Cary Grant (55 page)

That same kindness wasn't extended to him by the Los Angeles Superior Court, which refused to delay the start of the hearing and warned Grant's lawyers they had better deliver their client on the twentieth as scheduled, or it would start without him. Grant chose to remain in the hospital.

During her extraordinary testimony, Cannon delivered a nightmarish account of her marriage to Grant. Grant had always claimed that his intake of LSD was limited to the hundred trips he had taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s before the drug was declared illegal, but she testified that he had secretly continued to use it on a regular basis and that during these “trips” he had at various times screamed at her, physically beaten her, and publicly humiliated her. He often tried to get her to go on LSD trips with him, she added. One time, she testified, she went to a party without his permission, and upon her return he gave her a hard spanking, laughing as he administered it. When she threatened to call the police, he told her the press would have a field day with it, so she didn't. Another time, while watching the Academy Awards, he got so upset with the winners that he “danced on the bed” and “went out of control.” When she wanted to wear a dress that he felt
was too short for the public to see her in, she testified, he took away her car keys and locked her in her room. One time while locked up she called her agent, and Grant picked up an extension phone to listen. “Addie,” she claimed he said (referring to her agent, Adeline Gould), “stay out of my marriage. I'm going to break this girl. She's not going to leave until I break her.” Gould was called upon to testify and confirmed this conversation. Cannon also testified that Grant accused her of having a sexual relationship with her psychiatrist.

One of Grant's witnesses was Dr. Sidney Palmer, an associate professor at the University of Southern California Medical School, who testified that Grant had come to him the previous September to have his emotional state evaluated in preparation for the divorce hearings. During their visits, Dr. Palmer said, Grant admitted that he was still taking LSD but only under strict medical supervision. “I found nothing irrational or incoherent about him,” the doctor said. He added that Grant showed great concern for his daughter's welfare and had “deep love and affection” for Jennifer. “I found nothing indicating his behavior would be dangerous to a child.”

Another witness for Grant, Dr. Judd Marmor, his psychiatrist for a brief period of time, testified under oath that Grant had told him that he had spanked his wife, but for “reasonable and adequate causes.”

All the while, Grant convalesced in the hospital. Even before his lawyers conferred with him, he knew from the newspapers the damage that had been done. Some of Grant's friends suggested to the press that Cannon had set him up, that she had married him only to advance her own career, but this kind of unprovable speculation sounded defensive and gained scant attention alongside the sensational revelations of Cannon's sworn testimony. Grant had prepared a rebuttal statement to the court, but after her testimony, he quickly withdrew it.

On March 22, two days after the trial had begun, Dyan Cannon was granted a divorce from Cary Grant and was given custody of two-year-old Jennifer. Grant was allowed sixty days of visitation rights per year, a “reasonable” number of overnight visits, with a nurse or governess to be present for all extended visits. Presiding Judge Wenke noted in his decision that Grant's continued use of LSD had made him “irrational and hostile,” but he also cited a stipulation—entered by the actor's attorneys and agreed to by
Cannon's, presumably with the understanding that the joint entry would prevent a long, drawn-out appeal—that Grant had not used LSD in the past twenty-four months. The Grant mystique evidently held some sway when the judge awarded Cannon the relatively modest sum of $2,000 a month child support and thirty-six months of alimony to begin at $2,500 a month and gradually decrease to $1,000, and use of the beach house. He followed his final words, “This is now over,” with a single pound of the gavel.

The next day, a haggard-looking Grant checked out of the hospital, ashen and still heavily bandaged. He had no comment for the phalanx of press awaiting his discharge, other than to say that he hoped “to keep breathing in and out.”

Later that day he flew back to Los Angeles aboard the private plane of George Barrie, owner and president of the Rayette-Fabergé Corporation. Barrie and Grant had spoken by phone several times after being introduced to each other in person by Blackman at one of Taplinger's parties. Barrie then offered to fly Grant back aboard his personal aircraft. Taplinger's introduction was no happy accident. He wanted Barrie to somehow convince Grant to join such other Fabergé luminaries as Joe Namath, Muhammad Ali, and Margaux Hemingway to pitch their company's products.

Taplinger had cannily put Barrie and Grant together, hoping their show business backgrounds might help put them in business together.
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Born in New York City, Barrie fancied a career as a musician and during his early songwriting years supported himself by using his charismatic personality to sell hair-care products for a company called Rayette. By the '60s, he was half owner, created the Brut line of cosmetics for men, and came up with the idea of name endorsements as a way to sell the cologne. The formula worked, sales skyrocketed, and Brut became ubiquitous, with celebrities pitching it in numerous television ads and in magazines all over the world. Barrie then sold Brut to Fabergé for a reported $50 million and continued to run the promotional side of the company while writing songs for Hollywood movies.

During the flight, alone with Grant, Barrie proposed that the actor consider joining the board of Fabergé, a position that offered only a token annual salary of $15,000 (with stock options) but would require nothing more than the occasional personal appearance. As part of the deal, Fabergé would provide a permanent suite at the Warwick Hotel in New York, unlimited use of the corporate jet for business and personal reasons, limousines and drivers everywhere around the world, and any and all expenses incurred promoting Fabergé to be paid for by the company.

Barrie did not think he had much of a chance of getting the actor to accept the deal, but to his surprise, shortly after returning to L.A., he received a phone call from Grant saying he would love to be associated with the worldfamous cosmetics firm as its “Good Will Ambassador.” The next day Barrie formally announced Grant's assignment to Fabergé's board of directors. The day after that the company's stock rose two full points.

As Grant later told reporter Cindy Adams, he was delighted to represent Fabergé because “The use of my name doesn't harm the company and I'm permitted to do whatever I choose. They ask can I be someplace and I say yes or no. People flock to actors.”
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The Fabergé deal gave Grant something to do with all the time he now had on his hands. Instead of making movies where he played rich, sophisticated tycoon bachelors, as in
That Touch of Mink,
he could now be that rich, sophisticated tycoon in real life. Shortly after he joined Fabergé, Grant accepted another, even more surprising corporate invitation, this time to become a full member of the board of directors at MGM. Even though for most of his professional life he had been considered an outsider to the studio system, he jumped at the offer because the package allowed for unlimited accommodations at the entertainment conglomerate's new hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. To celebrate Grant's assignment to the board, the studio named the main screening room at its Culver City headquarters the Cary Grant Theater.

That same year he purchased his first stock in the Hollywood Park Race Track from his good friend, proprietor Marje Everett. The track had a storied history as the locale for the famous Hollywood Turf Club, formed in 1938 under the chairmanship of Jack Warner. Its six hundred original club members were a roster of 1930s greats, including Al Jolson, Raoul Walsh, Joan Blondell, Ronald Colman, Walt Disney, Bing Crosby, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Ralph Bellamy, Hal Wallis, Anatole Litvak, and Mervyn LeRoy. It was LeRoy who had first brought Grant to the track and introduced him to the so-called Sport of Kings.
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For a while he considered moving back to London to stay with his mother for the rest of her life. He decided against it, however, when his lawyers told him the courts would never allow Jennifer to travel abroad with him. Instead he bought a new and bigger home on five acres of land in Beverly Hills that he designed himself, with Eastern, Hebrew, and Mediterranean-inspired interiors, to accommodate Jennifer on her overnight and every-otherweekend visits. He gave her the biggest bedroom and always made sure it was stocked with lots of toys and dolls.

He never altered the schedule of her visits or missed a single one. He made sure his duties at Fabergé and the other boards were all adjusted to work around his designated time with his daughter. Having learned his lesson from his auto accident in New York City, he stopped going out in public. He didn't want any overeager photographer taking his picture with some young woman who might be standing nearby, lest it somehow hurt his visitation rights. Instead, he visited friends in their homes, mostly for dinner parties, where he could be counted on to sit down at their piano and riff through some modern jazz. In January 1968, on the occasion of his sixty-fourth birthday, a few friends insisted on throwing a party for him. He agreed, as long as there was no cake, ceremony, or gifts. And, he insisted, after dinner he must be allowed to entertain by taking requests for songs he would then play and sing for everyone.

Also in 1968, Gregory Peck was elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was a milestone that signaled a new, younger, and more liberal generation of actors wresting control of the Academy from the fading, conservative old guard. One of the first things Peck did as president would previously have been unthinkable: at the request of Sammy Davis Jr., who claimed he was speaking for Hollywood's black community, he postponed the fortieth Oscar ceremonies for four days following the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

That year Mike Nichols won Best Director for
The Graduate,
a film that confirmed Hollywood's tidal generational shift in movies and the leading men who starred in them. Dustin Hoffman became an overnight star for his portrayal of Benjamin Braddock, a 1960s malcontent who has an affair with his father's partner's wife and then falls in love with her daughter. Best Picture went to Norman Jewison's
In the Heat of the Night,
a decidedly liberal movie that dealt with racial prejudice in an explosive southern town.

Without question, the stars, the movies, the system that made them, and the people who went to see them were all for and of a new young, hip, rockand-roll generation. Peck, wanting to right what he felt were some longstanding wrongs of the Academy, began lobbying for a lifetime achievement award for Cary Grant. His request would likely have been granted for the 1969 Awards had Grant's messy divorce not been played out in the media. Barely missing the required votes, Peck continued to press for the honor and, early in 1970, announced to the world that at that year's Academy Awards, the great Cary Grant would, at last, be given an Honorary Oscar “for his unique mastery of the art of screen acting with the respect and affection of his colleagues.”

According to friends, news of the award reduced a grateful Cary Grant to tears.

A gray-haired, contented Cary Grant at 80, along New York City's East River.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)