Cary Grant (36 page)

I
n February 1945 Cary Grant was nominated for Best Actor by the Motion Picture Academy for his performance as Ernie Mott in
None But the Lonely Heart.
It was his second nomination, his forty-sixth film. He believed he had no chance to win, not only because of the Academy's longstanding hostility toward him, but also because the film had opened to mixed reviews and done poorly at the box office, and Hollywood was loath to give awards to actors whose movies lost money. Unwilling to give the Academy yet another chance to snub him, Grant kept his promise to himself and passed up the chance to sit at a table for hours with a smile fixed on his face until the time came for him to applaud when someone else's name was announced from the podium.

His instinct proved correct. At the ceremony Bing Crosby was awarded the coveted gold statuette for his portrayal of Father Chuck O'Malley in Leo McCarey's
Going My Way.
The Academy then underscored its snubbing of Grant by awarding a Best Supporting Actress Oscar to Ethel Barrymore, Best Original Score Oscars to composers C. Bakaleinikoff and Hanns Eisler, and
a Best Editing Oscar to Roland Gross, in recognition of their work on
None But the Lonely Heart.

For the rest of the year, a bitter Grant rejected all scripts offered to him for his consideration and reverted to his postmarital love-lost rejection/ depression/remorse cycle, not all that different from what he had put himself through following his divorce from Virginia Cherrill. When he found out that Hutton had taken up residence at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, he tried to reach her there, but no matter how many times he called—and on certain days it was as many as a dozen—she refused to come to the phone. When that didn't work, he sent flowers with all sorts of expensive presents attached, none of which managed to evoke from Hutton a call or even a thank-you card. When at last he did manage to catch her on the telephone, she was friendly but cold. Nevertheless, just hearing her voice made him believe they were going to get back together, and a suddenlyhappy Grant confidently told his friends they were reconciling.

They were not. While Hutton still considered herself a friend of her exhusband (“How could anyone really stay angry at such a lovely man,” she told one of the gossips), she remained firm in her conviction that their marriage was history. To get that message hammered into Grant's handsome head, Hutton used Louella Parsons as her personal messenger. She took to having frequent chats with the columnist, knowing Parsons's column was the surest way to send her ex-husband missives. When he could no longer stand it, Grant traveled to San Francisco and waited for Hutton in her hotel's lobby until she came down. She was surprised to see him but remained cordial. They talked and even had a drink, and Hutton told him once again that the time had come for both of them to move on. The next day Parsons ran another item from Hutton: “Cary was the husband I loved most, he was so sweet, so gentle, it didn't work out. But I loved him.” Grant took that as a hopeful sign.

Not long afterward, Hutton moved to Tangier, where she planned to live out the rest of her days. Upon hearing the news of her departure, Grant holed up in his apartment and for weeks did nothing but fumble around from room to room, according to friends, crying at night and drinking himself into fitful sleep.

It was the persistent Frank Vincent who, that spring, finally broke through Grant's black cloud and convinced him the time had come to reenter the world of the living. For openers, he insisted Grant move out of his dark and depressing apartment and into a real home. He found Grant a spacious six-room split-level above Hollywood in the lavish, star-studded Beverly Hills.

Despite an ongoing housing shortage, Vincent had no problem jumping to the front of the long line of buyers wanting the house, because it happened to belong to Howard Hughes, who had purchased it with the intention of living there with Katharine Hepburn upon her triumphant return to Hollywood following the success of
The Philadelphia Story.
Although the two actually did spend a little time in the house, the interior paint had barely dried before Hepburn left Hughes for good, having fallen in love with Spencer Tracy. The house then sat empty until the summer of 1945, when Hughes finally put it on the market. Vincent quickly gobbled it up for Grant (taking the discount Hughes offered for cash).

In the fall of 1946, as the Hills of Beverly were beginning to give up their warm summer breezes for the slicker spicy cool that blew through the storied canyons, Grant finally moved his relatively few pieces of functional furniture out of his small apartment and into his spacious new home.

Harry Cohn, meanwhile, was growing increasingly impatient with his sullen, reclusive star and wanted him to make the one movie left on his contract. As it happened, Jack Warner, whose studio had scored a major hit with
Destination Tokyo,
was also interested in using Grant again, whose postwar value had skyrocketed. Many of the biggest male stars who had gone off to war had returned with the wear from their emotional and physical battles etched into their once-smooth faces.

Two of the biggest, Clark Gable and James Stewart, had joined the armed forces as perfect physical specimens, only to come back looking rugged and creased and, in Stewart's case, with far less hair on his head. Gable, arguably
the single biggest male star of the 1930s, had suffered more than most, beginning with the untimely, horrible death of his beautiful wife Carole Lombard; he had spent the rest of the war in uniform, as if to atone for somehow being personally responsible for the war bond plane crash that had killed her and her mother. As a result, his once-mischievous grin had flattened into a permanent leathered fret, and the new gray brushstrokes around his temples put even more distance between this Gable and the roguish prewar Rhett Butler. Stewart, too, had acquired some roughness around his edges; his eyes now reflected a haunted look. Besides Gable and Stewart, dozens of other A-listers had newly “matured” in one way or another, including Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, and after four long years in the British service, David Niven.

There was no getting around the fact that few of Hollywood's male stars, such as Henry Fonda and Bob Hope, looked as good as they had before the war (and none looked as good as Grant did, before
or
after). At forty-two years old, Grant could easily play ten years younger on the big screen. Jack Warner believed that Grant's physical perfection made him the last of his generation's leading men who could still deliver a romantic picture into big profit. That was why he put out feelers to Columbia about the possibility of purchasing the rights to Grant's last unmade film he owed the studio. He had a specific project in mind for Grant and took Frank Vincent to lunch to discuss it.

Vincent listened patiently, then said simply that it didn't make any difference whether Columbia said yes or no—Grant was not ready to resume making motion pictures and might not ever be, and the best thing Warner could do was wait. In time, he might be able to get Grant without having to go through Columbia.

That sounded like nonsense to Warner, who thought it had to be some kind of bargaining ploy. The next week, ignoring Vincent's advice, he arranged a meeting with Harry Cohn, and the day before it took place, he called Vincent and suggested he be there for it. To Warner's surprise, Vincent showed up with Grant, who was beautifully tailored, well tanned, smiling, and bright-eyed. Vincent had told Grant about the meeting, and was surprised to hear him say he wanted to go. Grant told Vincent he respected both men, they had been very good to him, and while he had absolutely no interest in making any more movies, he felt obliged to at least show them the respect of listening to their offers.

Grant's mindset abruptly changed when Warner revealed to him the picture he had in mind—a musical biography of Cole Porter that he wanted to call
Night and Day,
with Grant starring as the great composer.

It was a temptation Grant couldn't resist. In addition to his stated feelings to Vincent of moral obligation to his friends, his decision to attend the meeting most likely meant his emotional cycle had finally turned and he was ready to go back to work. The Cole Porter biopic sounded to him like the perfect picture with which to make a triumphant return to film.

He was right. A biographical movie often was the highlight of an actor's career. In the seventeen years of the Academy's existence prior to the release of
Night and Day,
biopics had brought Oscars to an impressive roster of stars, including George Arliss for
Disraeli
(1929), Charles Laughton for
The Private Life of Henry VIII
(1933), Paul Muni for
The Story of Louis Pasteur
(1936), Spencer Tracy for Father Flanagan in
Boys Town
(1938), Gary Cooper for
Sergeant York
(1941), James Cagney for George M. Cohan in
Yankee Doodle Dandy
(1942), and Jennifer Jones for
The Song of Bernadette
(1943).
^*

The elusive Oscar was still very much on Grant's mind. The very nature of both the business he was in and the person he was, and the fact that each was such a defining element of the other, meant that a part of him still desperately
wanted to win one, if for no other reason than to be able to wave its golden ass in the faces of those studio heads dedicated to seeing that he never got the chance to do so. Comedy hadn't done it for him; neither had romance or drama. Perhaps, he figured, biography was the way to go.

The notion of playing the flamboyant Cole Porter, a social acquaintance of his for many years but not a particularly close friend, held enormous appeal to Grant. Porter had been, during Grant's Broadway years, a manneristic (rather than a physical) role model; one reason why it had amused him when the small, gnomish, physically impaired, and owl-eyed composer, asked by the press who, in a perfect world, he could see playing him onscreen, had replied without hesitation, “Why, Cary Grant, of course!”

Negotiating with Jack Warner, Porter expressed concern over what “facts” might actually be included in a film about his life. He would agree to sell the rights to his story only if the script excluded certain “touchy” elements of his real life. These included the composer's excessive drinking, his well-known homosexual lifestyle, and his marriage-for-appearance-and-bankbook to the older and extremely wealthy divorcée Linda Lee Thomas. And, of course, the price had to be right.

Night and Day
had been a pet project of Jack Warner since 1943, although when he first had the idea of making a movie about Cole Porter, he knew very little about the songwriter's life. One night, not long after the Warners biopic
Yankee Doodle Dandy,
directed by Michael Curtiz, had opened to rave reviews and great business, Warner was having dinner with songwriter Irving Berlin, during which the subject somehow turned to Cole Porter. Berlin told Warner about the famous horseback-riding accident that had crippled Porter. The idea of making a movie with a physically impaired hero, at a time when wounded soldiers were starting to return to the States, appealed to Warner, who was still looking for the right project to mark the twentieth anniversary of
The Jazz Singer,
the film his studio had made that had ushered in the era of talking pictures.

Before
Night and Day,
Warner had gone into production on another songwriter bio,
Rhapsody in Blue,
a big-budget star-studded bonanza about the life of George Gershwin. The problem with the picture was that its lead, Robert Alda, wasn't a big enough star or strong enough to outshine his supporting players. The film was a hit, but not the smash Warner was looking
for, and he was still searching for the right subject to commemorate
The Jazz Singer
when he had dinner with Berlin and shortly after decided to turn Cole Porter's life into a movie.

Warner paid Porter $300,000 for the rights to his life, a deal in which Porter would have total script and cast approval and retain the final choice of which of up to thirty-five of his songs would be included in the film. Warner then went after Cary Grant, the only star he believed could do justice to the role. He offered Grant $100,000 up front, plus a percentage. In addition, he bought out the contract for Grant's last film that he owed Columbia.

While Grant waited for Warner to come up with a script that Porter approved, he remained at his new, still barely furnished Beverly Hills house, where he spent much of his time reading mystical self-help books, of which he had become a fan, occasionally venturing out at the behest of Howard Hughes.

One evening Hughes, enmeshed in negotiations to take control of the perpetually money-losing RKO, needed a place to hold a top-secret meeting with Dore Schary—privacy never an easy thing to secure in Hollywood. Tipsters all over town grew rich reporting to the gossips the whereabouts of stars and their supposedly secret goings-on, while the owners of celebrity hangouts such as the Trocadero, Ciro's, the Brown Derby, and Chasen's regularly serviced the gossips in return for a mention in their columns.