(which was common). The bare statistics of his first year with the studio reflect the production-line smoothness of the times: he made seven movies in 1932, working a full fifty-two weeks.
During Grant’s first few hectic weeks at the studio he found a supporter in Jack Haley, the comedian, who later achieved his greatest Hollywood success in the role of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (1939). As his son, Jack Haley, Jnr., remembers, Grant was grateful to know someone else who had made the transition from vaudeville to movies:
When Cary was first at Paramount, he made a bee-line for my father, who had already done six or seven pictures there … Cary wanted to know what making movies was all about. My father told him, ‘The first thing you learn is not to use your stage makeup. So find a good makeup person. And don’t talk to the leading actress. She’ll steer you wrong. She’s your competition. Talk to the character people. They’ll teach you the ins and outs.’
Cary loved Charlie Ruggles, Arthur Treacher, and all those character people who came from Broadway or vaudeville. He felt secure with them. Years later Cary told me, ‘Your father was the only one who gave me advice for my first picture’.4
Grant first appeared, billed fifth, in Frank Tuttle’s farce This is the Night. Playing the supporting role of an Olympic javelin thrower whose wife is having an affair with a millionaire playboy, Grant was described in the advertisements for the movie as ‘the new he-man sensation of Cinemerica!’5 Tuttle left Grant largely to his own devices, which were still those of a stage-trained actor, and, as a consequence, his performance showed no appreciation of the importance of underplaying. At eighth in the cast list, he was less noticeable as a rich roué in Alexander Hall’s Sinners in the Sun, his first of two disappointing movies with Carole Lombard, although he did have his first chance to show audiences how good he looked in evening clothes. Equally facetious, and even more devoid of opportunities for Grant to impress, was Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily we go to Hell, in which his contribution, billed ninth, was always going to be negligible. A slightly more promising role was then given to him by Marion Gering in The Devil and the Deep, the stars of which were Tallulah Bankhead, Charles Laughton and Gary Cooper.6
Of the three other movies in which Grant appeared in 1932 – Blonde Venus, Hot Saturday and Madame Butterfly – by far the most significant was Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus starring Marlene Dietrich. It was the first good, substantial, role he had been given, one that would provide him with a serious opportunity to show that he could convince audiences as a romantic consort. He was playing opposite the nearest thing that Paramount had at that time to a screen ‘goddess’, and she was treated accordingly; her custom-built four-room dressing-suite had cost the studio $300,000 (about sixty times the cost of an average US family dwelling in 1932), she had the right to veto her publicity and, with von Sternberg as her director and mentor, an unusually influential say in the selection, and production, of her starring vehicles.
It was while making this, his fifth, movie, and the first that Gary Cooper had rejected, that Grant’s image underwent a minor but significant cosmetic transformation. The director, von Sternberg, ever the meticulous auteur, changed Grant’s hair parting from the left to the right. According to Alexander Walker, the main reason why von Sternberg decided to change the parting was to annoy and unsettle Grant.7 ‘Joe loved to throw you,’ Grant told Walker. ‘Could you do anything worse to an actor than alter his hair parting just a minute before he starts shooting a scene? I kept it that way ever since, as you may have noticed. To annoy him.’8 It also, as he (and von Sternberg) probably knew, improved his appearance; his ‘best side’, for the camera, was his right (he disliked the mole on his left side), and the new ramrod-straight parting (which became the single most simple and straightforward thing about him) complemented his other features.
The inexperienced and under-confident Grant did not enjoy working for von Sternberg. There were periods when he was left to look on bemused as the director and the star argued with each other in German, and there were other times when the director seemed intent on turning his fury onto him: ‘I could never get a scene under way before Joe would bawl out “Cut” – at me, personally, across the set. This went on and on and on. I felt like someone doing drill who kept dropping his rifle, but wasn’t going to be allowed to drop out of ranks.’9 Grant was miscast as Nick Townsend, a politician (‘he runs this end of town’) who makes Dietrich his mistress, enabling her to pay for her ailing husband, played by Herbert Marshall, to travel to Germany in search of a cure for his illness. Marshall – who, as Richard Schickel has rather cruelly remarked, ‘always played civility as if it were a form of victimisation’10 – should have provided Grant with a useful contrast for his own characterisation; von Sternberg, however, allowed Grant to throw away even his passionate speeches, and for too much of the movie he appears so self-effacing as to be almost invisible. He was, however, beautifully lit and photographed – as were all the leading actors – and he looked good in his fine clothes and glamorous environment. It was, in short, a helpful movie for an ambitious young actor, even if von Sternberg left him feeling, if anything, even less confident than before.
Amidst the unfamiliarity of his new surroundings, Cary Grant, like countless other new arrivals with British backgrounds, sought and found, at least for a short while, a relatively reassuring sense of security and stability in that tightly-knit community of émigré English actors and writers sometimes referred to as the ‘Hollywood Raj’ or the ‘British movie colony’.11 A few English performers, such as Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, had arrived as early as 1910 as refugees from Victorian music-hall, but the coming of sound had been the signal for a further wave of stage-trained English actors. Though the British mixed fairly freely with the rest of Hollywood society, they seemed, in spite of it, to retain a certain separateness. In the mid-thirties, the Christian Science Monitor, reporting on foreigners in Hollywood, was particularly struck by the obduracy of the British in their preservation of their culture:
Several English cake shops now exist, catering almost exclusively to the English, who maintain a stricter aloofness than do most other resident aliens; steak and kidney pies have miraculously made their appearance all over town and are sometimes even eaten by the natives; Devonshire cream is also manufactured, but in very small quantities … Once a year, on New Year’s Eve, the principal members of the British colony gather in a Hollywood café to hear the bells of Big Ben ring out over the radio … Billiards are now played regularly at the homes of most British stars, and officers of the British warships visiting in California harbors entertain and are entertained by a group founded by Victor McLaglen and known as the British United Services Club, comprised in large part of actors who have served in one of the branches of the British military; while on many a film set old members of the same London club [usually the Garrick], meet and fraternise.12
Many of these English actors had found work in Hollywood because of their ‘exotic’ qualities – their looks, their mannerisms and their accents. Their relative insularity, therefore, was not merely the result of homesickness or cultural taste but also, in many cases, professional necessity; to mix too freely and too frequently with one’s American colleagues was to risk becoming fully assimilated by, and acculturated in, American society. The commercial appeal of many English actors was their Englishness; English actors who looked and sounded American, unless they were remarkably talented, faced much fiercer competition for roles. Many of the most successful English actors of the time were well aware of the danger. Ronald Colman, Artur Rubinstein recalled, possessed a ‘beautiful’ English accent which actually ‘became
