Cary Grant (34 page)

The second event was Grant's unexpected reunion with his onetime roommate and companion Orry-Kelly, who by sheer coincidence happened to be the costume designer on
Arsenic and Old Lace.
Grant and Orry-Kelly spent a long evening together reminiscing about “the old days” and afterward promised to stay in touch.

They didn't.

In January 1942, back at Columbia, Grant made
The Talk of the Town,
produced and directed by George Stevens, an altogether forgettable film about a small-town love triangle that costarred Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman.
^*
Just before shooting began, in the wake of America's entrance into World War II, the thirty-eight-year-old Grant—who was still not an American citizen and therefore ineligible for the draft—decided to do volunteer work for the Hollywood Victory Committee, where he helped organize bond rallies and celebrity hospital tours and hosted several stateside performances for servicemen.

That February, Grant was nominated for Best Actor for his performance in
Penny Serenade.
The other nominees were Walter Huston in William Dieterle's
All That Money Can Buy
(aka
The Devil and Daniel Webster
), Robert Montgomery in Alexander Hall's
Here Comes Mr. Jordan,
Orson Welles in his Mercury Players production of
Citizen Kane,
and Gary Cooper in Howard Hawks's
Sergeant York.
The race was really between Grant, considered the favorite, and Cooper.

The Academy dinner, hosted by Bob Hope, was held on February 26, 1942, at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Grant attended with Hutton and sat quietly through the progression of awards, until James Stewart, winner of the Best Oscar the year before, was introduced by Rosalind Russell to award both the Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor. After announcing that the Best Supporting Actor went to Donald Crisp for
How Green Was My Valley,
Stewart opened the envelope for Best Actor and, staring at the name for several seconds, looked up and let a wide grin cross his face as he announced Cooper's name. The room broke into cheers, and Cooper received a standing ovation as he walked to the microphone. In his familiar halting, wet-lipped style, he leaned over and said, “It was Sergeant Alvin York who won this award.” That brought on another round of applause.

Joan Fontaine then won Best Actress for her performance in
Suspicion.
Backstage, after congratulating Fontaine, a gracious Cary Grant took Hutton's hand and left the ceremonies, skipping all the parties, and went home. In the car he turned to Hutton and said that this was the last Academy Awards he was ever going to attend.

J. Edgar Hoover believed that Barbara Hutton was funneling significant amounts of money to the Nazis, via her second husband, in return for their continued guarantee of his safety. In June, when production wrapped on
The Talk of the Town,
another secret meeting took place in Washington between Grant and Hoover. Within two days of his return to Beverly Hills, Grant asked Hutton to marry him as soon as possible. She agreed, and a day later Frank Vincent, at Grant's insistence, had a prenuptial agreement drawn up that said should he and Hutton divorce, he would not get any of Hutton's money (which was mostly held in secret Swiss accounts) and she would not get any of his. The notion of the prenup likely came not from Grant or Vincent but from Hoover, who, in order to protect Grant from any future complications, did not want his finances to be connected to Hutton's. Within days, despite all the previous delays, Grant's application for citizenship was suddenly expedited, and on June 26, 1942, at the age of thirty-eight, Archibald Alec Leach found himself taking the oath of allegiance from Federal Judge Paul J. McCormick in Los Angeles, after which he was officially a citizen of the United States. Later that same day he legally changed his name to Cary Grant.

On July 7, Hutton, her girlfriend Madeleine Hazeltine, and eleven members of the Hutton personal staff caravaned from Beverly Hills to Frank Vincent's mountainside getaway just outside Lake Arrowhead for her wedding to be held that day. To ensure that no one in the press would discover what was about to happen, Vincent was somehow able to obtain two marriage licenses with both names left blank.

To further throw everyone off track, a few days before, Grant had begun filming Leo McCarey's
Once Upon a Honeymoon,
a zealous bit of wartime nonsense that he had reluctantly agreed to star in for RKO at the request of the FBI, which had “asked” Grant to make an explicitly anti-Nazi
film. Barely a week into the shoot, Grant asked for and received a two-day leave.

On the morning of July 7, 1942, he drove to Lake Arrowhead, stopping on his way to buy flowers from a Beverly Hills shop, and arrived at Vincent's by noon. Less than an hour later a six-minute wedding ceremony took place, conducted by the local Lutheran reverend. Grant's only witness besides Vincent was his male secretary, Frank Horn. Notably absent were Randolph Scott, Howard Hughes, and any members of the Malibu Brit colony. That night the newlyweds returned to Beverly Hills, and the next morning Grant decided to enlist.

He took and passed an army physical and on August 4 was notified by the Adjutant General's Office that he was to report on September 15 for official induction. However, without any explanation, at the time or for the rest of his life, Grant never showed up, and nothing was ever again mentioned about his “enlistment” by anyone in or out of the government. Three months later, on December 11, his eligibility was mysteriously changed from 1A to 1H by the Selective Service. The only official reference to all this is buried in an internal RKO memorandum that reads as follows:

The studio source of this extraordinary document remains cloudy, but the source from “Washington” is, without question, J. Edgar Hoover. It assumes all responsibility for Grant's nonspecified “temporary service” in an unnamed organization and concludes with a promise of “publicity” that was standard FBI code for a Bureau coverup by way of media misdirection. In effect, the
FBI had put the studio on notice that Grant was to be made available whenever they wanted him.
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This marked a dramatic shift in Grant's political activities, a far cry from the days when Hoover had personally warned Grant that he was in danger of violating the Neutrality Act (something, of course, that lost all meaning when America formally declared war on Japan, Germany, and the rest of the Axis powers).

Immediately after getting married, Grant went right back to making movies. He finished the aptly named
Once Upon a Honeymoon
and followed it with H. C. Potter's equally fortuitously titled
Mr. Lucky,
in which he looked absolutely shimmering as a handsome, roguish,
draft-dodging
gambler hustling the moneyed set aboard a cruise ship, only to be redeemed in the last reel by finding true love and renouncing his evil ways. The character was an unusual one for Grant to play and ventured almost beyond the limit of what an audience would accept from him. Manny Farber, writing in
The New Republic,
described the film, and Grant's performance in it, as “interesting, like a bad salad with an intelligent dressing.”

With
Mr. Lucky
in the RKO can, Grant waited for his next assignment while the war raged on. In May 1943 he made a brief appearance at a Hollywood War Bond Drive, where Jack Warner buttonholed him and asked him to please play the starring role in
Destination Tokyo.
After the government's initial neutrality warning, and until he had been granted full U.S. citizenship, Grant had steadfastly refused to appear on film in any military uniform. He did not want to be seen as a foreign visitor portraying American heroes, fearing it might offend too many people and result in his somehow being asked to leave the country. With all of that resolved, however, he was more than willing to appear in Warner's picture.

To acquire Grant's services, Warner had to go through Columbia, where Grant had extended his nonexclusive contract. Columbia agreed to the loanout in return for the services of Warner star Humphrey Bogart for
Sahara
(a role Grant had turned down), clearing the way for Grant to star in
Destination Tokyo
(in a role previously rejected by Gary Cooper).

Directed and cowritten by Delmer Daves and Albert Maltz, based on an original story by Steve Fisher that appeared in
Liberty
magazine, and made with the full cooperation of the U.S. Navy,
Destination Tokyo
tells the story of an American torpedo submarine's daring and highly dangerous spy mission into the heart of Tokyo Bay. In the climax of the film the submarine sinks several Japanese warships, miraculously escapes from screen-shaking depth charges, and returns home to San Francisco.

Six weeks of filming began in September 1943 on a Burbank set that the studio built to the exact physical specifications of the interior of a naval submarine. The actors were directed to project the quiet authority of men on a mission. They talk in the hushed whispers of the righteous and acknowledge each other's bravery with smiles of pride and recognition. The only woman in
Destination Tokyo
is Faye Emerson, who was hardly even in the film until the end, when, home at last, the heroic Captain Cassidy (Grant) is reunited with his wife and child at the military dock. The film ends with their warm embrace—the implied reason “why men fight.”

Grant enhanced his excellent performance by having thirty duplicate uniforms on hand at all times so he would always look immaculate onscreen—the epitome of the sleeves-rolled-up, handsome, manly, gallant American he envisioned his character to be.

Destination Tokyo
was critically well received and proved to be a box office smash when it opened on New Year's Day 1944, two weeks before Grant's fortieth birthday. According to
Newsweek,
“Even moviegoers who have developed a severe allergy for service pictures should find
Destination Tokyo
among the superior films of the war… Cary Grant gives one of the soundest performances of his career; and John Garfield, William Prince, Dane Clark, and the rest of the all-male cast are always credible either as ordinary human beings or extraordinary heroes.”

Because filming on
Destination Tokyo
had dragged on well beyond its original six-week schedule, Grant was forced to shoot his sequences at the Warner lot during the day, then scuttle back to Columbia Pictures, where he had already begun work on his next film. Alexander Hall's
Once Upon a Time,
costarring Janet Blair and the venerable James Gleason, was a fluffy life-on-Broadway comedy about, of all things, a caterpillar who stands upright
and dances whenever he hears the song “Yes Sir, That's My Baby.”
Harvey
esque in its concept—no one can see the caterpillar except Jerry Flynn (Grant)—the story, originally written and produced for the radio, was one of the more glaring miscues of Grant's prime career.

The overlapping production on the two films resulted in Grant's often staying overnight at the studio and sleeping in his dressing room—something that understandably displeased his bride, Hutton, who resented her husband's frequent absences. Increasingly during their first year of marriage, while Grant stayed either at the studio or alone at their rented house, Hutton attended lavish parties without him, thrown mostly by her transplanted European friends of questionable title (and apparently little money, as she usually paid for everything, something the always-parsimonious Grant resented). Alone at the rented house one night, Grant—who liked to be in bed by eleven when he was working, wearing only the tops of his pajamas, a cup of hot tea on the night-table, and reading a good book—had been completely captivated by
None But the Lonely Heart,
a novel by Richard Llewellyn, whose previous work,
How Green Was My Valley,
had been made into a spectacular movie by John Ford.

None But the Lonely Heart
is set in poverty-stricken London in the days leading up to World War II. The hero, Ernie Mott, still not completely over the death of his father in the last war, works in his mother's secondhand store to help her get by. At one point he becomes so desperate for money that he joins a band of thieves and is nearly caught. When he finally gets home, he is shocked to find that his mother has been arrested for trafficking in stolen goods. He soon learns the reason for her action: she is dying of cancer and wants to make sure she leaves something behind for him. She dies in his arms in prison, and Ernie promises himself a better life.