Cary Grant (20 page)

The critics' praise for Grant, and only Grant, was unqualified.
Variety
proclaimed, “Cary Grant… virtually steals the picture.”
Time
magazine did the same: “Cary Grant's superb depiction of the Cockney almost steals the show.”
The New York Times
said that “Cary Grant, whose previous work has too often been that of a charm merchant, turns actor in the role of the unpleasant Cockney and is surprisingly good at it.”

Grant felt professionally liberated. For the first time, he did not have to be told he was good in a movie. This was, after all, his meat, the kind of physical performing with rhythmic comic timing that he had sharpened to a fine edge in his years of stage performing.
“Sylvia Scarlett
was my breakthrough,” he would recall years later. “It permitted me to play a character I knew.” Although he was, in private, less than thrilled with Cukor, Grant, in a publicity interview, made a point of thanking him in public for allowing him to play the role “as I saw it.”

It wasn't until after the film's opening that Scott finally broke the news to him that he intended to marry Marion duPont. The next day a devastated Grant quietly packed his bags and caught a plane back to New York City. Once there he booked passage on a luxury liner bound for Mother England.

11

D
uring the filming of
Sylvia Scarlett,
Cary Grant had quietly and directly—that is to say, not through Paramount—received an offer to star in a small independent British film, Alfred Zeisler's
The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss,
a remake of a 1920 Henry Edwards silent comedy, that was to be shot entirely in Great Britain. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. After Scott's marriage bombshell, Grant couldn't wait to get out of town, and England now seemed to him the perfect place to go to. Grant had told Zukor about the offer, and the studio head had unhesitatingly given him a green light. The studio had nothing for Grant coming up, and Zukor was relieved that his talented but increasingly fussy actor—he was now making Hepburn-like noises about script approval—had found a project that would keep him not only occupied but out of everyone's hair for a while.

Grant was excited about playing another British character in a role that
allowed him to show off some of his ability to do physical comedy. Although he could as yet not fully articulate it, his growing dissatisfaction with Paramount lay in how the studio had continued to misuse his talent. This bothered him as much as any complaints he had about salary, billing, or the studio's seemingly neverending rules of morality. He no longer wanted to serve the house; he wanted it to serve him. And, if he ever had, he no longer sought the title of the next Valentino, or the second-string Gary Cooper, but the one and only Cary Grant. It was that goal as much as his feeling of having been abandoned by Scott that led him to fly to England to star in the independent production of
Bliss.

In it, Grant plays the title character, Ernie Bliss, a working man who unexpectedly inherits $5 million, then sets out to discover “the real meaning of life” by spending a year earning his living without any help from anyone or anything, including his own newly enriched bank account. Along the way he falls for a woman (played by Mary Brian, dubbed “the sweetest girl in pictures!” for her portrayal of Wendy in Herbert Brenon's 1924 silent version of James M. Barrie's
Peter Pan
), who comes to love him for who he is rather than what he has. The film is yet another variation on the theme of Chaplin's
City Lights—
the power of inner beauty—but unlike
Wings in the Dark
contains a great deal of wit, humor, grace, and insight.

Grant was enormously pleased with his work in
Bliss.
Save for occasional flashes of brilliance (in
Blonde Venus, She Done Him Wrong,
and
Sylvia Scarlett
) in the five years and twenty-one movies he made before it, he had not appeared in a feature that fully showed off his unique physical and verbal comedic abilities as much as his particular romantic appeal. Without a tuxedo, murder weapon, period costume, physical affliction, or femme fatale in sight,
Bliss
finally allowed Grant to give the kind of performance he was capable of, the first true glimpse of what was to become the classic Cary Grant persona of charm, looks, wit, and decency.

Mary Brian, seduced by Grant's charismatic performance, took an immediate liking to him away from the camera as well and responded with genuine affection when Grant developed what resembled a schoolboy's crush on her. Before long they were being photographed together in London nightclubs and restaurants, their “affair” played up in the gossips on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite all outward appearances, however, Grant had no sexual
interest in the strikingly beautiful actress. Still, there were many in the industry and out who believed that something must have been going on between the two of them, a belief bolstered by two significant factors: Brian's strong resemblance to Virginia Cherrill, and Randolph Scott's impending marriage. The studio, sensing a good opportunity, went so far as to intimate through its reliable posse of gossip-mongers that Grant and Brian were engaged.

The story was, of course, completely fabricated, but it gained a measure of believability when Grant, for whatever reason, was slow to deny it. Directly confronted by the press, he offered only a vague response that could be interpreted any way the entertainment reporters wanted. In truth, Grant was enjoying his friendship with Brian and may also have wanted to send a message to Scott that he wasn't suffering, although he knew all too well that Scott wouldn't interpret his relationship with Brian the way the public did. If there was any real message Grant was sending to Scott, it had to do more with loneliness than one-upsmanship.

There may have been yet another reason why Grant publicly welcomed Brian's companionship, and that was to please his mother. During the filming of
Bliss,
Grant intended to spend as much time as possible with Elsie, unencumbered by any drama surrounding the presence of a fiancée. He looked forward to enjoying the incredible gift of his mother's “coming back to life”—and coming back to
his
life. He was, therefore, quite unprepared for the reality that awaited him.

The first shock came after spending a day with Elsie, when he suddenly realized that she didn't exactly remember who he was. She seemed to treat him more like an old acquaintance than her son. The second came when he realized that she preferred to stay indoors as much as possible, in the same grimy house in Bristol from which she had been forcibly taken all those years before. It was as if she still believed she was being held in confinement. Grant once again offered to move her permanently to America so that she could live near him in comfort and style such as she had never known, but she laughed off the notion as completely absurd. At fifty-eight years old, she told him, the thought of moving to a foreign country was as comical as it was frightening.

Perhaps worst of all, she began to nudge him about the prospect of marriage, seemingly unaware that he already had done it once. He was old enough, she insisted, to finally take on that sort of responsibility. If he didn't
watch out, she warned him, he could wind up a lonely old man. This last part completely unnerved him.

Grant did manage to convince Elsie to accompany him to London so she could watch some of the filming of
Bliss.
The visit, unfortunately, was interrupted by the news that his father, Elias, had fallen gravely ill. Decades of carousing, hard drinking, and chain smoking had finally taken their toll. At the age of sixty-three, his body had given in to all the self-inflicted abuse. On December 1, 1935, Elias Leach died of acute septicemia and gangrene of the bowel.

Distraught at missing the chance to say good-bye to his father in person, Grant remained grimly terse toward the press, especially in the face of hard questions regarding Elias's decades-long double life and the heretofore unknown existence to the public of “only child Archie's” half-brother, Eric, with whom Grant would now attempt to forge a closer friendship.

It all added up to a difficult replay of all the old traumas. Once again he was forced to deal with abandonment, this time by his father's death—which was real—and by his mother's resurrection, which in many ways had proven illusory.

The only official comment he made regarding his father's passing was at the funeral, held in Bristol, before friends and family, in which he said, simply, “He was a wise and kindly man and I loved him very much.”

The day after filming was completed, Cary Grant boarded a luxury liner and set sail with Mary Brian back to the States.

Because it had trouble securing an overseas distributor,
The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss
did not arrive in American theaters until the spring of 1937, more than a year after it was made.
^*
By then, everything in Grant's Hollywood career and personal life had completely changed.

Grant returned to Los Angeles early in 1936 to the bad news that
Sylvia Scarlett
had bombed at the box office, so much so that Katharine Hepburn was now considered all but unemployable by the major studios. In the wake of the film's failure, her personal relationship with Howard Hughes had also floundered. She was tough and singular and disinclined to let Hughes gloss over the deep wound of her career nosedive with a palliative high-fly among the clouds. She was, Grant knew, far more grounded than that.

Despite the film's commercial failure, his outstanding reviews had put him at the top of everyone's popularity list. Adolph Zukor, who had by now been kicked upstairs to the supervisory position of chairman of the board as part of Paramount's reorganization, no longer had the studio under his absolute control. Two next-generation low-profile but high-powered executives, Barney Balaban and Y. Frank Freeman, had taken control over the actual making of movies. Unlike Zukor, they wanted to take advantage of Grant's popularity by casting him in Otho Lovering's
Border Flight,
opposite the studio's newest female discovery, Frances Farmer. It would prove the breaking point for Grant.

He so disliked the script he decided to test his newfound popularity by taking a page out of Gary Cooper's playbook: he unequivocally refused to appear in
Border Flight.
He sent word directly to Zukor that the studio should not expect him to show up on the set for the scheduled first day of shooting. Moreover, Grant informed Zukor, from now on he must have complete approval over all the projects he was to be involved in, as well as a long overdue raise. At his present salary of $2,500 a week, Grant was by no means starving, but he was still earning less than half the $6,000 a week that Cooper was bringing in, and that truly galled him.

Zukor went ballistic. As far as he was concerned, Cary Grant didn't deserve Gary Cooper's salary, because Cary Grant wasn't Gary Cooper. In his five years at Paramount, Grant had appeared in twenty-six films that—with a few notable exceptions, including
Blonde Venus
and
She Done Him Wrong
—were unremarkable product churned out factory-style by forgettable directors whose work more closely resembled that of assembly-line supervisors than of visionaries exploring the landscape of imagination.