Cary Grant (53 page)

Cannon's career, meanwhile, had taken off. She went out on a nationwide tour of
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
for much of that year and the next. To occupy his time waiting for her to return to Los Angeles, Grant, who had little outside interest in anything these days other then horseracing, formed another new production company, Grandox, to produce one film to be distributed by Universal. What convinced him to return to the screen was the movie's concept. His seventy-first film, he believed, had all the qualities needed to bring him the big prize, an Academy Award. He couldn't resist one more run for the elusive golden child of his dreams.

The film was
Father Goose,
whose original screenplay by Frank Tarloff was, at Grant's insistence, rewritten by Peter Stone. The film concerns the wartime adventures of Walter Eckland (Grant), a grizzled South Pacific loner forced to become a reconnaissance spy for the U.S. government during the early days of World War II, as the Japanese army is advancing on the Allies' positions in the Pacific. Alone on an island, the cranky, boozy, unshaven Eckland finds himself the involuntary caretaker to Catherine Freneau (Leslie Caron), the very proper and (of course) single schoolmarm and her
seven little girl students, all trapped with him after a bombing raid and forced to share his single recon hut. At first Eckland refuses to have anything to do with either Freneau or her children, but he gradually falls in love with her and them and at the film's climax performs a heroic rescue and saves the whole bunch with the promise of marriage to Freneau on the horizon. Familiar Hollywood moral of the story: a wife and children will turn a meaningless existence into one filled with meaning and joy.

Not surprisingly, the chance to play against type held great appeal to Grant. He was happy to shed the custom suit and perfect haircut of the suave über-urbanite in favor of the dirty, disheveled garments of a boozy old geezer (who somehow still manages to have the thirty-four-year-old Caron pursue and fall in love with him). All of it was carefully calculated by Grant to court Oscar.

If the Academy favored any one type of performance, it was one in which an actor went against image. Bing Crosby had done it when he switched from bebopster to priest in
Going My Way
(1944), Ray Milland did it by going sloppy drunk in
The Lost Weekend
(1945), José Ferrer did it disfiguring his face in
Cyrano de Bergerac
(1950), Humphrey Bogart did it going from suitand-tie tough guy to unshaved alcoholic in
The African Queen
(1951), Gary Cooper did it playing over-the-hill in
High Noon
(1952), William Holden did it as a crewcut POW cynic in
Stalag 17
(1953), Marlon Brando did it as a punch-drunk fighter in
On the Waterfront
(1954), Ernest Borgnine did it as a mama's boy in
Marty
(1955), Yul Brynner did it being bald and barefoot in
The King and I
(1956), and Alec Guinness did it losing his mind building
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957).

Production on
Father Goose
began on April 9, 1964, and finished in time for the film to be released for a gala Christmas opening at the Music Hall, which Grant attended personally. While in New York he appeared at the fourteenth annual Chanukah Festival for Israel at Madison Square Garden. (Some Hollywood cynics derided this as Grant's attempt to win a few extra Jewish votes for the upcoming Oscars, apparently unaware of Grant's years of extensive work for several Jewish charity organizations.)

Father Goose
was a smash holiday hit and continued Grant's streak of box office winners, grossing more than $6 million in its initial domestic theatrical
release. It was, however, a bit of a financial disappointment to Grant, because it did $150,000 less than
Charade,
$2.5 million less than
That Touch of Mink,
and $3 million less than
Operation Petticoat.
He was still big box office, but the message he read in the diminishing returns was that his popular appeal was softening. Because of it, he became unusually accessible to the press, engineering and guiding his own campaign to win over the voters of the Academy.

His efforts seemed to pay off. Even before the film's big open, Hollywood was buzzing with Oscar talk for Grant's need-a-shave performance. In her column in the
Hollywood News,
syndicated gossip Sheilah Graham declared that, having seen an advance screening and getting him to do a rare sit-down, she was proud to announce that “Cary Grant's latest picture,
Father Goose,
is the very best of his whole career. And he plays it with dirty sneakers, shabby clothes, a beard and I was just about to say, no glamour, but that's not true. It's there and it always will be.

“I chatted with Cary during his twenty-four hours in New York after the preview of the picture and he corroborated something about success. It does not happen haphazardly. Every step is as carefully planned as those of an architect building a good house. I'll come to that in a minute.

“First of all I have to make a correction in my Academy Award prediction for the best actor of the year. I stated yesterday that Rex Harrison stood alone, far out in front [for
My Fair Lady
]. That isn't true anymore…In my crystal ball I see an Oscar for Mr. Grant.”

Despite, or perhaps in defiance of, Grant's big push, the aging majority of Academy members had long memories of Grant, few of which were positive. That February when nominations for the 1964 Oscars were announced,
Father Goose,
despite Grant's concentrated PR campaign, was noticeably absent from most of the major categories, amid an unusually strong roster of films. The Best Picture nominations included Peter Glenville's
Becket,
Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,
Robert Stevenson's
Mary Poppins,
and Michael Cacoyannis's
Zorba the Greek.
Best Actor nods went to Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole
(Becket),
Anthony Quinn
(Zorba),
Peter Sellers
(Dr. Strangelove),
and the eventual winner, Rex Harrison.

Father Goose
received three nominations, all in nonperformance categories—Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, which it won (S. H. Barnett, Frank Tarloff, and Peter Stone), Best Editing, which it lost to
Mary Poppins,
and Best Sound, which it lost to
My Fair Lady.

According to close friends, Grant was crushed to have not even been nominated and vowed once again not to attend the Awards ceremony. Instead, he put all his efforts on dream child number two.

IN THE SUMMER OF
1965 Grant decided the time had come for him and Cannon, who had concluded her national tour of
How to Succeed,
to get married. Grant had proposed marriage several times in the three years they had been seeing each other, but Cannon had remained noncommittal. Then in June she quietly informed Grant that she was pregnant, prompting him to once more pop the question. This time she said yes, she would marry him, right then and there, before the weekend was over.

They obtained a marriage license at Godfield, a small desert town two hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas, where no press hounds lurked, then drove to Vegas. To ensure privacy, Grant once again called upon Howard Hughes to make the final arrangements. Hughes hired James Prennen, a local Las Vegas justice of the peace, to perform the top-secret ceremony at the Desert Inn, the Vegas hotel that Hughes now owned. Immediately afterward the sixty-one-year-old Grant whisked his twenty-eight-year-old bride to Bristol, England, via private plane provided by Hughes, to meet his mum.

While away, rumors of his “impending” marriage to Cannon began to appear in the American press. To avoid any unnecessary hounding, Grant chose Roderick Mann of the British
Sunday Graphic
(pointedly snubbing his cobiographer Joe Hyams, who had been trying to reach Grant for confirmation of the rumor spreading through Hollywood) to announce that he had indeed married Dyan Cannon. “I'm only telling you now because you asked me. So many people have been hinting that we were thinking about marrying, were about to marry, or were actually married—but nobody actually came right out and asked.”

The story ran in the following Sunday's
Graphic
and immediately made headlines around the world.

When they returned to Los Angeles, Cannon revealed to the press that she was pregnant. That night Grant celebrated his wife's public announcement by taking her to a luxury box at Dodger Stadium, where the two dined on Dodger dogs, chips, and sodas while they root, root, rooted for the home team. Grant later told a friend he was never happier.

Unfortunately, the feeling would not last for very long.

32

A
s much as he claimed to be excited by the prospect of becoming a father, something of the old, pre-acid Cary Grant remained terrified at the thought; no scar, physical scrape, or emotional blow ever heals completely. Shortly after his wife announced to the world she was going to have his baby, Grant suddenly signed on to make another movie, telling Cannon she should stay home and rest while he was in Japan on location. When she protested, telling him she was only in her first trimester and was perfectly capable of traveling with him, he would hear none of it. The last thing he wanted, he said, was to in any way cause her to have a miscarriage, not at this stage of his life. Besides, he told her, not winning an Oscar for
Father Goose
had taught him a lesson. “Cary Grant” was dead. Therefore, why not kill him off for good?

Cannon must have wondered how her pregnancy had somehow become all about his career.

After turning down a multimillion-dollar deal to play the lead in the film version of the hit stage musical
The Music Man,
Grant formed Granley
Productions, with producer Sol C. Siegel, and signed on Columbia Pictures to serve as the distributor for his next film. The company then acquired the rights to a 1943 George Stevens wartime comedy,
The More the Merrier,
which had starred Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur and character actor Charles Coburn. In it, the chronic wartime housing shortage causes Coburn to wind up sharing Jean Arthur's apartment. He then splits his half with McCrea, the premise that sets up the comic unfoldings and the eventual romance between McCrea and Arthur, helped along by Coburn's gentle guidance. The film had been nominated for Best Picture and lost to
Casablanca,
but Coburn as the elder Cupid figure had walked away with the Best Supporting Oscar in an upset over the overwhelming favorite, Claude Rains, Bogart's foil in the fabled North African adventure romance. The role Grant now wanted was Coburn's, in a remake to be called
Walk, Don't Run.

Whatever subconscious motivations may have been at work, Grant envisioned his seventy-second film, his last hurrah, as a farewell kiss to his audience. To ensure that this message wouldn't get lost, for the first time since his earliest days at Paramount when he lost Dietrich to Herbert Marshall in
Blonde Venus,
he would not get the girl—in this instance Samantha Eggar, a ravishing British redhead who had caused a sensation the year before as the gorgeous victim opposite Terence Stamp's schizo kidnapper in William Wyler's
The Collector.
Grant personally selected her to play the romantic lead. Jim Hutton, also cast by Grant, was a tall, slender, charming, and athletic actor in whom Grant saw a clear reflection of his younger self. Veteran non-boat-rocker Charles Walters
(Easter Parade, High Society)
was chosen by Siegel to direct.

The production was on location in Japan in time to shoot during the 1964 Summer Olympics, but problems slowed the filming down and kept Grant in Tokyo for nearly six months after the Games ended, allowing for only three brief trips back to the States. Not until late in February did Grant get to shoot his last scene in the movie and the last of his career. In it, he gets into a limo and instructs his driver to take him home to his wife and two children, “who are almost grown.” Taking one last look through the window, the camera then pulls back and rises slowly as Grant, with all the majesty of a king, slowly rides off into his final cinematic sunset.