Authors: Marc Eliot
“Selectivity always suggests art and, in the case of the very few stars who achieve the magnitude of Cary Grant, art of a very high and subtle order. Indeed the evidence both of our eyes and of such testimony on the point that the star himself has offered, suggests that Grant went further than most in that the screen character he created, starting some time in the mid-1930s, drew on almost nothing from his autobiography, his characters created almost entirely out of his fantasies of what he would like to have been from the start, what he longed to become in the end.”
—
RICHARD SCHICKEL
C
ary Grant was feeling youthful and benevolent. His third marriage had reinvigorated his spirit and given him the feeling that he was once more solidly in control of his career and his life; and of Betsy as well. They did everything they could together and seemed to enjoy each other's company more than anyone or anything else. Early in 1950, with neither of them committed to making a movie, Drake suggested they board a tramp steamer and travel around the world. Grant rejected that idea, his last trip home from England having eliminated any lingering romanticism he had about the open
seas. Instead, he introduced Drake to one of his favorite pastimes, the daytime races at Hollywood Park. Grant loved horses and often described their physical motion as an act of pure elegance. And he loved betting on them, although throughout his life he remained strictly a two-dollar man. What he loved was the action of the race, the stable smell of the horses, the sunshine he basked in along with the rest of the crowd, always flecked with the faces of some of the biggest Hollywood stars, who met at the specially reserved part of the park on a daily basis to lunch, talk, drink, eat, flirt, date, hustle, and occasionally even bet on a horse or two.
That spring Grant signed on to make one or two more movies, strictly to help out those he cared about, including Drake, after which he planned to formally announce his retirement and take his wife on their long-overdue journey to Bristol. He agreed to play a brain surgeon in
Crisis,
Dore Schary's first film at MGM, where the writer/director had landed after Hughes forced him out of RKO. Grant knew that his appearing in the movie was the kind of hit insurance Schary needed to commercially revitalize his career, even if the script was less than spectacular, which it decidedly was.
In
Crisis,
the directing debut of Richard Brooks, brain surgeon Dr. Eugene Ferguson (Grant) and his wife Helen (Paula Raymond) are kidnapped while visiting an unnamed South American country. His captors force him to operate on dictator Raoul Farrago (José Ferrer), and they warn him that if their leader dies, so will Ferguson and his wife. The good doctor operates and saves Farrago's life; a revolution then breaks out, and Farrago is killed, during which the Fergusons are rescued and set free.
Despite his good intentions,
Crisis
was a poor choice for Grant's first film of the 1950s. It was cheaply made; its poor production values and black and white cinematography made it look more like an episode of an early actionadventure TV series than a big-screen movie. Grant, still underweight from his illness, looked gaunt and noticeably older than he had in
I Was a Male War Bride.
For the first time he let his close-cropped hair show substantial gray around the temples. Still, his haggard appearance fit the overall character, and with Grant's name above the title,
Crisis
was successful enough to accomplish what he had wanted it to, which was to firmly establish Schary
at MGM. The film also gave Brooks his first hit, for which he was grateful to his star. Brooks and Grant became good friends during the making of the film and remained so for the rest of Grant's life. On numerous occasions Brooks would ask him for his opinion on scripts. It is a little-known fact that Grant was one of the better script-doctors in Hollywood, able to break down a film into its component parts and analyze characters as well as the personal style of any producer or director he had ever worked with.
During the making of the film, Grant, way ahead of his time, had strongly urged Schary to see to it that all the South American roles in the film were played by authentic Latin actors, which resulted in the casting of José Ferrer, Ramon Novarro (the original Ben-Hur of silent films), Gilbert Roland, Vicente Gómez, and a dozen others. At least part of Grant's heightened awareness in this area came from Drake, who had taken it upon herself to educate the already liberal Grant in the unfair ways of Hollywood typecasting. At a time when Hollywood was drawing ever-deepening political lines in the sand and demanding to know which side someone was on, Grant, with Drake proudly by his side and urging him on, stepped up publicly to the left.
While Grant was starring in
Crisis,
Drake appeared in Warner Bros.'
Pretty Baby,
a role she got due to Grant's quiet insistence to Jack Warner that he use her in the film.
Pretty Baby
was a nondescript comedy costarring Dennis Morgan and Zachary Scott, two contract leftovers from the war years, when actors in Hollywood were scarce and anything that moved in pants, stood over five foot five, and had a military deferment qualified as leadingman material.
Grant next agreed to appear in
People Will Talk
for Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a Fox film produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. It was Mankiewicz's first film after his dazzling
All About Eve
(1950), for which he won two Oscars—Best Director and Best Screenplay (and two the year before for
A Letter to Three Wives
).
*
Based on a German play by Curt Goetz that Mankiewicz adapted,
People Will Talk
depicts the growing paranoia at the heart of the McCarthy era. Grant plays another doctor, Noah Praetorius, with a “mysterious” background who teaches at a university. He comes under an
administrative investigation led by Professor Elwell (Hume Cronyn), during which he marries Deborah Higgins (Jeanne Crain), a single pregnant young woman, to save her from committing suicide. Afterward he is exonerated from whatever it was the committee thought he might have been guilty of.
The script played better than it sounds and reflected Mankiewicz's style of multilayered story lines. Despite Grant's gem of a performance, remembered mostly for the final shot of the film showing him ecstatically conducting a symphony orchestra, the film did not find an audience. After its poor opening, it disappeared quickly from the screen (and has rarely been seen since). At about the same time,
Pretty Baby
opened and also flopped at the box office, after which Grant and Drake decided to take a break from Hollywood and spend some time in Palm Springs. While there, Grant was visited by another old friend who had fallen on hard times and needed his help to resuscitate his career.
Even though Grant had not exactly set the world on fire so far in the 1950s, dozens of scripts continued to come his way. One in particular was hand-delivered to him in the desert by visiting neighbor George Cukor, who had a film he felt was perfect for the actor. Grant had already heard about the script at the track, where producer Sid Luft had brought it with him every day for weeks, trying to convince Grant to at least read it, which he had steadfastly refused to do.
The screenplay, by Cukor's old friend, Broadway playwright Moss Hart, was an updated musical adaptation of the original William Wellman/Robert Carson screenplay for the 1937
A Star Is Born,
which had starred Fredric March and Janet Gaynor. This dark-side fable of the film industry was a modern retelling of Shaw's
Pygmalion.
The original film was loosely based on the life of actor John Gilbert, one of Hollywood's greatest silent movie stars, whose career was destroyed by the industry's switch to sound, for which Gilbert's voice was not suited. While on top, Gilbert had married a young actress, Virginia Bruce, whose star did indeed rise as his fell. The movie also had elements of B. P. Schulberg's struggles at Paramount, the sudden early deaths of Rudolph Valentino and Irving Thalberg, and the alcoholism and tragic decline of John Barrymore.
A Star Is Born
was one of the highestgrossing films of 1937 and won writing Oscars for Wellman and Carson,
Academy nominations for March, Gaynor, Wellman (director), and David O. Selznick (producer), and an honorary award to W. Howard Greene for his innovative use of color photography.
Selznick had always wanted to remake the film, but after SIP, awash in debt, was dissolved in 1951, the project seemed out of reach. He eventually traded the rights to it to Warner Bros. in exchange for $25,000 and the film rights to Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms.
Jack Warner had been eager to acquire the project and turn it into a musical vehicle for Judy Garland. Once he had control of the property, he hired Hart to do the rewrite and chose Cukor to direct.
Cukor managed to convince Grant to keep an open mind long enough to at least read the screenplay. If he read it and still refused, Cukor said, he would never bring it up again. Under those terms, the next night at Cukor's nearby desert home, Grant read aloud the part of Norman Maine, with Cukor doing all the others. It took several hours to get through, and when they were finished, Cukor smiled and said to Grant, “This is the part you were born to play!”
“Of course,” Grant agreed. “That is why I won't.”
His primary reason for turning down
A Star Is Born
had to do with the obvious similarity of the script to his own life, something he had always carefully managed to avoid onscreen. The character of Norman Maine is an older leading man; so now was Grant. Maine is married to a much younger, talented actress, who is unknown at the time they wed but is a star by the time the film ends; Grant was married to the much-younger Betsy Drake, whose career he was mentoring, even as he felt himself edging toward retirement. Maine is a cold, narcissistic, self-involved actor with a serious drinking problem; Grant was considered by many in Hollywood to be too aloof and narcissistic, and while he wasn't an alcoholic, at least not by the definition of the day, he definitely drank too much.
The script, then, provided a direct bridge to his inner self without the essential redemptive resolution that Hitchcock had managed to bring to the characters Grant played in both
Suspicion
and
Notorious.
In these films Hitchcock had taken him and the audience to the brink and then, at the last possible moment, brought them back to the safety of literal solid footing and moral redemption. In
A Star Is Born,
Maine commits suicide.
Having said his piece, the evening came to an end, and Grant left. For the rest of his life Cukor never forgave him for turning him down. He felt at the very least, Grant owed him something for having cast him first in
Sylvia Scarlett
and then in
Holiday
and
The Philadelphia Story.
(James Mason eventually played the role of Norman Maine, opposite Judy Garland, both of whom were nominated for Oscars for their performances in the film's 1954 release, one of the highest-grossing films of that year.)
*
Instead, Grant next chose to do a film version of Cervantes's
Don Quixote
for Warners, but the project never even made it to the script stage. One former studio executive described it as “one of those periodically increasing episodes after he married Drake when he enjoyed the thought of chasing windmills.” When it fell through, Jack Warner convinced him to costar with Drake in something called
Room for One More,
a domestic can't-miss comedy that would also complete the studio's two-picture obligation to her.
Directed by Norman Taurog,
Room for One More
concerns the plight of “Poppy” Rose (Grant), a struggling civil servant, and the unrealistic generosity of his “goofy” wife Anna (Drake), who takes to bringing home orphaned pets and child misfits unwanted by their own families. Inevitably, the cranky Grant, who complains they can't afford to be so benevolent, sees the errors of his ways and not only saves the lives of the children (one boy becomes an Eagle Scout) but gets back in touch with his inner, better self. Released in January 1952, it had been held back until after the Christmas season, a sure sign of how little Warner Bros. thought of its box office potential. And although Drake received the best notices of her career—the
Hollywood Reporter
review called her “superb”—for a genuinely funny and charming performance, she would not make another picture for five years.
Apparently neither Grant nor Drake was the least bit concerned about the film's failure. Grant in particular insisted to everyone that he couldn't care less; the only role that interested him now was playing the student to Betsy Drake's one-on-one tutor in the art of self-hypnosis, which he hoped would
help him give up smoking. They went so far as to have no-smoking weekends. As for making films, Grant steadfastly maintained that he had once and for all retired, the reason being, as he told a reporter from the
Star Weekly,
a Hollywood fanzine, “Heavy romance on the screen should be played by young people, not middle-aged actors.”
No sooner had Grant convinced everyone that his filmmaking days were over than he signed on with Howard Hawks to star in
Monkey Business,
a fountain-of-youth comedy with a terrific script by the veteran team of Ben Hecht, I.A.L. Diamond, and Charles Lederer, two of whom had worked with Hawks or Grant before.
*
What attracted Grant to the film was precisely what had kept him away from
A Star Is Born.
Both films deal with essentially the same theme—the “perils” of aging—but they handle it in completely opposite stylistic ways.
Monkey Business
concerns the experiments of an aging all-my-joints-ache research chemist, Dr. Barnaby Fulton (Grant), who stumbles upon the formula for eternal youth that causes him to become sexually responsive to his secretary, Lois Laurel (rising-starlet Marilyn Monroe), much to the consternation of Mrs. Fulton (Ginger Rogers, in one of her brightest and most relaxed performances).