Cary Grant (45 page)

During the filming, Grant and Drake stayed at the famed Hotel du Cap for the entire shoot, while the rest of the cast and crew were housed at the Carlton, in Cannes (except for Kelly, who stayed with her lover, Oleg Cassini, in a private villa). Most evenings Grant and Drake joined Kelly and Cassini and the Hitchcocks for dinner at one or another of the many small candlelit restaurants along the hillsides of southern France. On weekends they would all go sailing. Grant hoped that Drake and Kelly would form a friendship that would defuse his wife's jealous fears.

It did not happen. Instead, Drake's dissatisfaction with her husband grew with what she perceived to be his increasingly amorous mood—not toward her but Kelly. Whether it was Grant's ritual leading-lady infatuation—the only acting “method” he ever relied upon (and a fetish he shared with Hitchcock)—or simply the fact that he felt more at home, more real, more in control, and therefore more comfortable with Kelly (an idealized version of Drake), the onscreen heat he generated with her was undeniable, palpable enough to enlist Drake into the artistic if neurotic jamboree of screen-to-life criss-crossing that was so much a part of any Grant/Hitchcock collaboration.

By the time the film was finished and Grant and Drake returned to the
idyllic surroundings of the desert, both knew things had irrevocably changed between them. As far as Drake was concerned, she had lost parts of her husband to Kelly, Hitchcock, and the one lover she could never successfully compete with—“Cary Grant.” For his part, Grant found that he had nothing left to say to or teach Drake, or worse, to learn from her. Their moment, he knew, had passed. Alone together, he had been something of a father figure to Drake, the child he had never had; in her thirties now, she was too old to sit on Daddy's knee, while Grant, in his fifties, for the first time felt too old to want to keep on bouncing her there.

26

T
o Catch a Thief
did not open for almost a year after shooting was completed, because Hitchcock had to work on his new TV series while editing the film. It was finally released in August 1955, a month before the official fall season, an indication of Paramount's lack of faith in the film's commercial
viability, even as it touted Grant's “comeback.” The obvious age difference between Grant and Kelly was a concern to the studio's executives, who remained unsure if audiences would buy it. Besides, no one at Paramount could figure out the film's plot. “Was he really the cat burglar, or wasn't he?” became the question most asked after the screenings, even though the film had a fairly unambiguous ending. If the Paramount crowd couldn't stay with it until the end, the studio executives wondered, could audiences?

Grant personally attended the lavish “world premiere” at New York's Paramount Theater—a theater he had performed in as a young man when it was a legitimate playhouse some thirty years earlier. Despite all the fanfare and promotion, the film received mixed reviews:
“To Catch a Thief
is not the thriller it could have been,” wrote the
Hollywood Citizen-News;
“What else can I tell you? The dialogue is so bad that Cary looks embarrassed to be saying it,” opined
The Saturday Review.
In defiance of all the doubts, however,
To Catch a Thief
went on to become the biggest hit of the first half of the 1950s. It also reenergized Grant's desire to make motion pictures, even if it meant the end of his marriage to Betsy Drake. As far as he was concerned, that love ship had already sailed.

Eager as he was to get in front of a camera again, another year passed before Grant chose his next film. It was not for any lack of desire on his part, or a shortage of scripts. He just wanted to wait, to see if
To Catch a Thief
was his resurrection and not his epitaph. Once the film proved it had legs, he proceeded carefully, so as not to halt the momentum of his comeback. While in search of the right script, he was interviewed by
Pix
magazine about the secret of his longevity. A smiling Grant sang a new tune now about his seemingly ageless place in the ever-changing world of film. “The movies are like the steel business,” he told the interviewer. “An actor should be good at any stage and last forever.”

Among the offerings he turned down during this period was Otto Preminger's
Bonjour Tristesse.
Preminger thought Grant perfect for the role of the father of waiflike Audrey Hepburn (with whom he would costar eight years later as her lover in Stanley Donen's
Charade
). Thanks, Grant said, but
no thanks.
^*
Fox wanted him for the lead in
Can-Can.
He said no again, and Frank Sinatra got the part. He thought about making a movie of Thomas Mann's
Joseph and His Brethren
and wanted Clifford Odets to write and direct it. When that fell through, Grant asked Odets to consider writing instead the story of a brigadier general who commits suicide, after which it is revealed he had led several different, secret lives. It, too, went nowhere. Columbia then proposed a musical version of
It Happened One Night.
Grant said yes if they would somehow retool the script into a remake of
His Girl Friday,
in which he could star again with Grace Kelly. “I can be ready in ten minutes,” Grant told them. Not surprisingly, that project quickly died. Perhaps strangest of all was the offer made to him by Mae West, who wanted to redo
She Done Him Wrong.
Sorry, he politely told her.

Even Mike Todd, the grand impresario of motion pictures and the flamboyant husband of Elizabeth Taylor, sought Grant's services, to star in his lavishly planned film version of Jules Verne's
Around the World in Eighty Days.
The film's gimmick was to have every major star in Hollywood play a cameo role—precisely why Grant did not take part. He was never one to share the screen with too many other stars, afraid he would get lost in the crowd and wind up appearing smaller than life. The film would eventually be made with David Niven in the lead and win the Best Picture Oscar of 1956.

While Grant waited for exactly the right film, his relationship with Drake continued to deteriorate. They decided to sleep in separate beds, then in separate houses. The gossips somehow picked up on it, and as the couple quietly passed their fifth anniversary, rumors flew that the marriage was in trouble. Whispers of Grant's homosexuality resurfaced, augmented by those who claimed Drake was gay, as well. The highly idiosyncratic nature of their marriage added fuel to these rumors, however unfounded they might have been. For the most part, Grant took his return to the gossip columns as a sign that he had also returned to prominence.

The picture Grant finally chose as his follow-up to
To Catch a Thief
was Stanley Kramer's $4 million costume picture set in the Napoleonic Wars,
The Pride and the Passion,
based on C. S. Forester's novel
The Gun.
(Forester, at
Kramer's urging, personally asked Grant to honor him by being in the film version of his novel.) In keeping with his often-puzzling and ultimately selfdestructive pattern, it would prove the worst of all possible choices.

The Pride and the Passion
's main character is a Spanish cannon, one that British naval officer Anthony (Grant) must prevent from falling into the hands of the French. Along the way Anthony meets Miguel (Frank Sinatra), a leader of the Spanish guerrilla forces, who wants to take the cannon to ávila and use it to run the French out of the city. They join forces against their common enemy, even as they compete for the affections of Juana, a female guerrilla fighter, played by Sophia Loren at the height of her cinematic lowcut peasant glory.

It is not all that difficult to understand what Grant was attracted to in this costume drama, his first since the disastrous
The Howards of Virginia
some fifteen years earlier. For one thing, it was to be shot in Spain, and Grant, eager to put some physical distance between himself and Drake, looked forward to going on location by himself this time. For another, he was eager to work both with Academy Award–winning producer-director Stanley Kramer and with Sinatra, who was red hot since winning an Oscar in 1954 for his role in
From Here to Eternity.
As far as Grant was concerned, the picture was a can't-miss.

Grant had costar approval on the film and had wanted Ava Gardner, now living in Spain, to play opposite him, until Sinatra, who was going through an ugly separation and divorce from the actress, made that choice a practical impossibility. Grant then made overtures to Grace Kelly, now Princess Grace; she reluctantly turned the film down, having agreed to give up movies for the prince. His third choice was one suggested by Stanley Kramer, who had wanted Sophia Loren from the start; her paramour, Italian filmmaker Carlo Ponti, was pressing Kramer to give Loren her first English-speaking role. With Grant's quiet approval, Kramer offered Loren a one-time-only, take-it-or-leave-it $200,000 to make the film. She took it, in what she called “the easiest decision I ever had to make.”

Grant waited until just before he left for Spain to tell Drake that she was not going with him, and then called his friend producer William Frye to ask him to “take care of her while I'm gone.” An angry and insecure Drake warned him that he had better not do anything on set that he would later be sorry for. She had heard too many stories, mostly from him, about his leadinglady
infatuations, and she wasn't about to sit by and allow Loren to take him away from her. Not that she would have minded all that much if Grant never came back. It was, by this time, more a question of public humiliation than private heartbreak. Not to worry, he told her.

Shooting began April 20, 1956, in Segovia. By the end of the first week, Grant had fallen hopelessly in love with Sophia Loren.

To complicate matters further, so had Frank Sinatra, although he would deny it for the rest of his days. His jealousy over the twenty-two-yearold Loren's preference for Grant, thirty years her senior and ten years older than Sinatra (and Ponti), led him to do something no one else had ever dared around the romantic-leading-man idol. He openly ridiculed Grant's sexuality, always referring to him on the set as “Mother Cary.” If there was any logic to this strategy, it didn't work. Although Loren did not speak English very well, she knew that Sinatra was picking on Grant, and after one particularly difficult day of shooting, she had had enough of it and did what Grant wouldn't, or couldn't. She rebuffed Sinatra's pettiness by calling him out in front of the entire cast and crew and labeling him “an Italian son of a bitch.”

To Sinatra, still smoldering with rage over his breakup with Gardner, this was the last straw. He could not wait to get out of “Windmillville,” as he referred to Segovia, and actually left the production before he had completed his scenes (he later finished them in Hollywood), forcing Grant to talk to a suit on a hanger in remaining scenes together.

Grant, meanwhile, increasingly sought Loren's company on location and at the end of the day would have long, rambling, confessional talks with her that stretched from the early evening into the next day's sunrise, talks in English, a language she barely understood at the time. They were constantly together on set, which started a rumor that somehow made it all the way back to Hollywood. In a flash, Drake, after reading about Grant and Loren in one of the columns, boarded a flight bound for Spain.

What didn't hit the columns—at least not at first (and when it eventually did, he vehemently denied it)—was the fact that even before Drake's arrival in Segovia, Grant had proposed marriage to Loren, promising he could obtain a “quickie” divorce from Drake. Loren's reaction was not the one he
had hoped for. She returned his proposal with a reminder to him of her commitment to Ponti.
^*

Once in Spain, Drake assured Grant that she was there only because she missed him and made no reference to the headlines his “affair” was making back in the States. After only two weeks, however, she had had enough. She simply couldn't stand the hangdog look Grant got on his face whenever Loren was around. If that was the way he wanted it, fine, she thought, and via long-distance telephone broke her moratorium on appearing in films by accepting an offer made by Frank Tashlin to appear in his upcoming comedy,
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
Hoping this might bother Grant enough for him to ask her to give up the picture and stay, she was dismayed when he wished her the best of luck with the movie. The next day she booked herself first-class passage back to the States aboard the flagship of a fleet of luxury Italian liners, the
Andrea Doria.