“Cary Grant is a great comedian, a great light comedian. He's very good-looking, but he's also very funny. That makes a devastating combination, and that's why he's been a star so long.”
—FRANK CAPRA
Shortly after Grant arrived in Mexico City, Barbara Hutton flew down to be with him, bringing with her the happy news that her divorce from Count Reventlow was finalized. Before they had signed off on their financial agreement, the count had been detained in Denmark by the Nazi occupiers and supposedly, under “threat of death,” been forced to collaborate with them on certain “matters of security.” One of the “rewards” for his cooperation was his captors' promise that he would be allowed to sign his divorce papers, receive his money from Hutton, hand most of it over to them, and be released.
Grant and Hutton stayed together in Mexico through Labor Day, after which they returned, separately, to Los Angeles, where Hutton wrote to the Nazi officials in Denmark asking for written proof that her divorce from Reventlow was indeed finalized. That correspondence was copied without her knowledge and given to the American government. All during this time Hutton was unaware that she was the target of a secret FBI investigation and under constant surveillance by someone able to track her every move.
That someone was Cary Grant.
By 1941, at the end of nearly a decade of nonstop filmmaking in which he appeared in forty features, Grant desperately looked to slow down the pace. After the highly satisfying but intense experience he had making Suspicion, he wanted to choose his next projects more carefully to see if he could maintain the quality of acting Hitchcock had gotten out of him.
Unfortunately, he was unable to do so. Shortly after returning to Hollywood, Grant met with Frank Capra, once Columbia Pictures' hottest director, who had finally made good on his threat to leave Cohn and moved to Warner Bros., where he was about to make the screen version of the longrunning Broadway comedy Arsenic and Old Lace. Over lunch Capra told Grant that he was the only actor who could do justice to the role of Mortimer Brewster. The director was as good a salesman as he was a filmmaker. He had already offered the part to Bob Hope, who was eager to do it but couldn't get Paramount to agree to a loan-out. Capra had also approached Jack Benny, who said no, and even Ronald Reagan, who turned the part down, before Grant agreed to do it.
Production on Arsenic and Old Lace began that October. The plot of the movie centers on theater critic Mortimer's engagement to Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane), which triggers mayhem, murder, and other assorted bits of craziness by his murderous aunts and deranged uncle, leading him to believe any children he will have will inherit his family's madness. The fast-paced farce continues until the final moments, when Mortimer discovers he was actually adopted and can therefore marry Elaine without fear of her giving birth to another generation of lunatics.
As it turned out, Grant did not at all enjoy working with Capra, and in the years that followed, whenever asked, he always described his portrayal of Mortimer as his least favorite film performance. Although he liked Capra personally—“a dear, dear man”—he felt the film “was not my kind of humor… too much hysterical shouting and extremely broad double takes.” In truth he hated everything about the production. He thought the sets were wrong, too dark and stagy, the supporting cast—except for Jean Adair, for whom he had a special affection—too theatrical (both Josephine Hull and Adair, who played Mortimer's aunts, were borrowed by Capra for filming during their vacation from the still-running Broadway production), and the comedy bits too forced. According to screenwriter Julius Epstein, Capra was aware of the film's problems and meant to fix them with reshoots and editing. That plan changed when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that December 7, and Capra abruptly left Hollywood to join the Signal Corps. Grant then donated his entire $160,000 salary to the United Service Organization, the British War Relief, and the Red Cross.*
Two unexpected events happened during the shoot that deeply affected Grant. The first reached all the way back to when young Archie Leach was touring with the Pender troupe; he had come down with rheumatic fever in Rochester, New York, and for several weeks was confined to his rooming-house bed, alone for most of the day. Jean Adair happened to be appearing at the same vaudeville house, heard about the boy whose only relatives lived in England, and made it a point to bring him flowers and fresh fruit every day until he recovered. When Capra introduced him to the actress on the first day of shooting, Grant immediately recognized her and asked if she did him. Of course, she replied, she had seen all his movies. When he told her he was that young acrobat who had taken ill in Rochester, she suddenly smiled, threw her arms around him, and pulled him close to her. While she didn't remember him by name (he was still Archie Leach at the time), she told him she thought there was something familiar about him.
The second event was Grant's unexpected reunion with his onetime roommate and companion Orry-Kelly, who by sheer coincidence happened to be the costume designer on Arsenic and Old Lace. Grant and Orry-Kelly spent a long evening together reminiscing about “the old days” and afterward promised to stay in touch.
They didn't.
In January 1942, back at Columbia, Grant made The Talk of the Town, produced and directed by George Stevens, an altogether forgettable film about a small-town love triangle that costarred Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman.* Just before shooting began, in the wake of America's entrance into World War II, the thirty-eight-year-old Grant—who was still not an American citizen and therefore ineligible for the draft—decided to do volunteer work for the Hollywood Victory Committee, where he helped organize bond rallies and celebrity hospital tours and hosted several stateside performances for servicemen.
That February, Grant was nominated for Best Actor for his performance in Penny Serenade. The other nominees were Walter Huston in William Dieterle's All That Money Can Buy (aka The Devil and Daniel Webster), Robert Montgomery in Alexander Hall's Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Orson Welles in his Mercury Players production of Citizen Kane, and Gary Cooper in Howard Hawks's Sergeant York. The race was really between Grant, considered the favorite, and Cooper.
The Academy dinner, hosted by Bob Hope, was held on February 26, 1942, at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Grant attended with Hutton and sat quietly through the progression of awards, until James Stewart, winner of the Best Oscar the year before, was introduced by Rosalind Russell to award both the Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor. After announcing that the Best Supporting Actor went to Donald Crisp for How Green Was My Valley, Stewart opened the envelope for Best Actor and, staring at the name for several seconds, looked up and let a wide grin cross his face as he announced Cooper's name. The room broke into cheers, and Cooper received a standing ovation as he walked to the microphone. In his familiar halting, wet-lipped style, he leaned over and said, “It was Sergeant Alvin York who won this award.” That brought on another round of applause.
Joan Fontaine then won Best Actress for her performance in Suspicion. Backstage, after congratulating Fontaine, a gracious Cary Grant took Hutton's hand and left the ceremonies, skipping all the parties, and went home. In the car he turned to Hutton and said that this was the last Academy Awards he was ever going to attend.
J. Edgar Hoover believed that Barbara Hutton was funneling significant amounts of money to the Nazis, via her second husband, in return for their continued guarantee of his safety. In June, when production wrapped on The Talk of the Town, another secret meeting took place in Washington between Grant and Hoover. Within two days of his return to Beverly Hills, Grant asked Hutton to marry him as soon as possible. She agreed, and a day later Frank Vincent, at Grant's insistence, had a prenuptial agreement drawn up that said should he and Hutton divorce, he would not get any of Hutton's money (which was mostly held in secret Swiss accounts) and she would not get any of his. The notion of the prenup likely came not from Grant or Vincent but from Hoover, who, in order to protect Grant from any future complications, did not want his finances to be connected to Hutton's. Within days, despite all the previous delays, Grant's application for citizenship was suddenly expedited, and on June 26, 1942, at the age of thirty-eight, Archibald Alec Leach found himself taking the oath of allegiance from Federal Judge Paul J. McCormick in Los Angeles, after which he was officially a citizen of the United States. Later that same day he legally changed his name to Cary Grant.
On July 7, Hutton, her girlfriend Madeleine Hazeltine, and eleven members of the Hutton personal staff caravaned from Beverly Hills to Frank Vincent's mountainside getaway just outside Lake Arrowhead for her wedding to be held that day. To ensure that no one in the press would discover what was about to happen, Vincent was somehow able to obtain two marriage licenses with both names left blank.
To further throw everyone off track, a few days before, Grant had begun filming Leo McCarey's Once Upon a Honeymoon, a zealous bit of wartime nonsense that he had reluctantly agreed to star in for RKO at the request of the FBI, which had “asked” Grant to make an explicitly anti-Nazi film. Barely a week into the shoot, Grant asked for and received a two-day leave.
On the morning of July 7, 1942, he drove to Lake Arrowhead, stopping on his way to buy flowers from a Beverly Hills shop, and arrived at Vincent's by noon. Less than an hour later a six-minute wedding ceremony took place, conducted by the local Lutheran reverend. Grant's only witness besides Vincent was his male secretary, Frank Horn. Notably absent were Randolph Scott, Howard Hughes, and any members of the Malibu Brit colony. That night the newlyweds returned to Beverly Hills, and the next morning Grant decided to enlist.
He took and passed an army physical and on August 4 was notified by the Adjutant General's Office that he was to report on September 15 for official induction. However, without any explanation, at the time or for the rest of his life, Grant never showed up, and nothing was ever again mentioned about his “enlistment” by anyone in or out of the government. Three months later, on December 11, his eligibility was mysteriously changed from 1A to 1H by the Selective Service. The only official reference to all this is buried in an internal RKO memorandum that reads as follows:
Washington suggests that they would like to have Cary Grant's name on their list of people who from time to time might do some temporary service. In each instance, if called upon, he will have an opportunity to say “yes” or “no” to whatever job is proposed and it is not at all certain that they will call upon him in any case. We understand that the type of work that he might be called upon to do would not be of the sort that would require him to drop out of whatever other activities he may be engaged in and the fact that he was doing the work would be publicized.
The studio source of this extraordinary document remains cloudy, but the source from “Washington” is, without question, J. Edgar Hoover. It assumes all responsibility for Grant's nonspecified “temporary service” in an unnamed organization and concludes with a promise of “publicity” that was standard FBI code for a Bureau coverup by way of media misdirection. In effect, the FBI had put the studio on notice that Grant was to be made available whenever they wanted him.* This marked a dramatic shift in Grant's political activities, a far cry from the days when Hoover had personally warned Grant that he was in danger of violating the Neutrality Act (something, of course, that lost all meaning when America formally declared war on Japan, Germany, and the rest of the Axis powers).
Immediately after getting married, Grant went right back to making movies. He finished the aptly named Once Upon a Honeymoon and followed it with H. C. Potter's equally fortuitously titled Mr. Lucky, in which he looked absolutely shimmering as a handsome, roguish, draft-dodging gambler hustling the moneyed set aboard a cruise ship, only to be redeemed in the last reel by finding true love and renouncing his evil ways. The character was an unusual one for Grant to play and ventured almost beyond the limit of what an audience would accept from him. Manny Farber, writing in The New Republic, described the film, and Grant's performance in it, as “interesting, like a bad salad with an intelligent dressing.”
With Mr. Lucky in the RKO can, Grant waited for his next assignment while the war raged on. In May 1943 he made a brief appearance at a Hollywood War Bond Drive, where Jack Warner buttonholed him and asked him to please play the starring role in Destination Tokyo. After the government's initial neutrality warning, and until he had been granted full U.S. citizenship, Grant had steadfastly refused to appear on film in any military uniform. He did not want to be seen as a foreign visitor portraying American heroes, fearing it might offend too many people and result in his somehow being asked to leave the country. With all of that resolved, however, he was more than willing to appear in Warner's picture.
To acquire Grant's services, Warner had to go through Columbia, where Grant had extended his nonexclusive contract. Columbia agreed to the loanout in return for the services of Warner star Humphrey Bogart for Sahara (a role Grant had turned down), clearing the way for Grant to star in Destination Tokyo (in a role previously rejected by Gary Cooper).
Directed and cowritten by Delmer Daves and Albert Maltz, based on an original story by Steve Fisher that appeared in Liberty magazine, and made with the full cooperation of the U.S. Navy, Destination Tokyo tells the story of an American torpedo submarine's daring and highly dangerous spy mission into the heart of Tokyo Bay. In the climax of the film the submarine sinks several Japanese warships, miraculously escapes from screen-shaking depth charges, and returns home to San Francisco.
Six weeks of filming began in September 1943 on a Burbank set that the studio built to the exact physical specifications of the interior of a naval submarine. The actors were directed to project the quiet authority of men on a mission. They talk in the hushed whispers of the righteous and acknowledge each other's bravery with smiles of pride and recognition. The only woman in Destination Tokyo is Faye Emerson, who was hardly even in the film until the end, when, home at last, the heroic Captain Cassidy (Grant) is reunited with his wife and child at the military dock. The film ends with their warm embrace—the implied reason “why men fight.”
Grant enhanced his excellent performance by having thirty duplicate uniforms on hand at all times so he would always look immaculate onscreen—the epitome of the sleeves-rolled-up, handsome, manly, gallant American he envisioned his character to be.
Destination Tokyo was critically well received and proved to be a box office smash when it opened on New Year's Day 1944, two weeks before Grant's fortieth birthday. According to Newsweek, “Even moviegoers who have developed a severe allergy for service pictures should find Destination Tokyo among the superior films of the war… Cary Grant gives one of the soundest performances of his career; and John Garfield, William Prince, Dane Clark, and the rest of the all-male cast are always credible either as ordinary human beings or extraordinary heroes.”
Because filming on Destination Tokyo had dragged on well beyond its original six-week schedule, Grant was forced to shoot his sequences at the Warner lot during the day, then scuttle back to Columbia Pictures, where he had already begun work on his next film. Alexander Hall's Once Upon a Time, costarring Janet Blair and the venerable James Gleason, was a fluffy life-on-Broadway comedy about, of all things, a caterpillar who stands upright and dances whenever he hears the song “Yes Sir, That's My Baby.” Harveyesque in its concept—no one can see the caterpillar except Jerry Flynn (Grant)—the story, originally written and produced for the radio, was one of the more glaring miscues of Grant's prime career.
The overlapping production on the two films resulted in Grant's often staying overnight at the studio and sleeping in his dressing room—something that understandably displeased his bride, Hutton, who resented her husband's frequent absences. Increasingly during their first year of marriage, while Grant stayed either at the studio or alone at their rented house, Hutton attended lavish parties without him, thrown mostly by her transplanted European friends of questionable title (and apparently little money, as she usually paid for everything, something the always-parsimonious Grant resented). Alone at the rented house one night, Grant—who liked to be in bed by eleven when he was working, wearing only the tops of his pajamas, a cup of hot tea on the night-table, and reading a good book—had been completely captivated by None But the Lonely Heart, a novel by Richard Llewellyn, whose previous work, How Green Was My Valley, had been made into a spectacular movie by John Ford.
None But the Lonely Heart is set in poverty-stricken London in the days leading up to World War II. The hero, Ernie Mott, still not completely over the death of his father in the last war, works in his mother's secondhand store to help her get by. At one point he becomes so desperate for money that he joins a band of thieves and is nearly caught. When he finally gets home, he is shocked to find that his mother has been arrested for trafficking in stolen goods. He soon learns the reason for her action: she is dying of cancer and wants to make sure she leaves something behind for him. She dies in his arms in prison, and Ernie promises himself a better life.
Grant told RKO he was interested in the book, and Charles Koerner, the new head of the studio, immediately secured the rights to it with a preemptive bid of $60,000 and then agreed to Grant's $150,000 asking price plus 10 percent of the profits to star in it.
Clifford Odets, the Broadway playwright who had gained great fame (but not a lot of money) dramatizing the plight of the working class (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Golden Boy), was looking for a fat paycheck before being drafted into the army. He asked his agent to find him something quick and lucrative in Hollywood, and RKO responded by hiring him to adapt None But the Lonely Heart for the screen.
He actually began working on the script before Grant's deal was finalized and was shocked when he found out that the forty-year-old actor had been signed to play Ernie Mott, who was only nineteen in the novel and still living with his mother. Odets tried several different ways to make the disparity work, until he came up with a story that aged the boy and made the mother slightly younger, retaining the elements of their character in a more believable mold. Grant, who had also been concerned about the age factor, felt that Odets's screenplay so perfectly captured the essence of both the story and the characters that he called Koerner and insisted that Odets be hired to direct the movie, as well.
Not wanting to rock any boats, Koerner quickly agreed, which is how it came to be that the young Philadelphia-born and New York–based playwright, one of the founders of the Group Theater, who had never before set foot in Hollywood or directed so much as a foot of film, was hired to helm a big-budget movie on its journey from page to screen.
During production, Grant and Odets became good friends, and Odets helped Grant connect the film's dramatic high points to the touchstones of his own early life, particularly his relationship with his mother and the hardships of life in working-class London. Part apologia, part autobiography, part shrine to Elsie, and part social criticism, the film remained one of Grant's personal favorites.*
In an increasingly politically polarized 1940s Hollywood, however, the presence of the openly left-wing Odets, a onetime member of the American Communist Party, enraged the industry's powerful conservative faction. Odets became one of the first targets of the notorious Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), founded by rightwing extremists Walt Disney, William Randolph Hearst, and director Sam Wood (and later headed by John Wayne).* The Alliance actively encouraged J. Edgar Hoover to launch an intensive “investigation into Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry.” The FBI's 1944 investigation was a prelude to the postwar witch-hunts to come.
One of the first things the FBI did was to examine in detail the content of Hollywood's wartime films, and they singled out five as “among the industry's worst, i.e., most pro-Communist offerings to date”: Herbert J. Biberman's The Master Race, which he also wrote; Citizen Tom Paine; H. C. Potter's Mr. Lucky; Delmer Daves's Destination Tokyo; and Odets's None But the Lonely Heart.† Amazingly, of the five movies the Bureau cited, three starred Cary Grant. A Bureau memo then stated that the following Hollywood celebrities had “known Communist connections”: Lucille Ball, Ira Gershwin, John Garfield, Walter Huston, and Cary Grant. Grant's “known Communist connection,” according to the FBI, was Clifford Odets. Later on, in 1947, during the first round of House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings (brought to Hollywood at the urging of the MPA), Lela Rogers (the avenging mother of Ginger Rogers), who had been hired by RKO to serve as its resident “expert” on Communist infiltration, testified before the Committee that in her opinion None But the Lonely Heart's despair and hopelessness were nothing more than Communist propaganda, citing as her proof the single line in the screenplay where Ernie Mott's mother tells him she is not going to get him to work in the secondhand store so he can squeeze pennies out of the little people poorer than he is.
She also cited Destination Tokyo for a single line of dialogue. Albert Maltz, who had written the film's screenplay (and would go on to become one of the so-called Hollywood 10 during the 1950s round of HUAC investigations), has Captain Cassidy (Grant) say after his submarine is almost blown up by an enemy bomb that was stamped “Made in the USA,” “Appeasement has come home to roost, men.” While the meaning of the line seems clear enough—an ironic comment on the sale of American munitions overseas before the war—it somehow came to be interpreted by Rogers and the committee as Communist propaganda. John Garfield, Grant's costar in the film, was eventually called to testify at the second HUAC hearings, denied he was ever a Communist, and was subsequently blacklisted, as was Maltz. Unable to find work, Garfield turned increasingly to drink and died prematurely of a heart attack in 1952, at the age of thirty-nine.*
Yet Cary Grant—whose name and movies turned up repeatedly in these FBI's investigations; who starred in three of the five movies cited by the FBI's investigation into Communist infiltration; who was close friends with several of those later called before HUAC and accused of being Communists; who had avoided military service first in England and later in America; who refused to appear in any patriotic movies before being granted citizenship; who married a woman who had once renounced her American citizenship to marry a suspected Nazi sympathizer whose closest friends were either known or suspected Nazis or Nazi sympathizers—remained completely untouched and unsullied by both the FBI and the HUAC.
After an examination of existing files of others and related sources, the only logical and unavoidable conclusion is that Grant was protected by the one man in Washington with the power to do so—J. Edgar Hoover—most likely as part of a deal made with the FBI and the British government. This “deal” allowed Grant to avoid prosecution for the Philippine bond scandal, kept him out of wartime service in both Britain and America, allowed him suddenly to switch citizenship (making possible his marriage to Hutton and better access to the accountability of her money), and kept the HUAC hounds from nipping at his especially tempting heels. Grant's part of it—and what had made him so angry after that initial call from the British War Office—was his forced agreement to serve as one of Hoover's domestic “volunteer” spies. There can be little doubt that Cary Grant was a special agent or contact for the FBI assigned prior to and during the war to spy on Barbara Hutton.
Given Hoover's known methods of intimidation and persuasion—which included threats of prosecution and/or exposure of the private sexual practices of those whose services he wanted, and Grant was clearly vulnerable on both counts—it is not difficult to see how effective Hoover's exercise of power, or more accurately, his abuse of it, could be.
Except for one incident, there is little evidence that Grant actually did anything for the Bureau, other than supplying information about Hutton's finances. She had an ongoing “friendship” with one Carlos Vejarnano Cassina. Grant, a bit jealous, believed Cassina was pretending to be romantically interested in Hutton to get to her money, and he was soon arrested by the FBI as a Nazi spy. When taken into custody, a personal letter of recommendation was found in his coat from Hutton for a highly sensitive defense job that Cassina was trying to get. After keeping him under surveillance for months, the FBI had known just when to pounce. Grant had been present the day Hutton handed Cassina the letter.*
In 1944, after finishing work on None But the Lonely Heart, Grant looked forward to the return of Hutton's only son, Lance, who had been away for six months in New York visiting his father, the count. Reventlow had suddenly been released by the Nazi authorities in Denmark, flown directly to New York City, remarried, and settled into life in a luxurious Park Avenue apartment, all without any visible means of support. Grant was genuinely fond of the boy and enjoyed playing ball with him and taking him around Hollywood to see the sights. That July, when Lance arrived in Pacific Palisades, he was dropped off by representatives of the count, who delivered a message to his ex-wife that he intended to seek full custody of their son.
One week later Lance disappeared. Fearing he had been kidnapped, Grant called the police, and a frantic search ensued. Police swimmers searched the shallow coastal waters in case the boy had accidentally drowned. A day later Grant and Hutton received word from the count that his men had taken the boy and secretly transported him to Canada, out of the clutches of his ex-wife and beyond the reach of American law.
The strain of the kidnapping finally brought Grant's already-shaky marriage to an end. Hutton had railed at him about it for weeks, blaming Grant for “pushing” her ex-husband to take her son away, referring to the fact that the count had managed to get an injunction preventing Grant from being alone with the boy because, the document claimed, Lance had told him that Grant persistently used “foul language.” It was a provocative charge that could easily explode into something much uglier for Grant should the courts ever decide to bring charges of child abuse against him.
By early August Grant had had enough. One night he quietly packed his bags, left the house without saying a word, and moved into a temporary apartment in Beverly Hills he had secretly rented the week before.
The next day an angry Hutton announced to the press that she and Grant had separated. Furthermore, she wanted to make clear, she was the one who had decided to end the marriage, not her husband, and there was “no chance of reconciliation.”
In February 1945, after several months thinking it over, Grant filed for divorce, finalized at a single fifteen-minute hearing held later that summer, during which it was agreed that because of their prenuptial agreement, neither party would receive any money from the other. Hutton insisted that Grant keep the many expensive gifts she had lavished on him, a trove that included several hundred thousand dollars' worth of diamond watches, cufflinks, and other assorted jewelry. When the judge asked her why she thought her husband was filing for divorce, she paused for a few seconds and then, with a smirk on her face, said that they did not share the same circle of friends.
* The film was withheld from release until 1944, when the original Broadway production finally closed. A clause in the contract between the producers and Warners prevented the film from opening until the show's stage run ended. That was fine with Grant, who hoped the film would somehow just disappear.
* This was the only film Colman and Grant made together. At a studio screening of the film, Grant and Barbara Hutton arrived fifteen minutes late, and Hutton insisted on having the film restarted. This led to angry words between Colman and Grant and caused a rift that never completely healed. Source: William Frye, interview by the author.
* The author has been shown much of Barbara Hutton's FBI file and examined related files, tax returns, and court documents referred to in this chapter.
* At the 1970 Academy presentation ceremony in which he received his Honorary Oscar, None But the Lonely Heart was the only film from which Grant insisted Mike Nichols include a clip in his preaward montage.
* Odets joined the American Communist Party in 1934, a year before he gained fame as the author of the extremely successful, if overtly political, Waiting for Lefty.
†The author has been unable to find a listing of any film released in the 1930s or 1940s under the title Citizen Tom Paine.
* Odets somehow escaped the wrath of HUAC and went on to write several more screenplays, most notably Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success (with Ernest Lehman). His close friendship with Grant may have been part of the reason.
* Cassina was eventually acquitted of all charges.