Cary Grant (39 page)

As for “old Cary Grant,” who thought the country needed some comic post-war relief with movies like
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer,
he couldn't quite understand what this new style of acting was all about. To him, the up-and-coming breed of movie stars seemed generally unkempt, indistinguishable from one another, and awfully hard to hear. As if on cue, Hitchcock proposed to Grant that they make a new film of Shakespeare's
Hamlet,
a project Grant had considered for a long time before rejecting it, fearing he wouldn't be able to master the proper British accent. Besides, he told Hitchcock, in the current youth-oriented atmosphere of Hollywood, he was far too old to play the Danish prince.

And then real-life tragedy suddenly interrupted everything in Grant's life when Frank Vincent, having just turned sixty-one, dropped dead of a heart attack. Grant was shocked when he heard the news, disappeared from sight for a week, and went on a bender that showed no signs of letting up. Worried friends tried to intervene, but the only person he would see was Hughes, who suggested the two of them get out of Hollywood for a while. Having just finished modifying his latest airship, the
Constellation,
a World War II B-23 bomber, into a passenger prototype for his new airline, TWA, he was about to fly it to New York and convinced Grant to come along for the ride.

They arrived in the city on January 8, and after two days of making the rounds, they were ready to fly back to L.A. Sometime during the night of
January 11, 1947, while flying over the Rocky Mountains, the plane lost radio contact and disappeared from radar screens. When it failed to arrive at an appointed stopover in Amarillo, Texas, word quickly spread that the plane had gone down somewhere over the Rockies, and that both Hughes and Grant had been killed in the crash.

22

T
he January 12 morning editions of newspapers across the country screamed the terrible news in giant front-page headlines:

While the world awaited the discovery of the wreck, Hollywood gussied itself up for the biggest public funeral it had ever produced, bigger than the one for Carole Lombard, bigger than the one for Will Rogers, bigger even than what New York gave Valentino.

Meanwhile, after sleeping late into the morning, Grant and Hughes awoke in a hotel in Guadalajara, oblivious that the world was in mourning for them. They ordered breakfast in their room, relaxed, cleaned themselves up, and went to the airport, which is where they first discovered they were supposed to be dead. Having intended to go to Mexico City, they returned instead to Los Angeles.

Upon landing, they were besieged at the airport by hundreds of reporters
from all over the world, who treated the two as ghostly heroes who had somehow managed to find their way back from the far side of the River Styx. After refusing to make any comments, Grant finally cleared up some of the mystery by telling Hedda Hopper, “All we did was to change plans in the course of our flight. Howard doesn't like to get embroiled with crowds; neither do I. So when we landed at El Paso, Howard rolled out to a dark part of the air field, and we sat in the plane drinking coffee while awaiting our clearance to proceed on to Mexico City. When we discovered the weather there was so bad, we went to Guadalajara instead. The next morning someone spotted us and said, ‘Didn't you fellows know that you're in the headlines? You're supposed to be lost.’ Howard and I laughed. Being lost suited us fine. We figured for as long as nobody knew where we were, we could live in peace.”

Although he would never admit it to his friend, high-flying with the macho, reckless Hughes through the boundless skies had always frightened as much as it excited Grant. Now, however, the notion that they could actually both have been killed in the wake of Vincent's death was what finally sobered him up. Ironically, his own “death” had resurrected his desire to live.

A few weeks later Grant placed an ad in the trades to announce that he would, from this point on, represent himself in all negotiations, with the assistance of his longtime lawyer and good friend, Stanley Fox, and that he had sold off all his remaining interests in Frank Vincent's talent agency.
^*

Grant's announcement attracted the attention of Jules Stein, who was in the process of rebuilding his Music Corporation of America from a small agency that specialized in booking local bands into “the octopus,” the “General Motors of Hollywood,” two still-used nicknames for what was to become the most powerful entertainment conglomerate in Hollywood, MCA Universal-International. Stein quickly convinced Grant that he would be far better off with professional representation and, to ensure his continued
independence, offered him a deal he couldn't refuse. He promised he would negotiate all of Grant's future pictures so that the rights to the negatives would revert to him after seven years. Stein, always ahead of the industry curve, believed television was the future of Hollywood and that the need for programming would send the networks to the studio's film libraries. This stroke of genius on Stein's part would eventually make Grant one of the wealthiest men in all of Hollywood.

But it still wasn't enough for him. Grant wanted their arrangement to be nonexclusive, for each individual contract that Stein set up was to be subject to final approval by Grant and Stanley Fox, who was to be included at the negotiating stage of all deals, for which he would receive half the agency's 10 percent commission. It was the only nonexclusive representation pact that Stein ever agreed to. He then assigned up-and-coming talent agent Lew Wasserman to personally handle Grant, whose first deal under MCA's guidance was the starring role in Samuel Goldwyn's highly anticipated
The Bishop's Wife.

The notion of starring in a pseudo-religious/angel/spirit film appealed to Grant, who believed the genre was a particularly good one for actors, especially during the lucrative Christmas season, which immediately preceded the announcement of Oscar nominations when the holiday films were freshest in the minds of the voters. Robert Montgomery had earned an Oscar nomination for his role as a premature ghost in the heaven-on-earth comedy
Here Comes Mr. Jordan
(1941); Jennifer Jones had won an Oscar for playing Bernadette in
The Song of Bernadette
(1943); Lubitsch had been nominated for his direction of
Heaven Can Wait
(1943), which featured Laird Cregar as the devil; and Bing Crosby's performance as a godlike priest in
Going My Way
(1944) had brought him an Oscar, along with one for its director, Leo McCarey (the year Grant received his second nomination, for
None But the Lonely Heart
). Although not an Oscar contender, Henry Travers as the angel Clarence all but stole Capra's
It's a Wonderful Life
(1946). Grant's own
Topper,
in which he played a happy-go-lucky ghost, was one of his earliest hits.

Grant had originally intended his next picture to be the George Cukor/Garson Kanin film
A Double Life,
about the tortured existence of a popular actor, but at Wasserman's urging he changed his mind at the last minute and opted for Henry Koster's
The Bishop's Wife,
once Goldwyn made
it clear he was willing to pay whatever it would take to get him. Before Wasserman was through, Goldwyn agreed to an astonishing $500,000, by far the most Grant had ever earned up front for a single movie.

It was enough to compensate Grant for a role and a script he wasn't all that crazy about. Written by Leonardo Bercovici,
The Bishop's Wife
concerns the tribulations of Bishop Henry Brougham (David Niven) and his singular and increasingly desperate attempts to raise money from his wealthy parishioners for a new cathedral, ignoring everything and everyone else to do so, including Julia (Loretta Young), his beautiful wife. His prayers are literally answered when Dudley (Grant), an angel from heaven, arrives and swiftly restores the priorities to everyone's life, including Henry's, by flirting with neglected Julia. When their relationship threatens to turn real, Dudley moves the rest of his miracles along rather swiftly to get Henry his cathedral. Then, with great personal regret, Dudley disappears, taking the memory of his brief visitation with him.

Niven was first approached to be in the film, for what he assumed was the role of Dudley, who is a handsome charmer, a romancer, and steadfastly angelic, while Henry is, throughout, humorless, stiff, unromantic, and unpleasant; his conversion from self-righteousness to self-awareness is the essential theme of the picture. When Niven, whose career had not yet regained its prewar momentum, complained about the role he was given, Goldwyn threatened to fire him.

Things became even more complicated when Grant expressed his dissatisfaction with
his
role, told Goldwyn he thought Dudley was “a rather conceited, impudent, high-handed magician,” and didn't see what he could possibly do with him. He was equally dissatisfied with Henry Koster, the director whom Goldwyn had settled upon after firing William Seiter and failing to convince William Wyler to take the film. Seiter's dismissal caused the film to be shut down for six weeks, until Koster, best remembered for a series of Deanna Durbin movies, was in place and ready to resume shooting. The Wyler/Seiter/Koster debacle bothered Grant, as did the choice of Loretta Young, with whom Grant had worked in 1934 in
Born to Be Bad.
He had always considered her overly vain, and the bond fraud incident with her husband didn't help matters any.

Grant's overall frustration with the slow progress of the film took the form
of daily battles with Koster. He remained dissatisfied with everything the director did, from the placement of his camera to the pace of the comedy sequences. Things became even more tense on the set when Grant and Young openly clashed over the blocking of their love scene, when Young refused to be shot from the left. Grant became completely fed up and then refused to be shot from
his
left side. As a result, Koster had to shoot the scene with the actors talking to each other while they stared out a window, both their right profiles in plain view.

An increasingly frustrated and disappointed Goldwyn showed Koster's final cut of the film to Billy Wilder, with an offer of $25,000 to “fix it,” which upset Grant, who had no use for this director either. Wilder made some suggestions and Koster reshot a few scenes, but it was clear to everyone that the film remained flawed. Nevertheless, largely on the strength of Grant's box office appeal,
The Bishop's Wife
opened to positive reviews and was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
^*

Grant's next film,
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House,
was not scheduled to go into production until that fall. Grant, who had turned fortythree that January, decided to spend the summer in England and meet with Alexander Korda about the possibility of starring in a film called
The Devil's Delight,
in which Carol Reed would direct. Grant was interested in playing the title role—the devil—in what he thought might be a neat turn after Dudley the angel. He also wanted to travel the British countryside by automobile with his new best friend, sixty-six-year-old British sometime playwright and full-time eccentric Freddie Lonsdale (author of
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
), whom he had met while Lonsdale was visiting Hollywood.

In London, Korda and his wife, actress Merle Oberon, from whom he was officially separated but with whom he was still friendly, took Grant to see all the new shows playing at the West End. One of them,
Deep Are the Roots,
was an American import. During the performance a featured player happened to catch his eye. Her name was Betsy Drake, a tall, blond, cute twenty-three-year-old
American actress making her British debut in the play. He made a mental note to find out more about her when he got back to the States.

As it turned out, he didn't have to wait quite that long. The last week in September Grant and Lonsdale boarded the
Queen Elizabeth
at Southampton, bound for America. Postwar summers in England had become the new fancy for many of Hollywood's Brit-born stars, and several had booked passage back to the U.S. on this voyage of the
Queen Elizabeth.
Besides Grant and Lonsdale, among the entertainment heavyweights who had commandeered first-class accommodations were fifteen-year-old movie star Elizabeth Taylor and her mother; Oberon; financier and art collector Jock Whitney; and Betsy Drake, traveling in unusually comfortable fashion for a still largely unknown actress.