Cary Grant (65 page)

THE LUX RADIO THEATER

Adam and Eve
(May 5, 1935) First broadcast.

Madame Butterfly
(March 8, 1937)

Theodora Goes Wild
(June 13, 1938)

Only Angels Have Wings
(May 28, 1939)

The Awful Truth
(September 11, 1939)

In Name Only
(December 11, 1939)

I Love You Again
(June 30, 1941)

Here Comes Mr. Jordan
(January 26, 1942)

The Philadelphia Story
(July 20, 1942). Special victory show for the U.S. government.

Talk of the Town
(May 17, 1943)

Mr. Lucky
(October 18, 1943)

Bedtime Story
(February 26, 1945)

Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer
[
sic
] (June 13, 1949)

Every Girl Should Be Married
(June 27, 1949)

Mr. Blanding
[
sic
]
Builds His Dream House
(October 10, 1950)

I Confess
(September 21, 1953)

People Will Talk
(January 25, 1954)

Welcome, Stranger
(April 5, 1954)

Even before resigning from the Academy, Grant had privately expressed his disdain for the industry's self-serving practice of giving out awards to itself. In 1946 Harold Russell won a special Oscar for his performance in William Wyler's
The Best Years of Our Lives
in addition to a regular Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the same performance; Grant's performances in two films that year, Michael Curtiz's
Night and Day
and Hitchcock's
Notorious,
were ignored by the Academy. Grant thereupon remarked to a friend, “Where can I get a stick of dynamite?”

Grant did not officially rejoin the Academy until September 1970, five months after receiving his Lifetime Achievement Oscar, and only after receiving a long and conciliatory letter from Academy Award–winning screenwriter Daniel Taradash, the newly elected Academy president who succeeded Gregory Peck. Taradash implored Grant to return to the fold. Only then did Grant reluctantly agree to end his thirty-five-year self-imposed exile. In response to Taradash, Grant wrote, “At the time because of what may have since become outmoded principles, I deplored commercializing a ceremony, which, in my estimation, should have remained unpublicized and privately shared among the artists and craftsmen of our industry. I'm not at all sure that my beliefs have changed; just the times.”

Highest estimated earnings by movie stars during the four decades Cary Grant made films:

Highest-grossing films starring Cary Grant, based on the first initial theatrical domestic release. The list was compiled in 1972 by
Weekly Variety,
based on theatrical receipts in the United States and Canada. It should be noted that it has not been corrected for inflation, and that during Grant's thirty-five-year career, the average price of admission fluctuated between five and seventy-five cents. Nevertheless, Grant's later films managed to outgross his earlier ones consistently. None of the forty-seven films he made before
Notorious
(1946) make the list.
^*

*
Sources:
Guinness Book of the Movies, Guinness Book of Records,
Herrick Library, Rebel Road Library, Archive of Film and Music,
The Films of Cary Grant
by Donald Deschner.

I WAS JUST A BOY
when I first became aware of Cary Grant. The film was
North by Northwest.
I saw it in its initial run one Friday night at the Loew's Paradise on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Because I was underage, I asked an adult if he would buy me my ticket. He agreed, I gave him the three quarters I had saved, got in, bought some popcorn (fifteen cents with real butter) and a Coke (ten cents), found a seat toward the front of the enormous theater with the artificial stars in its beautiful faux “sky,” and settled in to be transported. By then, although my access was by today's standards severely limited— no cable, no video, no DVDs, no Turner Classic Movies, and relatively few and far between revival houses, I was well hooked on the movies, on Alfred Hitchcock, and, after this film, on Cary Grant.

North by Northwest
was, along with a handful of others
(High Noon, On the Waterfront, From Here to Eternity, Shane, Sons of the Desert)
, one of the seminal films of my formative years that were so powerful and affecting they managed to change the emotional and creative direction of my life. With
North by Northwest,
it was not because of anything in its convoluted plot or sophisticated multitracked themes. I was too young to “get” all the multiple-theme doppelgängers, the “hidden” dark artistry of Alfred Hitchcock, the peculiar resistance to the love-lipsticked Eva Marie Saint—but was immediately and completely spellbound by the unbelievable, if for me still inexplicable, charismatic allure of its three stars, the evil James Mason, the provocative Ms. Saint, and the handsome Mr. Grant. For the first time, despite the very real presence of my father in our small and cramped apartment, I understood my mother's open, hopeless, and unconditional love for Cary Grant.

After graduating from the High School of Performing Arts and receiving my B.A. at the City University of New York, I lost two years recovering from a serious accident before I applied for and won in 1970 a fellowship at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts. Thus I began my new five-year educational marathon—two years spent earning my M.F.A. in writing, three more to study film history and criticism in the School of the
Arts' Ph.D. program under the aegis of someone who was to completely change my thinking about movies. His name was Andrew Sarris, at the time the film critic for
The Village Voice
newspaper and a professor at Columbia University, where he had joined the faculty of the School of the Arts after having shaken up the cinematic universe with his monumental
The American Cinema,
a book that propounded the “Auteur Theory” and that became for me, and an entire generation of students and filmmakers, cinema's holy grail. Although auteurism is, today, as standard an approach to film as low carbohydrates is to dieting, at the time Sarris's work had the power to outrage the mainstream while at the same time awakening it to the realization of the true artistry of the American cinema.

As much as I loved the surface of the silver screen, Sarris taught me about another layer of movies, those that lurk beneath the shimmering surface and connect directly to the soul. Uncovering these provocatively textured layers of emotion released their greater power and meaning, and the heat of the director's vision fanned the flames of my own creative fires. Sarris also taught me how film's dreams of reality help reveal the reality in my own dreams.

For many years after my time at Columbia I tried to see at least one movie every day of my life. Eventually I reemerged from this subtextural delirium and returned once more to the primal source of my attraction to it, the compelling, wondrous, and irresistible force of the messengers of their meaning. Having been immersed for so long in the examination of the emotional bones that lay beneath the perfect skin of its larger-than-life stars, I once more got the picture, as it were, after seeing a screening of
North by Northwest
in the mid-'80s at a Hitchcock festival in one of New York's revival theaters. It was then I realized all over again that no one ever looked better, had a greater face or deeper soul, than the cinematic miracle that was Cary Grant. And that the real magic of movies and actors was how they showed you both.

THE RESEARCH FOR THIS BIOGRAPHY
was conducted over a five-year period of interviews, library and private collection research, and, of course, repeated viewings of Cary Grant movies (of which, by my count, I have now seen sixty-three of the seventy-two).
^*
As a biographer I probably put less stock than others in firsthand “eyewitness” recollections of those who knew, or claim to have known, Cary Grant. For one thing, nearly twenty years have passed since his death in 1986 at the age of eighty-two. By the time I began this book, relatively few people from his early and middle years were still alive and able to tell their tales. Some of the others who did, as I have sometimes painfully discovered in my career, shared an unfortunate (but prevalent) tendency to either rewrite history
for the sake of the departed, or elevate their own position in his saga. Any decent biographer shares the same fraternal joke: that he or she has met at least a dozen of his or her subject's “best friends,” “closest companions,” or “most trusted confidants.” When I wrote
Death of a Rebel,
my first biography, of Phil Ochs, although he died in a web of severe loneliness, I somehow came across dozens of “best” and “closest” friends.

Far more important, I believe, is an accurate documentation of events, and equally important, the ability to understand and determine the meaning of those events. When Grant died, there was an unfortunate but inevitable rush of hopelessly inaccurate accountings of his death, with the “big secret” of his life revealed “at last,” the “hidden” fact of his homosexuality. A generation later, this subject no longer produces the shock and often accompanying outrage it did in the months after his passing. What it does do now is offer a clearer window into the way Hollywood reacted to the gay issue in Grant's lifetime, and in a larger sense the way it was generally regarded by the twentieth century's so-called mainstream culturalists.

As for his work for the FBI, another poorly researched “sensation” that first surfaced in the immediate wake of Grant's passing, the painful lesson we have come to learn is that virtually no one in the entertainment industry of the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties was able to escape the long and grisly arm of the monstrous (and monstrously powerful) J. Edgar Hoover. As I have done in the past, I used the Freedom of Information Act for a source of invaluable information. The FOIA is a direct, if hard-fought-for, application of the Constitution that in a free world guarantees the public's essential right to know, a byproduct of our First Amendment. I have used the FOIA for four books
—Death of a Rebel, Rockonomics, Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince,
and this biography of Cary Grant. I must report that despite numerous court decisions in favor of the public's right to access, the FBI continues to make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for journalists to receive meaningful and important documents, and that they retain a seemingly unchallenged right to alter and withhold whatever information they feel is not in the best interest of the public.

In the case of Cary Grant, they have continued to insist that despite all evidence to the contrary, there never was any file kept on Cary Grant (more likely, if it does not exist it was destroyed along with thousands of others by J. Edgar Hoover, at his direction, shortly before and after his death). Fortunately, I was able to piece together much of what I needed from files made available to me by people outside of the government who had, from time to time, gained access to the FBI's dossiers on others, and they are noted in the Sources section of the book.

One final, troubling note about the Grant/Hoover relationship. Throughout most of the ten-year anti-Communist inquisition the government inflicted upon Hollywood, from approximately the mid-forties to the mid-fifties, while McCarthy took center stage as the country's self-styled savior, Hoover's influence, if not presence, always lurked just behind the scenes. And yet, throughout his career, after his Depression gangster years, he never pursued any organized crime figures, and no one was ever asked in all of the hearings that took place under the auspices of HUAC if they “were now or ever have been a Nazi.”
Finally, it appears that strings were pulled during the HUAC years to protect Grant, who had become an invaluable property (if not a loyal one) to some of Hollywood's most important filmmakers. On a darker note, Hoover, who was gay, may simply have fallen in love with Cary Grant and wanted to protect him. Stranger things, as we now know, have occurred in the history of twentieth-century American law enforcement.

THERE ARE SEVERAL PEOPLE
I wish to thank for their help, assistance, guidance, and encouragement during the writing of this book. Because so many requested anonymity, out of respect for them and for Cary Grant, I have honored those requests. Of those I can mention, I will. They include Peter Bogdanovich, Charlie Callas, Cindy Hubach, Teresa McWilliams, Ward Morehouse, William Frye, Joey Reynolds, Chi-Li Wong, Virginia Cherrill (her private diaries and audiotapes generously supplied by Ms. McWilliams), Luisa Flynn, and Satsko. To the rest, you know who you are, and I thank you all.

I wish to thank the Authors Guild and my fellow Friars, especially Mickey Freeman.

I also wish to thank my publisher Shaye Arehart, my editors Julia Pastore and Teryn Johnson, production editor Mark McCauslin, designer Lauren Dong, production supervisor Leta Evanthes, copyeditor Janet Biehl, proofreader Robin Slutzky, my photographer Brenda Killenbeck, and my agent Mel Berger.

And especially to all my friends who have stayed loyal to me throughout the years, I thank you as well.