but it was, in many ways, a spectacular failure. Based on Compton Mackenzie’s picaresque novel, it starred Katharine Hepburn and was directed by George Cukor. Grant played Jimmy Monkley (‘gentleman adventurer’), a cockney con-man who teams up with Sylvia Scarlett (Hepburn) and her father (Edmund Gwenn) in various embezzlement schemes. The most unusual aspect of the movie was that the plot called for Hepburn to masquerade as a boy through most of the story.40 Coded motifs and hidden implications abound in the script: Monkley wants to cuddle up to Sylvester ‘like a hot-water bottle’; a housemaid wants to daub a moustache on Sylvester and kiss ‘him’; and a bohemian artist is given a ‘queer feeling’ by his fascination with the boy. For a woman to appear on the screen in drag, in spite of the moralistic Production Code of the time, was a daring departure for a Hollywood movie, but the conceit was only allowed after Cukor had been ordered to add what he later described as ‘a silly, frivolous prologue, to explain why this girl was dressed like a boy, and being so good at it. We weren’t allowed to give the impression that she liked it, or that she’d done it before, or that it came naturally.’41
The movie proved to be both a personal watershed and a professional catastrophe for several of the people who made it. Its dismal reception set in motion Katharine Hepburn’s boycotting by the nation’s movie exhibitors as ‘box-office poison’. Hepburn’s accent flits from French to cod-cockney to Bryn Mawr, and, in her stylised boy’s clothes and principal-boy’s gestures, she appears – far from seeming unnervingly androgynous – merely epicene (an American cousin, perhaps, of the English camp comic actor Kenneth Williams). The dialogue – ‘why, then I won’t be a girl! I won’t be weak and I won’t be silly! I’ll be a boy and be rough and hard’ – did nothing to discourage her irritatingly mannered performance. At one point during the shooting of the movie, Hepburn confided in her diary: ‘This picture makes no sense at all.’42 It was a perceptive remark. RKO executives were furious long before Sylvia Scarlett was confirmed as the studio’s worst box-office failure of the year. The movie’s shell-shocked producer, Pandro Berman, told Hepburn and Cukor (but not Grant) that he never wanted to work with either of them ever again.43
What was extraordinary was how Grant managed to emerge from this débâcle not merely unscathed but with an enhanced reputation. ‘That was really the beginning for Cary,’ Katharine Hepburn remembered. ‘He was the only reason to see Sylvia Scarlett. It was a terrible picture, but he was wonderful in it.’44 One reason why Grant was so effective in it was the fact that he was playing an Englishman, and several scenes were set in a travelling fair (performing songs like ‘The Winkle on the Boarding ’ouse Floor’). There is, indeed, more than a trace of Archie Leach in Grant’s performance. Jimmy Monkley was formed by the same society that had shaped Grant: first glimpsed in a black hat and coat on a boat crossing the English Channel, he later refers to himself sarcastically as ‘a little friend of all the world, nobody’s enemy but me own’, and more soberly as ‘a rolling stone’ who is neither a ‘sparrow’ nor an ‘’awk’. ‘Take it from me,’ he tells Scarlett, ‘it don’t do to step out of your class.’ In contrast to Archie Leach, however, Jimmy Monkley sees no way of escaping, merely surviving. ‘You have the mind of a pig,’ Scarlett tells him. ‘It’s a pig’s world,’ he replies. As Richard Schickel has suggested, the role of Jimmy Monkley offered Grant the opportunity ‘to get in touch with what was usable in his past, lay it out in public, and discover that his bright new, light new world would not collapse inward upon him, that, indeed, it was capable of vast expansion’.45 George Cukor agreed: until then, he said, Grant had been ‘a successful young leading man who was nice-looking but had no particular identity’.46 This movie, he added, changed that: ‘Sylvia Scarlett was the first time Cary felt the ground under his feet as an actor. He suddenly seemed liberated. It was very exhilarating to see.’47 The critics were also impressed: writing in Variety, one declared that Grant ‘steals the picture’, while the Motion Picture Herald reviewer praised Grant’s performance as ‘the most convincing’ and in stark contrast to the ‘overstrained’ attempts at characterisation by his more experienced co-stars.48
Sylvia Scarlett, or rather Grant’s role within it, was his ticket to leave Paramount. His contract was about to run out, and the success of his portrayal of Jimmy Monkley, combined with the increasingly cavalier treatment he felt he was receiving from Paramount (vetoing his request to go on loan to MGM for Mutiny on the Bounty, putting him in a mystery called Big Brown Eyes, loaning him out again to MGM for a second lead in Suzy and then putting him in the insipid screwball comedy Wedding Present), made up his mind for him. He would refuse to renew his contract. Not only would he break away from Paramount, he would, he resolved, from that point on, after twenty-one movies, refuse to commit himself exclusively to any one studio.
It is difficult today to appreciate just how astonishing and courageous (or reckless) Grant’s decision seemed in the mid-thirties. No one of his stature had contemplated acting as a freelance performer since the days before the studio system took hold of Hollywood. He had, however, come a long way on his own, further than most, and, although his own vision of himself was still somewhat out of focus, it was considerably sharper than the vision of Cary Grant found among the producers at Paramount. It seems possible that even the executives at Paramount were beginning, grudgingly, to realise that this was the case. Adolph Zukor, who was anxious to keep him at the studio, offered Grant thirty-five hundred dollars per week to stay. Grant, however, was adamant that his future lay in independence and the freedom to choose not only his roles but also, eventually, his co-workers and his scripts. Jack Haley, Jnr., has stressed the peculiarity of Grant’s independent spirit:
He was constantly a maverick, rebelling against what everybody expected him to do. He had the confidence to say good-bye to Pender and look for work in the theater. Later he’d walk out on the Shuberts. Then he walked out on Paramount, which offered him a great deal of money to stay. And that was right toward the end of the Depression. It took cojones to do that.49
Many other promising young actors were stunned by such an urgent and uncompromising attitude. ‘If I had stayed at Paramount,’ he said, ‘I would have continued to take pictures that Gary Cooper, William Powell, or Clive Brook turned down.’50 The rivalry between Grant and Cooper, in particular, had been growing increasingly intense during the previous couple of years. Cooper had once dismissed the challenge of Grant by claiming that he was ‘a crack comedian, no competition for me’,51 but things had since become rather more unnerving, and Photoplay magazine said of the two men: ‘They know that they’re pitted against each other, and when the final gong sounds, one of them will be on the floor.’52
In the autumn of 1936, Grant bought out what little remained of his contract and announced that he was open to offers from other studios. The first movie he accepted was Columbia’s When You’re in Love. While working on it, he was also offered a prominent role in The Toast of New York by RKO. He worked on the Columbia movie by day and the RKO project by night. Neither movie did particularly well at the box-office, but both studios were impressed with his performances and offered to sign him to contracts. His financial demands nearly deterred them: he asked for a flat fee of $75,000 per movie. Both studios felt the sum was exorbitant. The only way to break the stalemate was for Grant to prove to Columbia and RKO that he could find a similar offer elsewhere. Hal Roach approached him to co-star in the fantasy comedy Topper, offering to pay him $50,000 if the movie was successful.