“I had a theme in most of my movies—to take a fellow who seemed to dress rather well, who was moderately welleducated and sophisticated and should know his way around, and put him in a series of ridiculous and untenable situations. How is he going to get out of that? To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest come quickest to mind. The attraction then to the audience is this: If it can happen to him, it can happen to me. And the fact that it's happening to me and not to them is their relief. I tried to be myself on screen. I learned it was the most difficult thing to do. That's exposure of one's self. The hardest thing is to be yourself in front of 30 million people. By contrast, it is much easier to hide behind a character.”
—CARY GRANT
To Catch a Thief did not open for almost a year after shooting was completed, because Hitchcock had to work on his new TV series while editing the film. It was finally released in August 1955, a month before the official fall season, an indication of Paramount's lack of faith in the film's commercial viability, even as it touted Grant's “comeback.” The obvious age difference between Grant and Kelly was a concern to the studio's executives, who remained unsure if audiences would buy it. Besides, no one at Paramount could figure out the film's plot. “Was he really the cat burglar, or wasn't he?” became the question most asked after the screenings, even though the film had a fairly unambiguous ending. If the Paramount crowd couldn't stay with it until the end, the studio executives wondered, could audiences?
Grant personally attended the lavish “world premiere” at New York's Paramount Theater—a theater he had performed in as a young man when it was a legitimate playhouse some thirty years earlier. Despite all the fanfare and promotion, the film received mixed reviews: “To Catch a Thief is not the thriller it could have been,” wrote the Hollywood Citizen-News; “What else can I tell you? The dialogue is so bad that Cary looks embarrassed to be saying it,” opined The Saturday Review. In defiance of all the doubts, however, To Catch a Thief went on to become the biggest hit of the first half of the 1950s. It also reenergized Grant's desire to make motion pictures, even if it meant the end of his marriage to Betsy Drake. As far as he was concerned, that love ship had already sailed.
Eager as he was to get in front of a camera again, another year passed before Grant chose his next film. It was not for any lack of desire on his part, or a shortage of scripts. He just wanted to wait, to see if To Catch a Thief was his resurrection and not his epitaph. Once the film proved it had legs, he proceeded carefully, so as not to halt the momentum of his comeback. While in search of the right script, he was interviewed by Pix magazine about the secret of his longevity. A smiling Grant sang a new tune now about his seemingly ageless place in the ever-changing world of film. “The movies are like the steel business,” he told the interviewer. “An actor should be good at any stage and last forever.”
Among the offerings he turned down during this period was Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse. Preminger thought Grant perfect for the role of the father of waiflike Audrey Hepburn (with whom he would costar eight years later as her lover in Stanley Donen's Charade). Thanks, Grant said, but no thanks.* Fox wanted him for the lead in Can-Can. He said no again, and Frank Sinatra got the part. He thought about making a movie of Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brethren and wanted Clifford Odets to write and direct it. When that fell through, Grant asked Odets to consider writing instead the story of a brigadier general who commits suicide, after which it is revealed he had led several different, secret lives. It, too, went nowhere. Columbia then proposed a musical version of It Happened One Night. Grant said yes if they would somehow retool the script into a remake of His Girl Friday, in which he could star again with Grace Kelly. “I can be ready in ten minutes,” Grant told them. Not surprisingly, that project quickly died. Perhaps strangest of all was the offer made to him by Mae West, who wanted to redo She Done Him Wrong. Sorry, he politely told her.
Even Mike Todd, the grand impresario of motion pictures and the flamboyant husband of Elizabeth Taylor, sought Grant's services, to star in his lavishly planned film version of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. The film's gimmick was to have every major star in Hollywood play a cameo role—precisely why Grant did not take part. He was never one to share the screen with too many other stars, afraid he would get lost in the crowd and wind up appearing smaller than life. The film would eventually be made with David Niven in the lead and win the Best Picture Oscar of 1956.
While Grant waited for exactly the right film, his relationship with Drake continued to deteriorate. They decided to sleep in separate beds, then in separate houses. The gossips somehow picked up on it, and as the couple quietly passed their fifth anniversary, rumors flew that the marriage was in trouble. Whispers of Grant's homosexuality resurfaced, augmented by those who claimed Drake was gay, as well. The highly idiosyncratic nature of their marriage added fuel to these rumors, however unfounded they might have been. For the most part, Grant took his return to the gossip columns as a sign that he had also returned to prominence.
The picture Grant finally chose as his follow-up to To Catch a Thief was Stanley Kramer's $4 million costume picture set in the Napoleonic Wars, The Pride and the Passion, based on C. S. Forester's novel The Gun. (Forester, at Kramer's urging, personally asked Grant to honor him by being in the film version of his novel.) In keeping with his often-puzzling and ultimately selfdestructive pattern, it would prove the worst of all possible choices.
The Pride and the Passion's main character is a Spanish cannon, one that British naval officer Anthony (Grant) must prevent from falling into the hands of the French. Along the way Anthony meets Miguel (Frank Sinatra), a leader of the Spanish guerrilla forces, who wants to take the cannon to ávila and use it to run the French out of the city. They join forces against their common enemy, even as they compete for the affections of Juana, a female guerrilla fighter, played by Sophia Loren at the height of her cinematic lowcut peasant glory.
It is not all that difficult to understand what Grant was attracted to in this costume drama, his first since the disastrous The Howards of Virginia some fifteen years earlier. For one thing, it was to be shot in Spain, and Grant, eager to put some physical distance between himself and Drake, looked forward to going on location by himself this time. For another, he was eager to work both with Academy Award–winning producer-director Stanley Kramer and with Sinatra, who was red hot since winning an Oscar in 1954 for his role in From Here to Eternity. As far as Grant was concerned, the picture was a can't-miss.
Grant had costar approval on the film and had wanted Ava Gardner, now living in Spain, to play opposite him, until Sinatra, who was going through an ugly separation and divorce from the actress, made that choice a practical impossibility. Grant then made overtures to Grace Kelly, now Princess Grace; she reluctantly turned the film down, having agreed to give up movies for the prince. His third choice was one suggested by Stanley Kramer, who had wanted Sophia Loren from the start; her paramour, Italian filmmaker Carlo Ponti, was pressing Kramer to give Loren her first English-speaking role. With Grant's quiet approval, Kramer offered Loren a one-time-only, take-it-or-leave-it $200,000 to make the film. She took it, in what she called “the easiest decision I ever had to make.”
Grant waited until just before he left for Spain to tell Drake that she was not going with him, and then called his friend producer William Frye to ask him to “take care of her while I'm gone.” An angry and insecure Drake warned him that he had better not do anything on set that he would later be sorry for. She had heard too many stories, mostly from him, about his leadinglady infatuations, and she wasn't about to sit by and allow Loren to take him away from her. Not that she would have minded all that much if Grant never came back. It was, by this time, more a question of public humiliation than private heartbreak. Not to worry, he told her.
Shooting began April 20, 1956, in Segovia. By the end of the first week, Grant had fallen hopelessly in love with Sophia Loren.
To complicate matters further, so had Frank Sinatra, although he would deny it for the rest of his days. His jealousy over the twenty-two-yearold Loren's preference for Grant, thirty years her senior and ten years older than Sinatra (and Ponti), led him to do something no one else had ever dared around the romantic-leading-man idol. He openly ridiculed Grant's sexuality, always referring to him on the set as “Mother Cary.” If there was any logic to this strategy, it didn't work. Although Loren did not speak English very well, she knew that Sinatra was picking on Grant, and after one particularly difficult day of shooting, she had had enough of it and did what Grant wouldn't, or couldn't. She rebuffed Sinatra's pettiness by calling him out in front of the entire cast and crew and labeling him “an Italian son of a bitch.”
To Sinatra, still smoldering with rage over his breakup with Gardner, this was the last straw. He could not wait to get out of “Windmillville,” as he referred to Segovia, and actually left the production before he had completed his scenes (he later finished them in Hollywood), forcing Grant to talk to a suit on a hanger in remaining scenes together.
Grant, meanwhile, increasingly sought Loren's company on location and at the end of the day would have long, rambling, confessional talks with her that stretched from the early evening into the next day's sunrise, talks in English, a language she barely understood at the time. They were constantly together on set, which started a rumor that somehow made it all the way back to Hollywood. In a flash, Drake, after reading about Grant and Loren in one of the columns, boarded a flight bound for Spain.
What didn't hit the columns—at least not at first (and when it eventually did, he vehemently denied it)—was the fact that even before Drake's arrival in Segovia, Grant had proposed marriage to Loren, promising he could obtain a “quickie” divorce from Drake. Loren's reaction was not the one he had hoped for. She returned his proposal with a reminder to him of her commitment to Ponti.*
Once in Spain, Drake assured Grant that she was there only because she missed him and made no reference to the headlines his “affair” was making back in the States. After only two weeks, however, she had had enough. She simply couldn't stand the hangdog look Grant got on his face whenever Loren was around. If that was the way he wanted it, fine, she thought, and via long-distance telephone broke her moratorium on appearing in films by accepting an offer made by Frank Tashlin to appear in his upcoming comedy, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Hoping this might bother Grant enough for him to ask her to give up the picture and stay, she was dismayed when he wished her the best of luck with the movie. The next day she booked herself first-class passage back to the States aboard the flagship of a fleet of luxury Italian liners, the Andrea Doria.
The Andrea Doria set sail from Genoa on July 17, 1956, to make its fiftyfirst crossing of the Atlantic to New York. The next day Drake boarded at the ship's first stop, the port of Naples. Grant, claiming a full day's shooting schedule, did not take her to the pier to see her off
A week later, at precisely 11:10 P.M. on the night of July 25, a dark and foggy night, the worst peacetime disaster at sea since the sinking of the Titanic took place sixty miles from Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. Only hours away from docking in New York, the Andrea Doria collided with the smaller Swedish cruise ship, the SS Stockholm. As the Andrea Doria began to sink barely a half hour after the crash, its more than 1,197 passengers and crew scrambled for places on the lifeboats and dropped into the sea like ice cubes into highballs. Miraculously, out of the total of more than seventeen hundred people aboard both ships, only forty-six died, mostly from the force of the initial collision.
Among the Andrea Doria's survivors was Betsy Drake, although more than $200,000 worth of jewelry that she had taken with her to Spain to wear for Grant, all of it gifts from him, and a manuscript of a book she was working on went down with the ship. Her being aboard became a big story within a bigger story and made headlines on its own. For Drake, the worst part of the entire experience was that Grant did not immediately drop everything and fly to be by her side. He couldn't, he told her by phone, because his departure would shut down production on a very expensive shoot.
He neglected to add that he was, at the moment, busy trying to convince Loren to marry him.
To let him know she had arrived safely back at their home in Los Angeles, she sent Grant a one-line telegram that said simply, FROM YOUR SAFE AND
SOUND WIFE.
“We fell in love,” Loren admitted in her unusually frank autobiography. “Slowly, as our relationship grew and his trust in me grew, he came to realize that trust and vulnerability went hand in hand; when his trust was strong enough, he no longer bothered with his mask. And I was just as open and trusting with him. He told me about his early life, and I told him about mine, and we found a bond in their emotional similarities. We saw each other every night; we dined in romantic little restaurants on craggy hilltops to the accompaniment of flamenco guitars, drank the good Spanish wine and laughed and were serious and confessional and conspiratorial…
“But I was also in love with Carlo… and now here was Cary Grant, ready to renounce everything for me. Wanting me with no strings attached… Cary talked about getting married. With every passing day, he said, he was surer that we belonged together, that finally he had found someone to whom he could commit himself and to hell with being vulnerable.”
Vulnerable she was, but not indecisive. Loren owed her career to Ponti and was not prepared to leave him to marry Grant, no matter how much she may have loved her costar. When the long shoot was finished and her romantic but chaste affair with Grant about to end, she felt relief that she was due in Greece to start filming Jean Negulesco's Boy on a Dolphin. Ponti, still married to someone else at the time (a situation that made everything even more complicated for the devoutly Catholic Loren), was well aware of the situation with Grant and wanted to get her as far away from him as he could. He had arranged for Loren to leave immediately with him for Greece, with production set to begin the day after her work on The Pride and the Passion ended.
After seven long, eventful, and ultimately heartbreaking months in Spain, Grant at last returned home with nothing to say to anybody, least of all Drake, about his “affair” with Loren. Instead, he seemed to have found a renewed sense of commitment to his wife, happy that she had survived her ordeal at sea and grateful she was apparently willing to have him back.
Drake was indeed happy to see him, but if he was not willing to acknowledge the undeniable distance he had put between them, she was. Soon enough their separate residences did not seem nearly far enough apart for her. Drake, in the middle of filming Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, was grateful to be involved in something that took up so much of her time.
During the making of the film, she increased her studies of and participation in hypnosis, in the hope she might find relief from the post-traumatic depression she had fallen into after the accident. Eventually she sought treatment from Dr. Mortimer Hartman, one of the early experimenters with lysergic acid diethylamide 25, otherwise known as LSD.
With his wife away now for so much of the time, and still smitten with Loren, Grant found himself in the grip of a new bout of loneliness. To get himself out of it, he plunged himself back into the only cure he knew, the welcome-wagon world of moviemaking. In 1957 he made four movies in quick succession, all the while secretly obsessing over how to get his Italian beauty to marry him.
* The roles eventually went to David Niven and Jean Seberg.
* To the press, Grant continually denied not only that he had proposed but that they had had a relationship at all. His standard response to any direct inquiry was “Where do all these rumors start?” Or “As I remember it, Sophia was in love with Frank Sinatra.” True enough, although that was a reference to the film, not real life. Years later, in 1979, Loren, with her coauthor A. E. Hotchner, wrote about the circumstances of Grant's pursuit in her autobiography. In 1980 Loren's memoir was made into a TV movie, and Grant unsuccessfully sued to have himself and his experience with Loren during The Pride and the Passion eliminated from the script. When the film aired, Grant's only public comment was “I can't believe that anyone would exploit an old friendship like this.” Privately, it was a completely different story. To begin with, Grant had been personally approached by Loren during the writing of her memoirs to help her remember certain details, to have some input, to which he flatly refused. According to Loren, in Peoplemagazine (March 24, 1980): “He was part of my life. I loved him dearly, so I rang him and said, ‘I can't leave you out.’ He told me, ‘I still love you and trust you, so anything you write is fine with me.'” Grant also told his close friends that he was in love with Loren and indeed planned to marry her, and that he saw this happening when they were reunited a year later in Melville Shavelson's Houseboat.