Cary Grant (33 page)

Debilitated by her love for him, she cannot do anything to stop him, and, in the climactic scene, she calmly accepts a glass of milk from him that she knows is poisoned and dies.

This was fertile turf for Hitchcock, who loved the idea of making a movie about a woman so masochistically attached to her husband she would actually allow him to kill her. If, in fact, that was what he intended to do. Hitchcock's brilliant twist was to keep the audience guessing until the very end whether Aysgarth was really a murderer, or if the whole thing was only a figment of his wife's paranoid imagination.

If Hitchcock clearly envisioned the film in his mind, his studio-assigned producer, Harry Edington, did not. And when Hitchcock, who had vacillated over the ending of the film, decided Grant should turn out to be a killer, Edington said that was impossible because audiences would never accept Grant in that type of role. This impasse came two months into production and lasted until Hitchcock finally and reluctantly altered the script to make the woman the victim only of her own paranoid delusions.
^*

Filming then resumed, and for the next three months Fontaine became so unnerved by the director's relentless harping on her to “act crazy” that she developed an upset stomach that once again halted shooting. This delay stretched into a week and caused the entire project to once again come up for review at RKO, where, because of the vagueness of the shooting script, in which it still remained unclear as to whether Johnnie was a killer, the studio's board members considered canceling the whole project. One alternative solution was to cut from the completed footage all negative references to Johnnie's character and see what that would leave; the studio then produced an incomprehensible fifty-five-minute “happy” version of the film that horrified Hitchcock, who then assured the studio that he would finish the film the way they wanted. As a result,
Suspicion
ends with a wild car ride
down the side of a winding road, in which Johnnie at first seems to be trying to kill Lina but in reality is only trying to save her from falling out of her side to certain death.

Despite all the plot confusion, for the first time in his career, due in large part to Hitchcock's direction, Grant gave a performance almost entirely defined by his character's internal emotional life rather than his exterior features. Grant's Johnnie Aysgarth embodied Hitchcock's darkest projections of himself, as the director audaciously took one of the most popular actors in Hollywood and used his smooth veneer as a mask to drive the audience mad trying to figure out what was underneath it. As had every other of the major directors who'd helped mold Grant's onscreen persona as an extension of their own, Hitchcock, through his skilled and idiosyncratic use of the tools of his trade—close-ups, angularity, the rhythm of the montage against the composition of the mise-en-scène—was able to create rather than elicit a performance from Grant without what he considered the unnecessary instrusion of “acting.” In Sternberg's hands, Grant had become the epitome of the sleazy ladies' man; McCarey's vision was someone with charm, wit, and the boundless energy of love-infused youth; to Hawks, Grant was the romantic, athletic adventurer; to Cukor, he was the adventuresome, interior romantic. It was Hitchcock who finally took Grant deeper, who used his insecurity as an actor (a reflection of his own very real repression) to create a personality whose criminal darkness was the perfect cover to protect the emotional defects of the charismatic performer, the complex but amiable surface of the character he played, and the masterful director who managed to at once put them all on dazzling display. As John Mosher correctly put it in his review for
The New Yorker,
“Cary Grant finds a new field for himself, the field of crime, the smiling villain, without heart or conscience. Crime lends color to his amiability.”

For both star and director, their inspired collaboration on
Suspicion
became a virtuosic display of not only what they could do on film but what film can do best, the visual, or surface, display of one's soul by the behavioral display of one's private (secret, repressed, forbidden) thoughts and desires. This great Hitchcockian touch is what makes
Suspicion
so compelling. By allowing Grant to act out the subtext of his character—a man so enraged at his wife that he wants to kill her—he becomes, in Hitchcock's morally rigid
world, an actual killer. And even more shocking, his wife becomes his coconspirator for her “role” in triggering such murderous thoughts.

Even with its denatured script and studio-imposed happy ending,
Suspicion
proved an unqualified box office success and joined the two previous films he made that year
—The Philadelphia Story
and
Penny Serenade—
on the list of top-five-grossing films of 1941.
^*
The film's record-breaking Thanksgiving weekend opening took place at Radio City Music Hall (officially kicking off the 1941 holiday moviegoing season), and this time everyone in the business believed there was no way the Academy could deny Grant a long-overdue Oscar.

Shortly after he completed work on
Suspicion,
Grant, claiming exhaustion, opted out of his next scheduled picture, Edmund Goulding's bigscreen version of the long-running Broadway hit
The Man Who Came to Dinner,
in which he was to play Sherman Whiteside. The role went instead to Monty Woolley, who had done it on Broadway. Then on the morning of August 18, 1941, without telling anyone except the government, which had given him a special exit and re-entry visa, Grant packed a few bags, got into his car, and quietly drove to Mexico City, where he checked into the Hotel Reforma for what he told his friends was to be a long and well-earned rest.

It lasted two days.

19

S
hortly after Grant arrived in Mexico City, Barbara Hutton flew down to be with him, bringing with her the happy news that her divorce from Count Reventlow was finalized. Before they had signed off on their financial agreement, the count had been detained in Denmark by the Nazi occupiers and supposedly, under “threat of death,” been forced to collaborate with them on certain “matters of security.” One of the “rewards” for his cooperation was his captors' promise that he would be allowed to sign his divorce papers, receive his money from Hutton, hand most of it over to them, and be released.

Grant and Hutton stayed together in Mexico through Labor Day, after which they returned, separately, to Los Angeles, where Hutton wrote to the Nazi officials in Denmark asking for written proof that her divorce from Reventlow was indeed finalized. That correspondence was copied without her knowledge and given to the American government. All during this time Hutton was unaware that she was the target of a secret FBI investigation and under constant surveillance by someone able to track her every move.

That someone was Cary Grant.

By 1941, at the end of nearly a decade of nonstop filmmaking in which he appeared in forty features, Grant desperately looked to slow down the pace. After the highly satisfying but intense experience he had making
Suspicion,
he wanted to choose his next projects more carefully to see if he could maintain the quality of acting Hitchcock had gotten out of him.

Unfortunately, he was unable to do so. Shortly after returning to Hollywood, Grant met with Frank Capra, once Columbia Pictures' hottest director, who had finally made good on his threat to leave Cohn and moved to Warner Bros., where he was about to make the screen version of the longrunning Broadway comedy
Arsenic and Old Lace.
Over lunch Capra told Grant that he was the only actor who could do justice to the role of Mortimer Brewster. The director was as good a salesman as he was a filmmaker. He had already offered the part to Bob Hope, who was eager to do it but couldn't get Paramount to agree to a loan-out. Capra had also approached Jack Benny, who said no, and even Ronald Reagan, who turned the part down, before Grant agreed to do it.

Production on
Arsenic and Old Lace
began that October. The plot of the movie centers on theater critic Mortimer's engagement to Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane), which triggers mayhem, murder, and other assorted bits of craziness by his murderous aunts and deranged uncle, leading him to believe any children he will have will inherit his family's madness. The fast-paced farce continues until the final moments, when Mortimer discovers he was actually adopted and can therefore marry Elaine without fear of her giving birth to another generation of lunatics.

As it turned out, Grant did not at all enjoy working with Capra, and in the years that followed, whenever asked, he always described his portrayal of Mortimer as his least favorite film performance. Although he liked Capra personally—“a dear, dear man”—he felt the film “was not my kind of humor… too much hysterical shouting and extremely broad double takes.” In truth he hated everything about the production. He thought the sets were wrong, too dark and stagy, the supporting cast—except for Jean Adair, for
whom he had a special affection—too theatrical (both Josephine Hull and Adair, who played Mortimer's aunts, were borrowed by Capra for filming during their vacation from the still-running Broadway production), and the comedy bits too forced. According to screenwriter Julius Epstein, Capra was aware of the film's problems and meant to fix them with reshoots and editing. That plan changed when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that December 7, and Capra abruptly left Hollywood to join the Signal Corps. Grant then donated his entire $160,000 salary to the United Service Organization, the British War Relief, and the Red Cross.
^*

Two unexpected events happened during the shoot that deeply affected Grant. The first reached all the way back to when young Archie Leach was touring with the Pender troupe; he had come down with rheumatic fever in Rochester, New York, and for several weeks was confined to his rooming-house bed, alone for most of the day. Jean Adair happened to be appearing at the same vaudeville house, heard about the boy whose only relatives lived in England, and made it a point to bring him flowers and fresh fruit every day until he recovered. When Capra introduced him to the actress on the first day of shooting, Grant immediately recognized her and asked if she did him. Of course, she replied, she had seen all his movies. When he told her he was that young acrobat who had taken ill in Rochester, she suddenly smiled, threw her arms around him, and pulled him close to her. While she didn't remember him by name (he was still Archie Leach at the time), she told him she thought there was something familiar about him.