Cary Grant Read Free Page B

Academy in 1970 did Peck finally get the votes he needed and Grant his award.
    More than two hours into the Awards ceremony, held that year at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles, a nervous, tuxedoed Cary Grant was escorted by a hostess from the green room to the immediate backstage area, where he stood behind a fly curtain and listened through a small technician's cue speaker as Frank Sinatra finished his brief but spirited introduction.
    A onetime rival of Grant's for the affection of Sophia Loren (in 1956, during the filming of Stanley Kramer's
The Pride and the Passion
), Sinatra had been Peck's last-minute choice to replace Princess Grace (Kelly) Rainier. At Grant's insistence, Kelly had bowed out of what would have been her first live appearance at the Oscars in fifteen years (she had appeared in 1967, but on film shot in Monaco), after Grant announced that he could not, for “personal reasons,” show up to accept his Oscar.
    Those “personal reasons” had to do with an about-to-erupt sex scandal involving just the kind of gossipy scrutiny into Grant's personal life he had more or less succeeded in avoiding for most of his career. In March, less than a month after the Academy announced its intention to award Grant his Honorary Oscar and just two days after Grant assured Peck he would end his personal twelve-year boycott of the ceremonies to acceptit, * ( Cynthia Bouron, a former Hollywood call girl and self-proclaimed actress, filed a paternity suit against Grant, claiming he was the father of her seven-week-old baby girl. Within hours word of the publicly filed lawsuit swept across the Hollywood trades and on to the front pages of newspapers across the country and around the world. Grant, who had been tipped off the day of the filing by a friend at the Los Angeles courthouse, immediately flew to Bristol, England, to visit his suddenly sick mother.
    Many felt the timing of the lawsuit could not have been mere coincidence. After it became a matter of public record, more than one columnist claimed to have known it was coming for weeks and that he had been asked by unnamed parties to sit on the story until the Academy's decision to give Grant his Oscar had been publicly announced.
    The day the story broke it became the subject of choice over morning coffee in Beverly Hills. How, everyone in the business wondered, could Grant possibly have allowed himself to become ensnared in one of the studios' oldest tactics, the moral smear? The widespread belief among Grant's supporters was that if the hardliners at the Academy had not been able to prevent Grant from getting his award by ballot, they would do it another way, by publicly humiliating him and forcing him to bow out of the ceremonies.
    Once the lawsuit was filed, except for his conversations with Peck via long-distance telephone, Grant carefully avoided direct contact with anyone but his closest friends and his lawyer, spokesperson and personal manager Stanley Fox. Despite their well-known diligence, the British paparazzi had very little success tracking Grant down, the reason being that after making a brief, highly publicized appearance in Bristol, Grant secretly flew to the Bahamas in one of good friend Howard Hughes's private planes, where he remained in seclusion at the billionaire's private villa.
    During his absence, Bouron held a press conference to announce that
she
intended to show up at the Academy Awards, hold a press conference in front of the red carpet, reveal her new baby's full name, and if Grant dared to show, hand him the subpoena that he had thus far been able to avoid.
    Grant had reason to worry. The truth was that he had had a brief sexual affair with Bouron the year before. The nature of the mutual attraction between the sixty-six-year-old Grant and the thirty-three-year-old Bouron was most likely a clever sting of sorts, made possible by Grant's enduring attraction to much younger women and his desire to have a second child. When