Cary Grant (48 page)

The similarities to Grant's and Bergman's real-life issues were hard to miss and purposefully emphasized to play on Grant's problems with Drake and his recent “affair” with Loren. In the film, Philip's ambivalence toward marriage— which, as in most films, is a metaphor for sexual intimacy—is writ large. Also, he is Roman Catholic and uses that as one of his excuses for not being able to easily obtain a Church-sanctioned divorce—a virtual copy of Ponti's longstanding excuse for not marrying Loren. In the film, Grant's charm, good looks, and enormous integrity, as always, lead him to do the right thing, to satisfy the audience's desire to see him happily married. As for Bergman, her longtime scandalous affair with Rossellini is reflected in Anne's willingness to romance a seemingly married man, also happily reconciled in the film to please the paying crowd.

Most important, the chemistry of the Grant-Bergman pairing was nothing less than inspired, not only recalling the dynamics of
Notorious
but reflecting Grant's feeling that Bergman had been a victim of scandal. His acceptance of her as his leading lady helped make her acceptable to the audiences, and
Indiscreet
signaled the end of her years of self-imposed exile from Hollywood; such was the power of “Cary Grant.”
^*

During the British shoot, Betsy Drake decided to fly over and spend Christmas with her husband. They went with Bergman to Italy for Christmas Day, after which Grant and Drake joined Prince Rainier and Princess Grace aboard Aristotle Onassis's yacht in the Mediterranean, where they stayed until January 1. Just before returning to the set for the final month of shooting, Grant left Drake in London to do some shopping, while he went alone to Bristol to visit his mother.

Elsie, in her eighties now and suffering from increasing memory lapses,
had difficulty more than ever recognizing Grant, something he found extremely upsetting and hard to accept.

Filming ended on
Indiscreet
in February 1958, and the film was rushed into release by May, distributed by arrangement with Warner Bros., in order for Grandon to start to quickly earn back some of its investment.
^*
Just as the film opened, Grant and Drake took a holiday junket to Moscow organized by producer Sam Spiegel. Upon their return to London, Grant was met by a reporter at the airport who asked why he would visit a Communist country. With a slight squint in his eyes, an offended Grant testily told the reporter, “I don't care what kind of government they have in Russia, I never felt so free in my life.”

It was an unfortunate choice of words, as Grant was referring to his own state of mind, not to the benefits of the system of government. Nevertheless, Hedda Hopper—still hanging on as one of the most persistent of right-wing extremist William Randolph Hearst's political harridans—wrote in her column that if Grant loved the Red life so much, he ought to move to Moscow. Grant tried to respond by explaining to another reporter that when he said “free,” he meant not being hounded by autograph-seekers, but the minor tempest did not completely go away, and despite the waning HUAC hysteria, many in Hollywood still considered Grant too far to the left for his own good.

Upon his return to New York, Grant continued to march to the beat of his own drummer. In a famous story that has been told many times, Grant, while staying with Drake in separate suites at the Plaza Hotel, always ordered two English muffins for breakfast, split into four halves. One day only three arrived. In a fury, he called room service to find out why. He was told that an efficiency expert had determined that most people eat only three, and that if the hotel held one quarter back, they could gain a full extra order of English muffins for every four orders.

Grant blew a Humphrey Bogart
Caine Mutiny
gasket. He placed a call to the president of the Hilton chain (which at the time owned the Plaza Hotel) and vowed to start an “English Muffin Lovers Society” to “protect the rights of English-muffin lovers everywhere!” The next day he found four halves of his English muffins included in his morning order.

Back in Hollywood, while planning his next film with Stanley Donen, Grant was offered the leading role in the screen version of Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita,
to be directed by Stanley Kubrick. He angrily turned it down, describing the film as nothing more than a “degenerate” project. The role was then offered to Olivier, who also turned it down. It eventually went to James Mason, who gave one of the great performances of his career in a movie that has attained classic stature.

Grant instead chose to play the lead in Alfred Hitchcock's next venture,
North by Northwest,
a film that Grant could not wait to make. After reading the script, he knew the main character was one he could completely identify with, and understood why Hitchcock had told him he was the only one who could do complete justice to the role.

As usual, Hitchcock had gotten it exactly right.

29

I
n 1957, as the next to last of a multiple-picture deal with Paramount (
Psycho
would be the last), Alfred Hitchcock had made
Vertigo,
the most personal movie of his career. Although many consider it among his best work,
Vertigo
was something of a box office disappointment and would not gain its rightful reputation as a classic for many years to come.
^*
It starred James Stewart, one of the two screen alter egos Hitchcock most preferred, the other, of course, being Cary Grant. If Grant is unthinkable driven to immobility as the temporarily
insane hero gone mad over the haunting image of costar Kim Novak, Stewart remains likewise impossible to conceive as the athletic, unflappable, seemingly invulnerable Roger O. Thornhill, the “hero,” for lack of a better term, of
North by Northwest.
^*

To ensure a better deal for his next series of films, Hitchcock signed with Lew Wasserman, who had conceived Hitchcock's TV show, which was by now one of the biggest hits in MCA-Universal's TV roster. Hitchcock wanted to make an out-and-out mainstream hit and knew that Cary Grant's enormous star power was the best guarantee he could get. Wasserman made a one-picture deal for Hitchcock at MGM to serve as a bridge until a new multiple-picture deal at Universal could be worked out. He paired Hitchcock with Ernest Lehman, the successful screenwriter (
Sweet Smell of Success, Somebody Up There Likes Me, The King and I,
and
Sabrina
are a few of his better-known movies), at the time under contract to MGM.

Hitchcock and Lehman already knew each other well. They had first met during the filming of
Rear Window,
a film that so impressed Lehman that when the opportunity came to work with Hitchcock, he jumped at it. During the making of
Vertigo,
Hitchcock had come across a novel by Hammond Innes called
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
that for a while he considered filming. Lehman had done a first draft for the film that Hitchcock liked but ultimately decided it was not a subject he wished to take on. Hitchcock still wanted very much to work with Lehman and instructed him to try to come up with a script that would fit Cary Grant as well as one of his custom-made suits. Lehman then began working on something he called
In a Northerly Direction,
later on
Breathless,
before it had its final title, suggested by MGM story editor Kenneth MacKenna:
North by Northwest.

The story of the film, described by Donald Spoto as “a superbly paced comic thriller about mistaken identity, political depravity, sexual blackmail, and ubiquitous role-playing,” was a self-homage to Hitchcock's favorite film format, an emotional criss-cross over the physical landscape of a hero and his girlfriend thrown together by something that resembles, in Hitchcock's
world, the religion of fate. The director had used this landscape scenario several times before, in
The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Young and Innocent,
and
Saboteur
and with some variation in
Strangers on a Train, Vertigo,
and
To Catch a Thief.

Hitchcock offered Grant $450,000 up front, a full one-third more than his normal asking fee, 10 percent of the gross profits on all earnings over $8 million, plus an extra $5,000 a day seven weeks after the contract was signed, no matter what unforeseen delays might take place. Those seven weeks quickly came and went before a single foot of film was shot, which raised Grant's actual salary closer to $750,000.

Having signed Grant, the rest of the casting went smoothly, once it became clear to Grant that Hitchcock was not going to be able to get Sophia Loren as his costar. Hitchcock had initially agreed with him that their pairing would work for the film, but Ponti said no. He had had enough of Grant and absolutely refused to let his new wife appear with him again. MGM pushed for its contract star Cyd Charisse, but she left Hitchcock cold. He preferred blond beauty Eva Marie Saint, a Grace Kelly look-alike who had won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work on Elia Kazan's
On the Waterfront
(1954). If Grant could not have his obsessive desires met, Hitchcock could satisfy his own. He saw in Saint, who had played mostly working-class women onscreen (
Waterfront, A Hatful of Rain
[1957]), something glamorous and mysterious that made her the perfect romantic lure to ensnare Grant into her world of sex and spy games.

Filming on
North by Northwest
took place on locations across the country, beginning in New York at United Nations Plaza, the first of the film's many monuments that spread the canvas of the screen, from New York to Chicago, to South Dakota, and finally to California. The interior of the Plaza Hotel, the CIT Building at 650 Madison Avenue, Grand Central Terminal, the Phipps estate in Old Westbury, Midwest cornfields, and Rapid City's Mount Rushmore—all showed off the physical beauty of the rolling American landscape that became, in Hitchcock's view, a metaphor for the beauty of endless freedom, both the country's and the leading characters' quest to defend it.

The story centers on an innocent man who is caught in a web of deceit and intrigue, then is drawn into it until, through a series of increasingly
bizarre misadventures, he turns into the very man he has been mistaken for and falls in love with a beautiful woman far guiltier than she appears to be. Roger O. Thornhill (Grant) is kidnapped by foreign spies who mistake him for the CIA operative George Kaplan. Thornhill narrowly escapes death when he is forced to drink a bottle of bourbon, then is put behind the wheel of a car at the top of a winding road. This time, in
North by Northwest,
the mandatory car scene is played early on, with a comedic tone rather than a suspenseful one, primarily because no one would ever believe Hitchcock would kill his star this early in the film.
^*
Instead, the car ride signals the beginning of a far more precarious journey to self-discovery, personal freedom (from the clutches of a domineering mother and two previous wives who left him “because they thought I led too dull a life”), and ultimately romantic redemption in the beautiful guise of Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). Ingeniously, Hitchcock (and Lehman) have Thornhill chase himself, in his pursuit of “Kaplan,” across the country.