Читать книгу Cary Grant: A Class Apart - Graham McCann - Страница 15

Since I was tall, had black hair and white teeth, which I polished daily,I had all the semblance of what in those days was considered a leadingman. I played in the kind of film where one was always polite andperfectly attired.

CARY GRANT

You must not forget who you are …

FEDORA

It was an anxious Cary Grant who reported to work for the first time at Paramount. Archie Leach had a new name, but he had yet to make a new reputation. Here he was at the studio of Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier, Fredric March, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Claudette Colbert, Tallulah Bankhead, Miriam Hopkins, Sylvia Sidney, Carole Lombard and Harold Lloyd – big stars, experienced performers. The only person with whom Archie Leach was acquainted was Jeanette MacDonald, but her option had not been renewed and she was leaving the studio. Cary Grant was on his own.

If Cary Grant was intimidated by his new surroundings, he was not disheartened. Jean Dalrymple, who had given Archie Leach his first paid speaking role in vaudeville, recalled:

I had lunch with him at the Algonquin just before he went to California. He was so excited. He felt it was his great opportunity. I remember telling him not to get stuck in California but to come back to the theater from time to time.

I didn’t know he was going to be a sensational hit. He didn’t always have that marvelous, debonair personality. He was often very quiet and reserved. But when he got in front of a camera, his eyes sparkled and he was full of life. The camera loved him.¹

Cary Grant’s Hollywood was the Hollywood of the thirties. The effects of the Wall Street Crash were still being felt, and yet memories of the event, which had hit movie-makers in the West as well as more conventional businessmen in the East, were already – for some – receding. Audiences were still visiting America’s vast rococo and Moorish picture palaces, those strangely aristocratic arenas of the new democratic art where visitors were greeted with an anxious show of opulence – fountains and waterfalls, painted peacocks and doves, huge mirrors and grand arcades, thick carpeting and air-conditioning, all designed to project, for a few hours, an illusion of prosperity. If it seemed to the weary, depression-ridden citizen that the American dream could not be lived, then Hollywood studios worked hard to remind people that it could still be imagined. ‘There’s a Paramount Picture probably around the corner’, the studio told Saturday Evening Post readers. ‘See it and you’ll be out of yourself, living someone else’s life … You’ll find a new viewpoint. And tomorrow you’ll work … not merely worry.’² It was a relatively successful strategy. In the midst of the Great Depression, audiences were still exhibiting what in the circumstances appeared a remarkable appetite for the products of Hollywood. In the first half of the decade, however, Paramount, ruled by Adolph Zukor, lacked the rock-like business stability of, for example, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and the profit or loss incurred by one movie tended to affect unduly the studio’s financial climate.³ In the year that Cary Grant joined the studio, Paramount had made a sixteen-million-dollar loss, with possible bankruptcy ensuing.

Paramount – not surprisingly – had no intention of starting Cary Grant in important leading roles, but he would have more than enough opportunities to attract the attention of movie audiences. The company (after a policy of wild and rashly overoptimistic expansion during the second half of the 1920s) owned the largest circuit of theatres in the world, which it kept supplied by producing around sixty feature films per year. Operating on increasingly strict factory lines, it completed and shipped at least one new movie every week, so there was always a place for a new contractee somewhere along the assembly line. As a newcomer, Cary Grant was expected to work extremely hard for his $450 a week. He was there, without doubt, to do what he was told. It was a six-day schedule, Monday to Saturday, with no extra pay for overtime (which was common). The bare statistics of his first year with the studio reflect the production-line smoothness of the times: he made seven movies in 1932, working a full fifty-two weeks.

During Grant’s first few hectic weeks at the studio he found a supporter in Jack Haley, the comedian, who later achieved his greatest Hollywood success in the role of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (1939). As his son, Jack Haley, Jnr., remembers, Grant was grateful to know someone else who had made the transition from vaudeville to movies:

When Cary was first at Paramount, he made a bee-line for my father, who had already done six or seven pictures there … Cary wanted to know what making movies was all about. My father told him, ‘The first thing you learn is not to use your stage makeup. So find a good makeup person. And don’t talk to the leading actress. She’ll steer you wrong. She’s your competition. Talk to the character people. They’ll teach you the ins and outs.’

Cary loved Charlie Ruggles, Arthur Treacher, and all those character people who came from Broadway or vaudeville. He felt secure with them. Years later Cary told me, ‘Your father was the only one who gave me advice for my first picture’.⁴

Grant first appeared, billed fifth, in Frank Tuttle’s farce This is the Night. Playing the supporting role of an Olympic javelin thrower whose wife is having an affair with a millionaire playboy, Grant was described in the advertisements for the movie as ‘the new he-man sensation of Cinemerica!’⁵ Tuttle left Grant largely to his own devices, which were still those of a stage-trained actor, and, as a consequence, his performance showed no appreciation of the importance of underplaying. At eighth in the cast list, he was less noticeable as a rich roué in Alexander Hall’s Sinners in the Sun, his first of two disappointing movies with Carole Lombard, although he did have his first chance to show audiences how good he looked in evening clothes. Equally facetious, and even more devoid of opportunities for Grant to impress, was Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily we go to Hell, in which his contribution, billed ninth, was always going to be negligible. A slightly more promising role was then given to him by Marion Gering in The Devil and the Deep, the stars of which were Tallulah Bankhead, Charles Laughton and Gary Cooper.⁶

Of the three other movies in which Grant appeared in 1932 – Blonde Venus, Hot Saturday and Madame Butterfly – by far the most significant was Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus starring Marlene Dietrich. It was the first good, substantial, role he had been given, one that would provide him with a serious opportunity to show that he could convince audiences as a romantic consort. He was playing opposite the nearest thing that Paramount had at that time to a screen ‘goddess’, and she was treated accordingly; her custom-built four-room dressing-suite had cost the studio $300,000 (about sixty times the cost of an average US family dwelling in 1932), she had the right to veto her publicity and, with von Sternberg as her director and mentor, an unusually influential say in the selection, and production, of her starring vehicles.

It was while making this, his fifth, movie, and the first that Gary Cooper had rejected, that Grant’s image underwent a minor but significant cosmetic transformation. The director, von Sternberg, ever the meticulous auteur, changed Grant’s hair parting from the left to the right. According to Alexander Walker, the main reason why von Sternberg decided to change the parting was to annoy and unsettle Grant.⁷ ‘Joe loved to throw you,’ Grant told Walker. ‘Could you do anything worse to an actor than alter his hair parting just a minute before he starts shooting a scene? I kept it that way ever since, as you may have noticed. To annoy him.’⁸ It also, as he (and von Sternberg) probably knew, improved his appearance; his ‘best side’, for the camera, was his right (he disliked the mole on his left side), and the new ramrod-straight parting (which became the single most simple and straightforward thing about him) complemented his other features.

The inexperienced and under-confident Grant did not enjoy working for von Sternberg. There were periods when he was left to look on bemused as the director and the star argued with each other in German, and there were other times when the director seemed intent on turning his fury onto him: ‘I could never get a scene under way before Joe would bawl out “Cut” – at me, personally, across the set. This went on and on and on. I felt like someone doing drill who kept dropping his rifle, but wasn’t going to be allowed to drop out of ranks.’⁹ Grant was miscast as Nick Townsend, a politician (‘he runs this end of town’) who makes Dietrich his mistress, enabling her to pay for her ailing husband, played by Herbert Marshall, to travel to Germany in search of a cure for his illness. Marshall – who, as Richard Schickel has rather cruelly remarked, ‘always played civility as if it were a form of victimisation’¹⁰ – should have provided Grant with a useful contrast for his own characterisation; von Sternberg, however, allowed Grant to throw away even his passionate speeches, and for too much of the movie he appears so self-effacing as to be almost invisible. He was, however, beautifully lit and photographed – as were all the leading actors – and he looked good in his fine clothes and glamorous environment. It was, in short, a helpful movie for an ambitious young actor, even if von Sternberg left him feeling, if anything, even less confident than before.

Amidst the unfamiliarity of his new surroundings, Cary Grant, like countless other new arrivals with British backgrounds, sought and found, at least for a short while, a relatively reassuring sense of security and stability in that tightly-knit community of émigré English actors and writers sometimes referred to as the ‘Hollywood Raj’ or the ‘British movie colony’.¹¹ A few English performers, such as Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, had arrived as early as 1910 as refugees from Victorian music-hall, but the coming of sound had been the signal for a further wave of stage-trained English actors. Though the British mixed fairly freely with the rest of Hollywood society, they seemed, in spite of it, to retain a certain separateness. In the mid-thirties, the Christian Science Monitor, reporting on foreigners in Hollywood, was particularly struck by the obduracy of the British in their preservation of their culture:

Several English cake shops now exist, catering almost exclusively to the English, who maintain a stricter aloofness than do most other resident aliens; steak and kidney pies have miraculously made their appearance all over town and are sometimes even eaten by the natives; Devonshire cream is also manufactured, but in very small quantities … Once a year, on New Year’s Eve, the principal members of the British colony gather in a Hollywood café to hear the bells of Big Ben ring out over the radio … Billiards are now played regularly at the homes of most British stars, and officers of the British warships visiting in California harbors entertain and are entertained by a group founded by Victor McLaglen and known as the British United Services Club, comprised in large part of actors who have served in one of the branches of the British military; while on many a film set old members of the same London club [usually the Garrick], meet and fraternise.¹²

Many of these English actors had found work in Hollywood because of their ‘exotic’ qualities – their looks, their mannerisms and their accents. Their relative insularity, therefore, was not merely the result of homesickness or cultural taste but also, in many cases, professional necessity; to mix too freely and too frequently with one’s American colleagues was to risk becoming fully assimilated by, and acculturated in, American society. The commercial appeal of many English actors was their Englishness; English actors who looked and sounded American, unless they were remarkably talented, faced much fiercer competition for roles. Many of the most successful English actors of the time were well aware of the danger. Ronald Colman, Artur Rubinstein recalled, possessed a ‘beautiful’ English accent which actually ‘became better and more marked with time instead of becoming Americanised’,¹³ while C. Aubrey Smith, specialising in playing a limited range of crusty English colonel types, developed and preserved a lucrative cluster of echt-English mannerisms for the enchantment of American audiences. There were some for whom the need, or desire, to maintain their cultural distinctiveness caused them, gradually but usually inexorably, to settle into a comfortable form of self-parody. Aubrey Smith – who once summed up his experience of working with Garbo in Queen Christina in the remark, ‘She’s a ripping gel’,¹⁴ and who lived in a house on Mulholland Drive that boasted a weather vane made out of three cricket stumps, a bat and a ball – was a comically anachronistic figure even for most of his compatriots, while Gladys Cooper, taking tea one warm afternoon at the Pacific Palisades home of Robert Coote, reacted with typical mock-horror to the arrival of George Cukor by exclaiming disapprovingly: ‘Darling … there seems to be an American on your lawn.’¹⁵

Although as time went on Cary Grant continued to enjoy the company of many of the Hollywood British, he was not eager to become too closely identified with them. The least appealing aspect of the British colony was that it was a kind of microcosm of British society, with the same hierarchical structure and snobbery. There were other working-class Englishmen in Hollywood, but few of them seem to have embraced – or been embraced by – the colony. Chaplin was sufficiently powerful and secure to have no need of such a self-consciously exclusive community, whereas others from similar backgrounds, such as Stan Laurel, Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Laughton, found the prospect of enduring the old class tensions for a second time, this time on foreign soil, too unpleasant to contemplate for very long.¹⁶

At a time when Archie Leach was just beginning to get used to being Cary Grant, the stalwart members of the British colony – after the initial pleasantries were over with – were the most likely people to remind Cary Grant that he was ‘really’ just Archie Leach. Established members of the colony did nothing to disguise their privileged backgrounds: Aubrey Smith (Charterhouse and Cambridge), Basil Rathbone (Repton), Boris Karloff (Uppingham), John Loder (Eton) and Clive Brook (Dulwich) were among those who were known to attend the annual public-school dinner organised by the Hollywood British. David Niven (Stowe and Sandhurst), who arrived in 1934, found it relatively easy to ingratiate himself with this exclusive group,¹⁷ whereas Grant, who struck some of the expatriates as ‘socially insecure’,¹⁸ simply had no choice but to ‘go native’.

He became friends with another Paramount contract player, Randolph Scott, when the two co-starred in Hot Saturday, and they decided to pool their resources and share a house. Handsome, amiable and increasingly successful, the two men began to attract precious publicity as two of Hollywood’s most eligible young bachelors.¹⁹ Scott introduced Grant to Howard Hughes, who, in turn, provided Grant with an entrée into Hollywood’s most glamorous social circles, introducing him to a period of grand and incessant parties, sophisticated and affluent new friends, and all the paraphernalia of California high society. In a sense, Grant found that he could have the best of both worlds: the established British stars were, at least early on, useful contacts, while the rest of the Hollywood community appreciated his unusual sociability. Cary Grant became known as an Englishman who genuinely enjoyed – and felt comfortable in – the company of Americans, and that, in the early thirties, was a rarity which he exploited to the full.

On the movie screen, Cary Grant was still struggling to improve as an actor. Josef von Sternberg had made an ill-conceived attempt to shout him into producing a more assured performance, but the stiffness remained: ‘Joe bemoaned, berated and beseeched me to relax, but it was years before I could move with ease before a camera. Years before I could stop my right eyebrow from lifting, a sure sign of inner defenses and tensions. ’²⁰ The majority of the roles he was being given by Paramount simply capitalised on his good looks, putting him into smart uniforms or elegant evening clothes at every opportunity. His success, such as it was, struck him as shallow. Jack Haley Jnr. sympathised: ‘It must have been miserable for Cary. As a foreigner … he was at the bottom of the barrel in terms of parts. The first choice went to Gary Cooper. The second went to George Raft. Even Fred MacMurray was getting better parts than Cary.’²¹ A publicist put it more bluntly: ‘Gary Cooper or Freddie March, they were actors. Cary Grant? He was kind of a stick … He was there to look tall, dark and handsome.’²² When he was forced to play Lieutenant Pinkerton in the movie version of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, and sing ‘My Flower of Japan’ to Sylvia Sidney’s Cio-Cio-San, it seemed that his career, if it was progressing at all, was doing so painfully slowly.

Cary Grant’s fortunes changed suddenly and unexpectedly. Before he had finished shooting Madame Butterfly, he found himself cast in She Done Him Wrong, opposite Mae West. In his autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, von Sternberg boasted that he had ‘rescued’ Grant from a possible career of being ‘one of Mae West’s foils’ in order to launch him ‘on his stellar career’.²³ The memories of Hollywood celebrities are notoriously unreliable: as the call to work with West came some months after Grant had finished Blonde Venus, von Sternberg’s role in the advancement of Grant’s ‘stellar career’ was somewhat overstated. West claimed in her (equally unreliable) autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It, that she noticed ‘a sensational looking young man’ – Grant – on the Paramount lot, and cast him on the spot: ‘If this one can talk,’ she claims she said at the time, ‘I’ll take him.’²⁴ According to West, she saw immediately that Grant ‘had poise, a great walk, everything women would like’.²⁵ In truth, Grant was probably first spotted by West on the screen in one of his earlier movie appearances (‘I liked his voice first, but I saw right away that the rest of him measured up’²⁶). As far as his casting for She Done Him Wrong was concerned, it seems likely that B. P. Schulberg had favoured pairing his new leading man with the aggressive West,²⁷ and it is also known that Lowell Sherman, the director West had chosen for the movie, had liked Grant’s performance in Blonde Venus.²⁸

The movie was an adaptation of West’s stage success of 1928, Diamond Lil. She played Lady Lou, ‘one of the finest women who ever walked the streets’, who runs a Bowery saloon; Grant played Captain Cummings, from the nearby church mission, who is really ‘the Hawk’, a government agent. It was the first opportunity since Grant had been in Hollywood for him to make use of his vaudeville training as a straight man. ‘Haven’t you ever met a man who can make you happy?’ he asks her. ‘Sure,’ she replies, ‘lots of times.’ West had usually played opposite men who appeared as tough and as coarse as her own character, and Grant’s more vulnerable performance provided an interesting contrast to her brash sexuality. ‘Why don’t you come up sometime, see me?’ she says to him, staring into his eyes. ‘Come up. I’ll tell your fortune.’

Shooting began on 21 November 1932, and was completed in a mere eighteen days. For an outlay of $200,000, it earned $2 million within three months in the US alone. This movie, in effect, saved Paramount from bankruptcy. Cary Grant emerged from the triumph as someone who had the potential to be much more than a mere straight man to Mae West. As Pauline Kael observes, West brought out Grant’s passivity, giving him an aloof charm, ‘a quality of refinement in him which made her physical aggression seem a playful gambit’.²⁹ Kael also noted that the success of the performance was achieved in spite of Grant’s relative lack of confidence in his own abilities as a movie actor: he did not ‘yet know how the camera should see him’, and he appeared, when he had little to do in a scene, ‘vaguely ill at ease’, standing ‘lunged forward as if hoping to catch a ball’³⁰ (this might be a little unfair: Grant’s character was meant to seem uneasy in his duplicity, and his physical awkwardness provided West with the opportunity for yet more double entendres: ‘That’s right. Loosen up. Unbend. You’ll feel better’). He was, none the less, the ‘classiest’ leading man whom West had appeared with, and the critics appreciated that fact. ‘Hi, tall, dark and handsome,’ she said to him; it was a nice welcome for Cary Grant. His good looks, under-playing and good comic timing combined to suggest a very promising future. After roles in three more formulaic movies – The Woman Accused, The Eagle and the Hawk and Gambling Ship (all 1933) – Paramount seized on the opportunity to cast Grant alongside West for their second movie together: I’m No Angel. The weak story-line never threatened to distract one’s attention from the comic dialogue:

Grant: Do you mind if I get personal?

West: I don’t mind if you get familiar.

Although it was a poor movie in comparison with She Done Him Wrong, it was another great success at the box-office. Paramount raised his salary to $750 per week. Fan mail began to arrive in increasing amounts, and the fan magazines started to compete for his interviews.³¹

He was grateful for the exposure afforded him by his association with West – who was among the top ten box-office attractions in the country at that time – but he became increasingly resentful of the shameless way in which she sought to take all of the credit for his stardom: ‘She always got a great deal of publicity for herself … I could never understand the woman. I thought she was brilliant with that one character she portrayed, but she was an absolute fake as a person. You would shudder from it.’³² At the time, however, Grant – who thought more than most about the technique behind a performance – was well aware of what an excellent teacher in the art of screen comedy West was: ‘She knows so much … Her instinct is so true, her timing so perfect, her grasp of the situation so right. It’s the tempo of the acting that counts rather than the sincerity of the characterisation. Her personality is so dominant that everyone with her becomes just a feeder.’³³ One of the most impressive qualities of the young Cary Grant was this capacity for quiet observation; he never missed an opportunity to learn from performers more experienced, and more skilled, than himself, and he learned much of immense value from his working experience with Mae West.

Grant was now in the process of becoming something of a Hollywood celebrity. He inherited the dressing-room formerly occupied by George Bancroft, a star of silent movies who had recently been demoted to the ranks of supporting players. Paramount’s most illustrious top dozen stars were quartered side by side in implied order of importance. Mae West had taken possession of dressing-room number 1, followed by the other leading women: Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Sylvia Sidney, Miriam Hopkins and Carole Lombard. Then came the leading male stars: Gary Cooper, Fredric March, Bing Crosby, George Raft, Cary Grant and Charles Laughton. Grant’s personal life was also beginning to change: he became engaged in 1933 to Virginia Cherrill, who had played the blind girl in Chaplin’s City Lights, and in November he took her back to England,³⁴ where they were married on 9 February the following year. He was thirty years old. The marriage, however, was soon in trouble; in the spring of 1935 they separated, and Grant began a series of brief relationships with other women.³⁵ The couple were granted a divorce that March.

Professionally, the years 1934 and 1935 did not see Grant offered many movie roles by Paramount which provided him with much opportunity to exploit his new-found popularity. Thirty Day Princess, Born to Be Bad, Kiss and Make Up, Ladies Should Listen (all 1934) were largely forgettable affairs. After making Wings in the Dark (1935), Grant was given six months off; Paramount had a backlog of Grant movies which had yet to be released.³⁶ It seemed as though the studio was undecided as to how best it should utilise his talents, and his dissatisfaction with Paramount deepened: ‘They had a lot of leading men at Paramount with dark hair and a set of teeth like mine, and they couldn’t be buying stories for all of us.’³⁷ In November 1935 he returned to England to make The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss³⁸ for the independent company, Garrett Klement Pictures; if he had hoped to find temporary relief away from Hollywood, he was disappointed – during the filming, his father died.

When Grant returned to Hollywood early in 1936 he was anxious to sort out his future. He feared that he was in danger of being eclipsed by some of his contemporaries, such as James Cagney (who had just reached number ten in the list of top box-office draws) and Errol Flynn (who had starred recently in the very successful Captain Blood). It had become obvious to insiders that Grant was unhappy at Paramount. When Sylvia Scarlett, which he had made on loan at RKO the previous year, was released, the generally positive reviews of his contribution encouraged him to persevere in his struggle for more control over his career.

Grant later acknowledged Sylvia Scarlett as ‘my breakthrough’,³⁹ but it was, in many ways, a spectacular failure. Based on Compton Mackenzie’s picaresque novel, it starred Katharine Hepburn and was directed by George Cukor. Grant played Jimmy Monkley (‘gentleman adventurer’), a cockney con-man who teams up with Sylvia Scarlett (Hepburn) and her father (Edmund Gwenn) in various embezzlement schemes. The most unusual aspect of the movie was that the plot called for Hepburn to masquerade as a boy through most of the story.⁴⁰ Coded motifs and hidden implications abound in the script: Monkley wants to cuddle up to Sylvester ‘like a hot-water bottle’; a housemaid wants to daub a moustache on Sylvester and kiss ‘him’; and a bohemian artist is given a ‘queer feeling’ by his fascination with the boy. For a woman to appear on the screen in drag, in spite of the moralistic Production Code of the time, was a daring departure for a Hollywood movie, but the conceit was only allowed after Cukor had been ordered to add what he later described as ‘a silly, frivolous prologue, to explain why this girl was dressed like a boy, and being so good at it. We weren’t allowed to give the impression that she liked it, or that she’d done it before, or that it came naturally.’⁴¹

The movie proved to be both a personal watershed and a professional catastrophe for several of the people who made it. Its dismal reception set in motion Katharine Hepburn’s boycotting by the nation’s movie exhibitors as ‘box-office poison’. Hepburn’s accent flits from French to cod-cockney to Bryn Mawr, and, in her stylised boy’s clothes and principal-boy’s gestures, she appears – far from seeming unnervingly androgynous – merely epicene (an American cousin, perhaps, of the English camp comic actor Kenneth Williams). The dialogue – ‘why, then I won’t be a girl! I won’t be weak and I won’t be silly! I’ll be a boy and be rough and hard’ – did nothing to discourage her irritatingly mannered performance. At one point during the shooting of the movie, Hepburn confided in her diary: ‘This picture makes no sense at all.’⁴² It was a perceptive remark. RKO executives were furious long before Sylvia Scarlett was confirmed as the studio’s worst box-office failure of the year. The movie’s shell-shocked producer, Pandro Berman, told Hepburn and Cukor (but not Grant) that he never wanted to work with either of them ever again.⁴³

What was extraordinary was how Grant managed to emerge from this débâcle not merely unscathed but with an enhanced reputation. ‘That was really the beginning for Cary,’ Katharine Hepburn remembered. ‘He was the only reason to see Sylvia Scarlett. It was a terrible picture, but he was wonderful in it.’⁴⁴ One reason why Grant was so effective in it was the fact that he was playing an Englishman, and several scenes were set in a travelling fair (performing songs like ‘The Winkle on the Boarding ’ouse Floor’). There is, indeed, more than a trace of Archie Leach in Grant’s performance. Jimmy Monkley was formed by the same society that had shaped Grant: first glimpsed in a black hat and coat on a boat crossing the English Channel, he later refers to himself sarcastically as ‘a little friend of all the world, nobody’s enemy but me own’, and more soberly as ‘a rolling stone’ who is neither a ‘sparrow’ nor an ‘’awk’. ‘Take it from me,’ he tells Scarlett, ‘it don’t do to step out of your class.’ In contrast to Archie Leach, however, Jimmy Monkley sees no way of escaping, merely surviving. ‘You have the mind of a pig,’ Scarlett tells him. ‘It’s a pig’s world,’ he replies. As Richard Schickel has suggested, the role of Jimmy Monkley offered Grant the opportunity ‘to get in touch with what was usable in his past, lay it out in public, and discover that his bright new, light new world would not collapse inward upon him, that, indeed, it was capable of vast expansion’.⁴⁵ George Cukor agreed: until then, he said, Grant had been ‘a successful young leading man who was nice-looking but had no particular identity’.⁴⁶ This movie, he added, changed that: ‘Sylvia Scarlett was the first time Cary felt the ground under his feet as an actor. He suddenly seemed liberated. It was very exhilarating to see.’⁴⁷ The critics were also impressed: writing in Variety, one declared that Grant ‘steals the picture’, while the Motion Picture Herald reviewer praised Grant’s performance as ‘the most convincing’ and in stark contrast to the ‘overstrained’ attempts at characterisation by his more experienced co-stars.⁴⁸

Sylvia Scarlett, or rather Grant’s role within it, was his ticket to leave Paramount. His contract was about to run out, and the success of his portrayal of Jimmy Monkley, combined with the increasingly cavalier treatment he felt he was receiving from Paramount (vetoing his request to go on loan to MGM for Mutiny on the Bounty, putting him in a mystery called Big Brown Eyes, loaning him out again to MGM for a second lead in Suzy and then putting him in the insipid screwball comedy Wedding Present), made up his mind for him. He would refuse to renew his contract. Not only would he break away from Paramount, he would, he resolved, from that point on, after twenty-one movies, refuse to commit himself exclusively to any one studio.

It is difficult today to appreciate just how astonishing and courageous (or reckless) Grant’s decision seemed in the mid-thirties. No one of his stature had contemplated acting as a freelance performer since the days before the studio system took hold of Hollywood. He had, however, come a long way on his own, further than most, and, although his own vision of himself was still somewhat out of focus, it was considerably sharper than the vision of Cary Grant found among the producers at Paramount. It seems possible that even the executives at Paramount were beginning, grudgingly, to realise that this was the case. Adolph Zukor, who was anxious to keep him at the studio, offered Grant thirty-five hundred dollars per week to stay. Grant, however, was adamant that his future lay in independence and the freedom to choose not only his roles but also, eventually, his co-workers and his scripts. Jack Haley, Jnr., has stressed the peculiarity of Grant’s independent spirit:

He was constantly a maverick, rebelling against what everybody expected him to do. He had the confidence to say good-bye to Pender and look for work in the theater. Later he’d walk out on the Shuberts. Then he walked out on Paramount, which offered him a great deal of money to stay. And that was right toward the end of the Depression. It took cojones to do that.⁴⁹

Many other promising young actors were stunned by such an urgent and uncompromising attitude. ‘If I had stayed at Paramount,’ he said, ‘I would have continued to take pictures that Gary Cooper, William Powell, or Clive Brook turned down.’⁵⁰ The rivalry between Grant and Cooper, in particular, had been growing increasingly intense during the previous couple of years. Cooper had once dismissed the challenge of Grant by claiming that he was ‘a crack comedian, no competition for me’,⁵¹ but things had since become rather more unnerving, and Photoplay magazine said of the two men: ‘They know that they’re pitted against each other, and when the final gong sounds, one of them will be on the floor.’⁵²

In the autumn of 1936, Grant bought out what little remained of his contract and announced that he was open to offers from other studios. The first movie he accepted was Columbia’s When You’re in Love. While working on it, he was also offered a prominent role in The Toast of New York by RKO. He worked on the Columbia movie by day and the RKO project by night. Neither movie did particularly well at the box-office, but both studios were impressed with his performances and offered to sign him to contracts. His financial demands nearly deterred them: he asked for a flat fee of $75,000 per movie. Both studios felt the sum was exorbitant. The only way to break the stalemate was for Grant to prove to Columbia and RKO that he could find a similar offer elsewhere. Hal Roach approached him to co-star in the fantasy comedy Topper, offering to pay him $50,000 if the movie was successful. It was. For very little work (he was actually on the screen for far less of the movie than it seemed), Grant experienced his first undisputed commercial success as a star. He played an elegant ghost in a high society world of nightclubs, champagne, pink ladies and fast cars, a magical figure who exuded what would come to be thought of as the essence of Grant’s image – playful and unflappable sophistication. After its release there was a further huge increase in his fan mail, over two hundred letters each week. It showed producers that he could carry a movie, and it also marked the beginning of his reputation as one of Hollywood’s most gifted light actors. Through his agent, Frank Vincent, Grant worked out a unique deal whereby he would work for both Columbia and