Cary Grant by Marc Eliot Page A

all the rings on her fingers so he can slip a single small diamond on one. Lou looks into his eyes and murmurs, “Tall, dark, and handsome,” to which he replies, “You bad girl.” “You'll find out,” she says, sucking in her cheeks and smiling wickedly as the film ends. *
    She Done Him Wrong,
West's second film, was, in retrospect, the best per- formance of her career. It was loosely based on her own early experiences in New York, the saloon being a substitute for the stage, white slavery a refer- ence to her (and possibly Grant's) escort days, and her arrest at the end rem- iniscent of the legal troubles her shows had run into with the city's moral squads.
    It was also the eighth and final film Grant made in 1932 and, after this highly productive year, the one that brought him closer than ever to the first rank of Paramount's leading men. † Ironically, it was Grant's approach to playingthe romantic lead in
She Done Him Wrong
that did it. His onscreen aloof- ness, a reflection of nothing so much as his own uncertainty as to how to play a love scene opposite the voracious West, was taken by the public to be just the opposite—manly, moral resistance to Lil's many charms—and created a new type of romantic sophisticate, not only for Grant but for the legions of actors who would thereafter try to imitate him. Grant's “Hawk” was under- played and always gentlemanly, resistance translated into self-assurance and moral righteousness, all highly glossed with what would become his trade- mark shimmering elegance.
    No one was more surprised than Grant at how successful he was opposite the voracious West. As in the past, he had tried to mask what he thought of as his own lack of any true acting style by emulating his performing idols, Chaplin, Noël Coward, Jack Buchanan, Rex Harrison, and Fred Astaire. Years later Grant perceptively and graciously summed up his acting in
She Done Him Wrong
as a combination of pose and impersonation. “I copied other styles I knew until I became a conglomerate of people and ultimately myself,” he told an interviewer. “When I was a young actor, I'd put my hand in my pocket trying to look relaxed. Instead, I looked stiff and my hand stuck in my pocket wet with perspiration. I was trying to imitate what I thought a relaxed man looked like.”
    Nevertheless, the physical image of Cary Grant seemed even more per- fect on the big screen than it had on stage. In his early movies especially, the camera quickly discovered and magnified the perfection of his features, the beautiful dark and sharp eyes that sat carved beneath his thick black brows, the handsome nose, the flawlessly smooth skin, the thick, slick hair always perfectly cut and parted, and that remarkable cleft in his chin, whose two smooth and curved bulges resembled nothing so much as a beautiful woman's naked behind while she was on her knees in sexual supplication before the godlike monument of his face.
    Opposite West, Grant's arched body language seemed to react with bemused distaste, an apparent product of calculated wit. He smartly held his own by not allowing himself to get engaged in a competition he could not win. In the silvery sheen of sharp black and white, all Grant had to do was show up and let his irresistible face be photographed in shadowed cuts, as if caught in the flash of lightning. Holding his own, however, was not enough.
    Working with West had taught him a valuable lesson. As long as he was the pursuer, the focus was always going to be on the object of his affection. The thing to be in any movie was the one pursued. It was what all front-rank stars in Hollywood benefited from, and why he was not yet in their league. Should he ever have the opportunity to call the shots, as West had, he promised him- self, he would make himself the object of his co-stars', and by extension the audience's, heated pursuit. Eventually this decision would come to define the essence of, and the reason for, Cary Grant's superstar