“Nobody doesn't like Cary Grant. He's a Hollywood monument, and nobody wants to tamper with that … he survived the end of his own career in a manner that will probably never happen again.”
—WARREN HOGE
In February 1957 Cary Grant, despite having released one film in three years, was nevertheless riding high in the popularity polls, placing third among the top ten actors of that year.* An Affair to Remember, his new project, was the first of a two-movie deal he had made with producer Jerry Wald that was in turn part of Wald's new multipicture deal at 20th Century–Fox. The film was a remake of Leo McCarey's 1939 weeper Love Affair, which had costarred one of early sound cinema's great European lovers, Charles Boyer, and a favorite costar of Grant's, Irene Dunne. Wald, one of the new wave of hotshot hustling independents (widely believed to have been the prototype for Budd Schulberg's Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run?), offered McCarey a chance to remake his own film, modernized by color and widescreen cinematography, on the condition that he sign Cary Grant to play the male lead.
McCarey, who had not found his way back to Grant's list of favored directors, knew that Grant never wanted to play a role that someone else had originated. Still, he made the obligatory approach, figuring that once Grant turned him down, he could then go back to Wald and try to come up with a viable alternative. To McCarey's surprise, Grant immediately accepted, and Wald green-lighted the film.
An Affair to Remember was essentially the same story that it had been in the first version, and for that matter the same story told with minor variations a thousand times over since the beginning of film. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl (give or take a few years). In this version, Nick Ferrante (Grant) is engaged to Lois Clark (Neva Patterson), a wealthy heiress whom he does not love. On board a cruise bound for America from his adopted home of Naples, he meets Terry McKay (Deborah Kerr), who is about to marry Kenneth Bradley (Richard Denning). Nick and Terry fall in love but agree they must honor their previous commitments. They wistfully plan to meet again in the future, to see what if anything has happened in their lives. On that fateful day Terry is hit by a taxi and paralyzed from the waist down. When she doesn't keep the appointment, Nick tracks her down, declares his love, and doesn't care that she's “crippled.” They go off happily together into the sunset of their lives.
What set McCarey's remake apart from the dozens of other weepies released that year was the great chemistry between the film's two stars. At fiftythree, Grant seemed preternaturally handsome, with an onscreen persona that projected refinement, sophistication, maturity, and an enormous capacity to love and be loved. Opposite the thirty-one-year-old Kerr, the charming, urbane, witty side of Grant came on display, a side that Hollywood had lately seen too little of. Onscreen their relationship was mannered, restrained, articulate, and civilized, and yet it projected plenty of widescreen heat. Under McCarey's sharp direction, the film hit a vital nerve with female audiences, whose collective longing for Grant was perfectly personified by the nonthreatening warmth of Deborah Kerr.
If Grant's screen image seemed more flawless than ever, it served as the perfect mask behind which he could take refuge from the difficulties he was having in his private life. For one thing, while he was making An Affair to Remember, Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti arrived in Hollywood and were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel as Ponti negotiated a multiple-picture deal for Loren with Paramount. As soon as he found out, Grant began sending flowers every day, not caring about Ponti and oblivious to Drake's deepening depression over her husband's being still so obviously smitten. For her part, Loren did not discourage Grant's mannered advances and quite likely used them as the catalyst to get what she really wanted, a wedding ring from Ponti that could only come if he was granted a divorce from the Vatican. Loren had begun to suspect Ponti was using his first marriage as a convenient excuse and fought his complacency with her supposed “love” for Grant.
During production on Affair, one of the cameramen shooting a close-up of Grant noticed a lump on his forehead. Grant said it was a permanent bruise he had acquired during his USO tours, when he had to wear a steel helmet that didn't fit right. The studio insisted he have it looked at, and after a battery of tests it was diagnosed as a benign tumor. He arranged to have it removed upon completion of production and before the start of his next film, another Wald project, Stanley Donen's Kiss Them for Me.
Two days before the surgery Grant made a surprise appearance at the March 1957 Academy Awards, his first in sixteen years. The only reason he attended was that his good friend, Ingrid Bergman, who had been nominated for Best Actress of 1956 for her performance in Anastasia, had asked him if he would accept for her if she won. Bergman was still in “exile” in Europe for having committed the crime of falling in love with married Italian director Roberto Rossellini during the filming of Stromboli in 1949, and having his baby out of wedlock. When the scandal broke into the national headlines, Bergman, who was still married to her husband and who only two years earlier had been riding high from a decade starring in several successful Hollywood movies, including Michael Curtiz's Casablanca and Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, found herself unable to find work. The lockout lasted eight years, until 1957, when her long relationship with Rossellini finally came to an end. That same year she was “forgiven” by the Academy and nominated for the British film production of Anatole Litvak's Anastasia. Grant was one of the very few stars who had stood by Bergman throughout her ordeal and publicly announced that it would be his honor to represent her at the Oscar ceremony.
Grant relished the chance to embarrass the Academy's old guard, and the night Bergman's name was called, he walked proudly to the podium on the stage of the Pantages Theater and said into the microphone in a soft but commanding tone, “Dear Ingrid, wherever you are in the world, we, your friends, want to congratulate you, and may you be as happy as we are for you.”
The next day Grant entered Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. He had a phobia about surgery and dreaded submitting to a doctor's scalpel, which he feared might permanently damage his face. Drake offered to hypnotize him, to calm him in preparation for the difficult procedure, and, to her surprise, he agreed. Shortly after, Grant gave this account of the actual surgery: “I'd taken advice about [the tumor] once from the great British plastic surgeon, Sir Archibald MacIndoe. He told me it would take about a month to remove. I couldn't afford the time. I had Betsy hypnotize me before the operation. She emphasized that I had to stay calm and even enjoy the operation. I did just that. The surgeon used a local anesthetic. He might have been cutting my hair for all I cared. It [healed] with no scar.”
Drake attributed his quick recovery to the hypnosis and, thus encouraged, urged him to follow her lead again and enter psychoanalysis. At the relatively late age of fifty-three, in an attempt to save his marriage, for the first time in his life Grant agreed to see a shrink.
As grant completed the filming of his next movie, Kiss Them for Me, both The Pride and the Passion and An Affair to Remember opened; the former proved another major box office disappointment for Grant, while the latter was among the biggest hits of 1957. The message from the public seemed clear. They preferred the modern, urbane, and romantic Grant rather than the costumed, exotic, and rural one.
With his third film of the year already in the can, he was ready to start a fourth, Melville Shavelson's Houseboat, a light comedy that takes place aboard wealthy widower Tom Winters's (Grant's) houseboat, where a relationship with his maid, Cinzia Zaccardi (Sophia Loren), blossoms into true love amid a gaggle of children. Grant had committed to making the film before The Pride and the Passion, and it had been intended as a costarring vehicle with Betsy Drake. But, while in Spain, Grant had secretly arranged with Ponti's approval for Drake to be replaced in the lead by Sophia Loren.
With production about to begin, Grant believed the time was right for him to make his big move on the Italian sex goddess. Unfortunately, it did not work out the way he had hoped. As a result, Grant vented his frustration and anger on Shavelson, who had to listen to him carp over the smallest of details. In reality, what upset Grant was that Loren showed up every day for shooting with Ponti attached to her side, especially after he learned— through Louella Parsons's column, no less—that one weekend during production Ponti slipped away with Loren, obtained a quickie Mexican divorce, and married her.
Upon their return, at the end of that day's shooting, Grant kissed a beaming Loren on the cheek, shook a giggling Ponti's hand, and wished them both much happiness and health. The next day, in a beautifully fitting tux, Grant “married” a luminous Loren in the film's climactic wedding scene, while Ponti stood just off camera, intently watching every move both of them made.
Later that night, alone and tipsy, Grant parked himself in his favorite booth at the back of Chasen's, pissing and moaning out loud that he had “lost Sophia forever.” To at least one friend, producer Bill Frye, the loss, like the romance, took place mostly in Grant's tortured imagination. “It was all just some sort of extended daydream that he made up,” Frye said. “Sophia Loren was never his to lose. It was just another one of his crazy romantic fantasies that could have had no other ending.”
The day after that, Grant returned to the special, experimental therapy his wife had introduced him to, and was given his thirtieth consecutive weekly hit of LSD 25.
* In a poll conducted by Popularity, the top ten were, in order, Rock Hudson, William Holden, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Glenn Ford, and Yul Brynner. Clark Gable and John Wayne placed eleventh and twelfth.