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 better and more marked with time instead of becoming Americanised’,13 while C. Aubrey Smith, specialising in playing a limited range of crusty English colonel types, developed and preserved a lucrative cluster of echt-English mannerisms for the enchantment of American audiences. There were some for whom the need, or desire, to maintain their cultural distinctiveness caused them, gradually but usually inexorably, to settle into a comfortable form of self-parody. Aubrey Smith – who once summed up his experience of working with Garbo in Queen Christina in the remark, ‘She’s a ripping gel’,14 and who lived in a house on Mulholland Drive that boasted a weather vane made out of three cricket stumps, a bat and a ball – was a comically anachronistic figure even for most of his compatriots, while Gladys Cooper, taking tea one warm afternoon at the Pacific Palisades home of Robert Coote, reacted with typical mock-horror to the arrival of George Cukor by exclaiming disapprovingly: ‘Darling … there seems to be an American on your lawn.’15
Although as time went on Cary Grant continued to enjoy the company of many of the Hollywood British, he was not eager to become too closely identified with them. The least appealing aspect of the British colony was that it was a kind of microcosm of British society, with the same hierarchical structure and snobbery. There were other working-class Englishmen in Hollywood, but few of them seem to have embraced – or been embraced by – the colony. Chaplin was sufficiently powerful and secure to have no need of such a self-consciously exclusive community, whereas others from similar backgrounds, such as Stan Laurel, Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Laughton, found the prospect of enduring the old class tensions for a second time, this time on foreign soil, too unpleasant to contemplate for very long.16
At a time when Archie Leach was just beginning to get used to being Cary Grant, the stalwart members of the British colony – after the initial pleasantries were over with – were the most likely people to remind Cary Grant that he was ‘really’ just Archie Leach. Established members of the colony did nothing to disguise their privileged backgrounds: Aubrey Smith (Charterhouse and Cambridge), Basil Rathbone (Repton), Boris Karloff (Uppingham), John Loder (Eton) and Clive Brook (Dulwich) were among those who were known to attend the annual public-school dinner organised by the Hollywood British. David Niven (Stowe and Sandhurst), who arrived in 1934, found it relatively easy to ingratiate himself with this exclusive group,17 whereas Grant, who struck some of the expatriates as ‘socially insecure’,18 simply had no choice but to ‘go native’.
He became friends with another Paramount contract player, Randolph Scott, when the two co-starred in Hot Saturday, and they decided to pool their resources and share a house. Handsome, amiable and increasingly successful, the two men began to attract precious publicity as two of Hollywood’s most eligible young bachelors.19 Scott introduced Grant to Howard Hughes, who, in turn, provided Grant with an entrée into Hollywood’s most glamorous social circles, introducing him to a period of grand and incessant parties, sophisticated and affluent new friends, and all the paraphernalia of California high society. In a sense, Grant found that he could have the best of both worlds: the established British stars were, at least early on, useful contacts, while the rest of the Hollywood community appreciated his unusual sociability. Cary Grant became known as an Englishman who genuinely enjoyed – and felt comfortable in – the company of Americans, and that, in the early thirties, was a rarity which he exploited to the full.
On the movie screen, Cary Grant was still struggling to improve as an actor. Josef von Sternberg had made an ill-conceived attempt to shout him into producing a more assured performance, but the stiffness remained: ‘Joe bemoaned, berated and beseeched me to relax, but it was years before I could move with ease before a camera. Years before I could stop my right eyebrow from lifting, a sure sign of inner defenses and tensions. ’20 The majority of the roles he was being given by Paramount simply capitalised on his good looks, putting him into smart uniforms or elegant evening clothes at every opportunity. His success, such as it was, struck him as shallow. Jack Haley Jnr. sympathised: ‘It must have been miserable for Cary. As a foreigner … he was at the bottom of the barrel in terms of parts. The first choice went to Gary Cooper. The second went to George Raft. Even Fred MacMurray was getting better parts than Cary.’21 A publicist put it more bluntly: ‘Gary Cooper or Freddie March, they were actors. Cary Grant? He was kind of a stick … He was there to look tall, dark and handsome.’22 When he was forced to play Lieutenant Pinkerton in the movie version of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, and sing ‘My Flower of Japan’ to Sylvia Sidney’s Cio-Cio-San, it seemed that his career, if it was progressing at all, was doing so painfully slowly.
Cary Grant’s fortunes changed suddenly and unexpectedly. Before he had finished shooting Madame Butterfly, he found himself cast in She Done Him Wrong, opposite Mae West. In his autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, von Sternberg boasted that he had ‘rescued’ Grant from a possible career of being ‘one of Mae West’s