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THE MAN FROM DREAM CITY
Continued from previous page.
Although Leach didn't appear in the smart shows, he was something of a figure in the New York smart set, and he was known to the Algonquin group in that period when the theatrical and literary worlds were one. Some people considered him an intellectual and a powerhouse talent of the future. Moss Hart later described him as disconsolate in those years; Hart and Leach were among a group of dreamers talking of changing the theatre (the circle also included Edward Chodorov and Preston Sturges) who met daily in the Rudley's Restaurant at Forty-first Street and Broadway. It was a hangout where one got leads about possible jobs, and many performers frequented the place--Jeanette MacDonald, George Murphy, Humphrey Bogart. But Archie Leach was the only actor who was a regular at the Rudley rebels' table. The Anzac role he'd played in "Golden Dawn" must have clung to him, or perhaps, since he never talked much about his background, some of the others mistook his Cockney for an Australian accent, because they called him Kangaroo, and sometimes Boomerang. "He was never a very open fellow," Chodorov says, "but he was earnest and we liked him." "Intellectual" was probably the wrong word for Leach. They talked; he listened. He doesn't appear to have been much of a reader (except later on, during his marriage to Betsy Drake, when he became immersed in the literature of hypnotism and the occult), but there's no indication that anyone ever doubted his native intelligence. It's a wide-awake intelligence, though this may not be apparent from his public remarks of the sixties, which had a wholesome Rotarian tone he adopted during LSD treatments with a medical guru. In his youth, Leach liked to hang around people who were gifted and highly educated; always looking for ways to improve himself, he probably hoped that their knowledge would rub off on him. But there must have been more to it than that; he must have looked up to the brilliant young Rudley's group because the theatre he worked in didn't fully satisfy his mind. Uneducated outside the theatre, he was eager for spiritual leadership--for wisdom. In Hollywood, he was to sit at the feet of Clifford Odets, the leading wisdom merchant of the theatrical left (the sagacity was what marred Odets' plays). And during his many years of LSD sessions he was euphoric about how the drug had enabled him to relax his conscious controls and reach his subconscious, thus making him a better man--less selfish, fit at last for marriage, and so on. Obviously, he felt that he'd found a scientific route to wisdom.
When "Nikki" closed, on October 31, 1931, Leach decided to take a "vacation," and set out with a composer friend to drive to Los Angeles. He knew what he was after; many of the people he'd been working with were already in the movies. He had the situation cooled: he'd been earning from three hundred dollars to four hundred and fifty dollars a week for several years, and the Shuberts were eager to employ him if he returned. He had barely arrived in Hollywood when he was taken to a small dinner party at the home of B. P. Schulberg, the head of Paramount, who invited him to make a test ("Singapore Sue" had not yet been released), and after seeing it Schulberg offered him a contract. The studio executives wanted his name changed, and his friends Fay Wray and John Monk Saunders suggested that he use "Cary Lockwood." He proposed it when he went back to discuss the contract, but he was told that "Lockwood" was a little long. Someone went down a list of names and stopped at "Grant." He nodded, they nodded, and the contract went into effect on December 7th. He wasn't ever "discovered." Movies were simply the next step.
If Archie Leach's upward progress seems a familiar saga, it is familiar in the rags-to-riches mode of a tycoon or a statesman. What is missing from his steady climb to fame is tension. He became a performer in an era in which learning to entertain the public was a trade; he worked at his trade, progressed, and rose to the top. He has probably never had the sort of doubts about acting which have plagued so many later performers, and he didn't agonize over choices, as actors of his stature do now. A young actor now generally feels that he is an artist only when he uses his technique for personal expression and for something he believes in. And so he has a problem that Archie Leach never faced: When the actor became an artist in the modern sense, he also became a sellout. He began to feel emasculated when he played formula roles that depended on technique only, and he had to fight himself to retain his belief in the audience, which often preferred what he did when he sold out. He was up against all the temptations, corruptions, and conflicts that writers and composers and painters had long been wrestling with. Commerce is a bind for actors now in a way it never was for Archie Leach; art for him was always a trade.
He was unusually long-sighted about his career, and prodigiously disciplined, and so he got into a position in which he didn't have to take any guff from anybody. The Hammersteins had sold him to the Shuberts when he wanted to go to Ziegfeld; and to get movie roles he had to commit himself to a five-year contract with Paramount. But that was the last time he let others have the power to tell him what to do. He was twenty-seven when he signed the contract--at a starting salary of four hundred and fifty dollars a week. Paramount didn't know what it had. It used him as a second-string Gary Cooper, putting him in the pictures Cooper was too busy for--or, even worse, in imitations of roles that Cooper had just scored in. In between, Paramount lent him out to other studios and collected the fees. He was no more than a pawn in these deals. M-G-M requested him for one of the top roles in "Mutiny on the Bounty," a role he desperately wanted, but Paramount refused, and Franchot Tone won the part. A little later, Paramount lent him to M-G-M to support Jean Harlow in the piddling "Suzy."
When that contract ended, in February, 1937, Cary Grant, just turned thirty-three, was raring to go. He never signed another exclusive contract with a studio; he selected his scripts and his directors, and this is probably what saved him from turning into a depressingly sentimental figure, like the later, tired Gary Cooper, or a drudge, like the big M-G-M stars. It was in his first year on his own, free of studio orders, that he became a true star. In comedy, Cary Grant just might be the greatest straight man in the business, and his specialty is to apply his aplomb as a straight man to romance.
The "lunatic" thirties comedies that made him a star are still enjoyed, but their rationale has dropped from sight. In essence, they turned love and marriage into vaudeville acts and changed the movie heroine from sweet clinging vine into vaudeville, partner. Starting in 1934, when things were still bad but Roosevelt and the New Deal had created an upswing spirit, the happy screwball comedies were entertainment for a country that had weathered the worst of the Depression and was beginning to feel hopeful. Yet people had been shaken up. The new comedies suggested an element of lunacy and confusion in the world; the heroes and heroines rolled with the punches and laughed at disasters. Love became slightly surreal; it became stylized--lovers talked back to each other, and fast. Comedy became the new romance, and trading wisecracks was the new courtship rite. The cheerful, wacked-out heroes and heroines had abandoned sanity; they were a little crazy, and that's what they liked in each other. They were like the wisecracking soldiers in service comedies: if you were swapping quips, you were alive--you hadn't gone under. The jokes were a national form of gallantry--humor for survival. Actual lunatics in these movies became enjoyable eccentrics, endearing nuts who often made better sense than anybody else (or at least as much sense), while the butts of screwball humor were the prigs and phonies, the conventional go-getters, the stick-in-the-mud conformists. Ralph Bellamy, the classic loser and opposite number to Cary Grant in "The Awful Truth" and again in "His Girl Friday," still thought in the strict, stuffed-shirt terms of the Babbitty past. The word "square" wasn't yet in slang use, but that's the part Bellamy played--the man who didn't get the joke. Obliging and available, always around when you didn't want him (there was really no time when you did), he was the man to be jilted.
The comedies celebrated a change in values. In the movies of the twenties and the early thirties, girls who chased after riches and luxury learned the error of their ways, but after 1934 sin wasn't the big movie theme it had been. Adultery was no longer tragic; the unashamed, wisecracking gold-diggers saw to that. Glenda Farrell, one of the toughest and most honestly predatory of the millionaire hunters, put it this way in "Gold Diggers of 1937": "It's so hard to be good under the capitalistic system." Impudence became a virtue. Earlier, the sweet, archly virginal heroine had often had a breezy, good-hearted confidante; now the roles were reversed, and the lively, resilient heroine might have an innocent kid sister or a naïve little friend from her home town who needed looking after. What man in the Depression years would welcome a darling, dependent girl? Maybe the hero's shy buddy, but not the hero. He looked for the girl with verve; often she was so high and buoyant she could bounce right over trouble without noticing it. It was Carole Lombard's good-hearted giddiness that made her lovable, Jean Arthur's flightiness, Myrna Loy's blithe imperviousness--and in "Bringing Up Baby" Katharine Hepburn was so light-headed, so out of it, that she was unbeatable. The mistreated, masochistic women who had been moping through the confessional movies, pining for the men who had ruined them and looking tenderly at their fatherless offspring, either faded (like Ann Harding, Ruth Chatterton, and Helen Hayes) or changed their styles (like Constance Bennett in "Topper," Lombard in "Twentieth Century," and, of course, Claudette Colbert in "It Happened One Night" and Irene Dunne in "Theodora Goes Wild" and "The Awful Truth"). The stars came down to earth in the middle and late thirties--and became even bigger stars. Marlene Dietrich, who had turned into a lolling mannequin, reëmerged as the battling floozy of "Destry Rides Again." Just as in the late sixties some of the performers loosened up and became hip, thirties performers such as Joel McCrea and Fredric March became lighter-toned, gabby, and flip. An actor who changes from serious to comic roles doesn't have problems with the audience (the audience loves seeing actors shed their dignity, which has generally become a threadbare pose long before it's shed); it's the change from comic to serious that may confound the audience's expectations.
The speed and stylization of screwball humor were like a stunt, and some of the biggest directors of the thirties had come out of two-reel comedy and had the right training. Leo McCarey, who directed "The Awful Truth," had directed the Marx Brothers in "Duck Soup" and, before that, Laurel & Hardy comedies for Hal Roach. George Stevens, who directed Grant in "Gunga Din," was also a Hal Roach alumnus--cameraman on Laurel & Hardy and Harry Langdon shorts, and then a Roach director. "Topper," with its sunny hocus-pocus and Grant as a debonair ghost, was actually a Hal Roach production; it was considered Roach's most ambitious project. Movies in the thirties were still close to their beginnings. Wesley Ruggles, who directed Grant in "I'm No Angel," had been one of Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops; Howard Hawks, who directed Grant in several of his best thirties films, had started as a director by writing and directing two comedy shorts. The directors had graduated from slapstick when sound came in and Hollywood took over Broadway's plays, but after a few years all that talk without much action was becoming wearying.
The screwball movies brought back the slapstick tradition of vaudeville and the two-reelers, and blended it into those brittle Broadway comedies. When it was joined to a marital farce or a slightly daring society romance, slapstick no longer seemed like kid stuff: it was no longer innocent and was no longer regarded as "low" comedy. The screwball movies pleased people of all ages. (The faithful adaptations of stage plays had often been a little tepid for children.) And the directors, who had come out of a Hollywood in which improvising and building gags were part of the fun of moviemaking, went back--partly, at least--to that way of working. No longer so script-bound, movies regained some of the creative energy and exuberance--and the joy in horseplay, too--that had been lost in the early years of talkies. The new freedom can be seen even in small ways, in trivia. Grant's screwball comedies are full of cross-references, and gags from one are repeated or continued in another. In "The Awful Truth," Irene Dunne, trying to do in her (almost) ex-husband--Grant--refers to him as Jerry the Nipper; in "Bringing Up Baby," Hepburn, pretending to be a gun moll, tells the town constable that Grant is the notorious Jerry the Nipper. And the same dog trots through the pictures, as Mr. Smith in "The Awful Truth," as George in "Bringing Up Baby" (and as Mr. Atlas in "Topper Takes a Trip" and Asta in the "Thin Man" movies). That dog was a great actor: he appeared to adore each master in turn.
Once Grant's Paramount contract ended, there seemed no stopping him. As long as the screwball-comedy period lasted, he was king. After "The Awful Truth," in 1937, he did two pictures with Katharine Hepburn in 1938--"Bringing Up Baby" and "Holiday." It was a true mating--they had the same high-energy level, the same physical absorption in acting. In 1939 he did "Gunga Din" and "Only Angels Have Wings," and in 1940 "His Girl Friday," "My Favorite Wife," and "The Philadelphia Story."
During those peak years--1937 to 1940--he proved himself in romantic melodrama, high comedy, and low farce. He does uproarious mugging in the knockabout jamboree "Gunga Din"--a moviemakers' prank, like "Beat the Devil." Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur stole the adolescent boys' fantasy atmosphere from "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer," then took the plot from their own "The Front Page," mixed it with a slapstick "The Three Musketeers," and set it in a Hollywood Kipling India. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., plays the Hildy Johnson role--he plans to leave the British Army to get married and go into the tea business--and Victor McLaglen, in the Walter Burns role, and Grant, as the Cockney bruiser Archibald Cutter, scheme to get him to reenlist. When the three comrades fight off their enemies, they're like three Fairbankses flying through the air. Grant looks so great in his helmet in the bright sunshine and seems to be having such a marvelous time that he becomes the picture's romantic center, and his affection for the worshipful Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe) becomes the love story. The picture is both a stirring, beautifully photographed satiric colonial-adventure story and a walloping vaudeville show. Grant's grimaces and cries when Annie the elephant tries to follow him and Sam Jaffe onto a rope bridge over a chasm are his broadest clowning. (The scene is right out of Laurel & Hardy.) And he's never been more of a burlesque comic than when he arrives at the gold temple of the religious cult of thugs and whinnies with greedy delight at the very moment he's being shot at. The thug guru is shaven-headed Eduardo Ciannelli (the original Diamond Louis of "The Front Page"), who wears a loincloth and chants "Kill! Kill! Kill for the love of killing!" Perhaps because the picture winds up with a bit of pop magic--an eye-moistening, Kiplingesque tribute to Gunga Din, shown in Heaven in the British Army uniform he longed to wear--the press treated it rather severely, and George Stevens, the director, was a little apologetic about it. He may have got in over his head. He had replaced Howard Hawks as director, and when he added his Stan Laurel specialties to the heroic flourishes Hawks had prepared, and after the various rewrite men (William Faulkner and Joel Sayre were among them) built on to the gags, the result was a great, bounding piece of camp. Grant has always claimed that he doesn't like to exert himself, and that his ideal role would be a silent man in a wheelchair, but his performance here tells a different story. (All his performances tell a different story.) The following year, when Grant played Burns in "His Girl Friday" (this time an acknowledged remake of "The Front Page," and, with Charles Lederer's additions, a spastic explosion of dialogue), he raised mugging to a joyful art. Grant obviously loves the comedy of monomaniac egotism: Walter Burns' callousness and unscrupulousness are expressed in some of the best farce lines ever written in this country, and Grant hits those lines with a smack. He uses the same stiff-neck, cocked-head stance that he did in "Gunga Din": it's his position for all-out, unsubtle farce. He snorts and whoops. His Walter Burns is a strong-arm performance, defiantly self-centered and funny.
When Grant was reunited with Irene Dunne in "My Favorite Wife," they had another box-office smash, but his playing wasn't as fresh as in "The Awful Truth." This marital farce was really moldy (it was based on Tennyson's "Enoch Arden," filmed at least a dozen times, starting in 1911), and Grant's performance as the rattled husband is a matter of comic bewilderment and skittish double takes. The presence in the cast of his close friend Randolph Scott (they shared a house for several years) as the rival for Irene Dunne's affections may have interfered with his concentration; he doesn't provide an underlayer of conviction. He's expert but lightweight, and the role and the bustling plot don't bring anything new out of him.
The Hollywood comedy era was just about over by then. The screwball comedies, in particular, had become strained and witless; the spoiled, headstrong runaway heiresses and the tophatted playboy cutups had begun to pall on the public, and third-rate directors who had no feeling for slapstick thought it was enough to have players giggling and falling over the furniture. Right from the start, screwball comedy was infected by the germ of commercial hypocrisy. The fun-loving rich, with their glistening clothes, whitewall tires, mansions in the country, and sleek Art Deco apartments, exalted a carefree contempt for material values. The heroes and heroines rarely had any visible means of support, but they lived high, and in movie after movie their indifference to such mundane matters as food and rent became a self-admiring attitude--the attitude that is still touted in "Travels with My Aunt" and "Mame." Like Mame, the unconventional heroines of the thirties were beloved by their servants. Irene Dunne in white fox and a trailing evening gown would kick her satin train impatiently to tell us that it was not money but love and laughter that mattered. The costume designers often went in for sprightly effects: Irene Dunne and Katharine Hepburn would be put into pixie hats that clung on the side of the head, dipping over one eye, while on top there were pagodas that shot up six or seven inches to a peak. All too often, the villains were stuffy society people or social climbers (as in "Mame"), and the heroes and heroines just too incorrigibly happy-go-lucky. Love seemed to mean making a fool, of yourself. The froth hung heavy on many a screwball comedy, and as the pictures got worse and the Cary Grant parts began to be played by Lee Bowman and David Niven the public got fed up. The movement had already run down before the war started. In the forties, there were still some screwball comedies, but they were antic and shrill, except for a few strays: some of the Tracy-Hepburn pictures, and the comedies in which Preston Sturges reinvented slapstick in a more organic form--creating an image of Americans as a people who never stopped explaining themselves while balling up whatever they were trying to do.
THOUGH he remained a top box-office star, Cary Grant fell on evil days. After 1940, he didn't seem to have any place to go--there were no longer Cary Grant pictures. Instead, be acted in pictures that he wasn't right for, and in pictures that nobody could have been right for--abominations like the 1942 anti-Nazi romantic comedy "Once Upon a Honeymoon," in which he was an American newsman in Warsaw trying to rescue the American stripper Ginger Rogers from her Nazi husband (Walter Slezak). From the first frame, it was as clammily contrived as anything that Paramount had shoved him into, and in one pathetically insensitive sequence Grant and Rogers are mistaken for Jews and held in a concentration camp. His performance is frequently atrocious: he twinkles with condescending affection when the nitwit stripper develops a political consciousness and helps a Jewish hotel maid escape from danger. Mostly, he acted in stock situation comedies-- comedies with no comic roots, like "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" (1947), in which Myrna Loy is a judge who works out a deal. Grant, a philandering artist, will go to jail unless he dates her schoolgirl sister (Shirley Temple) until the teenager's crush on him wears off. Escorting Shirley Temple--wearing his shirt open and acting like an adolescent--Cary Grant is degradingly unfunny. There's no core of plausibility in his role. Grant doesn't have the eyes of a Don Juan, or the temperament. When the artist is accused of being a skirt-chaser, it seems like some kind of mistake.
In the thirties, Grant would sometimes appear in a role, such as the despondent husband of a mercenary, cold-hearted woman (Kay Francis) in the 1939 "In Name Only," that suggested that he had unexplored dimensions. They remained unexplored. In 1941, when he departed from comedy, it was in just the sort of sincere tearjerker that Hollywood was always proudest of--"Penny Serenade," with Irene Dunne again. The unrealistic casting of this inert, horribly pristine film is the trick: the appeal to the audience is that these two glamorous stars play a ordinary couple and suffer the calamities that do in fact happen to ordinary people. When tragedy strikes Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, it hurts the audience in a special way--"Penny Serenade" is a sweet-and-sour pacifier. Grant, who got an Academy Award nomination, could hardly have been better. Using his dark eyes and his sensuous, clouded handsomeness as a romantic mask, he gave his role a defensive, not quite forthright quality, and he brought out everything that it was possible to bring out of his warmed-over lines, weighting them perfectly, so that they almost seemed felt.
Nearly all Grant's seventy-two films have a certain amount of class and are well above the Hollywood average, but most of them, when you come right down to it, are not really very good. Grant could glide through a picture in a way that leaves one indifferent, as in the role of a quaint guardian angel named Dudley in the bland, musty Goldwyn production "The Bishop's Wife" (1947), and he could be the standard put-upon male of burbling comedy, as in "Every Girl Should Be Married" (1948) and the pitifully punk "Room for One More" (1952)--the nice-nice pictures he made with Betsy Drake, who in 1949 became his third wife. He could be fairly persuasive in astute, reflective parts, as in the Richard Brooks thriller "Crisis" (1950), in which he plays a brain surgeon forced to operate on a Latin-American dictator (José Ferrer). He's a seasoned performer here, though his energy level isn't as high as in the true Grant roles and he's a little cold, staring absently when he means to indicate serious thought. What's missing is probably that his own sense of humor isn't allowed to come through; generally when he isn't playing a man who laughs easily he isn't all there.
He was able to keep his independence because he had a good head for business. Within a short time of leaving Paramount, he could command a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a picture, and that was only the beginning. Later, he formed partnerships and produced his pictures through his own corporations--Grandon, Granart, Granley, and Granox. He didn't do what stars like Kirk Douglas did when they gained control over their productions: he didn't appear in Westerns, for the virtually guaranteed market. He was too self-aware for that; he was a lonely holdout in the period when even Frank Sinatra turned cowpoke. From the thirties on, Grant looked for comedies that would be mass-oriented versions of the Noël Coward and Philip Barry and Frederick Lonsdale drawing-room and boudoir farces that Broadway theatregoers admired in the twenties. And so he settled for Sidney Sheldon ("The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer," "Dream Wife"), or Stanley Shapiro ("Operation Petticoat," "That Touch of Mink"), for Norman Panama and Melvin Frank ("Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House"), or for Melville Shavelson and Jack Rose ("Room for One More," "Houseboat"). He sought the best material and got the second-rate and synthetic, because good writers wouldn't (and couldn't) write that way anymore. His taste didn't change, but he didn't do the real thing--not even the real Lonsdale. His friends say he believes that the world doesn't understand fine language. With "People Will Talk" and "The Talk of the Town," he was probably reaching toward Shaw. He got the loquacity without the wit.
Considering that he selected his roles, these choices indicate one of the traps of stardom. When actors are young, they're eager for great roles, but when they become stars they generally become fearful that the public won't accept them in something different. They look for roles that seem a little more worthwhile than the general run. With one exception--"None but the Lonely Heart"--Cary Grant appeared to be content throughout his career to bring savoir-faire to pratfalls, romantic misunderstandings, and narrow escapes. It seems reasonable to assume that he attained something so close to the highest aspirations of his youth that, as far as acting was concerned, he had no other goals--and no conflicts. Moss Hart said that Archie Leach's gloom vanished when he became Cary Grant.
THE only trace of gloom in Grant's movies is in "None but the Lonely Heart," which he made in association with Clifford Odets (as writer and director) in 1944. The film was an ironic interlude in Grant's career, coming, as it did, between the cloying whimsey of "Once Upon a Time," in which he was a Broadway sharpie exploiting a boy who had a pet dancing caterpillar, and "Night and Day," the ten-ton Cole Porter musical bio, in which he skittered about as a youthful Yalie before facing life with stoic courage and inscrutable psychic hangups. In "None but the Lonely Heart," set in the East End of London he plays Ernie Mott, a young Cockney--a restless drifter who lacks the will to leave the ghetto for good. Ernie grew up in oppressive poverty, but he wants to make life better for his mother, who runs a grubby antiques and secondhand-furniture shop. Made at Grant's instigation (he acquired the rights to the book), the film was a gesture toward the ideas he shared with the other dissidents at Rudley's, and, even more, a gesture toward his own roots--toward the grimness of his life before he apprenticed himself to the theatre. His mother was released from confinement in 1933 (that same year, his father died of "extreme toxicity"), and he established a surprisingly close relationship with her. Eccentric but hardy and self-sufficient, she had a whole new life after that twenty-year incarceration. She lived into her mid-nineties, and until she was in her late eighties she did all her own shopping and housework, and occupied her days with antiquing--driving fierce bargains when she spotted something she wanted. Grant has described her as "extremely good company." He wrote that "sometimes we laugh together until tears come into our eyes." In the thirties, he flew to England several times a year to see her, and he took the English beauty Virginia Cherrill (Chaplin's leading lady in "City Lights") to meet his mother before they were married, in, London, in 1934--his first marriage, which was dissolved the following year. The outbreak of the Second World War must have brought his English past even closer to him; he was still a British subject, and in 1939 he became involved in activities to aid the British. Later, when the United States was in the war, he went on trips to entertain the troops and on bond-selling tours. (In one routine, he played straight man to Bert Lahr.) In June, 1942, less than two weeks before his marriage to Barbara Hutton, he legally changed his name and became an American citizen.
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