Authors: Marc Eliot
Unknown to him, Thornhill has been misidentified by the enemy as a CIA operative who doesn't actually exist, a creation of the agency to throw the “bad guys” off the trail of the real counterspy they have embedded in their evil midst. After Thornhill is set up as the assassin of a UN representative, he goes on the run, fleeing from the authorities while pursuing the “real” Kaplan. Complicating matters, he becomes involved with a beautiful blonde on a train, Eve Kendall, who as it turns out is not only the lover of the enemy ringleader, Vandamm (James Mason), but also the secret CIA operative whom “Kaplan” was created to protect. Somehow along the way, between several of the film's best-remembered set pieces—Thornhill doing battle with a lowflying crop-duster, his ingenious escape from the auction, his faked “murder” by Eve at the base of the presidential monuments—he is at last let in on the various subterfuges by CIA chief (and Hitchcock surrogate) “the Professor” (Leo G. Carroll). Thornhill eventually tracks Eve to the cliffhanger home of Vandamm, which sets up the film's glorious climax. Thornhill literally scales the angular side of the house like a human spider, gets inside, and overhears Vandamm and Leonard, his second-in-command (Martin Landau), planning
Eve's murder. The scene culminates in both Thornhill and Eve dangling off the face of Mount Rushmore, where he rescues her by grasping her wrist and seemingly pulling her back to safety. The camera cuts from a close-up of Grant to one of Saint and back to Grant, and this time a pull-back reveals the two on a train, traveling east, married, and in love. Once again, as with Hepburn in
Bringing Up Baby
, Grant's rescue of Saint is a redemption, an elevation from the pedestrian world of loners to the poetic landscape of lovers. The famous final shot of
North by Northwest
that always gets a laugh for its sexual metaphor—a train plunging into a tunnel—suggests something darker as well: a nearly religious ritual of the inevitably joyless sexual industrialization that is, in Hitchcock's world, the unhappily-ever-after of the dutifully, if no longer romantically, married.
The key to the film is Grant's duality, as Hitchcock allows Grant, in the guise of mama's boy Thornhill, to once again play his character's subtext as text, the subconscious as conscious, the unleashed id as ego. This makes the real “chase” of the film the repressed Thornhill's desire to invade and inhabit the adventurous, brave, physical, clever, aggressive, and finally romantic world of the idealized (and mythic) hero George Kaplan, the man Thornhill secretly (subconsciously) wishes he could be. The genius of Hitchcock lies in how he gets the audience as well as Thornhill to believe in the existence of George Kaplan, until by the end of the film, it is Kaplan who survives, while Roger Thornhill simply ceases to exist (although the final shot suggests that Kaplan may already be turning back into Thornhill).
Even as Hitchcock's cameras were rolling for
North by Northwest,
Grant's secret, ongoing LSD sessions had allowed him to turn his own pursuit inward, to make the vital connections between the persona of “Cary Grant” and the private Cary Grant. In that sense, the film celebrates as much as it reflects the success of that union and turns Hitchcock's orchestrated Thornhill-to-Kaplan into the most personal, revealing, moving, and ultimately profound screen performance of Grant's long and brilliant movie career.
During the filming of
North by Northwest,
Grant, fifty-four, and Drake, thirty-five, made public what had been a de facto reality for years: that they were officially separated and headed for divorce. On October 16, 1958, they
issued a joint statement that said, “After careful consideration and long discussion, we have decided to live apart. We have had, and shall always have, the deepest respect for each other. But, alas, our marriage has not brought us the happiness we fully expected and mutually desired. So, since we have no children needful of our affections, it is consequently best that we separate for a while. There are no plans for divorce and we ask only that our statement be respected as being complete and our friends to be patient with, and understanding of, our decision.”
Grant provided scant more information even to his closest friends, offering only the familiar litany of reasons he had given for his first two divorces: that he had become bored, that he wasn't suited to domestic life, and that he and Drake had simply run out of things to talk about.
In February 1959, one month after his fifty-fifth birthday, Grant, for the first time in his career, reached the top of
Box Office
magazine's annual popularity poll, as it named him the number one film star of 1958.
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Six months later
North by Northwest
was released to critical and commercial success. It grossed $7 million in its initial domestic theatrical release, nearly twice what it cost to make, and would go on to become Hitchcock's highest-grossing film ever, as well as the third highest of Grant's career.
While Grant was in New York to attend the Radio City Music Hall opening of
North by Northwest,
an ugly and unsubstantiated story broke in newspapers across the country that detailed his former British chauffeur's revelations of having had a love affair with Grant. In the story, twenty-fiveyear-old Raymond Austin claimed that he expected to be named “the other man”—Grant's lover—in Drake's impending divorce action against him.
An outraged Grant immediately contacted his attorney, Stanley Fox, to issue an angry written denial. A month later Austin tried to commit suicide in London by taking an overdose of pills. Although he survived, it was the last anyone heard of him or his claim.
As soon as his publicity obligations for
North by Northwest
were completed, Grant flew to Key West to begin production on his next picture, Blake Edwards's
Operation Petticoat,
a light sex comedy involving the crew of a submarine and the ship's unlikely cargo of female nurses during World War II. Granart was yet another company he had set up (with this-time-only partner Robert Arthur, through their jointly owned Granart Company Productions) to independently produce the picture. During filming Grant became close with costar Tony Curtis, one among many new Grants-inwaiting, whose career was sizzling after the success of
Some Like It Hot
and who was responsible for bringing
Operation Petticoat,
via Universal Pictures, to Grant. According to Curtis, “I was doing so swell those days that Universal asked me what kind of movie I wanted to make next, and I said, ‘A service comedy about submarines.' They said, ‘Fine, we'll get Jeff Chandler or Robert Taylor to play the captain.' I said, ‘No, I want Cary Grant.' They got back to me later and said, ‘Robert Taylor wants to play that part very much, and he'll give you five percent of his ten percent of the gross.' I said, ‘No, I want Cary Grant.’ That's what I wanted, and that's what I got.”
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Grant jumped at the opportunity to work with Curtis. He loved the young actor's onscreen charisma and likely saw something of his younger self in the handsome, dark-haired romantic leading man. When they met, he was completely charmed by Curtis's humor as well. Grant told him he found his onthe-money impersonation the year before in Billy Wilder's
Some Like It Hot
absolutely hilarious. According to Curtis, “I never worked it deliberately as a Cary Grant imitation… [but] so much the better if the Cary voice makes it a little funnier for some people.”
Grant always loved young female costars, believing they made him look younger when he played opposite them; in a similar fashion, he believed acting
with Tony Curtis might make him more accessible to younger male and female audiences.
During filming an incident occurred between Grant and respected veteran Hollywood syndicated columnist Joe Hyams, who had, after years of trying, eventually got Grant to agree to a series of sit-down interviews.
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Throughout his career, Grant had cultivated his dealings with the press into something of an art form, giving essentially the same interview every time he wanted to publicize a new movie: he was born in Bristol, he joined the Pender troupe, he traveled with them to New York, he got his taste in clothes from his father, he loved women, he loved acting, he loved life, he loved everything about life, he was grateful for all that he had been able to achieve in life, etc., etc., etc. This time, for some reason known only to Grant, he told Hyams things that he had never told any interviewer before. When he saw his words in print, they horrified him.
One likely theory of why Grant suddenly became so loose-lipped is that his sessions with LSD had given him a new sense of self-confidence—one of the first things he discussed with Hyams was how uplifting his experience with the drug had been. Up until this time he had always denied that he had ever so much as seen a psychiatrist, let alone been one of the early experimenters with LSD. According to Hyams, Grant readily confessed to him that “I hurt every woman I loved …I was an utter fake …a self-opinionated bore… until one day, after weeks of treatment [with LSD], I did see the light…now for the first time in my life, I am truly, deeply and honestly happy.” These statements left Hyams open-mouthed with astonishment and sent him rushing for his typewriter.
However, before Hyams's series of articles based on the interviews appeared, another journalist, a Brit by the name of Lionel Crane, published an article in a London newspaper that contained virtually the same “revelations.” Hyams was angered and puzzled by the timing, especially when, after interviewing Grant, he had received a phone call from the actor asking him
as a personal favor not to print anything they had talked about, at least for the time being. Hyams, who had a reputation as a Hollywood insider who could be trusted, reluctantly agreed.
But once the Crane piece appeared, Hyams quickly published a two-part nationally syndicated article that quoted Grant's every last word concerning his psychiatric treatment, his acid-taking, his attitude toward women, and his lifetime of self-loathing. Needless to say, it caused a sensation that sent Grant into a rage. Without thinking the situation through, he publicly denied ever having been interviewed by Hyams, a claim Louella Parsons breathlessly repeated as gospel fact, without so much as making a single phone call to check with Hyams.
The journalist angrily rebutted both Grant and Parsons by publishing the details of the events that led up to the series of interviews, along with a photograph of himself conducting them with Grant taken at the Florida naval base during the shooting of
Operation Petticoat.
Hyams's rebuttal drew even more attention to the story, and a livid Grant, through Stanley Fox, threatened to sue him, the newspaper syndicate that distributed the articles, and the newspapers that carried them.
Hyams could not understand why Grant had so vehemently turned against him, until he learned that, shortly after Crane's piece appeared, the actor had sold the “complete and exclusive” story of his taking LSD to
Look
magazine for a substantial amount of money—a deal that, because of his interview, was now in danger of being canceled. Hyams then double-jumped Grant and sued him for slander to the tune of $500,000 for claiming that he had made up the entire interview and never met.
Grant panicked. He did not want to undergo a deposition, knowing full well that things might come out that were far worse than anything that had already appeared. To prevent that from happening, days before Grant's scheduled appearance before Hyams's lawyer, Stanley Fox offered the writer a generous settlement. He could ghostwrite Grant's “autobiography,” with complete access to Grant, sell it for whatever he could get, and keep all the money it made. It was a deal that was too good to resist. Grant's only stipulation was that it could run only once, as a magazine piece, and never as a book. Hyams agreed, if Grant would allow the byline to read, “By Cary Grant as told to Joe Hyams.”
The two then spent a great deal of time together taping discussions that were, for the most part, Grant's usual interview material. It gradually became clear to Hyams that this was going to be less an incisive, revelatory selfexamination than a pleasant recounting by Grant of his well-trod, occasionally romanticized memories—“Cary Grant's” memoir, not Cary Grant's. Still, he told his stories in such a disarming way and included enough interesting material to make the rather fanciful “autobiography” alluring to
Ladies' Home Journal,
which bought it for an astonishing $125,000.
When Grant found out about how much Hyams was making, he angrily threatened to cancel the entire deal. Fox then called Hyams and suggested the writer give Grant a $22,000 Rolls-Royce as a gift. Hyams did the math and decided 20 percent was not a bad amount to pay to avoid any further legal fees. He purchased the car for Grant324 and had it delivered bearing the license plate CG-1.
There the whole curious affair should have ended, except it didn't. Hedda Hopper, who had been after Grant for years to let
her
write his life story, was so angered he had given the assignment instead to Hyams that she wrote a vicious letter, not to
Ladies' Home Journal
but to one of the editors of
Look
magazine, where Grant had made his own lucrative deal, in which she “outed” Grant, claiming that everyone in Hollywood knew his upcoming “autobiography” was nothing more than his cheap attempt to cover up the truth about his lifelong homosexuality.
Look
decided not to print Hopper's letter (which is reprinted in Charles Higham and Roy Moseley's hasty postmortem Grant biography).
Instead, the magazine went ahead and ran its lengthy contracted LSD story, written by Laura Bergquist, entitled “The Curious Story Behind the New Cary Grant,” in which Grant agreed to be interviewed and talked of his experiences in discovering the joys of taking LSD. Early on, Bergquist set the tone for the piece by quoting David Niven, who described Grant in a way no one in his circle had ever dared do before in public, alluding to all the quirks of Grant's personality, and even, very indirectly, to his homosexuality. “I've known Cary for twenty-five years,” Niven said, “and he's the most truly mysterious friend I have. A spooky Celt really, not an Englishman at all. Must be some fey Welsh blood there someplace. Gets great crushes on people like the late Countess di Frasso, or ideas like hypnotism, then moves on. Has great
depressions and then some great heights when he seems about to take off for outer space.”