Cary Grant (21 page)

By comparison, Cooper, who had been with the studio for eleven years,
had made fifty-nine films. His first major screen appearance was in William Wellman's 1927
Wings,
the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, a level of success, achievement, and prestige that neither Grant nor any of his films had yet to match. Among the highlights of Cooper's career (through 1937) were Josef von Sternberg's
Morocco
(1930), a far more successful Dietrich vehicle than
Blonde Venus;
a segment in the eight-part
If I Had a Million
(1932), a panoramic multistar vehicle from which Grant was omitted because of his relatively low star-wattage;
^*
Frank Borzage's
A Farewell to Arms
(1932), nominated for Best Picture of the Year; Ernst Lubitsch's terrific
Design for Living
(1933); Frank Capra's
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
(1936, on loan to Columbia), for which Cooper received a Best Actor nomination; Lewis Milestone's hugely successful
The General Died at Dawn
(1936); and Cecil B. DeMille's neoclassic star vehicle western,
The Plainsman
(1937). At this point in time, there was simply no comparison between the two actors' achievements.

Which, Grant might have insisted, proved his point. It wasn't that Gary Cooper was a “better” actor—meaning a more popular and bigger moneymaker for the studio—it was that he was always given the superior scripts. More often than not, his discards and rejects went to Grant, who like most actors was almost always only as good as the films he appeared in and the directors he worked with.

Nevertheless, Zukor took Grant's demands as the ungrateful tantrum of a second-tier actor whom the studio had carried while he walked through most of his contract years delivering a series of undistinguished performances, and who was still gainfully employed only through the good graces of Zukor's generosity, who had personally insisted on keeping him employed through the studio's roughest times and at the height of a national depression.

Because Grant did not have an agent—he didn't know anyone whom he felt he could trust to negotiate financial terms for him—it was all the harder for Zukor, who abhorred negotiating directly with actors about anything, to deal with him. (Zukor didn't think actors were intelligent enough to know a good deal when they were offered one.) Still, to keep Grant happy, and over
Balaban and Freeman's strong objections, he released him from
Border Flight
(John Howard was given the role) and offered him a thousand-dollar raise, to $3,500 a week, the highest among the second-tier performers at the still financially shaky studio. Zukor considered his offer more than generous and felt that if Grant didn't like it, he could leave at the expiration of his soonto-expire contract. The way he saw it, Grant had failed to make the big breakthrough to the level of superstar. Besides, the studio's real A-list—of which Cooper, Dietrich, and West occupied the top slots—were all demanding huge salary increases to re-sign with the “new” studio. If he had to let someone go, Zukor figured, it would be Grant before any of them.

Still, Zukor hadn't completely given up on him, especially after the surprising critical reception for his work in
Sylvia Scarlett.
In one final attempt to mollify Grant, Zukor asked producer Walter Wanger to cast him as the lead in Raoul Walsh's upcoming
Big Brown Eyes,
opposite Joan Bennett, a film that Zukor considered important and prestigious for the studio, a role that could finally elevate Cary Grant to the A-list.

In truth,
Big Brown Eyes
was not as great a project as Zukor had thought, as it was little more than an imitation
Thin Man.
Grant read the script and decided to accept the role, although he correctly believed that he wasn't really right for the character of Danny Barr, a fast-talking, tough gumshoe type more suited to James Cagney. Grant used a clumsy stepped-up pace to his speech to convey “street smarts” and otherwise reverted to his familiar comfort zone of pocket-posing throughout the performance. Predictably,
Big Brown Eyes
did nothing at the box office.

In the wake of the film's failure, Zukor finally gave up on Grant, and when MGM asked to borrow him for George Fitzmaurice's
Suzy,
to star opposite the red-hot Jean Harlow, he quickly gave his approval.

Despite Dorothy Parker's clever dialogue contributions, the script for
Suzy
was a mishmash of three genres: romance, war, and espionage. Harlow, set adrift in the blanched cinematic ether of the sanitizing Hays Office, despite her character's romantic involvement with a man while still married to a presumed-dead but very much alive husband, was being rendered wholesome by the studio, with the result that she appeared unappealingly wholesome. Meanwhile, the sight of Grant in a military uniform playing a macho romantic two-timing aviator brought a round of back-of-the-wrist snickering from
Hollywood's knowing insiders. Grant's rival in the film for the affections of Harlow was none other than Franchot Tone. (Ironically, the reason Grant was offered the part was that MGM's regular roster of male A-list stars—Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Robert Young, William Powell, Robert Montgomery, and Spencer Tracy—were all considered too important to appear in the smaller role opposite Tone.)

Despite Grant's decent-enough rendition of the song “Did I Remember,” which went on to become a modest sheet-music hit, the film was quite ordinary, jacked up by flying sequences that were far superior to and did not match the rest of the film's scenes (with good reason: they were outtakes from Hughes's self-produced 1930
Hell's Angels,
which he leased to MGM for a hefty fee).

Suzy
was not an out-and-out flop, but it was by no means the major hit MGM had anticipated, and it did nothing for Grant's career. Shortly after its release, Grant made an extraordinary decision. He was not only not going to re-sign with Paramount, no matter what offer Zukor might come up with (if indeed he came up with one at all), but he would not sign an exclusive contract with
any
Hollywood studio. After his experience on Broadway with Hammerstein and the Shuberts, and now in Hollywood with Paramount, he had had enough of what he considered to be the actor's fate—indentured servitude.

After
Suzy,
A-line stardom seemed less reachable now for Grant than ever. Just behind Cooper, Crosby, and Henry Fonda, a new crop of younger leading men were already nipping at his heels, among them Jimmy Stewart, Fred MacMurray, Ray Milland, and Robert Cummings, all with smiles almost as dazzling and hair nearly as dark and luminous as Grant's.

And some could even act.

If Zukor was still at all interested in trying to keep Grant at Paramount, it wasn't apparent from the next assignment he gave him, the last under his existing contract. In the summer of 1936 Grant starred in Richard Wallace's
Wedding Present,
once again opposite Joan Bennett, with only costar credit, his name significantly placed after the title.

Wedding Present
was a dull newsroom romance that once again gave Grant little opportunity to display his comic talents. After its release and quick fade (like
Suzy
and
Big Brown Eyes,
it was released prior to the
American premiere of
Bliss
), Grant officially notified Zukor that he was not going to re-sign with Paramount.

Zukor was surprised, not at the decision itself, but at Grant's audacity. At the time, in the Academy-controlled closed shop of major studios, contract players who became free agents rarely succeeded, and everyone in the business, including Grant, knew it.

Nonetheless, it was a risk he was willing to take. According to Grant, “If I had stayed at Paramount, I would have continued to take pictures that Gary Cooper, William Powell, or Clive Brook turned down. Refusing a renewal of my contract wasn't the first time I took what seemed [to everyone else] like a step backward.”

At the end of 1936, Cary Grant became Hollywood's first star-without-astudio. It was a bold move, to be sure, but a move everyone predicted would do to him what it had done to everyone else who had tried to go up against the insular Hollywood system: help him commit career suicide. Those who had previously tried to go freelance and failed included Rudolph Valentino and Ronald Colman. Valentino had died before he could act upon his decision. Colman, who in his studio contract years, from 1917 through 1936, had appeared in forty-two films, once he went solo made only fifteen in the next two decades, despite a 1947 Best Actor Oscar for his performance in George Cukor's
A Double Life.
Gradually eased out of the movie business, Colman, unlike Grant, who continued to make important films for the next two decades, spent his last productive years mostly in radio and TV. Charlie Chaplin, who had made dozens of short and feature films while under contract to Keystone, Essanay, Mutual, and First National, had to start his own studio, United Artists, to be independent, after which his output fell to an average of two features a decade.

Both Randolph Scott and Howard Hughes warned Grant not to go through with his plan. Scott reminded Grant that he owed his very survival in movies to the contract system, and Hughes continued to have his share of trouble getting distribution for his independently produced movies—his enormous personal wealth the only way he had been able to keep himself going.

Grant, however, remained resolute. He was going to do things his own
way, with no studio, no morals clauses, no forced parts, and nobody looking over his shoulder. To celebrate his decision, and to underscore what he saw as his victory over the morally oppressive system from which he was proudly liberating himself, early in 1937 he and the newly married Scott (whose wife remained safely tucked away in Virginia, allowing Grant and Scott to resume their exclusive live-in arrangement) showed up in identical skin-tight circus acrobat outfits, complete with tutus, at a well-publicized costume ball thrown by Marion Davies for her paramour, the flamboyant William Randolph Hearst.

Predictably, the event provided juicy fodder for the gossip columnists, which was fine with Grant. In fact, he welcomed it. He had put his career on the high wire, with all the safety nets taken down. Now he would either soar higher than ever before or fall into the abyss. Either way, he knew, it would be the most fanciful flight of his life.

12

D
uring his exit negotiations with Paramount, Grant, aware that he was about to challenge the freelance jinx, put together a team of experts to help him do so. For the first time in his acting career, he officially signed with an agent. To find one he liked, he reached all the way back to his early days with the Pender troupe, where he had first met Frank W. Vincent, at the time a young manager for theatrical talent. Vincent had taken a liking to Archie Leach and, at Lomas's request, had kept an eye on him the entire time he toured on the Orpheum circuit. Vincent had since become a successful Hollywood agent, forming a business partnership with Harry Edington. By the
time Grant signed on, the agency's formidable roster included Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks, Leopold Stokowski, Rita Hayworth, Mary Martin, Rosalind Russell, Claire Trevor, Louis Jourdan, Nigel Bruce, Joel McCrea, and Edward G. Robinson.

The first thing Vincent did for Grant was to negotiate the terms of his exit from Paramount. He did it cleverly, offering to have Grant renew for $75,000 a picture, plus story approvals. Grant wanted to break out of his tuxedo roles and venture into comedy. As Vincent knew he would, Zukor rejected that proposal and countered that Grant must make a onetime payment to the studio of $11,800 to buy out the remaining months on his contract (based on his present weekly salary and the days he still owed Zukor) and agree to one final loan-out, for which Paramount would collect the fee. Vincent quickly agreed, and just for that Grant was a free agent.