Authors: Marc Eliot
Cary Grant (46 page)
The
Andrea Doria
set sail from Genoa on July 17, 1956, to make its fiftyfirst crossing of the Atlantic to New York. The next day Drake boarded at the ship's first stop, the port of Naples. Grant, claiming a full day's shooting schedule, did not take her to the pier to see her off
A week later, at precisely 11:10
P
.
M
. on the night of July 25, a dark and foggy night, the worst peacetime disaster at sea since the sinking of the
Titanic
took place sixty miles from Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. Only hours away from docking in New York, the
Andrea Doria
collided with the smaller Swedish cruise ship, the SS
Stockholm.
As the
Andrea Doria
began to sink barely a half hour after the crash, its more than 1,197 passengers and
crew scrambled for places on the lifeboats and dropped into the sea like ice cubes into highballs. Miraculously, out of the total of more than seventeen hundred people aboard both ships, only forty-six died, mostly from the force of the initial collision.
Among the
Andrea Doria
's survivors was Betsy Drake, although more than $200,000 worth of jewelry that she had taken with her to Spain to wear for Grant, all of it gifts from him, and a manuscript of a book she was working on went down with the ship. Her being aboard became a big story within a bigger story and made headlines on its own. For Drake, the worst part of the entire experience was that Grant did not immediately drop everything and fly to be by her side. He couldn't, he told her by phone, because his departure would shut down production on a very expensive shoot.
He neglected to add that he was, at the moment, busy trying to convince Loren to marry him.
To let him know she had arrived safely back at their home in Los Angeles, she sent Grant a one-line telegram that said simply,
FROM YOUR SAFE AND
SOUND WIFE
.
“We fell in love,” Loren admitted in her unusually frank autobiography. “Slowly, as our relationship grew and his trust in me grew, he came to realize that trust and vulnerability went hand in hand; when his trust was strong enough, he no longer bothered with his mask. And I was just as open and trusting with him. He told me about his early life, and I told him about mine, and we found a bond in their emotional similarities. We saw each other every night; we dined in romantic little restaurants on craggy hilltops to the accompaniment of flamenco guitars, drank the good Spanish wine and laughed and were serious and confessional and conspiratorial…
“But I was also in love with Carlo… and now here was Cary Grant, ready to renounce everything for me. Wanting me with no strings attached… Cary talked about getting married. With every passing day, he said, he was surer that we belonged together, that finally he had found someone to whom he could commit himself and to hell with being vulnerable.”
Vulnerable she was, but not indecisive. Loren owed her career to Ponti and was not prepared to leave him to marry Grant, no matter how much she
may have loved her costar. When the long shoot was finished and her romantic but chaste affair with Grant about to end, she felt relief that she was due in Greece to start filming Jean Negulesco's
Boy on a Dolphin.
Ponti, still married to someone else at the time (a situation that made everything even more complicated for the devoutly Catholic Loren), was well aware of the situation with Grant and wanted to get her as far away from him as he could. He had arranged for Loren to leave immediately with him for Greece, with production set to begin the day after her work on
The Pride and the Passion
ended.
After seven long, eventful, and ultimately heartbreaking months in Spain, Grant at last returned home with nothing to say to anybody, least of all Drake, about his “affair” with Loren. Instead, he seemed to have found a renewed sense of commitment to his wife, happy that she had survived her ordeal at sea and grateful she was apparently willing to have him back.
Drake was indeed happy to see him, but if he was not willing to acknowledge the undeniable distance he had put between them, she was. Soon enough their separate residences did not seem nearly far enough apart for her. Drake, in the middle of filming
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?,
was grateful to be involved in something that took up so much of her time.
During the making of the film, she increased her studies of and participation in hypnosis, in the hope she might find relief from the post-traumatic depression she had fallen into after the accident. Eventually she sought treatment from Dr. Mortimer Hartman, one of the early experimenters with lysergic acid diethylamide 25, otherwise known as LSD.
With his wife away now for so much of the time, and still smitten with Loren, Grant found himself in the grip of a new bout of loneliness. To get himself out of it, he plunged himself back into the only cure he knew, the welcome-wagon world of moviemaking. In 1957 he made four movies in quick succession, all the while secretly obsessing over how to get his Italian beauty to marry him.
*
The roles eventually went to David Niven and Jean Seberg.
*
To the press, Grant continually denied not only that he had proposed but that they had had a relationship at all. His standard response to any direct inquiry was “Where do all these rumors start?” Or “As I remember it, Sophia was in love with Frank Sinatra.” True enough, although that was a reference to the film, not real life. Years later, in 1979, Loren, with her coauthor A. E. Hotchner, wrote about the circumstances of Grant's pursuit in her autobiography. In 1980 Loren's memoir was made into a TV movie, and Grant unsuccessfully sued to have himself and his experience with Loren during
The Pride and the Passion
eliminated from the script. When the film aired, Grant's only public comment was “I can't believe that anyone would exploit an old friendship like this.” Privately, it was a completely different story. To begin with, Grant had been personally approached by Loren during the writing of her memoirs to help her remember certain details, to have some input, to which he flatly refused. According to Loren, in
People
magazine (March 24, 1980): “He was part of my life. I loved him dearly, so I rang him and said, ‘I can't leave you out.’ He told me, ‘I still love you and trust you, so anything you write is fine with me.'” Grant also told his close friends that he was in love with Loren and indeed planned to marry her, and that he saw this happening when they were reunited a year later in Melville Shavelson's
Houseboat.
“Nobody doesn't like Cary Grant. He's a Hollywood monument, and nobody wants to tamper with that … he survived the end of his own career in a manner that will probably never happen again.”
—
WARREN HOGE
I
n February 1957 Cary Grant, despite having released one film in three years, was nevertheless riding high in the popularity polls, placing third among the top ten actors of that year.
*
An Affair to Remember,
his new project, was the first of a two-movie deal he had made with producer Jerry Wald that was in turn part of Wald's new multipicture deal at 20th Century–Fox. The film was a remake of Leo McCarey's 1939 weeper
Love Affair,
which had costarred one of early sound cinema's great European lovers, Charles Boyer, and a favorite costar of Grant's, Irene Dunne. Wald, one of the new wave of hotshot hustling independents (widely believed to have been the prototype for Budd Schulberg's Hollywood novel,
What Makes Sammy Run?
), offered McCarey a chance to remake his own film, modernized by color and widescreen cinematography, on the condition that he sign Cary Grant to play the male lead.
McCarey, who had not found his way back to Grant's list of favored directors, knew that Grant never wanted to play a role that someone else had originated. Still, he made the obligatory approach, figuring that once Grant turned him down, he could then go back to Wald and try to come up with a viable alternative. To McCarey's surprise, Grant immediately accepted, and Wald green-lighted the film.
An Affair to Remember
was essentially the same story that it had been in the first version, and for that matter the same story told with minor variations a thousand times over since the beginning of film. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl (give or take a few years). In this version, Nick Ferrante (Grant) is engaged to Lois Clark (Neva Patterson), a wealthy heiress whom he does not love. On board a cruise bound for America from his adopted home of Naples, he meets Terry McKay (Deborah Kerr), who is about to marry Kenneth Bradley (Richard Denning). Nick and Terry fall in love but agree they must honor their previous commitments. They wistfully plan to meet again in the future, to see what if anything has happened in their lives. On that fateful day Terry is hit by a taxi and paralyzed from the waist down. When she doesn't keep the appointment, Nick tracks her down, declares his love, and doesn't care that she's “crippled.” They go off happily together into the sunset of their lives.
What set McCarey's remake apart from the dozens of other weepies released that year was the great chemistry between the film's two stars. At fiftythree, Grant seemed preternaturally handsome, with an onscreen persona that projected refinement, sophistication, maturity, and an enormous capacity to love and be loved. Opposite the thirty-one-year-old Kerr, the charming, urbane, witty side of Grant came on display, a side that Hollywood had lately seen too little of. Onscreen their relationship was mannered, restrained, articulate, and civilized, and yet it projected plenty of widescreen heat. Under McCarey's sharp direction, the film hit a vital nerve with female audiences, whose collective longing for Grant was perfectly personified by the nonthreatening warmth of Deborah Kerr.
If Grant's screen image seemed more flawless than ever, it served as the perfect mask behind which he could take refuge from the difficulties he was
having in his private life. For one thing, while he was making
An Affair to Remember,
Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti arrived in Hollywood and were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel as Ponti negotiated a multiple-picture deal for Loren with Paramount. As soon as he found out, Grant began sending flowers every day, not caring about Ponti and oblivious to Drake's deepening depression over her husband's being still so obviously smitten. For her part, Loren did not discourage Grant's mannered advances and quite likely used them as the catalyst to get what she really wanted, a wedding ring from Ponti that could only come if he was granted a divorce from the Vatican. Loren had begun to suspect Ponti was using his first marriage as a convenient excuse and fought his complacency with her supposed “love” for Grant.
During production on
Affair,
one of the cameramen shooting a close-up of Grant noticed a lump on his forehead. Grant said it was a permanent bruise he had acquired during his USO tours, when he had to wear a steel helmet that didn't fit right. The studio insisted he have it looked at, and after a battery of tests it was diagnosed as a benign tumor. He arranged to have it removed upon completion of production and before the start of his next film, another Wald project, Stanley Donen's
Kiss Them for Me.
Two days before the surgery Grant made a surprise appearance at the March 1957 Academy Awards, his first in sixteen years. The only reason he attended was that his good friend, Ingrid Bergman, who had been nominated for Best Actress of 1956 for her performance in
Anastasia,
had asked him if he would accept for her if she won. Bergman was still in “exile” in Europe for having committed the crime of falling in love with married Italian director Roberto Rossellini during the filming of
Stromboli
in 1949, and having his baby out of wedlock. When the scandal broke into the national headlines, Bergman, who was still married to her husband and who only two years earlier had been riding high from a decade starring in several successful Hollywood movies, including Michael Curtiz's
Casablanca
and Alfred Hitchcock's
Notorious,
found herself unable to find work. The lockout lasted eight years, until 1957, when her long relationship with Rossellini finally came to an end. That same year she was “forgiven” by the Academy and nominated for the British film production of Anatole Litvak's
Anastasia.
Grant was one of the very few stars who had stood by Bergman throughout her ordeal and publicly announced that it would be his honor to represent her at the Oscar ceremony.
Grant relished the chance to embarrass the Academy's old guard, and the night Bergman's name was called, he walked proudly to the podium on the stage of the Pantages Theater and said into the microphone in a soft but commanding tone, “Dear Ingrid, wherever you are in the world, we, your friends, want to congratulate you, and may you be as happy as we are for you.”
The next day Grant entered Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. He had a phobia about surgery and dreaded submitting to a doctor's scalpel, which he feared might permanently damage his face. Drake offered to hypnotize him, to calm him in preparation for the difficult procedure, and, to her surprise, he agreed. Shortly after, Grant gave this account of the actual surgery: “I'd taken advice about [the tumor] once from the great British plastic surgeon, Sir Archibald MacIndoe. He told me it would take about a month to remove. I couldn't afford the time. I had Betsy hypnotize me before the operation. She emphasized that I had to stay calm and even enjoy the operation. I did just that. The surgeon used a local anesthetic. He might have been cutting my hair for all I cared. It [healed] with no scar.”