Cary Grant (50 page)
Authors: Marc Eliot
In the piece, Grant responded, “I am through with sadness. At last, I am close to happiness. After all these years, I'm rid of guilt complexes and fears.” He then went on a reverie of rambling, sharing such interesting details with Bergquist as his new-found, post-acid ability to “think” himself thin without benefit of exercise or diet. At the end of the piece he addressed his feelings about acting and shared this startling revelation: “Acting isn't the most essential business in the world…Personally, I think I'm ready at last to have children. I'd like to have a whole brood cluttering around the dining room table. I think my relations with women will be different too. I used to love a woman with great passion, and we destroyed each other. Or I loved not at all, or in friendship. Now I'm ready to love on an equal level. If I can find a woman on whom I can exhaust all my thoughts, energies and emotions, and she loves me that way in return, we can live happily ever after.” To this Bergquist insightfully concluded, “There are Hollywood skeptics who wonder if the ‘new’ Grant may not be the best character part he has ever played.”
By comparison, Hyams's “autobiography” (which took two years to appear in the
Ladies' Home Journal
) was extremely tame, with most of the unsightly blemishes carefully airbrushed from Grant's life, like wrinkles from a publicity photo, in deference to the afterimage that still burned so brightly in the eyes of his legions of fans. Nevertheless, it became the “factual” reference point for so many of the lasting misconceptions surrounding the life of Cary Grant.
After her letter to
Look
magazine and the publication of his authorized autobiography, Grant never spoke to either Hopper or Hyams again.
Instead, as he moved into the 1960s, fifty-six-year-old Cary Grant preferred to look ahead, to a new life that, as far as he was concerned, was just beginning.
*
It was not, however, the disaster many people think. It cost $2.5 million to make and grossed $3.2 million in its initial domestic release, nearly a million-dollar profit. Nevertheless, it disappointed the studio bottom-liners because it made only half as much profit as
Rear Window,
Hitchcock's biggest money-maker for Paramount.
*
Stewart desperately wanted to star in
North by Northwest,
but from the start Hitchcock had his sights set on Grant. Rather than coming right out and telling him so, he diplomatically waited until Stewart began work on
Bell, Book and Candle,
a film he was contracted to do, and then told the actor that he was sorry, it was his (Hitchcock's) loss, and wished him well.
*
Hitchcock would have the last laugh when he turned that conventional assumption on its head two years later, in
Psycho.
*
Following him in order of selection were William Holden, Yul Brynner, Rock Hudson (the previous year's number one choice), Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, Gary Cooper, Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra, Kirk Douglas, James Stewart, and Clark Gable.
*
Other unsuccessful candidates for the title included TV star and Grant look-alike Craig Stevens, TV's
Peter Gunn;
TV star and Grant look-alike John Vivyan, TV's
Mr. Lucky;
and TV star and Grant look-alike, cleft-chinned David Janssen, star of
Richard Diamond, Private Detective
and later
The Fugitive.
Universal was hoping to talk Curtis out of Cary Grant because the film would have been much more profitable for them with any other actor in the role of the captain. When they acquiesced, it meant they also had to use Granart, Grant's production company, as the only distributor and therefore received a much smaller percent of the profits.
*
Not to be confused with Charles Higham, one of Grant's unauthorized biographers.
Cary Grant, fourth wife Dyan Cannon, and Grant's only child, three-month-old Jennifer, in 1966, during the brief period of time the couple appeared to be happily married.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)
“I was a self-centered boor. I was masochistic and only thought I was happy. When I woke up and said, “There must be something wrong with me,' I grew up. Because I never understood myself, how could I have hoped to understand anyone else? That's why I say that now I can truly give a woman love for the first time in my life, because I can understand her.”
—
CARY GRANT
A
t Drake's insistence, Grant tried a reconciliation that he knew couldn't possibly work. Even before he finished
North by Northwest,
Grant was preparing himself for his permanent exit from the marriage and once again rushed into the protective safety of another movie. Emotional separation had always been difficult, and nothing else in his life could occupy him so completely and take his mind off his personal woes as making movies. In his capacity as filmmaking “tycoon, bargaining with a mind like an IBM machine,” and in a deal he negotiated on his own, Grant turned the tables on Universal Studios by insisting it guarantee Grandon 75 percent of the profits or 10 percent of the gross, whichever was greater, with a guarantee of $1 million up front and outright ownership of the negatives after seven years.
It was still a good deal for Universal, but a great one for Grant, who had
become more actively involved in the financial planning of his motion pictures after he summarily dispatched Lew Wasserman and MCA. With the huge financial success of
North by Northwest,
the agency had begun to press him to move into television, something he had openly resisted ever since the little flickering box first began to appear in living rooms across the country. In his biography of Wasserman, Dennis McDougal describes how the Wasserman-Grant split happened: “The final outrage [after MCA's failure to acquire
Bell, Book and Candle
for Grant] came when Grant was summoned to appear at Wasserman's Beverly Hills office for a career discussion. There, several executives told Grant he ought to follow his triumphant appearance in
North by Northwest
by doing his own TV series. Grant immediately became hostile. He asked again whether they really believed that he should appear in television and MCA replied, ‘Yes.' Grant asked who would produce the show and was told it would be MCA, of course. He stood up, scanned the roomful of Wasserman clones, all clad in dark suits, white shirts, and black ties, and said, ‘Our contract is over as of now,’ walked out and never returned.”
Grant had every reason to be outraged. It was clear to him now that MCA was far less interested in prolonging his giant film career than reducing it to twenty-one black-and-white inches, in a medium where they would have complete control of the vehicle, the talent, the advertising, and the profits. Wasserman had done the same thing with Alfred Hitchcock in the mid1950s, giving him a half-hour drama anthology series, then using it as a way to bolster Revue, Universal's TV unit. (The director, however, was smart enough to ensure that he would be allowed to continue to make movies and maintain creative control over the show's content as well as long-term ownership of all its episodes. Wasserman was not going to make that mistake again. Grant would not have been offered creative input, profit participation, or ownership.)
As always, Grant's timing was perfect. He left Wasserman and MCA just as the government was tightening its long-term investigation into the alleged monopolistic practices and mob influence at the powerful management and talent agency.
*
RELEASED IN DECEMBER
1959, in time for the lucrative holiday season,
OperationPetticoat,
Grant'ssixty-seventhfilm, became the most successful of his career. It outgrossed
North by Northwest
by more than $3 million and in doing so elevated Grant into the rarefied air (of the time) where independent producers of films that surpass the $10 million gross mark (in their initial domestic thea trical release)we refe wand far between. A sproducerandstarof
OperationPetticoat,
he earned a personal net gain of $3 million, the most he had ever made from a single picture. A month after the film's opening, on the strength of his powerhouse box office, Cary Grant became the first star in film history to have his films gross more than $10 million
in a single theater.
He had already had a record twenty-four movies of his premiere at the cavernous 3,200-seat art deco Radio City Music Hall auditorium in the heart of New York City.
Operation Petticoat
pushed Grant's collective Music Hall gross over the $10 million milestone.
AS HE CROSSED THE MID-FIFTIES
line on his life's journey, each tick of the biological clock sounded more and more like a soundtracked funereal bass. His continued regular weekly doses of LSD were the best reminders of who he really was and what he still needed to do, even as he sensed that time was running out to salvage his own childhood by creating his own child. In February 1961, just after his fifty-seventh birthday, Grant told an entertainment reporter from
The New York Times
that “there is no doubt that I am aging. My format of comedy is still the same as ever. I gravitate toward scripts that put me in an untenable position. Then the rest of the picture is spent in trying to squirm out of it. Naturally, I always get the girl in the end. It may appear old-fashioned. There seems to be a trend toward satirical comedy, like
The Apartment.
Perhaps it is because young writers today feel satirical living in a world that seems headed for destruction.”
*
Grant's notion that his films could somehow save the world was a macro fantasy of fatherhood as wild and expansive as it was appealing to him. That month Grant quietly began spreading the word among friends that he was offering a bounty of a million dollars in cash for “the right woman willing to bear him a son.” That bounty would be resurrected periodically for the rest of his life.
GRANT DECIDED TO COMPLETE ALL
his outstanding film commitments to his own and Donen's film companies and take on no new projects. That winter he finally began work on
The Grass Is Greener.
The film was based on a successful British stage play by Hugh and Margaret Williams, shot on location in London and directed by Stanley Donen. Grant had insisted the film be shot there because he wanted to return to England. Thrifty as ever, he had found a project that would finance the entire trip without interfering with his nonmoviemaking affairs.
The Grass Is Greener
was, in that sense, the ideal project. With the exception of one or two scenes, it is essentially a one-set project; much of the action takes place in Lynley Hall, the stately mansion of Victor, Earl of Rhyall (Grant), who for financial reasons—he's flat broke—has opted to turn the place into a tourist attraction.
Grant cast Deborah Kerr to play his wife, Hilary, although she wasn't his first choice; the earthier Jean Simmons was. Simmons, however, was on the verge of divorce and because of it asked for and got the smaller role of Hilary's girlfriend, Hattie Durant. Donen recommended Robert Mitchum to play Charles Delacro, the wealthy young American who, while taking the tour, meets and falls in love with Kerr. In the key role of the butler, Grant dearly wanted Noël Coward, but Donen preferred Moray Watson, who had created the role onstage at the West End—the only original cast member to make the transition to film. Grant acquiesced.