Cary Grant (27 page)

Two full weeks passed without a commitment from Grant, until the softspoken Hawks persuaded the actor to do the film by promising to personally guide his performance every step of the way. Hawks then suggested to Grant that he look at some of the films of Harold Lloyd. Grant did and was so taken with the comedian's style of acting that he actually copied it, almost gesture for gesture, in putting together his interpretation of David Huxley, down to thick black horn-rimmed glasses, one of Lloyd's cinematic trademarks.

Filming of
Bringing Up Baby
began September 23, 1937. Although she was a highly trained stage actress, Hepburn had had little experience playing comedy, and like Grant relied heavily on Hawks for guidance. His one demand was that both his stars deliver their lines at top speed. With Hepburn running full steam—she had most of the dialogue—and Grant wearing large framed glasses that all but hid his face, Berman was disappointed with the early rushes and demanded “more glamour” from both stars.

Despite her energy and speedy recitations, Hepburn was having difficulty finding the comic rhythm of her character. To help her, Hawks hired Walter Catlett, a veteran vaudeville comic who had spent years with the Ziegfeld Follies in New York, to try to get Hepburn to stop “acting” funny and start
being
funny, by playing the scene's logical flow, such as it might be, and allowing the laughs to come from the audience's recognition of the sheer silliness of the situations.

At the same time, Grant, again to the surprise of no one more than himself, excelled in the role of Huxley, due in large measure to endless meetings, not with Hawks, but with Hughes, who patiently and meticulously helped Grant discover every nuance of his character's part. With Hughes's encouragement, Grant came up with many of the most famous set pieces of the film, which he would bring to the set early and rehearse before the perennially late Hawks showed up. Among them is the scene in which Grant, dressed in a woman's bathrobe, responds to the question of why by declaring, with all the proper exasperation, “I've gone gay all of a sudden!”

The famous torn-tuxedo routine, which led to the torn-dress sequence (where Grant's top hat covers Hepburn's rear end and she remarks, “Will you please stop doing that with your hat?” followed by their memorable “lock-step”
out of the ballroom), was a comic bit that Grant came up with and later claimed was based on something he had actually seen at the Roxy Theater in New York City while sitting next to the head of the Metropolitan Museum and his wife. At one point the man stood up to allow the woman to go to the bathroom, only to discover his fly was open. As he attempted to close it, he caught her dress in the zipper, and the two had to “lock-step” their way to the manager's office for a pair of pliers to get themselves uncoupled. Hawks marveled at the bit and, risking the ire of the Hays Office, used it in the movie.

Another Grant-inspired moment happened when, during a take, Hepburn's heel broke. Grant whispered to her, “I was born on the side of a hill,” a line that she immediately repeated. That scene also remained in the finished film.

The best moment of all, however, comes at the end, when Hepburn finds herself atop the delicate scaffolding, reaching for Grant. The power of this scene is enhanced by Grant's great physical prowess, which encouraged Hepburn to play the scene herself, in a single take, without a stunt double. Grant carefully rehearsed Hepburn's moves over and over, teaching her how to do the “circus grip” of the wrists he had learned as a boy and prepare her body for the big hoist. When Hepburn slips off the scaffold at the last minute, he grabs her by the wrist, and there she hangs suspended between the skeletal reconstruction below and the object of her deepest (and highest) affections above. It is an inspired moment, the uncertain dangling of mankind between the primitive past and the hopeful future, with the sanctity of life defined as mysteriously and magically as it is in the touch of Michelangelo's two fingertips atop the Sistine Chapel.
^*
When Grant confidently hoists her to safety, it is a moment not only of comic triumph but of pure cinematic grace; Susan's physical rescue becomes a metaphor for both her and Huxley's emotional redemption.

Despite the studio's desire for Hawks to turn out a cheap quickie,
Bringing Up Baby
developed into a long and difficult film to shoot. It completed
production on January 6, 1938, forty days over its original fifty-one-day schedule, an overrun that pushed the budget to well over a million dollars. (The automatic salary increases resulted in Grant and Hepburn each receiving an additional $120,000.) Then, just before the film opened, RKO fell into receivership. Once more it was Howard Hughes who came to the rescue, hoping to make a killing by buying at a fraction of their production cost the negatives of it and nine other RKO films, then selling them as a package to the Loew's theater chain.

Although the film is now regarded as a classic of the genre and a favorite of Hepburn fans and Grant fans alike, when it opened on February 18 at Radio City Music Hall and other venues around the country, it received mixed reviews and did not do well at the box office. Its first-week gross at the Music Hall totaled a modest $70,000, and it was pulled after a single week, prompting
Variety
to note that “the Katharine Hepburn draw, as expressed in some quarters, isn't what it used to be.” The film's total initial domestic gross came to just over $715,000 in the United States, with another $400,000 earned overseas.
^*
It fell far short of Hughes's hopes, and its failure would have serious short-term consequences for everyone involved with the film, including Grant. Hawks's contract called for participation in the profits only when the film grossed $2 million, which it never reached (in theaters), and RKO, despite Hughes's bailout, because of the way his deal was structured, lost $365,000 in unrecouped production costs. Hawks suffered the additional indignity of being permanently removed from
Gunga Din
before RKO outand-out fired him, citing numerous breaches of his contract. Hughes vigorously objected to the studio's action, accusing it of making Hawks the scapegoat for its financial disarray, and threatened to back Hawks in a major lawsuit. In response, the studio offered Hawks a termination fee of $40,000 to walk, which he reluctantly took because he needed the money.

The film's failure also caused Harry Brandt, who was then president of the Independent Theatre Owners of America—an organization of exhibitors that monitored stars' popularity in terms of how much their films earned— to quite famously point his angry finger at Hepburn and accuse her of being
“box office poison.” (Far less remembered, amid all the myths surrounding Brandt's “damnation,” was the fact that Hepburn had been clustered by him with several other female movie stars, none of whom had had a particularly good year at the box office. The “bottom ten” list, with Hepburn holding the number one spot, also included such “A” stars as Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis, and five other lesser names, all to a greater or lesser degree victims of the public's changing taste.)

Pandro Berman's public reaction to Hepburn's humiliation was to express his and the studio's continuing loyalty to her by insisting her career was far from over. Privately, Berman offered her a chance to buy out the remainder of her contract or face termination. Hepburn then forked over $220,000 for the privilege of never making another movie at RKO.

Disappointment in the film's performance added to the insecurity Grant already felt about his acting career. He had no easy explanation for the film's ungraceful flop, an apparent miss so disastrous it would help put an end to the era of screwball comedy. Although he managed to avoid the critical and professional fallout that Hepburn suffered, Grant felt that he had damaged his career making
Bringing Up Baby.
Now more than ever, he believed he would be able to make movies only as long as his face stayed pristine and his waist appealingly slim.

15

C
ary Grant began 1938 with a full and happy house: Randolph Scott was finished making his latest movie and was back at the beach, “the Brooks” was home from her shoot, and his savings for the first time topped a million dollars. Despite the failure of
Bringing Up Baby,
he had become a familiar figure at all the regular show business stops he liked. On any given day he could be seen taking a long lunch at the Hollywood-Brit contingent's favorite pub, the Cock and Bull on Sunset, most often sharing a booth with Howard Hughes, or having dinner at either the Brown Derby on Vine or the venerable Musso's and Frank's on Hollywood Boulevard, or dancing with the Brooks to big band music at the Troc deep into the night.

His increased visibility made him more accessible to the press. Whenever he was asked by reporters about his wealth and fame, in the beginning at least he tried to display a certain self-effacing if low-key charm, always reminding
whoever wanted to know that he never felt he had traveled all that far from the “brutal borders of poverty” and was always aware of the inherently transient nature of both fame and fortune. What he did try to conceal, without much success, was his slightly paranoid feeling that the government was now trying to rob him of nearly all his hard-earned cash. It was a subject that bothered him, but one he always tried to dismiss with a folksy “money isn't everything” approach.

“Sure,” he told a reporter from
Liberty
magazine, “the government gets eighty-one cents out of every dollar I earn. But I'm one of the lucky stiffs who earn a lot of dollars, all with a Grant-marked nineteen cents in them. That's nice going! Now, people will say ‘Oh poor So-and-So having to work as an extra! How sad!’ What they don't say, perhaps don't remember, is that So-andSo was up there in the chips for a while. He had all that fun and more than the average guy ever gets, and certainly if he's a man at all he's got good memories stored up in him, got good laughs he can laugh over once again.”

In reality, money was no laughing matter to Grant. There were those he trusted to help him make it, and others he looked to for ways to keep it. Frank Vincent, his agent, was in charge of making the deals, but Grant did not want him to be spread too thin or lose his focus on that primary function. And he certainly did not trust any of the women he was associated with. Ever since his divorce from Virginia Cherrill, the last thing he ever wanted anybody to know was how much money he really had.

Grant was even wary of Hughes, but for different reasons. He felt he did not know him well enough to take his advice on investments, even if Hughes had been willing to offer any, which he never did. In this poker game Hughes held his cards even closer to his vest than Grant, a quality the actor happened to admire but that also kept him from seeking anything in the way of financial advice. Grant couldn't help notice how often Hughes seemed to lose significant amounts of money on ventures he invested in.

That left Randolph Scott, whose expertise in what many thought were crackpot schemes—his uranium investments, for example—had left him wealthier than ever. Scott continually urged Grant to put his money to work, to let it grow, and not through the tortoise-slow interest the banks offered— and who could trust banks anyway in these uncertain times?—but in the hare-fast profits of bonds and securities. Scott especially loved foreign investments,
to which the U.S. government tax collectors' reach was not quite as long. That made sense to Grant, and following Scott's lead, he invested nearly half a million dollars in Philippine-based bonds, believing that within a year that money would double.

It was an investment that would come back to haunt both Scott and Grant and hasten their coming split.

That February Grant went back to Columbia to star in a new film that reunited him with George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn, all three of whom had worked on
Sylvia Scarlett.
Cohn had been eager to return Grant to the screen in another comedy, but with Irene Dunne playing opposite him. Cohn envisioned the winning couple from
The Awful Truth
in a remake of Philip Barry's 1928 Broadway hit,
Holiday,
which the studio had already filmed once before, in 1930, starring Ann Harding, Robert Ames, and Mary Astor.