Cary Grant (56 page)

33

I
n January 1973, two weeks short of her ninety-fifth birthday, just after high tea, Elsie Leach took an afternoon nap and passed away in her sleep at the nursing home in Clifton, England, where Grant had placed her. Beside her bed was a picture of her son Cary and one of her granddaughter Jennifer.

Grant received word of his mother's death en route to a board meeting of Western Airlines, the newest corporation he had joined. He had last seen Elsie only two weeks earlier, on one of his regular visits to Bristol.

He immediately boarded a private plane provided by George Barrie to attend her funeral. As he prepared to take off from Kennedy Airport, a few members of the press found him and asked for a reaction. Grant thought about it for a few seconds, then told them “she never smoked, never drank, and ate very lightly. She died in her sleep. There will be no services. I shall reunite her with my father in the Bristol cemetery. With the past now gone, I'll have the future ahead—with my daughter Jennifer.” He made no other public comment regarding the passing of his mother.

Elsie's death triggered a bizarre reaction in Grant. He resumed calling Dyan Cannon every day. Cannon, who had since moved into the Malibu colony and was living with radio and TV personality Joey Reynolds, refused to take his calls. According to Reynolds, “I was there the night Mr. Grant called and announced that he was trying to buy the house next door. Dyan had a hissy fit, and it ruined a good pot high. She had made a record deal with a friend of mine from Motown and was singing to me on her bed when the call came. Grant was trying to harass her because she had, lately, been giving him a hard time on visitation.”

Eventually Grant stopped calling. Not long afterward, he licensed the broadcast rights to six of his films to National Telefilm Associates, a TV film distribution company, for $2 million plus royalties. They included
Operation Petticoat, Indiscreet, That Touch of Mink, The Grass Is Greener, Father Goose,
and
Penny Serenade.
Grant later claimed he did it so he could watch them in private without having to screen them in the projection room of his home, because whenever he did, it greatly upset his daughter. “Jennifer once walked up to the screen and tried to slap Deborah Kerr. She kept telling her to ‘stop kissing my daddy.'” Ironically, the medium Grant had always refused to appear on out of fear that it would dilute his moviegoing audience became the primary cultivator of a new generation of Cary Grant fans.

He occasionally leaked to the press that if something came along that interested him, he might return to making films, but he continued to reject any and all offers to do so. He turned down a million dollars from Warren Beatty to make a cameo appearance in
Heaven Can Wait,
and the lead in Joe Mankiewicz's film version of the hit play
Sleuth,
which went to Laurence Olivier (opposite cockney actor Michael Caine). MGM offered him the lead in an all-star-cast remake of
Grand Hotel.
He said no to that as well. He also
turned down the chance to costar opposite Elizabeth Taylor in
Night Watch.
Even George Barrie tried to get him to star in the first film for Fabergé's new motion picture division, Brut Pictures'
A Touch of Class,
opposite Glenda Jackson, but after much wavering, Grant turned him down too, and the part was rewritten to suit the more youthful George Segal. “I'd have done it if I were fifty years younger,” Grant later joked to
Variety.

Director Peter Bogdanovich also tried to convince him to return to movies in his film homage to screwball comedy,
What's Up, Doc?
opposite Barbra Streisand. Grant said no, and that part went instead to Ryan O'Neal. Grant then told friends that the only roles he was suited for were old fellows in wheelchairs, and he had no desire to portray that type of character. Unfazed, yet another producer offered Grant $2 million in cash and 90 percent of the net proceeds to star in something called
One Thousand Cups of Crazy German Coffee.
That one made him laugh out loud. The producer had recently acquired the rights to a script that Grant himself had owned for years, before selling it when he decided he was never going to make another movie.

In June 1973, Grant and Gratia von Furstenberg accepted and split a $70,000 settlement from the trucking company the court deemed responsible for the accident that had put them both in the hospital in 1968 just prior to his divorce hearing.

SHORTLY AFTERWARD
, in a rare extended interview with
The New York Times,
Grant spoke for the first time in years about his experience with LSD and how he felt it had affected his marriages. “My intention was to make myself happy,” Grant told journalist Guy Flatley. “A man would be a fool to take something that didn't make him happy. I took it with a group of men, one of whom was Aldous Huxley. We deceived ourselves by calling it therapy, but we were truly interested in how this chemical could help humanity. I found it a very enlightening experience, but it's like alcohol in one respect; a shot of brandy can save your life, but a bottle of brandy can kill you. And that's what happened when a lot of young people started taking LSD, which is why it became necessary to make it illegal. I wouldn't dream of taking LSD now; I don't need it now.”

In 1974 Jennifer began Montessori school, which afforded Grant a little more leisure time but also brought back the feelings of loneliness he had been able to buffer so effectively in the role of doting father. At exactly this time he became involved with a twenty-year-old beauty by the name of Vicki Morgan. Unknown to Grant, Morgan, who apparently had a thing for older, wealthy men, was also involved at the time with department store magnate Alfred Bloomingdale, an elderly millionaire with a penchant for kinky sadomasochistic games. Eerily, a few years later Morgan, like Bouron, was found bludgeoned to death.
^*

The seventy-year-old Grant then pursued a twenty-six-year-old entertainment reporter, British-born, Hollywood-based Maureen Donaldson. She had first come to America to serve as a nanny for rock star Dee Donaldson, whom she eventually married. They divorced in 1973, after which she briefly worked as a reporter for gossip-monger Rona Barrett's popular and profitable
Hollywood
magazines. In 1974 one of her assignments was to interview Cary Grant.

Donaldson—in her own words “no great beauty”—quickly fell under the spell of her charismatic subject. They began dating, and Grant soon assigned her the task of picking up and delivering Jennifer to Dyan Cannon, so that he could avoid having to come face to face with his ex-wife. While Donaldson may have taken Grant's interest in her for something serious, his motivations were more likely practical and calculated. He was considering suing Cannon for greater custody and believed that if he had a steady girlfriend, especially one who was a former nanny, his chances would be significantly increased.

For the next four years Donaldson was Grant's constant companion, and their names occasionally surfaced in the gossips, where the most persistent rumor was that she was to become Grant's fifth wife. He was always quick to deny it, telling any reporter who directly asked that he was never going to
marry again. When that became clear to Donaldson, the relationship faded, and she disappeared from his life.
^*

IN
1976
HOWARD HUGHES DIED
in his private plane while on a flight to Mexico. Grant was saddened by Hughes's passing and frightened by how, surrounded by his staff and his security guards, he still managed to die, to all intents and purposes, utterly alone. It reinforced Grant's determination not to go the same way.

IN
1977, still looking fit if a little fuller around the middle, his thick head of white hair cut short and his skin evenly bronzed, Grant finally won a round in his ongoing court battle with Cannon when the courts loosened the restrictions on his visitation rights with Jennifer. Ironically, that seemed to bring Grant and Cannon closer together than at any time since the night before the Academy Awards. They began taking their daughter out together for Chinese food at Jennifer's favorite restaurant, the child-friendly Madame Wu's in Santa Monica, and those who saw them there remember what looked like happy times for the threesome.

During this period yet another reporter inquired as to whether Grant would ever make another picture, to which he replied, “Jennifer is my best production.”

In the spring of 1977, under the pseudonym Cary Robbins, Grant checked into St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica for surgery to repair a hernia, an event whose significance was elevated by the fake name that fooled no one in Hollywood and hence garnered worrisome headlines in the trades about Grant's health until he emerged from the hospital with a big smile on
his face. He gently chided the crowd of two dozen waiting reporters, telling them they ought to be spending their time looking for a real story. Eleven years after his last movie had been released, Cary Grant's newsworthiness was a tribute to his remarkable popularity.

The year ended on a sad note for Grant, with the news of Charlie Chaplin's passing on Christmas Day. Although they had never become what either would describe as friends—besides their shared status as Hollywood outsiders and loners it's possible Grant's marriage to Cherrill also had something to do with it—Grant never lost the inspiration Chaplin instilled in him.

IN 1978 THE SEVENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD
Grant began dating a new woman, twenty-eight-year-old Tanzanian-born Barbara Harris. They had met two years earlier on a British-based Fabergé junket. One friend of Grant's described the difference in their ages as a resurfacing of “Grant's Chaplin complex,” his attraction to younger women “as periodically dependable as the revival of
Modern Times.”

Grant continued to visit Harris every month in England, where she lived, and after a while invited the attractive brown-haired, hazel-eyed young woman to visit him in Los Angeles. Harris declined all his invitations. To keep seeing her, he increased the frequency of his British Fabergé junkets until late in 1978, when after about a year of dating, she invited him to meet her parents in Devon.

Grant was fifteen years older than her father. Later that same year Grant, along with Mr. and Mrs. Frank Sinatra and the Gregory Pecks, was invited to Princess Caroline's wedding in Monaco. Everyone in Peck's party, including Grant, arrived at the Pecks' villa at St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in the South of France alone. After a long conversation between Grant and Peck, during which Grant discussed his reservations about the age difference between himself and Harris, on the first night of Grant's arrival Peck encouraged him to disregard it, call her up, and invite her to join the party. Grant did just that, and to his delight, Harris immediately packed a bag and caught a plane for Nice. Grant drove to the airport by himself to pick her up, and they spent two days alone together before rejoining the others.

After the wedding Grant once again invited Harris to come to Los Angeles with him, and this time she said yes. They flew back to the States, and she stayed at his Beverly Hills home for three weeks, leaving only when her position at Fabergé required her to attend a function in London, after which an apologetic Barrie happily flew her back and forth on his private jet.

The next weekend was a difficult one for Grant. He arranged for the two of them to spend it in Palm Springs with his daughter. Wary of how Jennifer had reacted to his costars whenever she watched his old films, Grant wondered what her reaction would be to a real-life woman he brought into the mix. To his great relief, Jennifer and Harris got along extremely well, as Grant would later describe it, almost like sisters. His mood quickly elevated, and a sparkle no one had seen in his eyes for years was said by friends to have returned.