Loverboy of the
Bourgeoisie
ON THEIR WAY INTO THE
EDWARDIAN ROOM OF THE PLAZA Hotel all they had was that sort of
dutiful, forward-tilted gait that East Side dowagers get after
twenty years of walking small dogs up and down Park Avenue. But on
their way out the two of them discover that all this time, in the
same room, there has been their dreamboat, Cary Grant, sitting in
the corner. Actually, Grant had the logistics of the Edwardian Room
figured out pretty well. In the first place, the people who come to
the Plaza for lunch are not generally the kind who are going to
rise up and run, skipping and screaming, over to some movie star’s
table. And in the second place, he is sitting up against the wall
nearest the doorway. He is eating lunch, consisting of a single
bowl of Vichyssoise, facing out the window towards three old boys
in silk toppers moseying around their horses and hansoms on 59th
Street on the edge of Central Park.
Well, so much for logistics. The two
old girls work up all the courage they need in about one-fourth of
a second.
“Cary Grant!” says the first one,
coming right up and putting one hand on his shoulder. “Look at you!
I just had to come over here and touch you!”
Cary Grant plays a wonderful Cary
Grant. He cocks his head and gives her the Cary Grant
mock-quizzical look—just like he does in the movies—the look that
says, “I don’t know what’s happening, but we’re not going to take
it very seriously, are we? Or are we?”
“I have a son who’s the spitting image
of you,” she is saying.
Cary Grant is staring at her hand on
his shoulder and giving her the Cary Grant fey-bemused look and
saying, “Are you trying to hold me down?”
“My son is forty-nine,” she’s saying.
“How old are you?”
“I’m fifty-nine,” says Cary
Grant.
“Fifty-nine!
Well, he’s forty-nine and he’s the spitting image of you, except
that he looks older than you!”
By this time the other old girl is
firmly planted, and she says: “I don’t care if you hate me, I’m
going to stand here and look at
you.”
“Why on earth should I hate you?” says
Cary Grant.
“You can say things about me after I’m
gone. I don’t care, I’m going to stand here and look at
you!”
“You poor dear!”
Which she does, all right. She takes it
all in; the cleft chin; this great sun tan that looks like it was
done on a rotisserie; this great head of steel-gray hair, of which
his barber says: “It’s real; I swear, I yanked it once”; and the
Cary Grant clothes, all worsteds, broadcloths and silks, all rich
and underplayed, like a viola ensemble.
“Poor baby,” says Cary Grant, returning
to the Vichyssoise. “She meets someone for the first time and
already she’s saying, ‘I don’t care if you hate me.’ Can you
imagine? Can you imagine what must have gone into making someone
feel that way?”
Well, whatever it was, poor old baby
knows that Cary Grant is one leading man who, at least, might give
it a second thought. Somehow Cary Grant, they figure, is the one
dreamboat that a lady can walk right up to and touch, pour soul
over and commune with.
And by the time Grant’s picture,
“Charade,” with Audrey Hepburn, had its premiere at the Radio City
Music Hall, thousands turned out in lines along 50th Street and
Sixth Avenue, many of them in the chill of 6 A.M., in order to get
an early seat. This was Grant’s 61st motion picture and his 26th to
open at Radio City. He is, indeed, fifty-nine years old, but his
drawing power as a leading man, perhaps the last of the genuine
“matinee idols,” keeps mounting toward some incredible, golden-aged
crest. Radio City is like a Nielsen rating for motion pictures. It
has a huge seating capacity and is attended by at least as many
tourists, from all over the country, as New Yorkers. Grant’s first
25 premières there played a total of 99 weeks. Each one seems to
break the records all over again. Before “Charade,” “That Touch of
Mink,” with Doris Day, played there for 10 weeks and grossed
$1,886,427.
And the secret of it all is somehow
tied up with the way he lit up two aging dolls in the Edwardian
Room at the Plaza Hotel. In an era of Brandoism and the Mitchumism
in movie heroes, Hollywood has left Cary Grant, by default, in sole
possession of what has turned out to be a curiously potent device.
Which is to say, to women he is Hollywood’s lone example of the
Sexy Gentleman. And to men and women, he is Hollywood’s lone
example of a figure America, like most of the West, has needed all
along: a Romantic Bourgeois Hero.
One has only to think of what the rest
of Hollywood and the international film industry, for that matter,
have been up to since World War II. The key image in film heroes
has certainly been that of Marlon Brando. One has only to list the
male stars of the past 20 years—Brando, Rock Hudson, Kirk Douglas,
John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Victor Mature, William
Holden, Frank Sinatra—and already the mind is overpowered by an
awesome montage of swung fists, bent teeth, curled lips, popping
neck veins, and gurglings. As often as not the Brandoesque hero’s
love partner is some thyroid hoyden, as portrayed by Brigitte
Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida or, more
recently, Sue Lyon and Tuesday Weld. The upshot has been the era of
Rake-a-Cheek Romance on the screen. Man meets woman. She rakes his
cheek with her fingernails. He belts her in the chops. They fall in
a wallow of passion.
The spirit of these romances, as in so
many of the early Brando, James Dean and Rock Hudson pictures, has
been borrowed from what Hollywood imagines to be the beer-and-guts
verve of the guys-and-dolls lower classes. Undoubtedly, the
rawness, the lubricity, the implicit sadism of it has excited
moviegoers of all classes. Yet it should be clear even to Hollywood
how many Americans, at rock bottom, can find no lasting
identification with it. The number of American men who can really
picture themselves coping with a little bleached hellion who is
about to rake a cheek and draw blood with the first kiss is
probably embarrassingly small. And there are probably not many more
women who really wish to see Mister Right advancing toward them in
a torn strap-style undershirt with his latissimae dorsae
flexed.
After all, this is a nation that,
except for a hard core of winos at the bottom and a hard crust of
aristocrats at the top, has been going gloriously middle class for
two decades, as far as the breezeways stretch. There is no telling
how many millions of American women of the new era know exactly
what Ingrid Bergman meant when she said she loved playing opposite
Cary Grant in “Notorious” (1946): “I didn’t have to take my shoes
off in the love scenes.”
Yet “Notorious,” one will recall, was
regarded as a highly sexy motion picture. The Grant plot
formula—which he has repeated at intervals for 25 years—has
established him as the consummate bourgeois lover: consummately
romantic and yet consummately genteel. Grant’s conduct during a
screen romance is unfailingly of the sort that would inspire trust
and delight, but first of all trust, in a middle-class woman of any
age. Not only does Grant spare his heroines any frontal assault on
their foundation garments, he seldom chases them at all at the
outset. In fact, the Grant plot formula calls for a reverse chase.
First the girl—Audrey Hepburn in “Charade,” Grace Kelly in “To
Catch a Thief,” Betsy Drake in “Every Girl Should Be Married”—falls
for Grant. He retreats, but always slowly and coyly, enough to make
the outcome clear. Grant, the screen lover, and Grant, the man,
were perfectly combined under the escutcheon of the middle-class
American woman—“Every Girl Should Be Married”—when Grant married
Betsy Drake in real life.
During the chase Grant inevitably
scores still more heavily with the middle-class female psyche by
treating the heroine not merely as an attractive woman but as a
witty and intelligent woman. And, indeed, whether he is with
Katharine Hepburn or Audrey Hepburn or Irene Dunne or Doris Day,
both parties are batting incredibly bright lines back and forth,
and halfway through the film they are already too maniacally witty
not to click one way or another.
Because of the savoir faire, genial
cynicism and Carlyle Hotel lounge accent with which he brings it
all off, Grant is often thought of as an aristocratic motion
picture figure. In fact, however, the typical Grant role is that of
an exciting bourgeois. In “Charade” he is a foreign service officer
in Paris; in “Bringing Up Baby” he was a research professor; in
“Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” he was an enthusiastic
suburbanite; and in countless pictures—among them “Crisis,” “People
Will Talk,” “Kiss and Make Up”—he was in the most revered
middle-class role of them all, exploited so successfully by
television over the past three years: the doctor. Seldom is Grant
portrayed as a lower-class figure—he did not make a good beatnik
Cockney in “None but the Lonely Heart”—and rarely is he anything so
formidable as the trucking tycoon he played in “Born to Be Bad” in
1934. The perfect Grant role is one in which he has a job that
gives him enough free time so that he does not have to languish
away at the office during the course of the movie; but he has the
job and a visible means of support and highly visible bourgeois
respectability all the same.
Grant, of course, has had no Hollywood
monopoly on either savoir faire or gentility on the screen. Many
suave, humorous gentlemen come to mind: Jimmy Stewart, David Niven,
Fred Astaire, Ronald Colman, Franchot Tone. None of them, however,
could approach Grant in that other part of being the world’s best
bourgeois romantic: viz., sex appeal. It was Cary Grant that Mae
West was talking about when she launched the phrase “tall, dark and
handsome” in “She Done Him Wrong” (1933), and it was Cary Grant who
was invited up to see her sometime. Even at age fifty-nine, the man
still has the flawless squared-off face of a comic strip hero, a
large muscular neck and an athletic physique which he still
exhibits in at least one scene in each picture. Every good American
girl wants to marry a doctor. But a Dr. Dreamboat? Is it too much
to hope for? Well, that is what Cary Grant is there
for.
So Cary Grant keeps pouring it on,
acting out what in the Age of Brando seems like the most unlikely
role in the world: the loverboy of the bourgeoisie. The upshot has
been intriguing. In 1948, at the age of forty-four he came in
fourth in the box-office poll of male star popularity, behind Clark
Gable, Gary Cooper and Bing Crosby. By 1958, when he was
fifty-four, he had risen to No. 1. This fall—when he was
fifty-nine—the motion picture Theater Owners Association named him
as the No. I box-office attraction, male or female.
Well, the two old dolls had left, and
the next crisis in the Edwardian Room was that an Italian starlet
had walked in, a kind of tabescent bijou blonde. Old Cary Grant
knows he has met her somewhere, but he will be damned if he can
remember who she was. His only hope is that she won’t see him, so
he has his head tucked down to one side in his Cary Grant
caught-out-on-a-limb look.
He can’t keep that up forever, so he
keeps his head turned by talking to the fellow next to him, who has
on a wild solaro-cloth suit with a step-collared vest.
“Acting styles go in fads,” Cary Grant
is saying. “It’s like girls at a dance. One night a fellow walks in
wearing a motorcycle jacket and blue jeans and he takes the first
girl he sees and embraces her and crushes her rib cage. ‘What a
man!’ all the girls say, and pretty soon all the boys are coming to
the dances in motorcycle jackets and blue jeans and taking direct
action. That goes on for a while, and then one night in comes a
fellow in a blue suit who can wear a necktie without strangling,
carrying a bouquet of flowers. Do they still have bouquets of
flowers? I’m sure they do. Well, anyway, now the girls say, ‘What a
charmer!’ and they’re off on another cycle. Or something like
that.
“Well, as for me, I just keep going
along the same old way,” says Cary Grant with his Cary Grant
let’s-not-get-all-wrapped-up-in-it look.
But now that the secret is out, the
prospects are almost forbidding. Think of all those Actors Studio
people trussed up in worsted, strangling on foulard silk, speaking
through the mouth instead of the nose, talking nice to
love-stricken old ladies in the Edwardian Room of the Plaza Hotel.
The mind boggles, baby.