“As the tall, dark, and handsome male star, “Cary Grant' always stands for male beauty and desirability, whether in a Thirties screwball, a Forties film noir, or a Fifties romantic comedy. He consequently turns around the orthodox gendered difference between the one who looks (and so desires) and the one who is looked at (and so is being desired) …As a result Grant's trademark performance style is inseparable from his screen persona as the quintessential leading man of American romantic comedy.”
—STEVEN COHAN
During his exit negotiations with Paramount, Grant, aware that he was about to challenge the freelance jinx, put together a team of experts to help him do so. For the first time in his acting career, he officially signed with an agent. To find one he liked, he reached all the way back to his early days with the Pender troupe, where he had first met Frank W. Vincent, at the time a young manager for theatrical talent. Vincent had taken a liking to Archie Leach and, at Lomas's request, had kept an eye on him the entire time he toured on the Orpheum circuit. Vincent had since become a successful Hollywood agent, forming a business partnership with Harry Edington. By the time Grant signed on, the agency's formidable roster included Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks, Leopold Stokowski, Rita Hayworth, Mary Martin, Rosalind Russell, Claire Trevor, Louis Jourdan, Nigel Bruce, Joel McCrea, and Edward G. Robinson.
The first thing Vincent did for Grant was to negotiate the terms of his exit from Paramount. He did it cleverly, offering to have Grant renew for $75,000 a picture, plus story approvals. Grant wanted to break out of his tuxedo roles and venture into comedy. As Vincent knew he would, Zukor rejected that proposal and countered that Grant must make a onetime payment to the studio of $11,800 to buy out the remaining months on his contract (based on his present weekly salary and the days he still owed Zukor) and agree to one final loan-out, for which Paramount would collect the fee. Vincent quickly agreed, and just for that Grant was a free agent.
The loan-out was to Harry “King” Cohn, the iniquitous, self-styled-toughguy head of Columbia Pictures, the so-called Poverty Row of the majors. Zukor may have done it at least in part as an act of vengeance against Grant, for Cohn's reputation as a vulgarian, womanizer, and tantrum-throwing tyrant often overshadowed and undervalued the quality of the films his studio produced, at times to the detriment of the actors, producers, and directors who made them.
Cohn wanted Grant for one movie, Robert Riskin's When You're in Love. Vincent, however, saw an opportunity to make a unique deal for Grant and offered Cohn and Columbia a nonexclusive four-picture deal that came reasonably close to the magic figure that had sent Zukor running for the medicine cabinet—a guaranteed $50,000 for the first two pictures (above Paramount's fee) and $75,000 for the final two. The only proviso Cohn wanted, and it was a smart one, was that Grant had to make at least one movie a year for Columbia. To Grant, who had been averaging five films a year at Paramount (for approximately one-tenth of the money), that seemed the easiest part of the bargain. Then Vincent showed what he was capable of, why he was regarded as one of the best agents in the business. Before the ink was dry on the Columbia deal, he went to RKO Radio and struck the same nonexclusive four-picture deal, guaranteeing them as well a Grant movie a year for the next four years.
Vincent knew what he was doing when he chose these two studios with which to negotiate Grant's future. Both Columbia and RKO desperately needed a new leading man to compete with the big guns locked in at Paramount, MGM, and Warners, and in Cary Grant he had one of the best candidates. Still, it was an avant-garde deal in many ways, not the least of which was financial. Because of the standard contract system, it was unheard of for actors to simultaneously sign with more than one studio for more than one picture, and everyone in the business except Vincent and Grant felt the risk was too great. Grant's take was, in fact, just the opposite; he felt he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by making this daring attempt to resurrect his stalled career. As far as Vincent was concerned, Grant had the talent and looks to become Hollywood's number one leading man. And if he succeeded, Vincent knew, no one would care anymore about the multiplecontract deal.
To complete the transition from contract player to freelance actor, Grant resigned from the studio-controlled Academy, which did not look favorably upon actors signing contracts with two studios at the same time. It was something he was delighted to do.
The plot of When You're in Love involves a “wealthy tramp artist” (played by Grant, in a role that once again echoed his idol Chaplin's great screen persona), a characterization often evoked by studios during the 1930s to romanticize the grim reality of the Depression. For a fee, the tramp marries a Mexican entertainer (Grace Moore, at the time one of Columbia's biggest female stars) to bring her legally into the country. Once they cross the border, they part, only to meet again later on and realize they are, after all, truly in love. Fade to gold.
Or so Cohn hoped. He made the picture to break out Robert Riskin, for several years Frank Capra's screenwriting partner on a series of enormously popular (and populist) movies that had helped keep the studio in business. After the success of Capra's 1936 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Riskin, believing his writing collaborator/director had always gotten too much of the credit for their films, was eager to branch out on his own (a move that, not surprisingly, caused a lifelong rift between him and the egomaniacal Capra).
Unfortunately, the Riskin/Capra magic could not be generated by Riskin without Capra, and despite a few glowing reviews—such as Time magazine's, which declared, “Following the pattern of It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, in which Director Capra established Clark Gable and Gary Cooper as comedians, Director Riskin herein does the same thing for Cary Grant”—Grant's first film as a freelance actor flopped badly and became another in an increasingly long line of his pictures that failed to make back their costs. While his four-picture deals with Columbia and RKO were technically solid, he knew that without a hit, they could very well become the last films he would ever make in America.
Grant then went directly into Rowland V. Lee's The Toast of New York at RKO, but despite a sharp script by Dudley Nichols, top costars Edward Arnold and Jack Oakie, and leading lady Frances Farmer, this bloodless biography of robber-baron Jim Fisk, effectively denatured by the Hays Office, featured Grant shoehorned into yet another standard-issue tuxedo romance.
Nevertheless, Grant wanted to properly celebrate his freedom from Paramount and his deliverance into the Hollywood nouveau riche. To do so, he asked Scott to cohost a series of parties at the beach house, a place where previously very few “outside” celebrities had been invited. For the next several months, they turned the place into a weekend salon filled with actors, actresses, writers, directors, the San Simeon set, and dozens of leading ladies and starlets from Grant's two new studios. Among the most frequent guests were Howard Hughes, playwright Moss Hart, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Laurence Olivier (Larry O. to friends), and one of Grant's favorites, Noël Coward.
Grant and Scott quickly became the most gracious and charming hosts in Malibu. Grant's dazzling charm was the talk of the town, and his understated but barbed commentary about everything from Cohn's addiction to sturgeon to the lack of panties worn by Jean Harlow during the shooting of Suzy kept everyone in stitches, while Scott kept the champagne flowing. Caviar was consumed by the bucketful. Coward, a well-known homosexual, usually stayed over at the beach house on party nights, and his flamboyant, silk-robed presence always started the beach set buzzing with good-natured comments like “The queen has returned to her colony.”
Coward was actually one of very few allowed to stay overnight, and whenever he did so he loved to play tricks on his two hosts, especially Grant, the more sensitive and therefore vulnerable of the two. Coward was aware that Grant had costarred with some of the most famous women in Hollywood, and that it would therefore be difficult to “throw” him with star quality; there was, however, one he knew who would bring Grant to his knees. After arranging for her to come by the house, Coward called Grant at the studio and informed him that Greta Garbo was in Malibu and wanted to meet him. Garbo happened to be a friend of Dorothy Lamour, who, despite his newlywed status, had lately been “romantically linked” with Scott, and was eager to see his and Grant's bachelor lair that she had heard so much about. Coward knew that Garbo had been an idol of Grant's since his Broadwaymatinee-idol days. One time back then, Grant had once confessed to Coward that he had spotted the actress at the Astor Hotel on Forty-fifth Street and silently and carefully followed her all the way back to her own hotel, unable to work up enough courage to walk up to her and introduce himself.
Grant went dry-mouthed as he hung up the phone, and headed directly for his car. When he got to the house, he was greeted by Coward, who had a mischievous grin on his face as he made the formal introductions. At first Grant was too stunned to speak. At last he stuck out his hand and said, “Oh, Miss Garbo, I'm so happy you met me!”
Howard Hughes, on the other hand, was someone Grant, from their first meeting, felt extremely comfortable around. Hughes, like Grant, had a profound mistrust for the film industry. His mania for total control rivaled that of Chaplin without the accompanying artistic genius or business acumen. Like Chaplin, he loved women, and he loved the fact that they loved Grant. Beautiful bathing-suited babes were never scarce around the weekend soirées—young juicy girls with thick red lips, blue eyes, and hopeful breasts who were there because of Grant, and upon whom Hughes feasted like a frog on crickets.
One of the first things Grant did with his newly enriched bank account was to add a second, outdoor pool to the beach house that was only twenty-five feet from the sands of the Pacific. Oceanside pools were Hollywood's latest status symbol, and Grant insisted to Scott, an Olympic-level swimmer, that they had to have one. It quickly became a magnet for girls in bathing suits. One of the women Hughes swept off the Grant/Scott poolside was Ginger Rogers, at the time one of RKO's most popular screen “princesses.” This produced a slightly awkward situation for Grant, who had been caught in the middle of Hughes's increasingly strained relationship with Katharine Hepburn, both of whom he considered his friends. Moreover he had a secret crush on Rogers himself from the time he had been introduced to her while visiting the set of Roberta, the musical starring Rogers, Fred Astaire, Irene Dunne, and Scott.
Still, as far as Grant was concerned, he was not going to make any moral judgments about Hughes's behavior, especially so soon after the sudden, shocking death of his first great discovery and former lover Jean Harlow (Grant's costar in Suzy) at the age of twenty-six, after complications from uremic poisoning. If anything, he wanted to be there for Hughes, and therefore wore his unrequited love for Rogers as a badge of friendship.
Despite his new attempts at sociability, Grant much preferred solitude and found something close to it with, of all people, the otherwise flamboyant Hughes. Like Grant, Hughes was a man of few words, perhaps due to the shyness he had developed growing up in the shadow of his empire-founding father, whose early death left an emotional void that Hughes would have trouble filling for the rest of his life. Grant admired Hughes's extraordinary physical and social advantages—his tall, muscular physique and handsome face, his inherited wealth, and his resistance to socializing in crowds larger than the number of fingers he had on one hand. Scott, on the other hand, was always up for a good time, a quick laugh, cocktails at five, parties that lasted until dawn, early-morning swims, long luxurious sunbaths, and thiswill-fix-everything massages. Grant much preferred going to bed early, getting up early, reading the paper with a cup of coffee by the pool, listening to classical music on the radio, and on afternoons when he wasn't working, reclining on a canvas lounge on the sand with his feet hanging over either side being lapped by the cool incoming saltwater tide.
Not long after they met, whenever they were both free Grant and Hughes would spend afternoons that sometimes lasted until the evening sitting silently together in Hughes's massive mahogany den while he studied blue- prints for his various self-designed airplanes, and Grant smoked a cigarette, sipped a scotch, read a book. As Grant later remembered, “Howard was the most restful man I have ever been around. We could sit for hours together and never say a word.” According to Hughes's housekeeper, Beatrice Dowler, whenever the two dined together, most often only a few sentences were spoken between them during the entire meal.
But when they did speak about something important, it was usually Hughes giving advice, and Grant listening respectfully to what he had to say—mostly about women. To Hughes, who was likely unaware of Grant's homosexual desires—he either didn't know or didn't want to know—Grant seemed, if anything, too much in awe of women to see through what they were “selling” men and calling it love. Hughes often told Grant that he was a sucker for what he called “women's moneymakers.”
As they got closer, Hughes continued to enthrall Grant with the thrill of flying. Although he had no desire to get behind the stick himself, Grant was impressed by Hughes's virile hobby and was gratified to have a friend who actually lived the kind of adventurous life, filled with women, danger, and excitement, that he, Grant, only portrayed onscreen. With Hughes, no twitching flicker separated fantasy from reality.
When, early in 1937, Hughes announced that he was going to fly his H-1 Winged Bullet, as he called it, out of Burbank nonstop to Newark, Grant, along with the rest of the country, held his breath while following the entire escapade on radio and was greatly relieved when Hughes safely landed seven hours, twenty-eight minutes, and twenty-five seconds after takeoff, establishing an aviation record that would last for many years. This was the flight that made Hughes an American flying folk hero, nearly as popular as one of his own idols, all-American aviator Charles “Lucky” Lindbergh, whose 1927 solo flight from New York to Paris had brought flying into the forefront of the world's consciousness. On his return trip, Hughes stopped in Washington, D.C., where President Roosevelt greeted him at the White House and awarded him the Harmon International Trophy. When he arrived in Los Angeles, Grant threw a huge party for Hughes at the famed Trocadero nightspot on Sunset Boulevard.
Noticeably absent was the fellow who had introduced the two, Randolph Scott. Indeed, the more time Grant spent with Hughes, the less he saw of Scott. It was an odd juxtaposition: Scott had always been the wealthier of the two and the more sociable, and although Grant had gotten married first, Scott was the one who had made marriage work by finding a wealthy woman who conveniently happened to live two thousand miles away. He very much embodied what Hughes had been trying to explain to him about women, “love,” and “playing it smart.” And while Scott was not a complainer and never openly fought with Grant, he was extremely judgmental, especially about Grant's “folly” with Cherrill, something that had left a scar on the relationship between the two men.
Hughes's friendship also gave Grant perspective on the intensity of his sometimes smothering relationship with Scott, which now seemed at times more like a marriage than … whatever it was that neither could exactly define. Even during the very occasional visits by Scott's wife, who would always ask why Grant was still there, the answer to that question was never discussed between the two men.
One morning while grant was sunning himself by the pool, his next- door neighbor, legendary comic film director Hal Roach, dropped by for a noontime swim. The two had become good friends, and Grant had given Roach a standing offer to come by anytime he felt like going for a dip.
Roach, like Mack Sennett, had been a successful producer of silent comedy, but unlike Sennett, he had been able to continue delivering funny movies that talked. Of all the forms of filmmaking, comedy was the most pro- foundly changed by the advent of sound: the emphasis necessarily had to shift from the extraordinary visual hysterics of Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, and the other silent greats, sometimes for better and far more often for worse, to rapid-fire verbal humor. Among the most successful to make the transition were Laurel and Hardy, both of whom found voices that not only matched their silent-stare and arm-waving reactions but actually deepened the humor of their characters, so much so that in 1932 The Music Box (MGM) won the “Short Subject” Oscar for Roach and the comedy team. Now, a year after his second Academy Award,* eager to move into feature films, and searching for a new feature property to produce, Roach had come across the popular Thorne Smith novel Topper, which he believed contained all the elements necessary to make a hit movie: a simple but funny plot, great characters, henpecked husbands, spirited wives, and ghosts. When George and Marion Kerby, high-flying socialites at home in tuxes and with Tiffany, are unexpectedly killed in a car accident, they return as sometimes visible, sometimes invisible apparitions. They then set about to help George's wealthy but submissive banker partner find liberation from the short leash of his well-meaning but bossy wife. Having made a number of ghost stories in both the silent and the sound eras with Laurel and Hardy, Roach knew they were surefire laugh-getters that showed what the screen could do that the stage couldn't.
That morning while having a dip in Grant's pool, Roach casually talked up his new project and pretended to suddenly be “struck” by the notion of casting Grant as George Kerby, the film's young romantic lead. Of course the whole thing had been planned, Grant knew it, and Roach knew he knew it. Amused by the unsubtlety of the charade, Grant laughed off the notion as part of the gag, but when Roach persisted, he gracefully declined the offer. His agent, he claimed, would never allow him to play it for anything below his new asking price, $50,000 a picture, which was far more, he believed, than Roach—who had come up in the era of five-dollar-a-day performers in short subjects whose entire budgets were often less than Grant's asking price— would ever agree to.
Undaunted, Roach raised the subject with Grant whenever he saw him, ignoring all suggestions to call Vincent and instead appealing to the friend- ship factor. Grant liked Roach and admired his films a great deal, particularly his silent comedies, so as a favor to him, he decided that if Roach agreed to make a percentage deal and the film could be done quickly enough, then he would say yes. Roach agreed and quickly hired director Norman Z. McLeod to direct Topper, a move that both surprised and bothered Grant. He had worked for McLeod before, in the Paramount ensemble production of Alice in Wonderland, and did not have fond memories of the experience. There was, in fact, little about that film that Grant had liked. He had hoped that Roach would hire someone more contemporary, someone with a greater flair for the patented Roach style of physical comedy.
In truth, McLeod had a terrific flair for it, having directed one of the best of the Paramount Marx Brothers features, Monkey Business (1931), a movie that captured them at their anarchic best. Moreover, he had worked with Roach before and, despite Grant's concerns, knew exactly what his producer wanted—speed, energy, and razor-sharp timing for a comedy about ghosts— and that is precisely what he delivered.
In truth, the real reason Grant had said yes to Roach had less to do with friendship than with ambition. Having finally won professional independence, more than ever he wanted to play comedy. As he reflected later on, “For years I had begged Paramount to let me do something besides straight romantic leads. I said I ought to be doing light comedy. They wouldn't listen. When my contract was up, and they offered to renew, I said, ‘Does choice of roles go with it?’ and they said no. So I didn't sign… The first [comedy] I did as a freelance was Topper.”
During filming, Roach came up with what he thought was a great plot twist, but Grant flatly refused to go along. It simply didn't fit into his longrange formulation for what he perceived as the “new Cary Grant.” Roach had decided midproduction that he wanted to turn the film into a satire of marriage by having the Kerbys retake their vows after their death and reemerge as ghosts. Then, if George Kerby still wanted Marion as his wife, he would have to pursue her all over again. Grant steadfastly rejected the idea, as he had promised himself after working with Mae West; if Constance Bennett's character wanted him, if any female character onscreen wanted him, from now on she was going to have to do the pursuing.
Roach, unaware of the reasons for Grant's refusal to woo Bennett onscreen, thought it incomprehensible. Men chasing women was the very stuff of comedy, a reflection of the way the world really was. After thinking about it awhile, he finally concluded that Grant's real reason could be explained in two words: Ginger Rogers. Oblivious to Grant's sexual orientation, and to his reluctance to compete with Howard Hughes for Rogers's affections, Roach concluded that Grant's pursuit of her must not be going well, otherwise he would have had her by now, and that he didn't want to risk losing her altogether by chasing another woman, even if only in a movie. Ironically, the inspired lunacy of this logic was far more original and amusing than anything Roach came up with for the final scenario of Topper.
One aspect of the film that did intrigue Grant was Norman McLeod's use of cartoon sketches to show his actors how he wanted them to look in a scene (as opposed to how he wanted them to act). The comedy of physical action was something Grant wanted to learn more about. McLeod used his sketches to show facial expressions, body positions, and overall mise-en-scène he wanted within each frame. Grant studied them until he felt he had the character McLeod was after clearly in his head. With the director's help, he experimented with the range of physical comedy he was capable of, not merely to heighten the Cary Grant screen persona but to fundamentally redefine it.
Grant's next challenge in this project was less creative than commercial. Roach wanted Grant to share top billing with his costar, Constance Bennett, which he was reluctant to agree to. Billing (then as now) translated into money in Hollywood, and one of the primary reasons Grant had ventured out on his own was that he no longer wanted to play the second-fiddle, aftercredit foil to Paramount's top female stars. But again, as a personal favor to Roach, he acquiesced.
Roach's first choice to play Cosmo Topper had been W. C. Fields, another former vaudevillian whom Grant very much admired and was looking forward to working with. When Fields turned the role down, Roach gave it instead to Roland Young. Ironically, earlier in his career Grant had played supporting roles in a number of Young's starring movies, when Paramount had believed Young was going to be Hollywood's next great leading man. Grant's part was by far the better one, but it still bothered him that, according to the credits, the title character belonged to Young.
Topper was released on July 16, 1937, and to the delight of both Roach and Grant, it was a huge success and captured the summertime imagination of audiences. It went on to be the second-highest-grossing film of the year, a giant career leap for Grant as well as a solid financial investment that paid off in huge dollar dividends. It was by far the most popular and best Cary Grant film to date, but before the year was over, Grant would surpass his work in Topper in every way.
By the time it opened, Grant had formed a chaste passion for yet another Hollywood starlet, this time the young and beautiful Phyllis Brooks, whom he had met one weekend early in the shooting of Topper.
That Friday evening he had driven with Ginger Rogers up the coast to San Simeon for one of the weekend tennis celebrity tournaments that Hearst loved to hold on his castle grounds. Grant's natural athleticism put him among the front ranks of Hollywood's players, second only to Chaplin, who had far less natural ability but played with much greater ferocity. Rounding out the weekend, as always, was a full roster of events, including horse riding, lavish dinners in the unimaginably ornate dining room, and feature-length movies screened in the castle's modern, fully equipped screening room. This weekend, as always, was hosted by William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies. Grant adored being in the company of Hearst and Davies, and they liked him as well, particularly Hearst. Grant was among the very few Hollywood celebrities equally welcomed at San Simeon and at the still-very- much-married Hearst's Sands Point mansion in New York, where the eastern intellectual elite were the favored privileged guests.
Grant got a kick out of the dramatic predinner cocktail entrance Hearst always made, alone and just before Davies; they would meet in the dining room and greet each other in beautiful formal wear, as Davies stretched out her hand for Hearst to kiss. He appreciated and respected their eccentric ways, such as their rigid alcohol policy (other than cocktails and wine), which Hearst enforced in deference to Davies's dislike for alcohol, something Grant and most of the other guests who liked to drink got around by stopping at David Niven's room before dinner and sharing the secret stash he always brought with him and kept hidden under his Richelieu guest bed.
This weekend's lush gathering was attended by dozens of Hollywood's most glamorous figures, including Chaplin, whom Grant finally got to meet, Tyrone Power, and his date for the weekend, Phyllis Brooks, “Brooksie” to her friends. Of all the guests at the affair, none caught Grant's eye more than the gorgeous young ingenue. Although he said nothing to her the entire weekend, after he left he could not forget her.
Phyllis Steiller (Brooks's real name) was a transplanted midwestern beauty who had come to Hollywood with the hope of parlaying her face and body into a film career. She had a naturally easy manner about her, a quick giggle, and a habit of running her hand through her hair before tossing it back. She also loved to swear like a sailor. In many ways, her personality, good looks, and salty manner resembled Carole Lombard's, which was how she managed to land a player development contract in 1934 at Universal. When it didn't happen for her there, she was let go; RKO picked up her contract, put her in a number of B movies, didn't renew her, and she landed next at Fox. By this time she was a now-and-again starlet, one of a number of pretty if nameless faces that could light up a screen like a sparkler on the Fourth of July, only to quickly burn out and be forgotten.
She was soon relegated to candy duty, assigned by studio execs to attend openings with their unattached male stars. Everyone welcomed her frequent presence at these events, even the cynical hatpin-in-the-rear gossips who smirked at any woman with a handsome Hollywood bachelor if there was no word of marriage lingering in the air. Louella Parsons in particular was especially fond of Brooks and never failed to write glowing passages whenever the beautiful young blonde showed up at a premiere.
Brooks was a natural night owl whose favorite haunt also happened to be Grant's, the Sunset Strip's Trocadero, where Hollywood's male motion picture royalty (and their current ladies-in-waiting) knew they could count on being effectively sheltered from the civilians forever seeking autographs, and the freelance photographers restricted to the front entrance in the hopes of catching a salable shot of the latest screen idol. It was at the Troc one night that Grant caught his next glimpse of the striking Brooks, on the arm of her agent, Walter Kane, who wore her like an expensive bauble he was looking to sell to the highest bidder with a movie deal thrown in.
That evening, Eleanor French, a friend of both Grant's and Brooks's, was at the Trocadero. A café club singer Grant knew from his theater days in New York, French had come out to the coast to vacation. He had always enjoyed her witty manner and the way she tilted her head to one side and smiled as she told her favorite off-color joke. When Grant asked her if he knew the young woman sharing a table with Kane, French smiled, said of course, and took him over and made the introduction.
As the night came to a close, Brooks insisted they all get together again sometime soon, and Grant, without hesitating, said his friend Randolph Scott was returning from a brief vacation in Virginia to begin work on his new film, Last of the Mohicans, and wouldn't it be sweet if they threw a welcome- home party in his honor. Brooks readily agreed, and the idea was sealed with the clank of three empty glasses.
What seemed like a happy coincidence was, in fact, anything but. Brooks had recognized Grant that night as soon as he had walked into the club. At the time she still had quite a crush on Tyrone Power but knew nothing could come of it because of the iron lock that ice-skating star Sonja Henie had on his emotions. (Henie happened to be out of the country when Brooks accom- panied Power to San Simeon.) An eligible bachelor was her prey, and as far as she could tell, none was more eligible than the one actor she had met who was single and even more handsome than Tyrone Power—Cary Grant. Knowing her girlfriend Eleanor was coming out for a visit, that she knew Grant, and that he liked to frequent the Troc, she had worked out an elaborate (and unnecessary) plan of introduction, apparently unaware that Grant had noticed her as well that weekend at San Simeon. When he ended the evening by inviting them both to help throw a party to welcome home Scott, Brooks was, to say the least, elated.
Brooks was soon dating Grant on a regular basis, and within weeks was referring to him as “the love of her life.”
* Roach won again in 1936 for Best Comedy (One Reel) Live Action Short Subject, for Bored of Education, starring the Our Gang kids.