“Movie stars operate in an ether as intimate to us as dreams. That's why movie stars often seem as close, or closer to us, than loved ones.”
—PETER RAINER
Even before the Berengaria docked in New York City, Cary Grant knew his marriage to Virginia Cherrill was over. During the voyage she had talked about the type of home she wanted to make for them. The more elabo- rate and elegant she imagined it, the more Grant cringed. Even while living with Scott, who loved to decorate with the kind of ornate flourish that only inherited southern wealth could provide, Grant was content to have nothing more in the house in the hills than a chair or two, a version of his favorite bed, running water, a radio, and a refrigerator. Scott had filled the place for the both of them, and Grant had gone along with it primarily to please him. He did not have the desire to similarly accommodate his bride.
There were other problems as well. Cherrill had become extremely chatty during the long journey home—talking about everything from poetry to cooking. Unfortunately, nothing she went on about held the least bit of interest for Grant. He had had little formal education and did not consider himself an intellectual in any sense, or a gourmand. Whenever he and Scott talked, they mostly theorized about ways to increase their creative control and financial stake in the films they worked on, via approval of script, casting, directors, profit participation, salary guarantees against gross, and so on. Cherrill, on the other hand, was completely uninterested in discussing the art or the business of acting. She told Grant she was more than willing to give up her movie career, such as it was. She may not have been the domestic type, but she knew she could offer Grant her beauty and the promise of good sex that went with it— two things in which Grant, at least as far as Cherrill could tell, now seemed utterly uninterested. It was almost as if all the action for Grant had been in the pursuit; as in the movies, when the couple married, the story ended. In the morning after of what should have been the biggest day of his life, he almost seemed surprised she was still there.
Upon arriving in New York City, Grant's mood seemed to brighten, and in lieu of an official honeymoon, he stole forty-eight hours from the studio and booked a suite in the Raleigh Hotel in midtown Manhattan. For the next two days he took delight in giving Cherrill an informed walking tour of the city as he had known it in the 1920s, and he showed her all his personal land- marks: the hotel he'd stayed in while with the Pender troupe, the small apartment he'd shared with Orry-Kelly, the beautiful turn-of-the-century the- aters he'd performed in, and the spirited dives he'd frequented when he had little or no money. It was a repeat of his Bristol tour without the accompa- nying emotional trauma.
Cherrill noted with some surprise Grant's affinity for what she took to be the seamier side of the city. When she made a joke about all the adolescent boys from England he'd had to live with, Grant never broke stride as he mat- ter-of-factly related to her stories about the games they used to play with one another, the measuring of their penises to see who had the biggest, the “circle jerks,” the rubbing up against one another at night for comfort—all the things, he said with a half-smile, that go on in boys' dormitories all over England, from Eton to Oxford. As she would tell friends and acquaintances later on and note in her diaries, it was the closest Grant ever came to admitting to her that he was bisexual. Not surprisingly, Grant's “confession,” his way of trying to explain himself to her now that they were man and wife, further dismayed Cherrill. Unable to see much without her glasses and always unwilling to wear them in public, she walked speechless with Grant mile after mile in a blind haze along the city's cement streets.
By the end of the two days (during which time their marriage was, according to Cherrill, still not officially consummated), she was more than ready to board the Santa Fe Chief at Grand Central Terminal for the three-day jour- ney back to Los Angeles.
At Union Station in downtown L.A., they were met by dozens of paparazzi, tipped by the studio on their arrival and eager to photograph the newlyweds. To avoid the gauntlet that Cherrill actually looked forward to, Grant insisted they duck out a side exit and into a limousine he had ordered in anticipation of the crush of the press.
They went directly to the house on West Live Oak Drive. To Cherrill's dismay, Randolph Scott was there, waiting for them at the front door. That was when she realized he had not moved out, that he was still living in the small house with, apparently, no intention of leaving. As Grant carried Cherrill over the crowded threshold, his other full-time live-in, Archie Leach, barked loudly at Cherrill, then ran out the back door and disappeared. The dog's running away threw Grant into a new funk that lasted the entire week until, seven days later, the tired-looking hound came loping back home.
Grant barely had time to celebrate, as the studio, which had given him a few extra days to search for his dog, now demanded his immediate return to work. Zukor needed him to put as much filmed product in the can as possi- ble, anticipating the studio's imminent bankruptcy and the selling off of its assets, the most valuable of which were finished movies.
The first feature Grant appeared in after returning to Hollywood was Marion Gering's Thirty Day Princess, costarring Sylvia Sidney and pro- duced by B. P. Schulberg's new independent production company (distrib- uted by Paramount), formed while Grant was in London. Schulberg's official departure from Paramount upset Grant, as he had always believed Schulberg was his strongest supporter at the studio.
Thirty Day Princess is a variation on the old prince-and-pauper plot of switched identities and roles. A princess (Sidney, sporting an odd Asian- sounding accent despite her character's supposedly European origins—the “mythical kingdom of Taronia”) comes down with the flu at a particularly inopportune time. An actress (also Sidney) is hired to impersonate her to fool a New York newspaper publisher (Grant), who has been critical of the princess. Upon “meeting” her, he falls in love with her stand-in. This slap- stick rondo goes around in circles for seventy-three tedious minutes. Grant hated everything about the film, including the haste with which it was made and the fact that once again he was cast in a role that Gary Cooper had rejected. The film was ready for release that May, barely four months to the day Grant and Cherrill had returned from England.
Cherrill, meanwhile, continued to feel uneasy living under the same roof with Grant and Scott, and as soon as Thirty Day Princess was finished, insisted that she and Grant move to a place of their own. Grant obligingly, if reluc- tantly, leased an apartment at the La Ronda complex, on Havenhurst just east of Hollywood. The next day Scott rented the one next door, and Cherrill threw a fit. While Scott moved in his things, a loud argument ensued between her and Grant that lasted deep into the night. By now Grant was convinced that divorce was going to be the only remedy for the misery he had inflicted upon himself by marrying Cherrill. He would have already filed if not for two considerations. The first was practical: his inherent thriftiness made him fear divorce and alimony in a state where mandatory “irreconcilable differences” settlements were based on residency, not the location of the wedding, and was almost always a fifty-fifty split of assets. He didn't feel like handing over half of everything he had because of a stupid mistake he'd made. The second con- sideration was more complex. More than anything else, he hated the notion of appearing to abandon anyone, even his wife—especially his wife—which would have been a clarion echo of his father's abandonment of Elsie. As a result, Grant was emotionally paralyzed and withdrew even further from Cherrill. When they did communicate, he passively avoided the big issue by arguing with her over the smallest and most insignificant ones.
Their constant bickering continued through the release of four more unremarkable Cary Grant “tuxedo” movies that he was happy to lose himself in, if for no other reason than to get away from the situation at home. They were all made in the space of seven months, and none earned back its cost. Lowell Sherman's Born to Be Bad costarred Loretta Young and was released May 18, 1934, with Grant on cash loan to Darryl F. Zanuck's 20th Century. In Harlan Thompson's Kiss and Make Up, opposite Helen Mack, Grant sang “Love Divided by Two,” written for him by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger. In Frank Tuttle's Ladies Should Listen, Grant played opposite Frances Drake, and in one of Paramount Publix's final films, Elliott Nugent's Enter Madame, Grant starred opposite Elissa Landi.
In these movies, Grant can be seen with his hands in his pockets, trying to act suave, even interested. His reversion to pocket-posing was a manifestation of his boredom with playing the same uninteresting character over and over again, and his resident insecurity as an actor that always surfaced when- ever he felt unprotected by the lack of a strong script, a solid director, a tal- ented lighting designer, or a perfectionist cinematographer. Indeed, what is most notable about these movies is how similarly unremarkable they are, how glossy without shine their black-and-white photography appears, and how mechanically their mise-en-scène is presented. These were, pure and simple, product, the final churn-out of the Paramount Publix factory that in its endgame specialized in these hurried, repetitious, and banal feature films.
Of the actresses Grant played opposite in this cluster of features, Landi was the one he most favored, but not for the reasons one might suspect. At the time Landi was struggling to make it as an actress without having signed to any studio (although she had been offered a contract by several, including Paramount). She would not go on to become a star, despite her good looks and appealing onscreen personality, at least in part because of her unwillingness to become a contract player for any of the majors—an act of courage and tenacity Grant admired. Landi's failed attempt at autonomy became an early reference point as well as an object lesson for Grant, whose growing desire to gain control of his own cinematic destiny made him feel, more than ever after these last pictures, like a mouse in a wheel toy, running faster and faster and still getting nowhere.
Not long after, Grant petitioned Zukor and his collapsing studio to loan him out to MGM, where a film version of the popular book Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall was being planned. By now loaning had become so common among studios that Irving Thalberg, the legendary head of production at MGM, thought nothing of mentioning to Grant at a party that they both happened to attend just how much he would like to have him play the part of Midshipman Roger Byam in Mutiny. It was a special role, the always charming and articulate Thalberg explained, one that called for a personality of enormous intelligence and positive appeal with a rational eloquence, a balance between the extremes of the evil Captain Bligh and the idealistic Fletcher Christian. The film was to be one of MGM's spectacular star-studded showcases. Charles Laughton was set to play the role of Captain Bligh, and Clark Gable was the only actor the stu- dio would even consider for the role of Fletcher Christian.
Grant envied Gable's swaggering success (and his $4,000-a-week salary) and wanted more than anything to appear in a movie with him, knowing that it was bound to be a box office smash and elevate the careers of all who appeared in it. He quickly read the book and then the script and believed he was perfect for the part of Byam. Thalberg then contacted Paramount to arrange Grant's loan-out, which the MGM head of production believed at this point was nothing more than a mere formality. As far as Thalberg was concerned, there was no way the financially strapped Paramount could refuse the deal, especially the hefty fee it would collect for Grant's services while continuing to pay him his $750-a-week salary.
Thalberg consulted with Zukor, who feared the very thing Thalberg pre- dicted—that Mutiny would make Cary Grant one of Hollywood's biggest stars. With a year left on Grant's contract, Zukor believed it was not in the studio's best interest to escalate Grant's value. Better, he thought, to keep him at a level where his contract could be renewed at a bargain rate. It would prove a costly mistake on Zukor's part, and one that would permanently alter the direction of Grant's career.
Grant was, predictably, infuriated at Zukor's decision not to let him appear in Mutiny on the Bounty and vowed that when his contract was up, he would not re-sign with Paramount, no matter what they offered. It didn't help mat- ters any that Franchot Tone, cast in the role that Thalberg had wanted to give to Grant, earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actor of 1935.*
As all this was taking place, Grant's marriage to Virginia Cherrill con- tinued its precipitous decline. His gathered anger and confusion curdled into an overall insecurity and paranoia. He became irrationally jealous of any man he suspected of having a sexual interest in his wife—an ironic twist for a man who had no sexual interest of his own in her. (In truth, had he been thinking clearly, he would have realized that her running off with someone would have given him the perfect excuse to sue for divorce and come out of it for the most part financially intact.)
That September, while they were out having dinner, Grant mistook Cherrill's familiar squinting at the menu for flirting with someone at another table. They bickered about it, an argument that continued until they got home, where it escalated until, according to Cherrill, Grant slapped her hard across the face.
The next morning she packed her things and returned to her mother's apartment in Hancock Park, vowing never to live under the same roof with a madman.
“She liked to flirt, there was no question about it, whether or not the incident that sparked the violence actually happened,” recalled Teresa McWilliams. “And he was incredibly jealous. She had this lovely laugh, and enjoyed men playing up to her, while Cary was just unbelievably possessive. I suppose it was his way of being nuts about her. What made her finally leave, though, was the night he hit her. She still loved him, but she became afraid of him, and because of that slap it was a fear that could never go away.”
Grant knew he had gone too far. The next day all traces of his anger were gone, replaced by a profound remorse. In the days and weeks that followed, he began to drink more heavily and was often seen at the studio during rehearsals or going over lines holding a paper cup of scotch that he tried to pass as tea.
At night he turned to Scott for sympathy, but got none. Scott was glad Cherrill had finally left. Besides the fact that she had managed to crash his private party of two, he simply couldn't stand anything about her. He con- sidered her pretentious, self-centered, boring, and ill-mannered, and her incessant laugh drove him crazy. He told Grant he ought to count his lucky stars he was rid of the woman.
Instead, Grant desperately tried to reestablish contact with Cherrill. The last week in September, he finally managed to get her on the phone and begged her to return to their apartment at La Ronda. She agreed to meet with him at a party, believing she would be safe in a crowd. But once they were together, Grant could not control his rage. He angrily accused her of being unfaithful to him during their separation, demanding to know with whom she had been staying. He dismissed her moving back in with her mother as nothing more than a flimsy cover story.
They never made it back to his apartment. Cherrill stormed out of the party alone, and the next morning contacted gossiper Louella Parsons, with whom she had become good friends, to give her the “exclusive!” on “The Cary Grant–Virginia Cherrill Separation!” In Parsons's next column, she reported that Cherrill had told her the following: “Whether it is permanent or not is up to Cary. I will not discuss the reason for our trouble, but things have been going from bad to worse. I left Cary two weeks ago and consulted a lawyer, but we later patched things up, and I hoped we might make a go out of our marriage because I am in love with my husband.”
For Grant, who had no use for gossip columnists, especially after they had begun to write with annoying regularity about his relationship with Randolph Scott, this latest attempt on Cherrill's part, to use one to send him a personal message, was intolerable. Despite the hint their marriage might still be sal- vageable, Grant knew enough about how Hollywood operated to understand that Cherrill's interview had as much to do with her lawyer's building a case for a lucrative settlement than anything else.
To make matters worse, Scott was horrified at the appearance of Grant's marital problems in the columns (although it was something of a relief to have him linked with a woman rather than the usual innuendo about the two of them).
By the end of the following week Grant's drinking increased, his tele- phoned pleas to Cherrill became more desperate (and only made her more resolute), and he sank even further into twisted despair. On the evening of October 4, just after dining out alone, he returned to the apartment he had shared with Cherrill and called his closest friends, including Scott, who was right next door, offered rambling apologies for all his bad behavior, and made what sounded like nothing so much as vague farewells. He then placed one final call to Cherrill, begged her to come back, and when she refused, told her he was going to kill himself.
Following a few moments of silence, Cherrill, a seasoned player in the ongoing emotional push-pull of their relationship, hung up, waited, and when the phone didn't ring, called Grant back. The phone was answered by Grant's part-time Filipino houseboy, Pedro, who conveniently just happened to be on duty that night. Cherrill told him she was worried that Cary himself had not picked up. Pedro said he would check on Grant, who was in his bed- room. He put the phone back in its cradle, entered the room, and found his boss stretched out on the bed, clad only in boxer shorts, with a pitcher of water and a large, nearly empty bottle of sleeping pills on the night table. In a panic, Pedro called the police emergency services, and at 2:28 in the morning an ambulance came screaming up to the front of the house, several med- ical personnel rushed in, hooked Grant up to a respirator, put him on a stretcher, and took him to Hollywood Hospital. There his stomach was pumped, his blood was tested, and despite Cherrill's initial fears that he had fatally overdosed, he quickly revived. Later on the doctors told her they had found no more than a single tablet's worth of sleeping medication in Grant's blood, but that his alcohol level had been dangerously high.
Somehow, the story of Grant's “attempted suicide” made headlines in the next afternoon papers, and working with the publicity department at Para- mount, he scrambled to come up with a story. He was instructed by the stu- dio to tell the reporters that “I had been at a party with friends, and when I got home they tried to play a joke on me. They called the police after I lay down. It was all a colossal gag.”
And a colossal lie.
There is absolutely no evidence that anybody was with Grant that night, but telephone records confirm the series of calls he made on the evening of October 4. Later on, in fact, Grant himself would change his story and describe the incident this way: “You know what whiskey does when you drink it all by yourself. It makes you very, very sad.” So much for being “at a party with friends.” He went on to say, “I began calling people up. I know I called Virginia. I don't know what I said to her, but things got hazier and hazier. The next thing I knew, they were carting me off to the hospital.”
The incident might have been more easily written off (as it has by most of Grant's biographers), if not for his mysterious and never fully explained hospital stay in England the previous December, immediately following Grant's discovery that his mother was, in fact, still alive. What had really made Grant so ill back then that required several weeks of hospitalization? It is safe to say that the one thing it wasn't was rectal cancer. A truism says a single event is an incident, a series a pattern. It is difficult to see these two relatively close and emotionally traumatic episodes as unrelated. Curiously, all relevant hospital records in both instances have disappeared.
The divorce proceedings were not particularly lurid, but because they involved a handsome movie star and his beautiful ingenue wife, they were front-page news. Preliminary hearings began on December 11, 1934, in Los Angeles Superior Court, before the ironically named divorce court judge William Valentine. At the hearing Cherrill testified that in the three months since their separation Grant had almost completely cut her off financially, and because of it she had had to pawn her engagement ring and diamond watch and take a second loan against her car just to have enough money for food. In all that time, she claimed, Grant had given her a total of only $125. Now she demanded a thousand dollars a month, pending the finalization of their divorce, so she could properly prepare for her return to a career in films.
Grant, through his lawyer, made a counteroffer of $150 a month. When called to the bench by the judge to explain how he had arrived at his figure, Grant said, “She managed to [get along on that much] before we were married, so she could do it again.”
That was enough for Valentine. He ordered Grant to immediately start paying Cherrill $725 a month until the final settlement and subsequent dissolution of their marriage. In addition, Grant was required to post a $20,000 bond, to ensure his payment of both his and Cherrill's legal fees. Last, he was prohibited from selling any of his property.
A week later Cherrill amended her complaint to include accusations that, during their marriage, Grant “drank excessively, choked and beat her, and threatened to kill her.”
If Cary hit the roof, Zukor went through it. The last thing he needed was to lose his best and least expensive contract player to this kind of scandal. On Christmas Eve he brought the lawyers from both parties together in a secret meeting at the backlot, during which he warned Cherrill's attorneys that before any settlement could be reached, she would have to drop the chargesagainst Grant regarding his drinking and threats of violence. They agreed, knowing that at this point it didn't make much difference, as the columns had already headlined the accusations for the public's eager consumption.
By the time the divorce proceedings began, a still depressed Grant failed to show up in court, claiming he had to do last-minute reshoots of his two latest movies, Elliott Nugent's Enter Madame and James Flood's Wings in the Dark. It was a reasonable excuse, and Grant was allowed to have his lawyers stand in for him.
A single one-hour divorce session was held on March 26, 1935, and produced enough “revelations” from a well-rehearsed Cherrill for the next morning's papers. Her lawyer, Milton Cross, who specialized in Hollywood divorces, got her to claim, through her tears and in such a reluctantly soft voice that Valentine had to continually ask her to speak up, that her husband was “sulky, morose, took to drinking … and would argue with me on every point. He said I was lazy and ought to go to work, but when I tried to, he discouraged me and refused to let me work … he was tired of me and said he didn't want to live with me anymore.” To reinforce her claims, Cherrill's lawyers brought her mother to the stand, who testified she had seen Grant “mistreat” her daughter several times.
At Zukor's insistence, Grant had instructed his lawyers in advance not to cross-examine Cherrill or anyone else, including her mother, and to make no further comments of any kind on his behalf, either outside the courtroom to the press or inside before the judge. Grant agreed that the best thing to do was to get it all over with, even if he had to pay a premium price. In the end, the judge formally declared the eleven-month marriage over and awarded Cherrill half of Grant's property, estimated to be worth $50,000.
Less than a month later Cherrill left alone for an extended vacation in England.
Grant, meanwhile, reluctantly gave up the apartment at La Ronda and Scott quickly gave up his place next door. They returned together to the house under the hollywoodland sign on West Live Oak Drive. Scott was delirious to have Grant back and chose to pretend that nothing involving Cherrill had ever happened.
An inconsolable Grant didn't have to pretend. Nothing had, and he hated himself for it.
* No one was less happy to see Tone get the role over Grant than Gable. He and Tone had been bit- ter rivals for the affections of Joan Crawford and did not like each other at all.