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Sellout audience
peppers superstar with questions
Yes, he’s as suave as you’ve always imagined. Maybe
even more so.
Cary Grant – looking as if he had stepped from the pages of Gentleman’s
Quarterly in a finely tailored pinstripe suit, white shirt,
tasteful tie, silk socks and Italian leather slippers – appeared
before a sellout audience Sunday afternoon.
The audience came
to McFarlin Auditorium on the Southern Methodist University campus
clearly expecting to be charmed. And charmed they were – for one
hour and 45 minutes of questions and answers with a bona fide
superstar. The event,
titled A Conversation With Cary Grant, was presented by the International
Theatrical Arts Society.
Some of the
questions were predictable – and some of the answers were
dispatched with a raised eyebrow or the classic Grant double take.
And even if a few of Grant’s responses were mildly meandering,
it didn’t matter at all. Even Grant’s meanderings come off
smoothly.
He spoke fondly
of almost all his co-stars. “Kate Hepburn – a remarkable
woman,” he said of his four-time co-star. “She’s utterly
trusting if she knows that you know what you’re doing. I grew to
love her. I still do.”
He allowed,
however, that “Irene Dunne was never utterly comfortable (in
front of the camera). There was a fear there, a shyness, that made
it difficult for her to relax. And working with Mae West was
terrible. No, not terrible, just disconcerting. She certainly did not
discover me. (A
Hollywood
legend persists that West discovered Grant.) She always got a
great deal of publicity for herself. She lived in a world of
artifice. I really never could communicate with her. Mae does what
Mae wants to do, and you must suffer the consequences.”
He said that
early in his career he tried to emulate Noel Coward and Jack
Buchanan. “And George Burns, most particularly. He had
impeccable timing. His timing is what made Gracie Allen a hit. He
was the straight man. The straight man times the jokes.”
He also expressed
his admiration for Mickey Rooney, and said he considered Spencer
Tracy “the best of all actors. . . incredibly relaxed, but with
a mind that always worked.”
Relatively few of
the questions touched on controversy. He was asked his opinion of Haunted
Idol, an unflattering Grant biography published last year.
“It was utter
nonsense. Most biographies are. Don’t read biographies. Don’t
even read autobiographies. I don’t know anyone who tells the
truth about themselves. The books I read about Hitchcock were
sheer nonsense. Anyone who’s worked with him knows how fine he
is to works with. And all those actresses who write books about
themselves do so only for the money. But I don’t really care
anymore. I’ve developed skin like a rhino’s.”
When queried, he
discussed his LSD experiments. “All of it was under a doctor’s
care. It was an idea of a former wife who studied psychology at
UCLA and in fact became a psychologist. (He was referring to his
third wife Betsy Drake.) I took it because I hoped it would make
me happy. It was of help. It cleared away my hypocrisies and some
of my misconceptions from what my parents didn’t know. You go
through a lot of things in your youth – misteachings and
absolute accepting of adult teachings. It’s difficult when you
realize that frequently the adults who guided you may not have
known what they were talking about.”
But mostly the
afternoon was in a lighter vein. A woman reminisced about how she
laughed so hard watching him dance a jig on Indiscreet
that she went into labor early. A younger woman wished she “had
been born earlier so I could have had the chance to dig my claws
into you.” (Here, the Grant double take.)
And a young girl
said she was from her school newspapers and asked if he would say
“Judy, Judy, Judy” just one time so she could report he had
said it.
“Why, is your
name Judy?” he asked.
“No, but I’ll
change it if you want me to.”
“What is your
real name?”
“Dina.”
“Well, I
won’t say ‘Judy, Judy, Judy.’ But I’ll say, ‘Dina, Dina,
Dina.’”
That seemed
to satisfy her. And everyone else.
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