Cary Grant (37 page)

The one place Hughes knew to be absolutely impenetrable to the press was his former home, Grant's present one. As Billy Wilder once wryly observed, “I know of not one single soul—nobody—who has been inside Cary Grant's house in the last ten years.” Grant's reclusiveness made it the place of choice for Hughes's most important meetings, as well as his many secret sexual rendezvous with young starlets. Hughes, who shunned being the target of scandalous rumor as if it were a communicable disease, knew Grant was one of the few people in Hollywood he could trust unconditionally. Grant, as well, considered Hughes one of his best and most loyal friends, and whenever he wanted to use his former house, Grant was more than accommodating, to the extent of leaving all the bathrooms the way the six-foot-four
Hughes had had them custom-built, with extra-large toilets, showers, bathtubs, and beds to suit his lengthy frame.

The night of the meeting Schary arrived a few minutes late and saw Hughes's automobile already parked in the driveway. Upon being let in by Grant himself, who answered his own door—he no longer employed fulltime live-in help and even kept his part-time cook's food budget to one hundred dollars, preferring cold turkey sandwiches made in the afternoon to elaborately prepared evening meals—Schary, who had never been to Grant's home before, was surprised by what he saw, or more accurately, what he didn't see, inside of the home of one of the wealthiest stars in Hollywood. Aside from a few framed seascapes, notable for their lack of human figures, and a studio daybed in the living room still unmade, its blankets in a bunch, “there wasn't a paper, a cigarette, a flower, a match, a picture, a magazine— there was nothing except two chairs and the sofa. The only sign of life was Hughes, who appeared from a side room in which I caught a glimpse of a woman hooking up her bra before the door closed.”

The woman Schary saw was Linda Darnell, one of several actresses Hughes was chasing at the time, among them Swedish-born actress Ingrid Bergman, red hot since winning the 1944 Best Actress Oscar for her role as the victim in George Cukor's
Gaslight.
Bergman accepted an invitation from Hughes to travel with him to New York City one weekend, as long as they had a twenty-four-hour chaperone. Every straight actor in Hollywood (and more than one well-known lesbian actress) was after Bergman, despite the fact she was married at the time to Swedish doctor Peter Lindstrom, the father of her seven-year-old child. None of that mattered to Hughes. As far as he was concerned, her fame, her fortune, and the fact that she was a Swedish beauty made the luscious, tall, high-nosed actress irresistible.

After much convincing, Grant told Hughes he'd chaperone, provided he could bring a suitable traveling companion to make the reason for his presence a bit less obvious. Grant then asked Irene Mayer Selznick if she'd like to accompany him, and she quickly agreed. Grant and Selznick had been friends since his theatrical days in New York City, when he was an actor and she was a producer, and Grant still considered her one of his closest and most trusted confidantes. At the time Selznick and her husband were having difficulties
in their marriage, and Grant thought the trip might take her mind off her troubles for a few days. He was right; they both had a ball watching Hughes fall flat on his face trying to woo Bergman. All four spent at least one night together in the upstairs room of “21” eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Grant's choice, chased with expensive iced champagne. The only thing Hughes got out of it was a sticky tongue.

That Monday, Grant and Selznick took an early commercial flight back to L.A., while Hughes insisted that Bergman fly with him later in the day. When they arrived a few minutes late at check-in, Bergman discovered that not only had the seats Hughes insisted he had reserved been given away, but all the seats on every L.A.-bound flight scheduled for that day had been sold. She didn't know it at the time, but Hughes had purchased them all so that they would have to fly home in his private plane, which happened to be fully fueled, on the runway, and cleared for takeoff. “It was all very flattering,” Bergman said later, “and I imagine some women would have been very impressed.”

Unfortunately for Hughes, she wasn't one of them. She found his attempts at seduction laughable (and, not surprisingly, she found Grant far more attractive). Upon their arrival back in Los Angeles, Hughes dropped off Bergman and went directly to the home of Linda Darnell and apologized for the “pressing business” that had necessitated his sudden trip to New York that weekend.

When Jack Warner felt he had a workable Cole Porter script, delivered to him by a team of screenwriters that included Charles Hoffman, Leo Townsend, William Bowers, and Jack Moffitt, he hired Porter's close friend and Broadway veteran Arthur Schwartz to produce the movie, and Monty Woolley, another member of Porter's tight circle, to serve as technical adviser (he also played himself in the film). To direct, Warner chose Michael Curtiz, a selection that made no one happy except Warner, who had him under salaried contract. Curtiz, a solid journeyman director, had an old-world temperament and histrionic methods that made him extremely unpopular among actors, despite his roster of impressive movies that included
Angels
with Dirty Faces
(1938), for which he was nominated for Best Director,
Yankee Doodle Dandy
(1942), for which he was again nominated, and
Casablanca
(1942), which finally brought him the coveted Oscar.

Production on
Night and Day
began in the fall of 1945. Grant, in a foul mood and still lingering in post-Hutton melancholia, was in no mood for Curtiz's high-booted whip-cracking, and soon the two were going at it, in an on-set feud that became the talk of Hollywood.

For Grant, however, the real problem wasn't Curtiz but the gnawing fear that once again he had chosen a project that, rather than propelling him forward, was merely spinning his wheels.

Night and Day
was released July 2, 1946, its world premiere held at Radio City Music Hall. Despite generally lukewarm reviews by skeptical critics, who knew better than to accept this version of Cole Porter's life as anything but Hollywood fantasy, everyone loved Grant's acting and even his campy singing in a memorable rendition of “You're the Top.” Whenever Porter was asked how he felt about it, he insisted he loved the film as well, but he was always quick to qualify his opinion with the disclaimer that there wasn't a word of truth in it.

Audiences didn't seem to mind the film's extended flight of fancy, and to Grant's surprise and Warner's delight,
Night and Day
became the hit of the summer, grossing more than $14 million in its initial domestic theatrical release, more than justifying the huge amount of money Warner had spent to make it. Indeed, he had spared no expense, insisting that the picture be shot in beautiful three-strip Technicolor—Grant's first color feature film— and the incandescence it added to Grant's face astonished audiences, most of whom had previously seen Grant only in glossy black and white.
^*

Having once more proven his alchemical ability to turn leaden celluloid into box office gold, Grant decided to leave the motion picture business on a high note, and this time he meant forever.

21

T
his time forever lasted all of two weeks, before Grant eagerly agreed to appear in
Notorious,
the film that would reunite him with Alfred Hitchcock. The director had to wait in line for another chance to use Grant, having wanted him for
Shadow of a Doubt
(1943) to play the murderous Charlie, a role that went instead to Joseph Cotten, and for
Spellbound
(1945) as the psychotic John Ballantine, whom Gregory Peck eventually played, neither of which role would have met with the audience's approval.

Hitchcock first began to think about
Notorious
as early as 1943, when he had a notion to make a movie about a woman “carefully trained and coached into a gigantic confidence trick which might involve her marrying some man…the training of such a woman would be as elaborate as the training of a Mata Hari.” It would become a movie about a man whose control over a woman also makes him her victim, to the point of testing her loyalty by forcing her to marry his rival and then inconsolably suffering over it when she does—cinematic manna to both Hitchcock and Grant.

By early 1945 Hitchcock had developed and clarified the theme of the film. During lunch at Chasen's, he told William Dozier, a producer at RKO, that the film was going to be about sexual enslavement. After listening to a breakdown of the plot, Dozier took it directly to Selznick, who was eager to get the play-or-pay Hitchcock back into production, even if he, Selznick, was too busy to supervise the making of the film itself. At the time Selznick was in preproduction on
Duel in the Sun,
a postwar western eroto-epic (“Lust in the Dust!”) that starred Gregory Peck (whose spectacular performance in Hitchock's
Spellbound
had resulted in his being hailed as the “new” Cary Grant). Selznick was also more than a little preoccupied with
Duel
's female lead, the comely Jennifer Jones, who happened to be his paramour and eventually the second Mrs. Selznick. (Grant was relieved that Selznick wasn't going to be around very much: he didn't want to be caught between his professional obligations to Selznick and his personal friendship with his wife, who was, at the time, suffering from Selznick's public romancing of the much younger and far more beautiful Jones.)

Selznick's involvement with
Duel
stalled the commencement of production on
Notorious,
something that did not bother Hitchcock all that much. He was happy to collect his $7,000-a-week paycheck while he waited for
Notorious
to get the green light, and he used the time to work on the script, whose first draft, written by
Spellbound
screenwriter Ben Hecht, had fallen far short of what Hitchcock envisioned. At Grant's suggestion, the director called in Clifford Odets to rewrite the script, but he soon quit when Hitchcock insisted he add additional “love scene” dialogue between Devlin and Alicia while she is lying in bed, about to die from poison.