celebrities are notoriously unreliable: as the call to work with West came some months after Grant had finished Blonde Venus, von Sternberg’s role in the advancement of Grant’s ‘stellar career’ was somewhat overstated. West claimed in her (equally unreliable) autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It, that she noticed ‘a sensational looking young man’ – Grant – on the Paramount lot, and cast him on the spot: ‘If this one can talk,’ she claims she said at the time, ‘I’ll take him.’24 According to West, she saw immediately that Grant ‘had poise, a great walk, everything women would like’.25 In truth, Grant was probably first spotted by West on the screen in one of his earlier movie appearances (‘I liked his voice first, but I saw right away that the rest of him measured up’26). As far as his casting for She Done Him Wrong was concerned, it seems likely that B. P. Schulberg had favoured pairing his new leading man with the aggressive West,27 and it is also known that Lowell Sherman, the director West had chosen for the movie, had liked Grant’s performance in Blonde Venus.28
The movie was an adaptation of West’s stage success of 1928, Diamond Lil. She played Lady Lou, ‘one of the finest women who ever walked the streets’, who runs a Bowery saloon; Grant played Captain Cummings, from the nearby church mission, who is really ‘the Hawk’, a government agent. It was the first opportunity since Grant had been in Hollywood for him to make use of his vaudeville training as a straight man. ‘Haven’t you ever met a man who can make you happy?’ he asks her. ‘Sure,’ she replies, ‘lots of times.’ West had usually played opposite men who appeared as tough and as coarse as her own character, and Grant’s more vulnerable performance provided an interesting contrast to her brash sexuality. ‘Why don’t you come up sometime, see me?’ she says to him, staring into his eyes. ‘Come up. I’ll tell your fortune.’
Shooting began on 21 November 1932, and was completed in a mere eighteen days. For an outlay of $200,000, it earned $2 million within three months in the US alone. This movie, in effect, saved Paramount from bankruptcy. Cary Grant emerged from the triumph as someone who had the potential to be much more than a mere straight man to Mae West. As Pauline Kael observes, West brought out Grant’s passivity, giving him an aloof charm, ‘a quality of refinement in him which made her physical aggression seem a playful gambit’.29 Kael also noted that the success of the performance was achieved in spite of Grant’s relative lack of confidence in his own abilities as a movie actor: he did not ‘yet know how the camera should see him’, and he appeared, when he had little to do in a scene, ‘vaguely ill at ease’, standing ‘lunged forward as if hoping to catch a ball’30 (this might be a little unfair: Grant’s character was meant to seem uneasy in his duplicity, and his physical awkwardness provided West with the opportunity for yet more double entendres: ‘That’s right. Loosen up. Unbend. You’ll feel better’). He was, none the less, the ‘classiest’ leading man whom West had appeared with, and the critics appreciated that fact. ‘Hi, tall, dark and handsome,’ she said to him; it was a nice welcome for Cary Grant. His good looks, under-playing and good comic timing combined to suggest a very promising future. After roles in three more formulaic movies – The Woman Accused, The Eagle and the Hawk and Gambling Ship (all 1933) – Paramount seized on the opportunity to cast Grant alongside West for their second movie together: I’m No Angel. The weak story-line never threatened to distract one’s attention from the comic dialogue:
Grant: Do you mind if I get personal?
West: I don’t mind if you get familiar.
Although it was a poor movie in comparison with She Done Him Wrong, it was another great success at the box-office. Paramount raised his salary to $750 per week. Fan mail began to arrive in increasing amounts, and the fan magazines started to compete for his interviews.31
He was grateful for the exposure afforded him by his association with West – who was among the top ten box-office attractions in the country at that time – but he became increasingly resentful of the shameless way in which she sought to take all of the credit for his stardom: ‘She always got a great deal of publicity for herself … I could never understand the woman. I thought she was brilliant with that one character she portrayed, but she was an absolute fake as a person. You would shudder from it.’32 At the time, however, Grant – who thought more than most about the technique behind a performance – was well aware of what an excellent teacher in the art of screen comedy West was: ‘She knows so much … Her instinct is so true, her timing so perfect, her grasp of the situation so right. It’s the tempo of the acting that counts rather than the sincerity of the characterisation. Her personality is so dominant that everyone with her becomes just a feeder.’33 One of the most impressive qualities of the young Cary Grant was this capacity for quiet observation; he never missed an opportunity to learn from performers more experienced, and more skilled, than himself, and he learned much of immense value from his working experience with Mae West.
Grant was now in the process of becoming something of a Hollywood celebrity. He inherited the dressing-room formerly occupied by George Bancroft, a star of silent movies who had recently been demoted to the ranks of supporting players. Paramount’s most illustrious top dozen stars were quartered side by side in implied order of importance. Mae West had taken possession of dressing-room number 1, followed by the other leading women: Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Sylvia Sidney, Miriam Hopkins and Carole Lombard. Then came the leading male stars: Gary Cooper, Fredric March, Bing Crosby, George Raft, Cary Grant and Charles Laughton. Grant’s personal life was also beginning to change: he became engaged in 1933 to Virginia Cherrill, who had played the blind girl in Chaplin’s City Lights, and in November he took her back to England,34 where they were married on 9 February the following year. He was thirty years old. The marriage, however, was soon in trouble; in the spring of 1935 they separated, and Grant began a series of brief relationships with other women.35 The couple were granted a divorce that March.
Professionally, the years 1934 and 1935 did not see Grant offered many movie roles by Paramount which provided him with much opportunity to exploit his new-found popularity. Thirty Day Princess, Born to Be Bad, Kiss and Make Up, Ladies Should Listen (all 1934) were largely forgettable affairs. After making Wings in the Dark (1935), Grant was given six months off; Paramount had a backlog of Grant movies which had yet to be released.36 It seemed as though the studio was undecided as to how best it should utilise his talents, and his dissatisfaction with Paramount deepened: ‘They had a lot of leading men at Paramount with dark hair and a set of teeth like mine, and they couldn’t be buying stories for all of us.’37 In November 1935 he returned to England to make The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss38 for the independent company, Garrett Klement Pictures; if he had hoped to find temporary relief away from Hollywood, he was disappointed – during the filming, his father died.
When Grant returned to Hollywood early in 1936 he was anxious to sort out his future. He feared that he was in danger of being eclipsed by some of his contemporaries, such as James Cagney (who had just reached number ten in the list of top box-office draws) and Errol Flynn (who had starred recently in the very successful Captain Blood). It had become obvious to insiders that Grant was unhappy at Paramount. When Sylvia Scarlett, which he had made on loan at RKO the previous year, was released, the generally positive reviews of his contribution encouraged him to persevere in his struggle for