My Favorite Star

If there had never been a Cary Grant, someone would have had to invent him, and, in fact, someone did, a fellow named Archie Leach from Bristol, England. Acrobat, tumbler, stilt-walker, tall, dark and handsome, Archie came over to New York City with a well-known vaudeville kind of stunt show, decided to stay on and try his hand at acting and singing in the theater, got work on Broadway, changed his name, taking “Cary” from his first large role, and “Grant” from the phone book. Did a number of musicals, sang, danced, acted, played in a half-dozen shorts, got picked up by Paramount for a seven-year contract, did leads in over two dozen films before he found his picture persona. But along the way, in a couple of the good movies he did at Paramount, he learned a thing or two.

On one of his first, Blonde Venus (1932), the legendary Josef von Sternberg, discoverer-molder-Svengali of Marlene Dietrich, took one look at Grant on his first day of shooting and quietly said, deadpan, “Your hair is parted on the wrong side.” Grant himself told me this story—we were friends for 25 years—and I asked him how he had responded. “I parted it on the other side,” Cary said brightly, and somewhat conspiratorially, “and kept it that way for the rest of my career!”

Another big thing was gleaned from his successful experience on two pictures playing the love interest to Mae West. In both She Done Him Wrong (1932) and I’m No Angel (1933), Cary is the object of Mae’s affections and desires. She pursues him, rather than the other way around. Indeed, she makes one of the screen’s most famous (and most misquoted) invitations to Grant in their first scene together: “Why don’t cha come up sometime, an’ see me?” Cary’s a minister, says he hasn’t the time. She responds, “Say, what’re you tryin’ to do, insult me?!” What Cary took home was that it’s better to be wanted than to want, and once he established himself as a star in 1937, it never was otherwise.

It was what Leo McCarey wanted him to do opposite the divine Irene Dunne on The Awful Truth (1937) that overnight made him a real star. McCarey (who put Laurel and Hardy together) would improvise scenes with his actors from scratch, try it several ways, then write it down for them; when he went dry, he’d go over to his piano and play for a while. He wanted Cary to do some pratfalls. Grant wasn’t comfortable with any of this, and went to see Harry Cohn—the foul-mouthed founder and czar of Columbia Pictures—offered him his money back to get out of the movie, or to switch roles with “the other man,” Ralph Bellamy. To his everlasting glory, Harry Cohn told Cary to get the fuck out of his office and back on the set.

Leo McCarey won the Best Director Oscar for The Awful Truth, a rare event for comedies, and Cary Grant became a top comedy star. Garson Kanin—who directed My Favorite Wife (1940), a picture McCarey produced and co-wrote and Grant starred in—told me that on The Awful Truth, Cary was essentially doing Leo McCarey: some mannerisms, the subtle grunts, groans, intonations, deadpan reactions were McCarey characteristics. Cary also took all this with him throughout the rest of his career.

In 1938 came two box-office flops, both comedies with Kate Hepburn, both of them rightly considered classics today: Howard Hawks’ outrageous Bringing Up Baby, an intense exaggeration and expansion on the wildness of The Awful Truth, and, inspired perhaps by that film’s human aspects, George Cukor’s Holiday, an idealistic, socially minded, dubious-capitalist, drawing-room romantic comedy. Yet, despite these box-office misses, by the end of 1939, Grant had become one of the era’s superstars in both comedy and drama.

First, Cary was both rollicking and serious in Gunga Din, George Stevens’ popular adventure film. Then, with Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings, one of the great American adventure pictures, Grant became a top romantic leading man—with two women fighting over him—Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth, whose name in the film was Judy. From 1939 on, comic impersonators of Cary Grant always did him by saying, “Ju-dy, Ju-dy, Ju-dy.” Sometime in the early ’60s, I asked Grant about that “Judy” quote and he said, “I don’t know where that comes from! I nev-ah said that in a pictcha!” Soon after, I happened to see Only Angels again, and it jumped out at me: He does call her “Ju-dy” on more than three occasions in the movie. So I phoned Cary and told him where I thought the “Judy” quote came from. “You might be riight!” he exclaimed. “Of course, that makes sense.” He was laughing. “You solved it! Thank you ve-ry much!”

From 1940 until he retired in 1966, to raise his infant daughter (he was then only 62), Cary Grant—instantly a brand name, never again under long-term contract to a studio—acted in a series of pictures that are among the best films in a number of top directors’ careers, and therefore among the best ever made in America. Now, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, Gunga Din and Only Angels Have Wings (all available on DVD) are already a pretty staggering start for a newly independent actor, Grant being one of the first sound-era stars to strike out on his own. The shape and arc of his career was Grant’s own choosing, and a lot was prefigured in those first five.

His final collaboration with McCarey was even more successful than their first: that by-now-perennial tearjerker, An Affair To Remember (1957), with Deborah Kerr and Cary as a playboy/painter who falls in love and makes a fateful date for the top of the Empire State Building; it was one of the big hits of the ’50s and McCarey’s last success. With Cukor, he would make one more film, a big success, The Philadelphia Story (1940), his last with Hepburn, and with Jimmy Stewart. Cary, always very complimentary about Stewart’s Academy Award-winning performance in it, pointed out a scene to me in which he and Stewart almost break up, and Cukor kept it in.

Grant and Hawks, on the other hand, would do five films together, more than Cary did with any other director. In 1940, they shot the classic battle-of-the-sexes newspaper comedy, His Girl Friday, with Cary and Rosalind Russell doing probably the fastest spoken dialogue in pictures. Famously, the 180-page script (60 pages longer than usual) played in 90 minutes. In 1949, Hawks and Grant became one of the first to shoot in Europe after the war, on the hugely popular I Was A Male War Bride, with Ann Sheridan literally breaking up at Cary throughout. This is a generally overlooked picture today, but it was a great favorite in my family and one of Grant’s most successful. He is brilliantly deadpan playing a French officer and it is echt Hawks comedy. Three years later came their last and least successful, Monkey Business (1952), with terrific support from a young Marilyn Monroe, in one of her first sizable roles. Her scenes with Cary are gold, their chemistry palpable, and he is hilarious throughout, with the thickest glasses yet.

There were two other directors Cary worked with a lot—four times with Stanley Donen, and four times with the master, Alfred Hitchcock. In 1963, Donen had the casting coup of the day, pairing Grant with Audrey Hepburn, which had been talked about as a possibility for My Fair Lady (1964). Cary turned it down. “That’s Rex’s part,” he said referring to Rex Harrison, who’d originated the role on Broadway. So instead they got together for this Hitchcockian enterprise called Charade (1963), Cary’s last big hit, followed by only two more films before his retirement. Hepburn is so clearly thrilled to be in her scenes with Grant, and he seems so enchanted by her, that the chemistry sparks.