My favorite movie of all time is His Girl Friday. There are a
billion things to love about it, some of them very deep, very profound, all
about a moment in American cinema when . . . but never mind. Let’s talk about Cary Grant. He’s completely and entirely exquisite in His Girl Friday. He’s so funny you could burst from the
laughter. So poised that it’s like that
late-night diner trick where you balance a saltshaker on its edge. So insanely, over-the-top, extraordinarily
handsome that your teeth ache and you want to weep. But your tears are as fruitless as Echo’s,
when she is weeping for Narcissus. 
Not that Cary Grant comes off as a
narcissist in his movies, because he doesn’t.
Part of his perfection is that ever-so-slight hint of
self-deprecation. After all, you know,
he had a terrible – I mean a terrible –
childhood. Then, at the age of fourteen, he was
kicked out of school. He ran away and basically joined the circus. He spent his teens with a vaudeville act as an
acrobat. Can you imagine? The youth who became that elegant man, dressed in whatever shabby acrobat outfit he
had to wear, all big brown eyes, flying through the air with the greatest of
ease . . . before he shed his ugly name and pretty
accent. He must have been the prince of
the Ephebes. Can’t you just hear the cougars roaring?
Like all circus runaways, he made himself up out of broken pieces, and
when he put himself together, he put himself together just a little bit
wrong. A little bit (perfectly)
askew. That made-up (perfect) accent (remember Tony Curtis lampooning Grant: “Nobody talks like that!”). That
unbelievable handsomeness, a beauty that could crack heaven’s dome, put to the
task of (perfect) slapstick hilarity. It’s
irresistible. It’s immortal.
Here’s my question, though. It’s irresistible, it’s immortal . . . but is
it sexy?
On the one hand, that’s a stupid question. Let’s say that Cary Grant knocks on your door
and says “Hell-ow, how about it, you and me?”
Would you say, “no thank you?”
Obviously not. You would say,
“Come right in, Mr. Grant, and make yourself comfortable while I kick my true
love out the back door with instructions to not come back for an hour and
half.” And your true love, if they have
a soul, would wish you luck and check your breath and straighten your collar
and be proud as punch of you. Because
come on: Cary Grant.
But still. The
question lingers. Cary Grant. Sexy . . . or is part of the secret of his
manifold, fractal perfections the fact that . . . not so much?
Let’s pull back and look at the big picture. Cary Grant made movies between the years of
1932 and 1966. In those first two years of his career you
could put a whole lot of sex in your movies, and actors and directors ladled it
on. Grant appears in ’32 and ’33 as the
hunky young man whose dark good looks attract the attention of such smokingly
sexy women as Marlene Dietrich and Mae West.
Those films – Blonde Venus, She
Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel are
amazing and they are hot as hell. And Cary Grant’s in them (third billing). But is it Grant who stokes the flames? Nope.
These movies are sexy because of Dietrich and West. Grant is a pretty face. You almost don’t recognize him, he’s so
placidly gorgeous.
Then, in 1934, a thing called “The Code” – short for “The
Motion Picture Production Code” – changed everything. It radically curtailed how sex could be
represented in the movies. Overnight,
movies changed. They got lighter, they
got frothier, more flirty, less smoldering.
It was in the early days of the Code-era that Cary
Grant went from being handsome decoration to being the sparkling, antic faun we
know and love. His early hits, where we suddenly see that he’s a screaming
comic genius – His Girl Friday, Topper,
The Awful Truth – were all made immediately post-Code.
So yeah. Cary Grant
the living, breathing man was married five times to women, and may or may not
have also been lovers with men, most famously his best friend, the super gorgeous Randolph Scott. Be that as it may, Grant, in his private life, was a sexual
person. The persona of Cary Grant, on the other hand, the genius, the enthralling perfection of
Cary Grant the movie star . . . that Cary Grant came to flower in precisely the years of the film
industry’s greatest prudery.
He left films long before he died, claiming that he wanted
to spend time with his daughter. He was
also getting along in years. There is
something a bit disturbing about seeing Grant opposite Audrey Hepburn in Charade, when he’s 59 and she’s 34. But
whatever the reason, Grant left filmmaking as the Code was crumbling, just when
sex was on its way back in.
This is interesting to me for lots of reasons, but mostly
because I am an inveterate reader of “vintage” romance novels, in which there
isn’t any sex. And I write genre mash-up
novels that draw some inspiration from the Code-era screwball comedies I love,
and from that old-timey romance reading I enjoy. But my books have sex in them and my heroes
and heroines need to be the kind of people who might get down to it at any
point. It’s funny how difficult it is to
blend froth and steam. In fiction as in
cooking, they don’t really get along.
All of which is to say -- can we imagine Cary Grant sans his high-waisted, pleated culottes? Do we want to?
Last night the answer to that question slapped me in the
face like a cold, dead salmon. And I’m
still in shock. I watched a Grant movie
I’d never seen before. It’s not one of
his best known, but it isn’t exactly obscure.
Maybe you’ve seen it. It’s called
I Was a Male War Bride.
If you haven’t seen it, you should: I Was a Male War Bride is uproarious. Sort of like Some Like it Hot (an amazing film) if Some Like it Hot actually had Cary Grant in it, instead of Tony
Curtis pretending to be Cary Grant. It’s got this great leading lady, Ann
Sheridan, who is totally bad-assed and she and Cary Grant get into all sorts of
ridiculous scrapes, careening across Europe in the months after the end of the
Second World War. They’re just married
and they can’t find anywhere to spend the night alone. It’s an amazing portrait of women in the war,
too – just at that moment when women were still Rosie the Riveter and not yet
June Cleaver. Fantastic stuff. What could be better?
Except you will have to steel yourself for one particular
scene. In spite of the Code, this film manages to slip in a bedroom encounter that is
obviously a stand-in for a sex scene.
And I’m warning you. It isn’t
pretty. In fact, it creates a jagged rip
in the magical silver screen, revealing the hairy-knuckled possibility that Cary
Grant was . . .
It’s hard to type it . . .
Cary Grant was potentially – just potentially, mind you -- bad in bed.
Now I watched this film as a streaming video and no one has
decided to post it on the internet, so I cannot share the trauma with you here. I’m grateful.
I am simply warning you that, when you get around to watching I Was a Male War Bride, you will be
subjected to the sight of Cary Grant straddling a woman in bed and giving her a
“massage.”
I put “massage” in quotes because what we actually see him
doing is awkwardly sitting on her as if she were a tree stump, and grasping
fistfuls of her flesh as if she were made of play dough. He squeezes, quick and fierce, then moves on
to another fistful. He isn’t even
symmetrical in his movements, but just sort of clutches at her randomly. You can see that she’s in agony – her body
stiff even as she sighs and says “that feels so good.” Meanwhile he is staring down at his hands as
if in shock at his own ineptitude. For a
brief moment before the scene mercifully ends and the film leaves the horror
genre behind and gets back to being hilarious, you look at his hands too and
you think – or at least I thought – monkey
paws.
This morning I woke up and thought, “I must be wrong.” I remembered that there’s another massage
scene in the Grant oeuvre, but I couldn’t remember where. I Googled it and, lo and behold, he gives
Audrey Hepburn a foot massage in Charade. That scene has been put up on the
intertubes, and it’s interesting – you can hardly see him massaging her feet
and my bet is that it’s because Stanley Donen, the director, decided to chop
the film off and spare his audience the sight. It’s been fourteen years since
I Was a Male War Bride, and Cary
Grant still can’t give a massage. He
clutches at Hepburn’s feet with quick, hard squeezes, as if they are a rope he
is climbing.
Perhaps he was repelled by Ann Sheridan, and perhaps by
Hepburn too. Perhaps he couldn’t stand
to touch them. But even if that were
true, he was an actor. Pretending was
his job. And Cary Grant was certainly familiar
with massage: look how comfy-wumfy he looks here, receiving rather than
giving. That’s Doris Day, by the way,
another superstar of Code-era films.
Doris Day, whom Oscar Levant knew “before she was a virgin.”
One final piece of evidence.
Grant’s third wife, Betsy Drake, tried to deny that her ex-husband was
gay by offering up the following piece of information: “When we were married,” she said, “we were
fucking like rabbits.”
Of course she meant that they had sex all the time, and I’m
happy for them. But as an English
professor and a prurient so-and-so, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a
deeper meaning to the metaphor. I will
spare you any of the many videos available online that reveal how lepus curpaeums has sex. Suffice it to say, there is no foreplay,
there is a quick piston-like action, and the lady bunny can quite easily
continue doing whatever it was she was doing before the gentleman bunny got on
board. Chew lettuce, etc. You don’t really want rabbit sex to be your
high-water mark for fun in the sack.
OK. So. Three pieces of evidence. That’s what we need, isn’t it, to make an
historical truth claim? 1. Grant’s
career was strongest at the height of the Code; he made a great asexual hero. 2. He
gave horrible massages. 3. His ex-wife compared him to a rabbit.
Sigh.
But truth schmuth, right?
Who cares. I don’t actually want
to time travel back and jump Cary Grant’s lovely bones. We don’t watch movies or read novels or have daydreams
because we care about that miserly little thing called truth. Not even one little tiny bit. Cary Grant is still my fave. He’s still the most handsome, the most
hilarious, the most brokenly perfect. In
fact, I feel a Cary Grant film festival coming on. Arsenic
and Old Lace? Amazing. The
Philadelphia Story? Maybe even
better than His Girl Friday. North
by Northwest . . . oh my God. I
mean, the man was incredible.
I just wish I hadn’t watched I Was a Male War Bride last night.
I wish I didn’t have that sneaking suspicion. I wish I could get those paws out of my mind.
