The Books: “Cary Grant: A Biography” (Marc Eliot)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Cary Grant: A Biography, by Marc Eliot

First off, I love the cover design of this latest biography. It’s stark, simple, eye-catching … and Cary Grant was hugely tall so his posture here really stands out. I love that a playful image like that was chosen as the cover, and not just your typical glamour shot that makes up virtually every other book about Grant. I look at that image and I immediately want to read. So kudos to the design team at Harmony Books. Well done. Most hugely tall men are not able to sit cross-legged like that, but Grant, of course, was an amazingly agile acrobatic – even as an old man. The book highlights that aspect of his appeal, which lasted – well, forever. He was always spry, fresh, athletic, limber. Kind of amazing.

I found there to be a pretty good balance in Marc Eliot’s book between the personal and the professional. It doesn’t make the mistake of The Lonely Heart (excerpt here) and come up with a theory about Grant and then try to fit everything (even if it doesn’t fit) into that theory. I hate it when biographies do that. I mean, theories are good, don’t get me wrong … but in my opinion the great biographies steer clear of such positional nonsense. I’ve read plenty of biographies that have a big CHIP on their shoulder and it’s a huge turnoff. Kinda like reading political blogs this last week. Hmmmm. It all ends up sounding like “blah blah blah blah I AM RIGHT blah blah blah blah EVERYONE ELSE IS STUPID” and I cannot imagine anything more boring and less intellectually rigorous. But a book that is interested in going deep, in a true examination (especially of someone who might have gotten short shrift over the years) is a gem. Ron Chernow’s book on Alexander Hamilton will be read for decades, perhaps a century to come (you never know with public figures) … but certainly any book that is written on Hamilton will now have to reference Chernow’s book. It cannot be ignored. It’s magnificent. My hardcover copy weighs 45 pounds, I bet. It’s gorgeously written, and it stays clear of Freudian analysis – although it certainly makes some interesting points, things that have been skipped over or missed by Hamilton scholars in the past. It’s basically a deeper look at a complex personality. Every biography of Hamilton mentions his childhood in the West Indies, and his early job as a shipping clerk – and how much responsibility he was given as a youngster, and how amazingly facile he was with numbers and finance. This, of course, dovetails nicely with his later job as Secretary of the Treasury and his in-depth plan (not to mention his fanatical campaigning) for a national bank. A to B. But I haven’t read a book that also looks at the culture of the West Indies – the slave ships coming in daily, the slave markets, the fact that the islands were so small that you could not help but be right on top of the horrors of the slave trade … in a way that many in the colonies in America did not experience. There were the ports, of course, and the plantations, but nothing compared to growing up in a community so small that all of it was happening in the same place, at the same time. Hamilton watched all of that. And he, of all the Founding Fathers, was a straight-up abolitionist from day one. He did not own slaves. Many of the Fathers owned slaves, and were tortured by it … but knew they were deeply ensconced in a system they could not extricate themselves from … Many made plans to free their slaves after their deaths, many did what they could to keep families together … but only Hamilton was committed to the outright abolition of slavery. This is a known fact. I have read many books about Hamilton, but Chernow’s was the first to suggest that perhaps his brutal childhood in the West Indies, witnessing it at such close range, had a lot to do with his feelings about it. Certainly, Hamilton as an immigrant, basically, and a kid who grew up in a cloud of scandal and poverty (John Adams referred to him as “the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler”) could (conceivably) have had much sympathy from other downtrodden people. That’s a possible theory. And one that makes a lot of sense. But Chernow goes a tiny bit deeper. That’s what a good biographer does.

To me, Richard Schickel’s book (excerpt here) is the deepest of the books so far … just in terms of Cary Grant’s acting work and the creation of his persona (which kept changing, let’s remember). But Marc Eliot’s book is a wonderful addition to any Cary Grant library as well. It goes into Grant’s bleak childhood, into his early days in New York (one of the best sections of the book, I thought), and I loved how much Eliot focused on Grant’s head for business. He was playing the stock market, via phone? Telegraph?? – in his off moments filming Gunga Din. That was in 1939. He would go back to his room, and make some calls to New York, telling them to buy, sell, hold, whatever the hell … Grant was a poor boy. He knew the value of money. He NEVER threw it around. He loved nice things – but only because nice things have a tendency to last longer than cheaply made things. He had his suits custom-made. He was immaculate. His houses were always elegant, with pools and tennis courts – because he had a passion for swimming and tennis. He planned well. Most actors do not plan well. Grant has a reputation as a bit of a tightwad – it comes up again and again … and could drive his friends insane … Billy Wilder tells a story about Grant coming over to his house for a dinner party and becoming obsessed with the studio speakers Wilder had. He asked him a million questions about them – how they worked, how the sound was, how much they cost (as though money was an object!!) – and Wilder found it all very amusing. Grant could have gone out and bought 20 stereo speakers if he wanted, and tried them all, throwing the rest out in the trash, or giving the rest to his housekeeper. But Grant pondered, thinking, analyzing, reading Consumer Reports, interviewing his friends … before he ever made a purchase. This kind of caution is, obviously, hard to come by in Hollywood, where people are so overpaid. Grant used it well. He also was an independent spirit, which I think goes along with his financial smarts. He would not be owned by any one studio. He negotiated a deal, very early on, by himself, that he would be a free agent. Nobody was a free agent back then. To work outside the studio system … well … that was for desperate starlets who wanted to be loaned out to anyone who would bid on them. Not for Cary Grant, a huge movie star. But Grant was smarter than anybody in the room. He would not be owned. He got an unprecedented deal for himself, and ended up – through his life – being able to make choices based on what he wanted to do at that time, rather than having to do it because the studio owed another studio a favor. Bogart’s career, by contrast, was full of him suffering through projects he had to do, even when he was a big star, because he was underpaid at Warners, and was a true “studio man”. It was an emasculating situation for many stars, and Bogart really felt it. Grant remained unattached. Extraordinary.

He made some bad movies, but seriously – not a hell of a lot considering the length of his career. He had exquisite taste. He could be cautious to a fault – and Wilder begged him, over and over, to be in one of his movies. He wanted him for Sabrina, he wanted him for everything. But for whatever reason, Grant was reticent. They were good friends. And God, think of all the Wilder movies and how perfect Grant would have been in many of them. But Grant, as he got older, became more cautious – and would only trust his big-risk moments to Alfred Hitchcock. There’s an amazing story about how Grant was first-choice for the role of the alcoholic suicidal actor in Star is Born, the role that James Mason ended up playing. What a perfect fit, right? James Mason is heartbreaking in the part (“I need a job!”) but to imagine Grant … it gives me goosebumps. Perhaps it cut too close to the bone, perhaps Grant did not want to reveal what that role would require him to reveal … There’s an amazing and eloquent anecdote described in Marc Eliot’s book:

Cukor managed to convince Grant to keep an open mind long enough to at least read the screenplay. If he read it and still refused, Cukor said, he would never bring it up again. Under those terms,t he next night at Cukor’s nearby desert home, Grant read aloud the part of Norman Maine, with Cukor doing all the others. It took several hours to get through, and when they were finished, Cukor smiled and said to Grant, “This is the part you were born to play!”

“Of course,” Grant agreed. “That is why I won’t.”

I could think about that anecdote forever. It is very revealing but, typical for Grant, it doesn’t reveal all. Wonderful. Cukor never forgave Grant for turning the part down. But Grant never did anything just because someone wanted him to do it. He had his reasons. We can guess at what they are, but again, we don’t know. Marc Eliot takes a stab at explaining that decision but again, leaves the rest up to interpretation.

The excerpt I wanted to choose today has to do with Suspicion, the first film Grant did with Hitchcock.

First, let me go back to Richard Schickel and post what HE had to say about the film:

Alfred Hitchcock had also risen out of the English lower middle class, partly also by imagining a character for himself and then learning how to play it. He was as much a loner, and far more of an eccentric than Grant, and of course, saw in the actor precisely the qualities that reflected his own vision of life — a romantic and humorous surface with dark undercurrents running beneath, always ready to burst forth. All of Hitchcock’s anxiety — and he was as much the poet of anxiety as he was the master of suspense — was based on this unpleasant awareness that things were never what they seemed, that disorder always lurked below our treasured middle-class orderliness. All his movies were based on setting up a chain of circumstances that would bring his characters to an acknowledgement of that awareness.

There was not a single leading male figure in any Hitchcock movie that Cary Grant could not have played.

He began with him as early as 1941, with Suspicion, in which he played an obvious fortune hunter and a famous womanizer who takes an improbable interest in country mousey Joan Fontaine, keeps failing his promise to reform and take a job, and then appears to be planning to murder her for her money.

Grant is wonderful in the role; he is not quite smooth, so his comical high spirits make the threat he poses to the woman more than a mere menace. It brings the film close to the grotesque. His heightened playing underscores the film’s basic question, keeps forcing us to wonder if we are seeing him objectively or are we seeing him through her increasing paranoid eyes?

The film’s suspense derives entirely from that ambiguity…

What is significant about Suspicion is that, for the first time, one really feels the dangerousness of a charm as seductive as Grant’s. It was perhaps hinted at in Sylvia Scarlett, but the world of that film was so remote, and his character so exotic, that it did not menace as it does here, where Fontaine (who is very good and vulnerable) makes us feel its sexy lure, its ability, helplessly, to enthrall.

Yes, yes, yes. Suspicion is not quite successful. Hitchcock was forced to change the ending. The growing menace of the entire film is suddenly resolved, improbably, in the last 2 lines. The couples drives off into the sunset and I, as the viewer, am left with … But … but … what about all the rest of it?? Hitchcock was unhappy … but, as Schickel mentions, he saw something unique in Cary Grant, that nobody else was seeing at that time, so he got to work on Notorious, the brilliant thriller starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains. And here, he hit it out of the park. They all did.

But Suspicion is VERY important because it was a true break in the type Grant had been playing up to that time. It must be seen in that context. Grant had been playing madcap guys, comedic farcical roles, dashing heroes … so to accept Hitchcock’s direction, to allow himself to be molded into the character of an unsavory slippery liar … is a huge risk. And Grant did not like risks. He was careful. He held back. But he was in good hands with Hitchcock, and he knew it.

(Hitchcock had wanted the potentially poisoned glass of milk to seem ominous and to dominate the eerie climbing of the stairs scene – so he placed a small lightbulb in the liquid – so that the glass appears to glow.)

Here’s the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Cary Grant: A Biography, by Marc Eliot

Suspicion was based on the 1932 British novel Before the Fact by Anthony Berkeley Cox (written under the pseudonym Francis Iles), which RKO had purchased in 1935. After several unsuccessful attempts to make a movie out of it, they shelved the project until Hitchcock and Wanger found the book gathering dust on the studio’s shelves. The novel tells the story of Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth (Joan Fontaine), a passive but wealthy woman overly attached to her husband, Johnnie (Grant), who she discovers is in fact an embezzler, has murdered his best friend, and is about to murder her. 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 the 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-scene – was able to create rather than elicit a performance from Grant without what he considered the unnecessary intrusion 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. The 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 Academy Award.

*According to Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto, while Hitchcock insisted later on that he never intended to alter the plot of the original novel, his memos to RKO in its archives suggest that from the start the director “wanted to make a film about a woman’s fantasy life.” It is likely that the purpose of those memos was to tell the studio what it wanted to hear, in order to get the film into production. A previous attempt by the studio to film Suspicion, as a star vehicle for Laurence Olivier, had been abandoned for the very same reason: the studio refused to have him play a killer.

** Of the sixteen movies Grant made in his first five years as a freelancer, Suspicion came in at number three, grossing more than $400,000 in its initial theatrical release. RKO’s highest-grossing movie of 1941, The Philadelphia Story opened in December 1940 and played in theaters well into 1941. Grant made a third film in 1941, Arsenic and Old Lace, which was not released until 1944.