Cary Grant (40 page)

Drake was the daughter of hotelier Carlos Drake, a writer whose family had built the Drake and Blackstone hotels in Chicago. She was born in Paris in 1923, while her father was living his “Lost Generation” novelist dream, and returned to America at the age of six with her parents, after the 1929 stock market crash forced Carlos Drake to return to Chicago to attend to family business matters. At the age of seventeen, Betsy quit school and moved to New York to make a life for herself as an actress. Her striking looks soon landed her a contract as a Conover model. She eventually found work on Broadway in a series of plays and in 1946 was signed to a film contract by Hal Wallis, who flew her to Los Angeles for a screen test, which she failed. She then returned to New York and auditioned for and won her role in the British production of
Deep Are the Roots.

Now, aboard the
Queen Elizabeth,
she was approached by Merle Oberon, whom Grant had sent as an envoy to arrange a formal introduction. Oberon invited Drake to have lunch at the captain's table, which was where she first met Grant. The two talked for the rest of the day, and for most of the night atop the deck, and the next day they met again and resumed their ongoing verbal marathon. Grant was, by now, totally smitten. He liked everything about her, from the unusual way she spoke, with the slightest trace of a French accent cut with a noticable, and to Grant adorable, lateral lisp, to the stylish way she dressed—little high collars, princess-style coats, flared skirts, white cuffs, and white gloves. He was equally enthralled by her passion for the Eastern philosophy of Taoism and the power of hypnotism.

By the time the ship docked in New York's harbor, Grant was convinced he was in love with Drake, nineteen years his junior. With much reluctance, after spending a week with Drake in New York, he had to leave her behind, but not before making her promise to visit him in Los Angeles, where he was scheduled to begin work on H. C. Potter's
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

The film was a light and sophisticated comedy in which Grant played a Manhattan executive who moves his family out of the crowded city and into their own “dream house” in the suburbs. David O. Selznick had bought the best-selling novel by Eric Hodgins as a property for Grant and Myrna Loy to star in, a follow-up of sorts to
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.
Selznick hoped the pairing of Grant and Loy might blossom into a series of films, similar to Loy's earlier run in the
Thin Man
series opposite the debonair William Powell, which had recently ended its lucrative five-picture, twelve-year run.

If Grant was still uneasy working for Selznick because of his muchpublicized engagement to Jennifer Jones, he went ahead with the picture at least in part to promote Drake's acting career. When production on
Mr. Blandings
was completed, Drake came to Los Angeles in January 1948 to celebrate Grant's forty-fourth birthday. For the occasion, he moved into the larger 9966 Beverly Grove house so Drake could have her own bedroom. Nevertheless, for all practical purposes, although neither one officially said as much to the other, they were now living together.

Grant began setting up appointments for Drake, first with Ray Stark, a hungry talent agent who agreed to take on Drake as a client.
^*
Grant also met with Selznick and Dore Schary, the new head of production at RKO, to convince them, as he had Stark, that it was in their best interests to sign his young “protégée.” Selznick then worked out an unusual arrangement with Schary, to “share” Drake. It didn't hurt matters any that Howard Hughes had finally gained a controlling interest in RKO and was, for all practical purposes, Schary's boss.

Not long afterward Schary began production on
Every Girl Should Be Married,
starring Cary Grant as Dr. Madison Brown, a bachelor pediatrician who is relentlessly pursued by Anabel Sims, a sales clerk working in the children's
clothing section of a large department store. Brown resists with everything he has, but at the end, when he can no longer hold her off, he succumbs to Anabel's “charms,” and they go off together into the matrimonial sunset. It is supposed to be a comedy.

Schary had wanted Barbara Bel Geddes to play Anabel, but he was overridden by Hughes, who gave the part instead to the studio's newest acquisition—Betsy Drake. Grant knew that acting on screen with Drake was a risky proposition. People were going to say that she had gotten the part only because she was his girlfriend, and they would be right. Drake, however, believed just the opposite, and she told Hedda Hopper so. If everyone thought she had gotten her big break because of Grant, she explained in an interview with the columnist, then they were very wrong about her
and
Cary. A better way to look at it, she suggested, was that Grant had simply made it possible for them to share a creative experience with their real-life chemistry out there for all the public to see.

The film turned out to be a positive experience for both Grant and Drake; the only downside was that Hughes insisted on becoming actively involved in every aspect of its production, with the result that Schary abruptly resigned from RKO. Hughes then allowed Grant to rewrite much of the script, and even to instruct director Don Hartman in how to shoot several scenes, so as to shift much of the film's visual emphasis from his character to Drake's.

When the film was completed, Grant felt the time had come to introduce his new love to his mother.

A shockingly thin Cary Grant, still recovering from the infectious hepatitis he contracted in England during the making of
I Was a Male War Bride
(1949), is greeted upon his return to the States by future wife, Betsy Drake. At the time, Grant was 45 years old and Drake was 26.
(AP Wide World Photos)

23

O
n August 26, 1948, Cary Grant and Betsy Drake left together for Germany, where Grant had agreed to star in Howard Hawks's postwar military comedy,
I Was a Male War Bride.
Grant had agreed to star in the film only after much cajoling from Hawks, who had signed a new four-picture deal at 20th Century–Fox and was, a decade later, finally in a position to do a follow-up of sorts to
Bringing Up Baby.

After World War II, many European countries froze all foreign assets, including $24 million of 20th Century–Fox's money. That left the studio little choice but to go to where its money was and make movies there.
I Was a Male War Bride
was one of twenty-four such productions the studio scheduled to be shot on location in Europe in the late 1940s. Hawks, who had just completed principle photography for the one and only independent film of his career, the classic western
Red River,
seized the opportunity to make the German-based comedy. To get Grant to say yes, Hawks agreed to the everparsimonious actor's insistence that Betsy Drake accompany him on the
entire overseas shoot, all her expenses paid by the studio out of the film's budget, including a visit by the both of them to Bristol so he could introduce her to Elsie.

Howard Hughes was not happy about Hawks's getting Grant to be in his film. He had wanted Grant to continue working at RKO, but for both professional and personal reasons, Grant had declined all of Hughes's offers. For one thing, the intensity of their friendship suffered by what Grant felt was Hughes's overbearing and unfair interference during the making of
Every Girl Should Be Married.
Grant considered Schary a good friend as well, and although he did not say anything at the time, he did not appreciate having to watch him be bullied by Hughes.

Moreover, a growing postwar political schism was dividing Hollywood's Left and Right. And while Hughes was a staunch conservative, active in the HUAC machinations, Grant remained resolutely liberal and was particularly outraged that Hollywood's powerful, fanatical right-wing forces, to which Hughes was completely committed, had Charlie Chaplin at the top of their hit list.

The Charles Lederer, Leonard Spigelgass, and Hagar Wilde script for
I Was a Male War Bride
was based on the best-selling autobiographical novel by Henri Rochard, which recounted the trouble he had run into as a Frenchborn soldier trying to marry an American woman. Military marriages between occupying soldiers and native civilians were popular throughout the 1940s and 1950s and the subject of several postwar movies, including
Sayonara,
Joshua Logan's grim Academy Award–winning 1957 film adaptation of James Michener's best-selling novel. In
I Was a Male War Bride,
the subject was treated much more lightly, as the title character, played by Grant, winds up sneaking aboard a U.S.-bound transport by dressing as a female officer, something Grant found unbelievably funny, having grown up in the world of British music hall humor, where “going drag” was a longtime staple of Saturday-night skits. In fact, most people tend to remember
I Was a Male War Bride
as a film that Grant spent entirely in drag, although he actually spends less than ten minutes in a dress, near the end of the film, and does so
quite unconvincingly. The essential plot contrivance of
I Was a Male War Bride
has Captain Henri Rochard (Grant, playing a “suave French captain” without the slightest hint of any accent other than his usual light Bristol seesaw) in love with American WAC officer Lieutenant Catherine Gates (Ann Sheridan), who also happens to be his assistant. They go through a tumultuous courtship that ends in matrimony but leaves the couple no chance to consummate their union. It is postwar Europe, and Captain Rochard, a French citizen, cannot accompany his American-born wife to the United States unless he enters under the newly restrictive immigration policies, whose only military exemption is the category of “war bride.” At this point, he disguises himself as a civilian woman.

Grant's first stop on the way to Germany was London, where he met up with Hawks for preliminary rehearsals at Shepperton Studios. The first time Grant put on a dress, he performed a drag show for the director, exaggerating all his disguised character's feminine gestures. Hawks didn't think it was at all funny and advised Grant to play the character as straight as possible. Being an obvious straight male in disguise, as opposed to a gay man in a skirt, became the key to Grant's finding the humor in his character.

For the duration of the stopover, Grant, Drake, Hawks, and Sheridan were all put up at a luxurious apartment complex in Grosvenor Square, but even so it was difficult for Grant to ignore the postwar miasma that had settled upon bombed-out London, accentuated by endless fog and drizzle. Because of the heavy rehearsal schedule he did not have time to take Drake to Bristol, and Hawks had to assure him that he would be able to return to England during a break in the production schedule.

The next stop was Heidelberg, where actual filming began on September 28, 1948. Hawks shot his location exteriors first, preparing his actors to be ready to do their scenes at certain designated hours to catch the best light. This was Grant's first time shooting on the European mainland, and he was not used to the weather or the harsh postwar conditions. It was cold, the skies were gray, and meals were served up on tin plates. He especially did not appreciate having to use the same bathroom as Sheridan. Only Drake
seemed to enjoy the whole thing and treated it as an adventure. She loved the idea of “roughing it,” as she put it, and even volunteered to help prepare the company's meals.