Cash grant instant

"Cary Grant," said Alfred Hitchcock, his best director, "represents a man we know." Or one we want to know. A man who could make any suit look like it cost a million bucks. A man who became a movie star in just five years, whose charm and wit made women dream about him, and men try to be like him. But this was the cinematic Cary Grant, the ideal that endures in classics like The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), North by Northwest (1959), and Charade (1963, and a flawless DVD released this year on Criterion). But there's another, more complex Cary Grant now fascinating us: the young Cockney Archie Leach, who left Britain's music halls for a new identity and country; the leading man whose greatest romance, despite his five marriages, was with (more Grant page 80) (continued from page 78) Westerns' hero Randolph Scott; the superstar who became one of the most independent and sought-after actors in Hollywood, yet never lost his fear of (in his own words) "landing with a hollow thud on the concrete of Oblivion Street!" in Marc Eliot's Cary Grant: A Biography, due out this month from Harmony Books, the reel and real-life stories of Hollywood's most idolized yet least known immortal are told, as in the following passage when Grant, prior to the Second World War, reaches his peak as a star while making The Philadelphia Story (1940) and floundering from confusions of the heart.

PATRICK GILES

By the time His Girl Friday was released on January 18, 1940, to great reviews and tremendous box office, Cary Grant had all but disappeared from Hollywood's glittery nighttime social scene. Following his acrimonious split from [actor Randolph] Scott, he had reverted to his hermit ways, spending most of his time alone at the beach, and rarely visiting the new house he had rented for himself in Beverly Hills. He went out only for meals and had most of them alone, at Chasen's, in a red banquette in the rear, or at the Beverly Hills Hotel, or very occasionally at the Brown Derby, until he had to give that place up because of the relentless autograph-seekers. Everyone, it seemed to him, wanted his autograph, even if it were scribbled on a wet napkin, and he had come to resent it. He even went so far as to complain about what he called the "absurd practice" to Louella Parsons, with whom he had reconciled, and who continued to write about him, although in less sensationalistic ways, this time using one of her columns to put the world on notice that should they be lucky enough to see Cary Grant in person, they should not dare to ask for his autograph.

A few months later Grant agreed to make the actual long-awaited follow-up to The Awful Truth, costarring Irene Dunne and directed by Leo McCarey. My Favorite Wife instantly became one of the most anticipated productions of the year-until McCarey got drunk and totaled his car in a collision on Sunset Boulevard that nearly killed him and caused RKO to consider canceling the film. McCarey recovered enough to supervise the production, with Garson Kanin taking over as director.

In My Favorite Wife, Nick (Cary Grant), whose wife Ellen (Dunne) has disappeared in a shipwreck, waits the mandatory seven years before going to court to have her declared legally dead so he can marry the new woman in his life, Bianca (Gall Patrick). Nick loves Bianca, but not with the same passion he did Ellen. She will, he believes, be an excellent replacement mother for his two young children. Just as Nick remarries, Ellen is miraculously rescued from the deserted island where she has been living and shows up, only to discover she has been declared officially dead and Nick has a new wife. To complicate things further, Nick discovers that Ellen survived on that deserted island with a hunky partner (played by, of all people, Randolph Scott). All of this gets sorted out in the last reel to everyone's satisfaction, and along the way some genuine laughs are dealt. But the real-life tension and chemistry between Grant and Scott supplied the vibrancy. As they vie for the affections of Irene Dunne, they priss and preen at each other, competitively show off their bodies, and then all but ride off into the sunset together.

By now Grant was arguably the biggest male star in Hollywood, while Scott was still essentially a B movie actor, and it was generally believed that Grant had done Scott a favor by arranging for him to appear in this film.

In truth, Grant did it simply because he missed Scott and wanted to see him. During filming the two reportedly spent several nights together at the beach house.

There was talk among their friends that they might even be getting back together, but that wasn't what Grant had in mind. His loneliness was not eased by the temporary reprise with Scott, who left the beach house for good, again, when production on the film ended. Grant was looking for something more, something better, something that would move him to the front of the trolley car.

"Plenty of room up front" was the way Grant answered anyone these days who asked how things were going. Sometimes he added, "Step to the front of the car," a response that baffled most people. The car he was referring to was a streetcar, like the ones that still rode up and down Hollywood, Sunset, and Santa Monica Boulevards. He found them the ideal metaphor for what the relentless life of making movie after movie was when there was no one to come home to every night. The streetcars ran on circular tracks that started nowhere and always arrived at the same place, merry-go-round style. "There's only room for one car on the line, and so many passengers. The instant the car begins to move, the conductor takes up the chant, 'Move up front! Plenty of room up front!' At the next stop, when a new mob tries to scramble aboard, a handful of bruised, battered, and bedraggled actors get pushed off, landing with a hollow thud on the concrete of Oblivion Street!"

Clearly Cary Grant was ready to make some changes in his private life, even if he didn't have a clue as to what he wanted or how to go about finding it.

As it turned out, he wouldn't have to. Change found him, beginning in the spring of 1940 when--out of nowhere, or so it seemed at the time--Barbara Hutton appeared in Beverly Hills and immediately sought out the companionship of Cary Grant.

Hutton had gained a bizarre reputation as one of the so-called Beautiful People whom everyone loved to hate. Born in 1912, she had grown up with her name and pictures in the newspapers from the day she was five years old and her mother committed suicide, leaving little Hutton a one-third heir to her grandfather Frank Woolworth's estate; her share was estimated at the time to be in the $100 million range. Her father took personal charge of his daughter's inheritance and improved it by another $50 million, then predicted the collapse of Wall Street and got out of the market weeks before America was plunged into its Great Depression.

The Hutton name then became synonymous with greed and selfishness--and that was before blond, blue-eyed, five-foot-two, eighty-five-pound Barbara met Prince Alexis Mdivani, a universally reviled fortune hunter whom the twenty-year-old Hutton, it was widely believed, paid $2 million to marry her. She tired of him three years later and paid him $1.5 million more for a non-contested divorce so she could marry Danish Count Haugwitz-Reventlow, reportedly paying him $1.5 million for his hand in marriage. In order to conform to Danish rules of royal heritage, Hutton had to renounce her American citizenship, which she did without a moment's hesitation.

Hutton's second marriage lasted little more than a year, just long enough for her to have a baby, after which she and the count legally separated. She then relocated to London, where she planned to raise her infant son, Lance Reventlow, until England's entry into World War II drove her back to the safety of the United States.

She bought a home in San Francisco and, at the suggestion of her friend the Countess Dorothy di Frasso, hired a public relations firm to try to improve her image. She made a series of huge donations to several charitable causes, including a much-publicized $100,000 gift to the Red Cross.

In 1940, while visiting di Frasso, who lived in Beverly Hills, the countess threw a large, celebrity-studded dinner in Hutton's honor at her home. One of the invitees Hutton had insisted on was that handsome actor she had met on her voyage to America a year earlier aboard the Normandie.