Graham McCann - Cary Grant - A Class Apart

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

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