Cary Grant (35 page)

Grant told RKO he was interested in the book, and Charles Koerner, the new head of the studio, immediately secured the rights to it with a preemptive bid of $60,000 and then agreed to Grant's $150,000 asking price plus 10 percent of the profits to star in it.

Clifford Odets, the Broadway playwright who had gained great fame (but not a lot of money) dramatizing the plight of the working class
(Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Golden Boy),
was looking for a fat paycheck before
being drafted into the army. He asked his agent to find him something quick and lucrative in Hollywood, and RKO responded by hiring him to adapt
None But the Lonely Heart
for the screen.

He actually began working on the script before Grant's deal was finalized and was shocked when he found out that the forty-year-old actor had been signed to play Ernie Mott, who was only nineteen in the novel and still living with his mother. Odets tried several different ways to make the disparity work, until he came up with a story that aged the boy and made the mother slightly younger, retaining the elements of their character in a more believable mold. Grant, who had also been concerned about the age factor, felt that Odets's screenplay so perfectly captured the essence of both the story and the characters that he called Koerner and insisted that Odets be hired to direct the movie, as well.

Not wanting to rock any boats, Koerner quickly agreed, which is how it came to be that the young Philadelphia-born and New York–based playwright, one of the founders of the Group Theater, who had never before set foot in Hollywood or directed so much as a foot of film, was hired to helm a big-budget movie on its journey from page to screen.

During production, Grant and Odets became good friends, and Odets helped Grant connect the film's dramatic high points to the touchstones of his own early life, particularly his relationship with his mother and the hardships of life in working-class London. Part apologia, part autobiography, part shrine to Elsie, and part social criticism, the film remained one of Grant's personal favorites.
^*

In an increasingly politically polarized 1940s Hollywood, however, the presence of the openly left-wing Odets, a onetime member of the American Communist Party, enraged the industry's powerful conservative faction. Odets became one of the first targets of the notorious Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), founded by rightwing extremists Walt Disney, William Randolph Hearst, and director Sam
Wood (and later headed by John Wayne).
^*
The Alliance actively encouraged J. Edgar Hoover to launch an intensive “investigation into Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry.” The FBI's 1944 investigation was a prelude to the postwar witch-hunts to come.

One of the first things the FBI did was to examine in detail the content of Hollywood's wartime films, and they singled out five as “among the industry's worst, i.e., most pro-Communist offerings to date”: Herbert J. Biberman's
The Master Race,
which he also wrote;
Citizen Tom Paine;
H. C. Potter's
Mr. Lucky;
Delmer Daves's
Destination Tokyo;
and Odets's
None But the Lonely Heart.
^†
Amazingly, of the five movies the Bureau cited, three starred Cary Grant. A Bureau memo then stated that the following Hollywood celebrities had “known Communist connections”: Lucille Ball, Ira Gershwin, John Garfield, Walter Huston, and Cary Grant. Grant's “known Communist connection,” according to the FBI, was Clifford Odets. Later on, in 1947, during the first round of House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings (brought to Hollywood at the urging of the MPA), Lela Rogers (the avenging mother of Ginger Rogers), who had been hired by RKO to serve as its resident “expert” on Communist infiltration, testified before the Committee that in her opinion
None But the Lonely Heart
's despair and hopelessness were nothing more than Communist propaganda, citing as her proof the single line in the screenplay where Ernie Mott's mother tells him she is not going to get him to work in the secondhand store so he can squeeze pennies out of the little people poorer than he is.

She also cited
Destination Tokyo
for a single line of dialogue. Albert Maltz, who had written the film's screenplay (and would go on to become one of the so-called Hollywood 10 during the 1950s round of HUAC investigations), has Captain Cassidy (Grant) say after his submarine is almost blown up by an enemy bomb that was stamped “Made in the USA,” “Appeasement has come home to roost, men.” While the meaning of the line
seems clear enough—an ironic comment on the sale of American munitions overseas before the war—it somehow came to be interpreted by Rogers and the committee as Communist propaganda. John Garfield, Grant's costar in the film, was eventually called to testify at the second HUAC hearings, denied he was ever a Communist, and was subsequently blacklisted, as was Maltz. Unable to find work, Garfield turned increasingly to drink and died prematurely of a heart attack in 1952, at the age of thirty-nine.
^*

Yet Cary Grant—whose name and movies turned up repeatedly in these FBI's investigations; who starred in three of the five movies cited by the FBI's investigation into Communist infiltration; who was close friends with several of those later called before HUAC and accused of being Communists; who had avoided military service first in England and later in America; who refused to appear in any patriotic movies before being granted citizenship; who married a woman who had once renounced her American citizenship to marry a suspected Nazi sympathizer whose closest friends were either known or suspected Nazis or Nazi sympathizers—remained completely untouched and unsullied by both the FBI and the HUAC.

After an examination of existing files of others and related sources, the only logical and unavoidable conclusion is that Grant was protected by the one man in Washington with the power to do so—J. Edgar Hoover—most likely as part of a deal made with the FBI and the British government. This “deal” allowed Grant to avoid prosecution for the Philippine bond scandal, kept him out of wartime service in both Britain and America, allowed him suddenly to switch citizenship (making possible his marriage to Hutton and better access to the accountability of her money), and kept the HUAC hounds from nipping at his especially tempting heels. Grant's part of it—and what had made him so angry after that initial call from the British War Office—was his forced agreement to serve as one of Hoover's domestic “volunteer” spies. There can be little doubt that Cary Grant was a special agent or contact for the FBI assigned prior to and during the war to spy on Barbara Hutton.

Given Hoover's known methods of intimidation and persuasion—which included threats of prosecution and/or exposure of the private sexual practices of those whose services he wanted, and Grant was clearly vulnerable on both counts—it is not difficult to see how effective Hoover's exercise of power, or more accurately, his abuse of it, could be.

Except for one incident, there is little evidence that Grant actually did anything for the Bureau, other than supplying information about Hutton's finances. She had an ongoing “friendship” with one Carlos Vejarnano Cassina. Grant, a bit jealous, believed Cassina was pretending to be romantically interested in Hutton to get to her money, and he was soon arrested by the FBI as a Nazi spy. When taken into custody, a personal letter of recommendation was found in his coat from Hutton for a highly sensitive defense job that Cassina was trying to get. After keeping him under surveillance for months, the FBI had known just when to pounce. Grant had been present the day Hutton handed Cassina the letter.
^*

In 1944, after finishing work on
None But the Lonely Heart,
Grant looked forward to the return of Hutton's only son, Lance, who had been away for six months in New York visiting his father, the count. Reventlow had suddenly been released by the Nazi authorities in Denmark, flown directly to New York City, remarried, and settled into life in a luxurious Park Avenue apartment, all without any visible means of support. Grant was genuinely fond of the boy and enjoyed playing ball with him and taking him around Hollywood to see the sights. That July, when Lance arrived in Pacific Palisades, he was dropped off by representatives of the count, who delivered a message to his ex-wife that he intended to seek full custody of their son.

One week later Lance disappeared. Fearing he had been kidnapped, Grant called the police, and a frantic search ensued. Police swimmers searched the shallow coastal waters in case the boy had accidentally drowned. A day later Grant and Hutton received word from the count that his men had taken the boy and secretly transported him to Canada, out of the clutches of his ex-wife and beyond the reach of American law.

The strain of the kidnapping finally brought Grant's already-shaky marriage to an end. Hutton had railed at him about it for weeks, blaming Grant for “pushing” her ex-husband to take her son away, referring to the fact that the count had managed to get an injunction preventing Grant from being alone with the boy because, the document claimed, Lance had told him that Grant persistently used “foul language.” It was a provocative charge that could easily explode into something much uglier for Grant should the courts ever decide to bring charges of child abuse against him.

By early August Grant had had enough. One night he quietly packed his bags, left the house without saying a word, and moved into a temporary apartment in Beverly Hills he had secretly rented the week before.

The next day an angry Hutton announced to the press that she and Grant had separated. Furthermore, she wanted to make clear, she was the one who had decided to end the marriage, not her husband, and there was “no chance of reconciliation.”

In February 1945, after several months thinking it over, Grant filed for divorce, finalized at a single fifteen-minute hearing held later that summer, during which it was agreed that because of their prenuptial agreement, neither party would receive any money from the other. Hutton insisted that Grant keep the many expensive gifts she had lavished on him, a trove that included several hundred thousand dollars' worth of diamond watches, cufflinks, and other assorted jewelry. When the judge asked her why she thought her husband was filing for divorce, she paused for a few seconds and then, with a smirk on her face, said that they did not share the same circle of friends.

Cover boy and girl—Grant and Ingrid Bergman grace the cover of
Movie Story
magazine to promote the release of Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 classic,
Notorious.
(Rebel Road Collection)

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