In and Out of Hollywood: A Biographer’s Memoir

Chapter 18

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241 I began to think about a life of Cary Grant. I had first met with the star after visiting Alfred Hitchcock at his cottage at Universal Studios; I had dropped in, at Grant’s invitation, to see him at his own little house nearby. I was told, then or later, that there was a trompe l’oeil painting he had ordered from the studio’s art director Alexander Golitzen; annoyed by a view of nothing but oleander bushes and a brick wall, he had ordered a replica of a country scene to replace the window so that one would seem to be looking out at a garden with a gravel path, a wicker gate, a fence, and beyond them a hill with sheep gamboling on it and beyond that again a gray English sky. He wanted to feel he was back in the West Country of his birth. When the painting was completed, he sent it back, annoyed; he said the art department had made a very serious mistake. They denied it, and he pointed out that the knotty pine door’s one open knot failed to show the sky. The painting had to be done again before he would accept it. I found Grant as fussy as the story would indicate; as we talked, he stared for a long time at two books that were not in perfect alignment on a shelf and then, unable to stand the sight any longer, set them exactly side by side. He flicked a tiny fragment of dust off a table with a Kleenex and then deposited the Kleenex, with a flourish, neatly folded, in the wastebasket. His hair was too perfect: razor cut, it had obviously been checked and rechecked in a mirror. His eyes were strange: they had the peculiar blankness of a ventriloquist’s dummy. The enormous horn-rimmed glasses seemed to be lensless; he was, I could tell, and others later confirmed it, wearing contact lenses. He walked me into his inner sanctum, a pretty office with, at its center, a circular flowered table he told me he had painted himself. “Kind of gays things up a little,” he said. The term had only just come into use, and his wink told me a very great deal. I had a sense of a man who carried with him countless secrets, and it wasn’t surprising to find that he had been involved with Secret Intelligence in World War II, or that, of all things, he had been an under-the-table Hollywood movie agent at the height of his screen career, representing, with his partner Harry Edington, Garbo, Dietrich, Leopold Stokowski, Rita Hayworth, Joel McCrea, Edward G. Robinson, and Rosalind Russell. Few secrets in Hollywood were better kept than that one. It was clear to me soon after laying the groundwork for a new biography of Grant that his bisexuality was known to everyone in Hollywood. Edith Gwyn was the author of a racy daily column in the Hollywood Reporter from the early thirties on, and a diligent search of her contributions over many years showed she was privy to her industry’s secret facts and slipped them to readers. She hid barbs in a continuing gag involving movie titles that advertised the wrong stars: Dietrich was in Male and Female, Garbo in The Son-Daughter, and Grant in One Way Passage. Roy Moseley, with whom I had worked on the Merle Oberon biography , again came in as my fellow author and was indispensable as a finder of rare facts and an interviewer of people who had never talked about Grant. Most notably, he had friends in Grant’s former assistant and chauffeur Ray Austin, who witnessed Grant’s love affair with Howard Hughes, and in Grant’s first wife, Virginia Cherrill, costar of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, who spoke of Grant’s cruelty. More than one man I interviewed said he had idolized Grant until Cary came to his house wearing a dress. Grant’s gay relationship with Randolph Scott was astonishingly open; they would go to premieres and parties as a pair, without female stars, and no studio chief could change this. When they made the movie My Favorite Wife, and checked into a hotel in Pasadena, everyone expected them to occupy separate suites; to the shock and astonishment of their fellow actors and crew, they moved into the same room and shared a double bed. 242 [18.221.187.121] Project...