“Her shapely form in a blue bathing suit did not inspire the thought of her playing such a spiritual part as the blind girl.”
—CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Most accounts of the relationship between Cary Grant and Virginia Cherrill depict him as the victim of a young and cold beauty emboldened by fierce ambition, a calculating Hollywood wannabe who, via a steamy, if opportunistic, romance with Chaplin followed by a brief and stormy marriage to Grant, managed to sleep her way to the forgettable middle. But the personal recollections of friends who knew her for most of her life and the pri- vate diaries she left behind reveal a far different and hitherto unknown side to the woman who was to become the first Mrs. Cary Grant.
Born and raised in Carthage, Illinois, at the age of eighteen the five-foot- five, blue-eyed, already-ravishing blonde caught the eye of prominent Hollywood agent Irving Adler. Always on the lookout for a pretty face he could represent, he first noticed Cherrill at a local beauty contest she had entered as a lark and won while in her sophomore year at Northwestern University. Adler managed to arrange to meet her and, after a year's proper courtship, proposed marriage. Cherrill, bored with school and looking for a way up and out, accepted. They were married in Chicago, after which he moved with her to his home in Beverly Hills.
The relationship was not a very good one; the gap in their age and the difference in their lifestyles posed insurmountable problems; in less than a year they were divorced. Although she still had no interest in anything like an acting career (fearing he would lose her, Adler had forbidden Cherrill to look for film work, which had been perfectly fine with her), she thought it might be fun now to see more of Hollywood while still young and, happily, free.
She rented a little beach house for herself in Venice and summoned her mother, who had since divorced, to come and live with her. Then, one night in the spring of 1930, the twenty-one-year-old Cherrill had a chance personal encounter with the world's most famous film star, forty-three-year-old Charlie Chaplin, that was to profoundly change her life.
It took place in downtown Los Angeles at the American Legion fights (the same arena where Grant later claimed he first met Mae West). Chaplin noticed Cherrill, who was sitting nearby with her first husband's uncle (with whom she was still friendly and who was now wheelchair-bound—the reason she often accompanied him to the bouts, in which she otherwise had no inter- est). What caught Chaplin's attention was the way Cherrill squinted as she watched the action (being extremely nearsighted and too vain to wear her glasses in public). At the time, Chaplin was having trouble casting the lead for his new movie, City Lights, because he felt none of the actresses he had inter- viewed knew how to play “blind,” which the main female character, the flower girl, was, and he thought this beautiful girl might actually be blind.
Without hesitation, he went over and politely asked her if she could see. When she laughed and said of course, he invited her to audition for the film.
Exactly one month later Cherrill found herself in front of Chaplin's cam- era, starring as the heartbreakingly beautiful blind flower girl. After Louella Parsons visited the set that day, in her next column she breathlessly described Cherrill as “Hollywood's greatest beauty.”
Although virtually every account has them involved in a passionate romance by the time the cameras started to roll, Cherrill always insisted she never had any romantic interest in Chaplin. In fact, when they met, she was already engaged to the well-known New York–based millionaire Rhinelander William “Willie” Stewart, and all during the filming of City Lights, she was regularly traveling east to join him on weekends. However, Stewart, like Adler, did not approve of acting as a suitable career for a married woman, and when she refused to quit the movie, he broke the engagement. The timing of their split fueled speculation in the gossip columns that she and Stewart had parted because she had become involved with Chaplin.
Not that Chaplin would have minded, and not that he didn't try. But when she turned down his advances, he began to complain about her lim- ited acting abilities. According to Chaplin, she didn't even know how to hold a flower properly, or to mouth her one crucial line, “Flower, sir,” that Chaplin wanted to shoot in close-up. According to Cherrill, once he lost sex- ual interest in her, he no longer wanted her in his film. “Most of the actresses that worked for him became involved with him,” Cherrill said later. “He sud- denly thought I was too old. After all, I was twenty and had been divorced.”
Things got so bad between them that Chaplin actually fired Cherrill mid- way through City Lights and intended to replace her with Georgia Hale, the star of his 1925 The Gold Rush, until he realized how costly the casting change would be. As the principal financier of his own movies, he found himself caught in a financial squeeze when Cherrill insisted that before she would return, her salary would have to be doubled, from $75 a week to $150. Chaplin reluctantly agreed.
Despite all the off-screen folly, advance word on City Lights was extremely positive, so much so that even before its 1931 release, Cherrill was signed to a contract by Fox studios and immediately cast opposite a young and still-unknown contract player by the name of John Wayne, in Seymour Felix's instantly forgettable 1931 campus comedy, Girls Demand Excitement.*
The night Cary Grant met her, because of City Lights, she was a bigger star than he was. He had recognized her outside the Brown Derby and— uncharacteristically for him—walked right up and introduced himself. As they both waited for their partners and their cars, he asked if they might have lunch together some time. Cherrill happily gave the handsome actor her phone number. By now she and her mother had moved to a small apartment in Hollywood, and it was there she received a phone call the next morning from Grant, inviting her that same afternoon for a bite to eat at the Paramount commissary. Over coffee he asked Cherrill to dinner and she accepted. That night when he showed up at her apartment, she told him she hoped he didn't mind, but she had invited her mother along. Not at all, Grant said. In truth, he found the idea altogether delightful.
They began dating regularly and continued to see each other all during the making of She Done Him Wrong, a development that delighted Zukor, who arranged for photographers and reporters to follow the two whenever they were out in public. If all this media attention bothered Grant, he didn't show it. Again, uncharacteristically, he dutifully and happily posed for as many pictures as the paparazzi wanted. Scott, meanwhile, sat home and stewed with jealousy. While he usually found the women with whom the stu- dio provided for him and Grant to be a hoot, he found nothing amusing about Cherrill. He told Grant he didn't approve of her, that she was an oppor- tunist, and refused to socialize with the two of them. Grant calmly told him he was wrong about Cherrill, and then let it go at that.
Upon completion of She Done Him Wrong, after only a few days off that he spent with Cherrill, Grant returned to the studio at Zukor's insistence to begin shooting Woman Accused, his first film of 1933. Woman Accused was based on a highly popular magazine article that had been commissioned by Liberty, wherein ten famous authors of the day* combined their talents to write a murder mystery, each tackling a separate chapter.
He followed that one without a break by appearing in Stuart Walker's The Eagle and the Hawk, costarring opposite Fredric March in a World War I melodrama in which a heroic lieutenant (March) is destroyed by the ravages of war. Although March and a fellow officer (Grant) dislike each other at the start of the film, by the end, through March's moral humanitarianism, Grant's character comes to understand the true meaning of heroism. Strongly antiwar in its sentiment, Paramount hoped to cash in on the populist senti- ments of the so-called Lost Generation.
Schulberg, hired once again by Zukor to produce the film, had originally wanted Gary Cooper and George Raft to play the leads, but they considered the film's ending too downbeat—Raft's character commits suicide—and both refused to be in it. The film was then recast with March in Cooper's role and Grant in Raft's, and Carole Lombard and a romantic story line were added to make March's character more appealing to women. Shooting was completed in four weeks.
Grant, despite suffering a back injury during an especially elaborate special-effect stunt-bomb explosion, was immediately put into yet another production the day after he finished his last scene. This time it was Louis Gasnier and Max Marcin's Gambling Ship, a sorry mishmash involving gam- blers, gangsters, and lovers, in which Grant played a character who was all three, opposite Glenda Farrell and Benita Hume. In the film, Grant had lit- tle more to do than look good in a tuxedo—something at which he was by now quite adept.
His schedule left little time for Cherrill and even less for Scott. None- theless, because of all the studio-encouraged publicity, Grant and Cherrill had become Hollywood's newest hot couple and were invited everywhere. Although, by necessity, they had to turn down most offers, one place Grant especially wanted to go to with her was Hearst's castle at San Simeon, where, despite Cherrill's history with him, he hoped to finally meet Charlie Chaplin. The first time Grant and Cherrill made the three-hour drive from L.A. up the coast highway to the castle, the silent-screen legend, who had been invited by Hearst specifically to meet Grant, failed to show.
The Grant/Cherrill relationship as presented to the public was a picture-perfect romance and, for a time, it actually was. Cherrill felt a strong sexual attraction to Grant from the first time she laid eyes on him, and eagerly looked forward to spending every weekend she could with him, soon charmed by his quick wit and polite manner as well as his astonishing good looks.
Early on, during a black tie dinner one night at the Mocambo, one of Grant's acrobatic partners from his early years with the Pender troupe hap- pened to walk in. Grant recognized him, called him over, and threw his arms around the fellow. He asked him how he was, what he was doing, where he was staying. At one point he asked Grant if he still remembered how to do a backflip. “Of course,” Grant said.
“I'll bet you fifty dollars you can't do it right here and now.”
Without hesitation Grant went up to the bandleader and asked if he could have a drum roll. The room quickly hushed, and everyone's focus shifted to the center of the dance floor, where Grant did a fast half-dozen backflips straight across it, after which the room broke out in whistles and applause. Smiling, Grant returned to his table and stuck his hand out to col- lect his fifty dollars. Cherrill, by now in hysterics, would often recall that night as one of the funniest and most enjoyable she had spent with Grant. For his part, for the rest of his life, Grant would tell friends that Virginia Cherrill had the best sense of humor of any of his wives.
However, according to Cherrill's longtime friend Teresa McWilliams, it was not all backflips and giggles between the two. Far from it. “From the beginning, they were inseparable, even with Scott around nearly all the time. Inseparable and, almost from the beginning, fighting with each other. The essential problem was Cary's incredible jealousy. Virginia had this lovely laugh, and a naturally flirty way, and he was absolutely nuts about her, but it was those very qualities that also drove him nuts whenever any other man paid the least bit of attention to her. And some of those who did were pretty formi- dable. She was always either at his studio or working on a picture somewhere in those days, or just hanging out at one of the studio commissary soda foun- tains where men like Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy were always after her. When Grant heard about these goings-on, he made time in his day no matter what else he was doing, even shooting a picture, to drop in to visit Cherrill without letting her know he was coming, and if she was working, he would stand off to the side and watch, for hours if necessary, to make sure no one got too close to her.
“Often, at night, when Cary was either away, busy rehearsing or, as it was most of the time he just didn't want to go out, she'd take herself to the Brown Derby, where every man would flock around her, and she'd have a drink or two, laugh, tell jokes, and be the lighthearted girl she really was.”
Every man, that is, except Randolph Scott, who, Cherrill couldn't help but notice, despite his obvious dislike for her, seemed now to always be pre- sent. Having realized that Cherrill was not going to go away that quickly, Scott had changed his tactics and decided he had better make himself a vis- ible factor in her relationship with Grant. He often came along whenever the two of them went to dinner and would then hang around, waiting in the car until after Grant took her home. Studio executives noticed it as well, espe- cially in the publicity photos that usually included the three of them, and often offered to supply Scott with a female starlet to serve as his companion on these “double dates,” a suggestion the actor flatly refused.
Scott's jealousy was tempered by the fact that the studio had continued pressing him to counter the growing rumors about his “odd” relationship with Grant, who at least had a girlfriend. The last thing Scott wanted was a woman. Several years older than his partner, he was committed to their pri- vate way of life, less certain of a successful career in film, and wished to live out his years only with Grant.
To remind him of just that, midway through the filming of Gambling Ship the wealthy Scott gave Grant an expensive present—a house on the Santa Monica beach, one block south of Wilshire Boulevard, to use as their private getaway from the relentless Hollywood publicity scene (and Virginia Cherrill).
The house, adjacent to the fabled Malibu Beach, stood along an exclu- sive spit of waterfront known as Millionaire's Row. Scott had bought it from Norma Talmadge, a silent-screen star whose career had ended with her inability to make the transition to sound. He customized it with every luxury imaginable, including a private gymnasium, an indoor heated swimming pool, and a sumptuously appointed kitchen, and presented the keys to Grant as if to show him that he could provide him with the kind of good things in life that his actress girlfriend couldn't. Even though Scott gave the house to Grant, he put the lease in both their names, his only proviso being that if either of them got married, the other would have the right to buy out the rest of the property.
Grant immediately took to the place and brought in his favorite piece of furniture, in fact his only piece of furniture—his bed, which he installed in his own, separate bedroom. Eight feet long and six feet wide, it came with a headboard complete with bookshelves, lights, radio, clock, mirror, telephone stand, even a fold-down writing desk. At one point, he told a reporter lucky enough to get a personal tour of the beach house that his goal was to retire at sixty and spend the rest of his life in bed, as long as it was that bed.
Although he tried not to show it to either Scott or Cherrill, the growing tension caused by their uneasy three-way relationship, on top of his nonstop work schedule, was starting to take its emotional toll on Grant. His one-pack- a-day smoking habit increased to two. He began drinking more than ever. He developed serious insomnia and took pills to help him drop off into an always fitful sleep.
After several months of their odd public threesome, stories began to appear in the press of Grant's impending marriage to Cherrill. When Grant con- fronted Zukor, he denied having anything to do with it. He then asked Cherrill if she was the source, but she vehemently denied that the rumor had come from her. She pointed the finger at Scott, figuring he was doing it to cause problems between them. (She was wrong. The source, in fact, was Schulberg.)
Scott blew up over the press releases and insisted Grant promise him he was not interested in anything long-term with Cherrill. To keep Scott happy, Grant told any and all reporters or columnists who asked that his schedule was simply much too busy at the moment to permit him to concentrate on something as important and life-changing as marriage.
These comments in turn infuriated Cherrill, who retaliated by openly revisiting one of her former Hollywood lovers. In 1930, shortly after divorcing her husband and arriving in L.A., and prior to her second engagement and working for Chaplin, she had had a passionate, if brief, affair with pianist and actor Oscar Levant. Throughout the making of City Lights, Cherrill, although engaged to Stewart, resumed seeing Levant. From the time she met Grant, she had carefully avoided a still-smitten Levant until Grant's com- ment about his being too busy to consider marriage was published. One night after Cherrill had left for the evening, Grant, who suspected she was seeing somebody else, followed her in his Packard to her house in Hancock Park, where she was now living, still with her mother, and became incensed when he saw Levant pull up a few minutes later in his green Ford. Grant waited until Levant went inside, then repeatedly rammed the back of the car with his much heavier yellow Packard. Years later Levant recalled this peculiar inci- dent by noting with bemusement, “The only thing I got out of [my] love [affair with Cherrill] was a bill for damages to my car. I thought it was a peculiar way of anyone's showing his strength, even though I sympathized with Grant's mood.”
On a drive to Santa Barbara the following weekend, Cherrill tried to dis- cuss with Grant what had happened, but his unwillingness to admit he had acted like a lunatic only angered her more. She then asked him to pull into a bus depot so she could go to the bathroom. He did, she got out, went to the ladies' room, and then slipped out a side door and boarded the next bus back to L.A. Grant waited nearly an hour before he finally realized what she had done. He irately turned the Packard around and gunned his way home.
Other times when she was angry or frustrated with Grant, Cherrill sim- ply left Los Angeles without telling him where she was going, or with whom. On more than one occasion she would go to the airport, get on a plane, and fly to New York to rendezvous with Stewart. She always made sure their liaisons made it into the columns, so that Grant could not help but find out. These actions sent him into romantic somersaults.
Grant began filming Wesley Ruggles's I'm No Angel in the summer of 1933. He had mixed feelings about returning to the screen in what was essen- tially another star vehicle for Mae West in which he had little more to do than feed her straight lines.
In I'm No Angel West plays Tira, a circus performer who specializes in lion-taming while hustling rich men on the side. Grant is Jack Clayton, a wealthy, sexually shy socialite who easily falls for Tira's calculated charms. He asks her to marry him but then breaks up with her, she sues him for breach of promise, he lets her win, and in the final reel true love provides the real settlement. They reconcile, at least for the time being, with neither one having changed in the least.
In real life, the relationship between Grant and West was anything but loving. He resented what he considered her on-set star trips, in which she dic- tated everything from camera angles to light focus, and this time around she made Grant's character, as she insisted he portray him, as exciting as a wet mop. Lacking the inner fire and passion needed to play against each other, the film's conflict fell flat.
West was so dissatisfied with Grant that she refused to film her love scenes with him. Instead, she had them shot in single isolated takes, so that her face and dialogue would be shot one day, and his the next, edited later on to make it seem as if they had played the scene together. Grant was humiliated and told the studio in no uncertain terms that he would never work with West again.
For the public, however, Grant appeared gracious. When a reporter from the Los Angeles Times asked him if the legendary West sexual “magic” had worked on him, he said, carefully choosing his words, “I can't say that I'm in love with Miss West, or that she is in love with me, but I don't hesitate to admit that her screen loving really gets to you. Mae is a great actress because she is so thoroughly genuine.”
Despite all the on-set problems, their pairing once again struck box office gold, and Schulberg, who had produced the film, despite knowing how much they disliked each other, hoped to make them a permanent screen team, on the order of Sternberg and Dietrich, or Chevalier and MacDonald. Completed in September (at a cost of $225,000), I'm No Angel reached the- aters in November, in time to catch the Christmas holiday rush, and proved an even bigger hit than She Done Him Wrong,
Audiences packed houses to see the spectacular scenes in which West wickedly played with the lions, cracking leather whips like a professional dominatrix to keep them in their places, and to hear her familiar double entendres:
She: “I like sophisticated men to take me out.”
He: “I'm not really sophisticated.”
She: “You're not really out yet, either.”
He: “You haven't a streak of decency in you.”
She: “I don't show my good points to strangers.”
He: “Do you mind if I get personal?”
She: “I don't mind if you get familiar.”
He: “If I could only trust you.”
She: “Hundreds have.”
The script was written by West, who of course gave herself the best lines.
In its first eight weeks of release I'm No Angel grossed more than $4 million. In New York City it opened at the Paramount, where it set a new record for attendance, with 180,000 people buying tickets the first week alone.
WHILE GRANT WAS FILMING I'm No Angel, Cherrill took a role in a small independent film, Lois Weber's White Heat, shot on location in Hawaii.* According to Cherrill, during this period of enforced separation Grant hired private detectives to spy on her. To make matters worse, while Grant spent more and more time at the Hollywood apartment to be closer to the studio during filming, Scott preferred to remain at the beach house with a new girl- friend all his own—studio contract starlet Vivian Gaye. Grant tried to take Scott's new involvement in stride. He knew he couldn't complain, with Cherrill having become a permanent part of their relationship, and he knew Scott wasn't seriously involved with Gaye. In those uncertain financial times at Paramount, Zukor had stepped up the pressure on Scott to once and for all put an end to his relationship with Grant. If they didn't, Zukor warned Scott, the studio was willing to lose him before his more popular cohabiting partner. Soon after the studio's ultimatum, Scott became involved with Gaye.
A beauty of Swiss and Russian ancestry, Gaye had fallen hard for the tall, handsome, square-jawed Scott after being personally assigned by the studio to be his date one evening in 1933 (she replaced Sari Maritza, who had become his regularly assigned companion for public double dates with Grant and Cherrill when Maritza became involved with another actor).
Although he never actually proposed to Gaye, Scott thought it wise to let her believe, for his own sake, that there was a possibility of marriage in the future, and he did not object when she told friends they were going to get married, not even when it reached the gossips. As Scott knew it would, it pleased Zukor and—for the moment at least—the heat was off.
Meanwhile, Grant was hard at work on yet another movie role, this time playing the Mock Turtle in Adolph Zukor's last-ditch effort to save the studio from going under: an all-star musical production of Alice in Wonderland. By now bankruptcy appeared all but inevitable, and Zukor, who had managed to wrest total control of the studio from cofounder Jesse Lasky, put everything and everyone he had into Alice, hoping its success would save them for at least one more year.
Serving once again as producer, Schulberg assigned Norman McLeod to direct the Joseph L. Mankiewicz and William Cameron Menzies script, based on the Lewis Carroll classic, and he had McLeod cast every available Paramount star in it, including Gary Cooper as the White Knight, W. C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty, Sterling Holloway as the Frog, Edward Everett Horton as the Mad Hatter, Roscoe Karns as Tweedledee, Jack Oakie as Tweedledum, and Baby LeRoy as the Joker. Grant, not included in the orig- inal cast, was inserted at the last minute to play the Mock Turtle, after Bing Crosby angrily turned down what he considered an insult of a part. The film opened to mixed reviews and was taken by the public for what it was, a top- heavy novelty.
Shortly afterward, an exhausted Grant, having made five pictures in 1933, thirteen in two years, suffering from a variety of physical ailments made worse by his shattered nerves, decided it was the perfect time for himself and Cherrill—who had completed her film and returned to L.A.—to take a vacation. Now was as good a time as any, he figured, to show her England. Scott believed this choice of locale was no accident, and correctly figured Grant was taking Cherrill home to meet his family and get married.
To Grant's surprise, Cherrill was less than thrilled at the notion of a long cruise to London; not because she didn't want to make the trip—especially since Cary had begun to hint the end result would indeed be marriage—but because he insisted on waiting for Scott to finish acting in a film he was making called Broken Dreams so he could come along. When she asked him why Scott had to be there, Grant replied with a smile that every fellow needed a best man. Cherrill did not find it at all amusing.
The next day she accompanied Grant to Monogram Studios, where Scott was filming, all the while continuing to try to persuade him to leave his “pal” home. Their disagreement exploded into a furious argument on the set that interrupted shooting; it was a dust-up that made the local gossip columns.
The next day Scott announced his engagement to Vivian Gaye.
The day after that Grant booked passage for three on the French liner Paris, set to depart from New York, destination Southampton, England.
And the day after that, an enraged Cherrill flew by herself to New York City, from where she wired Grant that she was not going if Vivian Gaye wasn't. Grant wired back saying that under no circumstances was Gaye going to join them. Cherrill's response was to book passage for herself on the next liner bound for England.
And so it was that on November 23, a distressed and heavily sedated Cary Grant, accompanied by Randolph Scott, flew to New York City, headed straight for the pier to board the Paris, and set sail for England, where he hoped to find Cherrill and salvage their relationship.
Romantic salvation, however, would serve only as the point of departure, for upon his triumphant return to England after thirteen years in America, awaiting Grant was nothing less than a miraculous resurrection, one far more unexpected and shattering than anything he could ever have imagined or dreamed of.
* In the film, Wayne plays the head of a group of boys whose goal it is to oust all girls from their col- lege. The issue is finally decided by a basketball game. Virginia Cherrill, the female lead, seduces Wayne in an attempt to change his mind about the necessity of women in a man's life. Variety summed up the B movie this way: “Theaters playing to a clientele of class will find nothing in it.” To the end of his life Wayne laughingly referred to Girls Demand Excitement as the silliest film he had ever made.
* Rupert Hughes, Vicki Baum, Zane Grey, Viña Delmar, Irvin S. Cobb, Gertrude Atherton, J. P. McEvoy, Ursula Parrott, Polan Banks, and Sophie Kerr.
* Not to be confused with Raoul Walsh's 1949 White Heat, which starred James Cagney and Virginia Mayo. Because of the same first names of the female leads, these two films are often mistaken for each other.