Cary Grant (43 page)

The film portended future youth mix-up comedies like Penny Marshall's
Big
(1988) starring Tom Hanks (an actor who many thought might become his generation's Cary Grant). Grant's performance is pure delight; his athletic abilities come into clever play when he takes the drug and turns into a gangling, superfit teenage lover-boy. Under Hawks's clever and speedy direction, the film manages to celebrate middle age by defining it in terms of mature love, inevitability preferable to the energetic emptiness of adolescent passion. It also spoofs Grant's longstanding refusal to chase women in his films. Only when he is under the influence of the youth drug does he pursue Monroe. When he recovers, he reverts to his mature, i.e., passive, married and happy self.

The film also put Hollywood on notice that its next reigning sex goddess
was as troubled as she was talented. In her few brief scenes, Monroe flashed her delectable beautiful-but-dumb-blonde character's thighs in a way that could make dead male audiences sit up and take notice. For her part, Monroe all but stole the female spotlight from the aging, staid, if equally unnaturally blond, Ginger Rogers. As perfect as Monroe appeared onscreen, however, on the set she had been a completely different story.

During filming, front-page headlines revealed that as a teenager Monroe had posed nude for a calendar to make money after her mother was committed to an insane asylum. Monroe had a near breakdown when the story was revealed. While most of the others involved with the film were angered by her seemingly erratic behavior, Grant, however, felt empathetic toward her. Both “news flashes” were familiar touchstones for Grant, who had done time as a male escort—something he was never comfortable talking about— and had also suffered through the twisted tangle of his own mother's early fate. When Monroe was briefly hospitalized for “nerves” during production, the production company released a cover story to the press that she had had a sudden attack of appendicitis. Meanwhile, Hawks wanted to fire her over the delay that her “illness” caused, until Grant persuaded him to keep her on the film. Monroe's future in Hollywood owed a debt to the compassion of Cary Grant, at a time when she was considered to be just one more dumb blonde in an industry that purchased them twelve at a time for ten cents a pack. Had she been fired at this early juncture, she would most likely not have been given another chance in Hollywood.

Still, not everyone appreciated Grant's concern for the young starlet. Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee slugger, had just begun to date Monroe, and one time she had invited him to come to the set to watch her work. When he showed up, studio publicity photographer Roy Craft was promptly dispatched to take DiMaggio's picture with her and the film's star, Cary Grant. The next day the photo appeared in a slightly altered version in nearly every newspaper in the country. In the original version Monroe is seen with a smile as wide as the Hollywood Freeway, and Grant showing a lot of teeth as well. Only DiMaggio seems ill at ease. In the published version, Grant, at DiMaggio's insistence, was carefully cropped out.

Monkey Business
opened on September 15, 1952, to surprisingly good reviews. John L. Scott, in the
Los Angeles Times,
thought the film hilarious:

“Ever catch a film comedy that made you double up with laughter even though you knew it was silly, ridiculous, and even preposterous? It's a pleasure to report that
Monkey Business,
starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Charles Coburn, is just such a movie.” Despite its generally favorable critical reception, however, the film did not do well, prompting Grant to look to make one more. Because his last three,
People Will Talk, Room for One More,
and
Monkey Business,
had all failed at the box office, he didn't want to retire on a triple down note.

In his search for a surefire hit movie to go out on, he turned once more to Dore Schary (now firmly ensconced at MGM) and screenwriter Sidney Sheldon (who had written
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer
and was now directing as well as writing) to develop a comedy for him. They came up with something they called
Dream Wife,
a film about a businessman, Clemson Reade (Grant), married to a State Department official, Effie (Deborah Kerr), who is too preoccupied with her position to pay any attention to him. He decides to leave her for a Bukistani woman he meets, schooled in the art of “pleasing men.” Princess Tarji (Betta St. John) comes to the United States but learns the ways of American female emancipation (such as it was in the early 1950s) from who else but Effie. In the end it all works out—Clem returns to his wife, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Except for introducing Deborah Kerr into Grant's world of leading women, the film was yet another creative, critical, and financial disappointment, and Grant believed it was the handwriting on the wall he would not, after all, be able to erase. To his way of thinking, in an industry and art form that revered youth, he could no longer lay claim to be the ultimate Hollywood pretty boy. He worried that his long bout with hepatitis had irrevocably pushed him past his full physical bloom of just six years earlier, when his star had shone so brightly in
Notorious
. The intervening seasons had drawn his face taut and had made the veins stick out in his thick neck. His hair, once shiny black, had taken on the cool gray tones of salt and pepper. He feared the industry now considered him a has-been, and that many of the old guard were more than eager to celebrate his professional passing with the shouted epitaph of good riddance.

He was not completely wrong. Despite his enduring reputation as
Hollywood's eternal golden boy with the Midas touch, by the early '50s the reality was that Cary Grant was no longer that much in demand. His glorious acting career had been reduced by the unavoidable trivialization that comes with the crime of aging in L.A. The only award he was even considered for these days came from Igor Cassini (“Cholly Knickerbocker” to his syndicated newspaper column readers) for “Best-Dressed Actor” of 1952 (Irene Dunne won for best-dressed actress). Ever the gentleman, when interviewed on the subject he smiled to hide his humiliation and obligingly explained in earnest detail that the secret of his good looks was really his clothes—custom-made suits and shirts—and advised men who wanted to emulate him to never wear suspenders, belts, or garters but instead to go with hidden waist-tabs to keep their pants up and straight. Not exactly the acceptance speech he had long envisioned delivering on Oscar night.

Late in 1952 Grant and Drake slowly began their reemergence from Palm Springs into Hollywood's social scene. They had been appearing in a radio series based on
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House,
and one night they invited the show's producer, William Frye, to a black-tie dinner at Perino's, which many considered to be the best restaurant in L.A. That night Grant was reminded of the age difference between himself and Drake, which he had assumed nobody cared about. As Frye remembered, “Cary was being very mysterious, and all he would tell me was that he would let me know at the right time what we were going to do after. Well, it was quite a guest list—Cary, Betsy, Leslie Caron and actor Richard Anderson, and my date was the daughter of Sharman Douglas, the ambassador to Great Britain. I arrived at Cary's house, and we all went down to the restaurant in a limo. Cary sat in the front, and Richard and I sat on the jumpseats, with the women in the regular back.

“The dinner was fabulous, all pre-ordered, the way Cary always arranged, and after, we got back in the limo, and were taken to the little Biltmore Theater to see one of the most remarkable ‘comebacks’ in show business history, the closing night of Mae West's one-woman show. What can I say, she moved like she had a motor attached to her, all gyrations under flashing lights, etc. After, Cary took us backstage to say hello to her.

“And there she was, in the dressing room, still in costume, rhinestones, feathers, a great big hat, and a cane in her hand. She had positioned herself
near an electric fan so that the feathers would move a certain way. She looked like she had been wound up. ‘Cary, baby,’ she said to him, with a big smile on her face, ‘come and see mama!'

“‘I want you to meet my wife, Betsy,’ Grant said. Mae looked at her for several seconds and said, ‘Well, where in the world did you find this one?'”

A few weeks later Grant canceled the radio series when two writers on the show filed a lawsuit to recover $25,250 in monies they claimed they were owed for scripts written that were never produced. Having done thirty-nine episodes, Grant was bored and wanted out. He quickly settled and the show went off the air.

The majority of films coming out of the new, postwar Hollywood—torn by its own political paranoia fed by the vengeful HUAC and beaten into submission via self-flagellation—were reflective exercises in doom and gloom, tic-tac-tortured visions filled with beautiful young zombie antiheroes, the slouching Brandos, the mad-eyed Clifts. Mainstream Hollywood film had turned fully in the direction of Kazan's Method acting, a world in which Grant felt supremely uncomfortable. He decided to finally and officially announce to the world that he had irrevocably retired from motion pictures. “It was the period of blue jeans, the dope addicts, the Method,” he would say later on, “and nobody cared about comedy at all.”

Early in February 1953, a month after his forty-ninth birthday, Grant held a press conference to formally announce his retirement and used the opportunity to speak out in defense of Charlie Chaplin. The State Department had just revoked Chaplin's visa for suspected Communist involvement while the great comedian was vacationing overseas—not long after Howard Hughes had refused, for political reasons, to exhibit Chaplin's latest film,
Limelight,
despite a longstanding agreement the screen legend had with RKO theaters in place years before Hughes had acquired the chain. Grant was enraged by all this and wanted the world to know that he supported Chaplin and was adamantly against the blacklist, even if it meant speaking out against Howard Hughes.

In an extraordinarily brave statement, a display of courage all too scarce in the Hollywood of the early 1950s, Grant, after saying he would make no more movies and that he and his wife were about to embark on an extended vacation, told the gathering of reporters, “[Chaplin] has given great pleasure
to millions of people, and I hope he returns to Hollywood. Personally, I don't think he is a Communist, but whatever his political affiliations, they are secondary to the fact that he is a great entertainer.” After a pause he added in a low but firm voice, “We should not go off the deep end.” The silence of the crowd of reporters hung like wet laundry on a windless day, as they wrote down the words of this star of the first magnitude who, until now, had survived in Hollywood by always managing, in public at least, to stay above the public political fray.

Having said his piece, Grant bid the reporters farewell, after which he and Drake took a slow boat to China.

25

F
or the next several months, Cary Grant and his wife, Betsy Drake, traveled in glorious simplicity around the world, seeing the sights and seeking out the various religious, mystical, and psychological figures who were far more important to them than any heads of state. If it had been up to Grant, they would have lived like this for the rest of their lives.

While in the Far East, they toured Hong Kong and Tokyo, where, without publicity representatives, press, sponsors, or TV crews, they spent several days visiting American soldiers wounded in the Korean conflict and hospitalized in Japan. After doing the same in Singapore, Grant chose Tangier as their next destination because, he told Drake, he wanted to visit his ex-wife, Barbara Hutton; he missed her son, Lance, whom he hoped to spend some time with. Drake said she didn't mind at all.

During the visit a surprisingly friendly Hutton offered to finance an independent movie for Grant, the subject of which could be of his choosing, as long as it was shot entirely in Tangier. It was an offer he found tempting but
ultimately turned down. His mood then took a nosedive when Hutton told him she planned to marry international playboy Porfirio Rubirosa.
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