Cary Grant Read Free Page A

Academy-dominated Hollywood, and to do it he had to start his own studio, United Artists (with Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, and Mary Pickford).
    No one, that is, until Cary Grant. The same year his deal at the studio expired, Grant appeared in George Cukor's
Sylvia Scarlett
for RKO, a role that showcased his unique talents as his screen acting at Paramount had not. And, although Grant's performance in the film was arguably just as good as, in some cases notably better than, William Powell's in
My Man Godfrey,
Paul Muni's in
The Story of Louis Pasteur,
Gary Cooper's in
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,
and Walter Huston's in
Dodsworth,
he was pointedly ignored at Oscar time by a still-resentful Academy. To the conservative moguls, he was now officially an outsider, an enemy of their system, as reviled as any independenttrade union activist. Their anger was exacerbated, no doubt, by his early, frequent, and indiscreet flaunting of his eleven-year “marriage” to actor Randolph Scott.
    IT WAS A RESENTMENT THAT was to last for a very long time. Of the seventy- two movies he would make, only two of his performances—in
Penny Serenade
(1941) and
None But the Lonely Heart
(1944), both made during Hollywood's wartime male talent drain—earned him nominations for Best Actor, and both times he lost (first to rival Gary Cooper, who won for
Sergeant York,
and then to Bing Crosby, who won for
Going My Way
).
    Nevertheless, his pioneering individualism had helped to redefine the notion of what creative freedom meant in Hollywood, and played a key role in the complex, multifaceted movement toward industrywide independence. Aided by a 1948 landmark antitrust lawsuit brought against the studios by the government to end the moguls' absolute control of the production, distribution, and exhibition of movies, Grant was among the handful of individuals whose actions eventually helped transform Hollywood from a factory that manufactured movies by mass production, much the way Ford made cars, to a place where outside, independently financed films could be produced by the actors themselves and sold for distribution to the highest bidder.
    As much as the studios resented Grant, he resented them in turn for what he believed was their stubborn refusal to properly acknowledge via Oscar not only his individual success but all that the success of his movies meant to the industry. To him, their intentional slight was not only an offense to his ego but cost him (and them) potential millions in profits at the box office for the many pictures he not only starred in but owned a piece of; one of the truisms of Hollywood is that no matter how successful a film, the awarding of an Oscar significantly increases its profits.
    In fact, many in the industry steadfastly believed that it was the money far more than the rejection—after all, how much more popular with the public could Grant be?—that kept the notoriously penny-pinching actor's finger on the legal hair-trigger of the pistol he continually pointed at the heads of the studios. From the early 1930s until he left the business entirely, Grantbrought numerous if mostly frivolous lawsuits against the heads of the industry, and almost always with the same accusation: that they had somehow conspired to cheat him out of what was rightly his. As late as the summer of 1968 he was still going at it. That August he and his partner, director Stanley Donen, filed a multimillion-dollar suit against MCA (Universal Studios) for its “poor judgment” in failing to obtain television distribution of the four films they had coproduced. The lawsuit, eventually settled out of court and like all the others, did nothing to ameliorate the industry leaders' long-term hostility toward Grant. That same year the members of the Academy angrily vetoed newly elected Academy president Gregory Peck's decision to award Grant a rare Honorary Oscar for his lifetime of achievement as an actor. Only after Grant “voluntarily” rejoined the