrs. John Henry Leach, his uncle and aunt, and their daughter, son-in-law, and infant grandson—were all killed when a German bomb made a direct hit on Bristol. The news of their deaths unnerved him and produced a swell of guilt and remorse for having avoided returning to England, joining the army, and fighting the Germans. Grant, however, made no public comment about the incident and allowed no interruption in his filming schedule. Ironically, the real-life grief he was feeling gave his portrayal of Roger Adams a nontechnical reality that was eerily unlike anything Grant had ever done before or would do again in the movies.

During the closing days of shooting, the Academy Award nominations for the best films, direction, technical expertise, and performances of 1940 were
announced. As expected, Hepburn was nominated for Best Actress for her portrayal of Tracy Lord in
The Philadelphia Story.
The shocker came with the Best Actor nominations: James Stewart got one for his portrayal of Macaulay Connor, but Cary Grant was once again overlooked. Because of it, Grant chose not to attend the Awards ceremony. Stewart did and won, as did screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart for his adaptation of the Barry play.
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Penny Serenade
opened April 24, 1941, to positive reviews, many of which singled out Grant's performance for special praise. Otis Ferguson, writing in
The New Republic,
said, “Cary Grant is thoroughly good, in some ways to the point of surprise, for there is not only that easy swing and hint of the devil in him, but faith and passion expressed, the character held together where it might so easily have fallen into the component parts of the too good, the silly, etc.”

Grant was pleased with the critical response to his performance, but he was now looking ahead to his first really exciting project since
The Awful Truth.
At last his schedule and Alfred Hitchcock's were in sync, and Grant eagerly signed on to appear in the director's fourth American film,
Suspicion.
^†

What particularly delighted him was the role of Johnnie Aysgarth, a different type of romantic lady-killer from the ones he was used to playing.

A murderous one.

18

T
he chance to work with Alfred Hitchcock couldn't have come at a better time. After his bitter disappointment at being left out of the nominations for
The Philadelphia Story,
and the personal trauma he suffered during the making of
Penny Serenade,
Grant had considered retiring from movies. He had made his money and left his mark; he wondered why he should continue to subject himself to the further humiliation of being rejected by the Academy. What renewed his interest in film acting was the opportunity to work with Hitchcock.

Production on
Suspicion,
which had begun on February 10, 1941, only weeks after Grant had completed
Penny Serenade,
dragged along for five months, while Hitchcock and David O. Selznick furiously clashed over the fate of the character of Johnnie Aysgarth.

By the time he began
Suspicion,
Hitchcock had come to regret his decision to sign with Selznick. From the start he had found himself battling with Selznick over the script for
Rebecca,
something that caused him great consternation,
especially when Selznick won most of the story points he was fighting for. Because of it, despite the film's winning the 1940 Best Picture Oscar, Hitchcock would always consider it Selznick's picture. In his notebooks Hitchcock bitterly observed that
Rebecca
had taught him that Hollywood regarded the director as “a minor figure in a fast film industry made up of entrepreneurs who headed the studios.”

As for Selznick, by the end of 1940, having won Best Picture two years in a row,
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he was physically exhausted, creatively spent, and ironically, in serious need of immediate cash. Both films were expensive period pieces that endured heavy cost overruns and produced myriad problems, all of which pushed him into a debilitating addiction to Benzedrine that in turn fueled an already-out-of-control gambling habit. In 1940 Walter Wanger (who had made a series of successful films in the 1930s while under contract to Paramount, Columbia, and MGM, respectively)
^†
had signed a new distribution deal with United Artists, borrowed Hitchcock from Selznick to direct
Foreign Correspondent,
and wanted him again to direct
Suspicion,
which he was about to produce for RKO. Despite the fact that Wanger was willing to pay Selznick $5,000 a week for Hitchcock's services while Selznick was only paying the director $2,500 a week, Hitchcock made no attempt to interfere with the deal. No matter what it cost him in dollars, he was as anxious to get away from Selznick as Selznick was to get away from him.

Suspicion
was based on the 1932 British novel
Before the Fact
by Anthony Berkeley Cox (written under the pseudonym Francis Iles), which RKO had purchased in 1935. After several unsuccessful attempts to make a movie out of it, they shelved the project until Hitchcock and Wanger found the book gathering dust on the studio's shelves. The novel tells the story of Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth (Joan Fontaine), a passive but wealthy woman overly attached to her husband, Johnnie (Grant), who she discovers is in fact an embezzler, has murdered his best friend, and is about to murder her.