A shockingly thin Cary Grant, still recovering from the infectious hepatitis he contracted in England during the making of I Was a Male War Bride (1949), is greeted upon his return to the States by future wife, Betsy Drake. At the time, Grant was 45 years old and Drake was 26. (AP Wide World Photos)
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“I've been called the longest lasting young man about town. It's ridiculous for a man in his fifties, but then until thirtyfive a man is often a self-centered idiot. After thirty-five he should begin to make more sense. Sufficient kicks in the rear over the years do make a difference.”
—CARY GRANT
On August 26, 1948, Cary Grant and Betsy Drake left together for Germany, where Grant had agreed to star in Howard Hawks's postwar military comedy, I Was a Male War Bride. Grant had agreed to star in the film only after much cajoling from Hawks, who had signed a new four-picture deal at 20th Century–Fox and was, a decade later, finally in a position to do a follow-up of sorts to Bringing Up Baby.
After World War II, many European countries froze all foreign assets, including $24 million of 20th Century–Fox's money. That left the studio little choice but to go to where its money was and make movies there. I Was a Male War Bride was one of twenty-four such productions the studio scheduled to be shot on location in Europe in the late 1940s. Hawks, who had just completed principle photography for the one and only independent film of his career, the classic western Red River, seized the opportunity to make the German-based comedy. To get Grant to say yes, Hawks agreed to the everparsimonious actor's insistence that Betsy Drake accompany him on the entire overseas shoot, all her expenses paid by the studio out of the film's budget, including a visit by the both of them to Bristol so he could introduce her to Elsie.
Howard Hughes was not happy about Hawks's getting Grant to be in his film. He had wanted Grant to continue working at RKO, but for both professional and personal reasons, Grant had declined all of Hughes's offers. For one thing, the intensity of their friendship suffered by what Grant felt was Hughes's overbearing and unfair interference during the making of Every Girl Should Be Married. Grant considered Schary a good friend as well, and although he did not say anything at the time, he did not appreciate having to watch him be bullied by Hughes.
Moreover, a growing postwar political schism was dividing Hollywood's Left and Right. And while Hughes was a staunch conservative, active in the HUAC machinations, Grant remained resolutely liberal and was particularly outraged that Hollywood's powerful, fanatical right-wing forces, to which Hughes was completely committed, had Charlie Chaplin at the top of their hit list.
The Charles Lederer, Leonard Spigelgass, and Hagar Wilde script for I Was a Male War Bride was based on the best-selling autobiographical novel by Henri Rochard, which recounted the trouble he had run into as a Frenchborn soldier trying to marry an American woman. Military marriages between occupying soldiers and native civilians were popular throughout the 1940s and 1950s and the subject of several postwar movies, including Sayonara, Joshua Logan's grim Academy Award–winning 1957 film adaptation of James Michener's best-selling novel. In I Was a Male War Bride, the subject was treated much more lightly, as the title character, played by Grant, winds up sneaking aboard a U.S.-bound transport by dressing as a female officer, something Grant found unbelievably funny, having grown up in the world of British music hall humor, where “going drag” was a longtime staple of Saturday-night skits. In fact, most people tend to remember I Was a Male War Bride as a film that Grant spent entirely in drag, although he actually spends less than ten minutes in a dress, near the end of the film, and does so quite unconvincingly. The essential plot contrivance of I Was a Male War Bride has Captain Henri Rochard (Grant, playing a “suave French captain” without the slightest hint of any accent other than his usual light Bristol seesaw) in love with American WAC officer Lieutenant Catherine Gates (Ann Sheridan), who also happens to be his assistant. They go through a tumultuous courtship that ends in matrimony but leaves the couple no chance to consummate their union. It is postwar Europe, and Captain Rochard, a French citizen, cannot accompany his American-born wife to the United States unless he enters under the newly restrictive immigration policies, whose only military exemption is the category of “war bride.” At this point, he disguises himself as a civilian woman.
Grant's first stop on the way to Germany was London, where he met up with Hawks for preliminary rehearsals at Shepperton Studios. The first time Grant put on a dress, he performed a drag show for the director, exaggerating all his disguised character's feminine gestures. Hawks didn't think it was at all funny and advised Grant to play the character as straight as possible. Being an obvious straight male in disguise, as opposed to a gay man in a skirt, became the key to Grant's finding the humor in his character.
For the duration of the stopover, Grant, Drake, Hawks, and Sheridan were all put up at a luxurious apartment complex in Grosvenor Square, but even so it was difficult for Grant to ignore the postwar miasma that had settled upon bombed-out London, accentuated by endless fog and drizzle. Because of the heavy rehearsal schedule he did not have time to take Drake to Bristol, and Hawks had to assure him that he would be able to return to England during a break in the production schedule.
The next stop was Heidelberg, where actual filming began on September 28, 1948. Hawks shot his location exteriors first, preparing his actors to be ready to do their scenes at certain designated hours to catch the best light. This was Grant's first time shooting on the European mainland, and he was not used to the weather or the harsh postwar conditions. It was cold, the skies were gray, and meals were served up on tin plates. He especially did not appreciate having to use the same bathroom as Sheridan. Only Drake seemed to enjoy the whole thing and treated it as an adventure. She loved the idea of “roughing it,” as she put it, and even volunteered to help prepare the company's meals.
On weekends Grant and Drake flew either to Switzerland or to France, where they would live like royalty for two days before returning to the harsh environs of Heidelberg.
Production shifted back to London that December, and Grant planned to take Drake to Bristol his first free weekend. Unfortunately, shortly after they arrived, Sheridan came down with pleurisy, made worse by the relentless British winter, the fiercest the country had seen in twenty years. Grant had to remain on seven-day call to accommodate the improvised shooting schedule that now changed daily, and as a result he had to once again postpone taking Betsy to meet Elsie.
Two weeks later Sheridan had recovered enough for Grant to film his one remaining scene with her, after which he was scheduled to drive with Drake to Bristol. Before they could leave, however, Grant came down with a severe headache, his temperature spiked, and he began coughing. Hawks sent him back to his hotel early to get some much-needed rest. By two A.M. Grant had turned yellow. He was rushed to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with infectious hepatitis, complicated by jaundice, a potentially lethal combination that landed him in the intensive care ward.
He remained there for four weeks, during which time he dropped forty pounds. At one point his doctors told a nearly hysterical Drake to prepare herself for the worst, that Grant had less than a 10 percent chance of surviving. The problem, they explained to her, was the damage that years of hard drinking had done to his liver.
Grant's otherwise superb physical conditioning is what saved him. Upon his release from the hospital, he was ordered to remain in bed and was taken to a small suite in London's Mayfair Hotel. The only nurse he would allow to care for him was Drake, who stayed by his side around the clock and served his every need.
With production on the film once again shut down, the rest of the cast and crew, including Hawks, returned to the States. Two weeks later, after helping Grant move into Pamela Churchill's luxurious Mayfair flat that he had sublet, Drake left for Hollywood at his insistence to begin working on a new film, Dancing in the Dark, which he had helped her get.
Grant, alone with a new private nurse who was a complete stranger, lapsed into the worst depression of his life and, he later admitted to friends, thought seriously about suicide.
In January 1949, four months after his his initial attack and well on the road to recovery, Grant was finally well enough to go home. An elated Drake, still in the United States working on her film, arranged for his return to Los Angeles via the Dutch ship Dalerdijk. She chose that vessel because it was specially equipped for long-distance medical treatment. The Dalerdijk left Antwerp on March 10, with Grant aboard in a private suite that doubled as his personal infirmary. Unusually rough waters and bad weather made his confinement all that much more lonely an affair. Bedridden for the voyage, he suffered the entire two weeks it took for the ship to cross the Atlantic, pass through the Panama Canal, and eventually up the southern waters of the Pacific to Los Angeles Harbor.
In the meantime Hawks finished as much of the picture as he could and rescheduled the rest of Grant's scenes to be shot at the Fox studios. One scene in the movie has Grant driving through a haystack on a motorcycle. Only the first part of the scene had been completed before he took sick. Later on, while looking at the rushes, Hawks wryly commented that it looked as if “Cary came out [the other side] weighing twenty pounds less.”
Production on the film took an unusually long and grueling eight months, with a budget that had skyrocketed to over $2 million due to all the unforeseen delays. And, because of his illness, Drake never got to meet Elsie, the whole reason Grant had taken the movie.
In December 1948, during production of I Was a Male War Bride, Every Girl Should Be Married was released and received a lukewarm critical reception. Time magazine said of it, “Newcomer Betsy Drake seems to have studied, but not learned, the tricks and inflections of the early Hepburn. Her exaggerated grimaces supply one solid laugh—when hero Grant mimics them cruelly and accurately. In the past, Cary Grant has shown a talent for quietly underplaying comedy. In this picture, he has trouble finding comedy to play.”
Despite a respectable box office, Drake felt humiliated by her uniformly poor reviews and began to think about returning to New York and the live stage. Grant would have none of it. Still weak and underweight, he insisted he needed her by his side and promised to get her more film work. The only way to win over the critics, he told her, was by making good movies—hopefully ones they could appear in together.
Grant kept his word and used his influence at Fox to get Drake cast in the starring role of a film version of the 1931 stage musical The Bandwagon by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. The film, renamed Dancing in the Dark during production, was directed by Irving Reis (who had been fired from The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer because Grant disliked his work). The producer of the film was George Jessel, a good friend of Reis who, as a result of the bad blood between Reis and Grant, determined to make the shooting as unpleasant as possible for Drake, after the studio forced her, at Grant's “urging,” into the role originally intended for June Haver.
Dancing in the Dark opened shortly after Grant's return to Los Angeles in the spring of 1949 to scathing reviews, many of which once again focused on Drake. To keep her from directly packing her bags and boarding a plane back to the East Coast, Grant arranged for her to appear with him on the Lux Radio version of Every Girl Should Be Married. The show was broadcast June 27, and proved so popular (like every show Grant did on the radio) that it was repeated April 17 the following year, and afterward Grant agreed to do a radio serial based on Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, costarring Betsy Drake as his wife. He had been able to get the radio serial rights from Selznick, who always needed money, and Howard Hughes, who put up the money to buy them.*
Broadcasting was a medium Grant felt particularly comfortable in. According to his producer, William Frye, “He was very meticulous, exact, charming, funny, and sweet. Difficult, too, but I found working with him a lesson in professionalism. He would go over the scripts word for word, and if there was one that affected the character's point of view, he would insist that we change it to make it better.”
This proved to be not as easy as it sounds. The show's principal writers, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (who would later go on to write several Broadway shows, including Inherit the Wind, and numerous television serial dramas), made it difficult for Grant to change so much as a single word. Not long after production began, he stopped speaking to them and they to him. “One problem with the show,” Frye recalled later on, “was that Betsy, a lovable actress onscreen, had problems in radio because she had a slight stammer, and that held production up for hours on end because she needed special editing and reediting.”
Another thing Grant did to keep Drake with him was to bring up the subject of marriage.
That stopped Drake packing for good.
In June 1949 word from “unnamed sources” began appearing in the Hollywood gossip columns that Grant and Drake were secretly engaged. This produced a burst of fan hysteria and media frenzy that made the forty-fiveyear-old Grant and his twenty-six-year-old bride-to-be the number one subject on everyone's lips. It actually wasn't until July that Grant officially proposed to Drake, but his continuing health problems, related to a slowerthan-expected full recovery, forced them to leave open the date of their marriage. Grant spent much of the remainder of the summer undergoing tests at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, including the most comprehensive physical checkup he had ever had, to make sure nothing was lurking in his system that might be the reason for his inability to completely shake the lingering effects of his recent illness.
To his and Drake's relief, he emerged with a clean bill of health, although he did receive a warning to cut down on his drinking and give up smoking, neither of which he did. Satisfied that he was in good enough condition to get married, he and Drake secretly set the date.
I Was a Male War Bride opened on September 2, 1949, and Grant and Drake attended the gala New York premiere together. If the making of the film had been unexpectedly difficult for Grant, standing at the back of the Roxy Theater (where it had been moved from Radio City due to scheduling conflicts caused by its delayed opening), he felt completely gratified as he listened to the black-tie audience roar with approval several times throughout the screening. At the party afterward Grant was asked by a reporter from The New York Times for his reaction. “Having just seen the picture,” he said, “I was amazed how the audiences laughed themselves sick…I honestly feel it's the best comedy I've ever done.”
The film's first run lasted through October and grossed more than $4.5 million, making it by far 20th Century–Fox's biggest hit of 1949, its most successful comedy, and the third-biggest Hollywood release of the year by any studio, in a virtual tie with Anatole Litvak's Academy Award–winning The Snake Pit, and surpassed only by Henry Levin's lavish musical Jolson Sings Again and Elia Kazan's racially controversial Pinky. I Was a Male War Bride would eventually rank as the third most successful film of Howard Hawks's entire oeuvre, just behind Sergeant York and Red River. It not only restored his reputation as a bankable Hollywood director, it allowed the forty-five-yearold Grant to close out the 1940s on a note of high professional achievement and unprecedented popularity.
As the day of their wedding—December 25—approached, to ensure privacy Grant called upon the ultimate expert at it, who was, once again, happy to help. Howard Hughes handled all the details. On Christmas morning the billionaire personally picked Grant and Drake up in his car, drove to the airport, and then flew them all to Phoenix in one of his private planes to a small hacienda owned by a friend of his, real estate baron Sterling Hebbard. There, a brief, nonreligious ceremony was performed by Methodist minister Reverend Stanley H. Smith. Hughes served as Grant's best man; Drake had no maid of honor. Immediately following the ceremony Hughes flew them both back to L.A. and then drove them home, where waiting for Drake was her wedding present from Grant, delivered by one of Hughes's trusted assistants while they were gone: a white poodle that she immediately named Suzie. As he carried her over the threshold, Drake told Grant she couldn't be happier.
The press, effectively locked out of the whole affair, managed to get a story out of Grant's wedding to Drake anyway by wondering if he, like so many others in show business, was being love-laced by something queer in the American air. As one of the most tumultuous decades in American history came to a close and Hollywood was sinking into political turmoil, the rich and famous, not only in Tinseltown but in Washington and New York as well, were suddenly marrying each other in a frenzy unseen since the last, giddy days of the Roaring Twenties. What's more, the older the groom, the younger the bride. Besides the hitching of 45-year-old Grant and 26-year-old Drake, that December no less than the Vice President of the United States, 71-year-old Alben Barkley, married a 38-year-old St. Louis widow; 59-yearold William O'Dwyer, mayor of the City of New York, married a 33-year-old ex-model; Tyrone Power, 35, married Linda Christian, 24; 41-year-old Jimmy Stewart married 31-year-old Gloria Hatrick; 45-year-old Greer Garson remarried, this time to 58-year-old cattle baron E. E. (Buddy) Fogelson; 39-year-old ice-skating sensation Sonja Henie married for the second time thrice-married New York blueblood 55-year-old Winthrop Gardner Jr.; the King of Hollywood, 48-year-old Clark Gable, married his fourth wife, 39-year-old Douglas Fairbanks's widow Lady Sylvia Ashley; and 47-year-old David O. Selznick, his divorce from Irene official, finally married 30-year-old Jennifer Jones.
But of all of them, it was the Grant/Drake marriage that dominated the headlines. The morning of December 26, the day after their hushed-up wedding, the front page of the Los Angeles Examiner, in a headline worthy of the start of the next world war, screamed out the news that “CARY GRANT, BETSY DRAKE ELOPE IN HUGHES' PLANE.”
It was the spinsterish Hedda Hopper, herself rumored to be hopelessly in love with Grant, whom she routinely dubbed “the handsomest leading man in Hollywood,” who got in the last, slightly cynical but still insightful word on Grant's marriage to Drake. Quoting screenwriter Lenore Coffee, she put it this way in her concluding column of the month, the year, and the decade: “When a man of forty falls in love with a girl of twenty, it isn't her youth he is seeking but his own.”
* Hughes, eager to return to Grant's good graces, was more than happy to provide the funding.