For people who don’t like yacht clubs

LOVE AFFAIRS TO REMEMBER

Wild speculation and biography department.

I feel like I’m on the verge of outing Leo McCarey. Always a questionable activity, especially when it’s based on textual readings of an artist’s work. Still, it seemed harmless in this case to throw some mad theories out there.

I got interested in some odd parallels between Hitchcock and McCarey, two utterly different artists — one who emphasised above all else the careful preparation of every element of his filmmaking practice, the other who stressed the value of improvisation. McCarey apparently forced a reluctant Cary Grant to improvise on THE AWFUL TRUTH, and Hitchcock for once allowed him to on TO CATCH A THIEF. Although I always wondered if that was just Hitchcock trying to throw shade on his scriptwriter, John Michael Hayes, who had been getting too much attention in the press. Biographers’ attempts to ascribe Hitch’s liberation to the effects of the breezy location founder in the face of obvious process photography.

But here are the connections: both men were Catholic, McCarey more stridently, Hitchcock in a more subtle and interesting way. Both men only had one wife all their lives, and one child, a daughter. The one wife fits well with Catholicism, the one child not so much. In Hitchcock’ case, we pretty much know the explanation: after successfully procreating and giving us the essential Patricia, he and Alma packed the whole sex thing in and concentrated on making pictures, with the occasional foray into harassment and assault of lading ladies for Hitch. With McCarey, there might have been some trouble having children: he got married young, at seventeen or eighteen in 1914, but Mrs. Stella Martin McCarey did not present an heir, Virginia (some sources say Mary), until around 1927. And then there’s all that sexual frustration in the films: Ann Sheridan in GOOD SAM and Paul Newman in RALLY ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS! are sex-starved because of their spouse’s obsessions.

Meanwhile, according to what we would have to call gossip, McCarey was frequently unfaithful. He hinted at this himself when he said that THE AWFUL TRUTH was inspired by events in his own life, but he was always quick to say “but not the adultery part,” with a quip like, “don’t print this, my wife will kill me,” sometimes thrown in.

But almost in the same emphysemic breath, he would tell Peter Bogdanovich about trying to pick up Vina Delmar before discovering she was the author of a story he admired, MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW. But then it turns out that Vina Delmar (like McCarey?) was two people: she wrote with her husband, Eugene (real name Albert Otto Zimmerman), under her name. So which one was McCarey trying to pick up? Admittedly, Vina was pretty cute. But anyhow, when McCarey admits to a “very close” collaboration with Vina on MWFT and THE AWFUL TRUTH, he was in reality collaborating with two people. “Nice man, that Mr. McCarey,” said Vina, describing a charming and laid-back writing process in which McCarey would apologise if they didn’t like his ideas, and apologise again if he didn’t like theirs.

(I mentioned to our friend Nicola that McCarey’s womanizing caused him great Catholic guilt, and Nicola, who knows whereof she speaks, corrected me: “He had Catholic guilt because he was Catholic.)

McCarey had just lost his father, whom he loved. But McCarey Sr. was also the man who forced Leo to become a lawyer against his will, so the relationship may have been a bit more complicated than is admitted. It’s striking that, while dad made his fortune as a boxing promoter, McCarey learned how to box from a nun at his school (see THE BELLS OF ST MARY’S). Capra tells us that the elder McCarey would stage massive newsboy fights, in which dozens of scrappy kids would throw their shoes into the ring and then battle to retrieve a matching pair, the winner being chosen by crowd popularity rather than actual success. Rewarded with a gold coin, he would then walk home wearing two left shoes. But little Leo was banned from these exhibitions — he would sneak in without dad’s permission. And of course the mass shoe fights are transformed into the escalating street battles of the Laurel & Hardy silents McCarey supervised, starting with PUTTING PANTS ON PHILIP.

McCarey determined, on his father’s death, to never again make a film he wasn’t dead set on making. He had just had the great success of RUGGLES OF RED GAP and the less happy experience of THE MILKY WAY, in which he couldn’t get the results he wanted from Harold Lloyd. Also, on that picture, the accident-prone Leo drank milk from a contaminated cow and nearly died. His brother Ray finished the picture in his place. More about Ray, who is hardly ever mentioned, later.

Critically acclaimed, MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW underperformed and basically got McCarey fired from Paramount (he held a lifelong grudge: “Every time I work for Paramount, it costs them a half million more than it should”), whereas THE AWFUL TRUTH at Columbia was a massive hit and won him the Oscar.

YACHT RUNS WILD

McCarey was a member or at least associate of the Emerald Bay Yachting Association, “the yacht club for people who don’t like yacht clubs,” originally “the Young Men’s Purity, Total Abstinence and Snooker Pool Association,” in essence a debauched drinking club with John Ford as a prominent member. Devotion to drink was not enough to gain admission, you had to be an “ambulance drunkard.” Alcohol may have been the real cause of McCarey’s “bone disease” after his Oscar win, and of the near-fatal car crash that stopped him directing M FAVORITE WIFE. When he made LOVE AFFAIR, where you begin to see religion forcing its way in — I think the film is uneven, the delicate balance of McCarey’s best work already beginning to skew. And on the night of the preview, he drunkenly drove his car onto and along the railway tracks, pretending he was in charge of the Super Chief, while editor Edward Dmytryk, in the passenger seat, tried to recall if the Santa Fe ran a night train.

Here, McCarey seems guilty not of recycling his life into his films, but his films into his life — the story recalls the conclusion of TWO TARS, a Laurel & Hardy short he supervised in 1928.

Then McCarey made the even bigger mistake of going into business with Howard Hughes, which ate up the next few years of his life and produced nothing. McCarey, forever recycling his life in pictures, wanted to make a movie about moviemaking, under the title (wait for it) QUEER PEOPLE. The project fizzled when Hughes became obsessed with making THE OUTLAW and McCarey couldn’t even get him on the phone: the men ended up suing each other.

Then we have the ragged, bizarre ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON, the wildly successful priest films, and the ragged GOOD SAM, whose release in 1948 coincides with Ray McCarey’s suicide. He was found kneeling by his bedside like a praying child, with a bottle of pills beside him. McCarey merely said his brother had been ill for some time. Depression, alcoholism, or unrelated physical suffering that made life unbearable? This is the other Hitchcock connection, the less successful, suicidal brother. An even bigger trauma if you throw in dedicated Catholicism. Ray had been a fellow director at Roach Studios, but had mainly made B-pictures. Following in big brother’s footsteps.

Ray McCarey, occluded.

 

You still find people calling McCarey a nice man socially, at this time, but John Huston calls him macchiavellian, and his writer on MY SON JOHN, a fellow commie-hater, came to believe he had lost his mind. Red-hating dominates the McCarey of MSJ and SATAN NEVER SLEEPS, with RALLY ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS! offering a satire of jingoism which, along with the burlesquing of the father in MSJ that complicates things a bit. But, as David Ehrenstein has commented right here, MSJ doubles as a homosexual panic picture, red terror as pink terror. McCarey comments that a big theme of the film is the college-educated son being embarrassed by his plebeian father. But it’s also the elegant, well-mannered son embarrassing the macho dad. It’s easy to see that the class elements here derive from McCarey’s own “loving” relationship with his father, but where does the sexual subtext originate? (The film is never able to address WHY Robert Walker’s character has strayed into the arms of the commies: we get no politics at all, merely a sort of pop-Freudian reading based on his domineering father and over-protective mother, the classic psychologist’s set-up for the dread sexual inversion.)

(Incidentally, Frank McHugh reprises his role of Father O’Dowd from GOING MY WAY in MY SON JOHN, making this the third panel in McCarey’s triptych of cosy religious movies, which just makes things weirder.)

Everyone seems to agree, without there really being a definite source, that McCarey was a serial cheater. Maybe trying to prove his masculinity to himself. Maybe he had no sex life at home. Maybe he was just compulsively charming and highly sexed. Did he just go with women or did homosexual flings enhance his stockpile of Catholic guilt? This is the man credited with creating Cary Grant. The floundering deceit that forms much of the comedy in MY FAVORITE WIFE does seem to support the idea of McCarey the philanderer…

A BRIEF DISCOURSE ON NAMES

McCarey says he and his wife called each other Tom & Jerry (two inseparable comic strip friends, long before the cat & mouse double act used the names ironically). Tom & Jerry is the name of an episode of Screen Director’s Playhouse McCarey wrote and directed. Jerry is a name which recurs obsessively in Leo’s work. Skeets Gallagher in LET’S GO NATIVE  Gloria Swanson in INDISCREET, Cary Grant in THE AWFUL TRUTH, all play Jerries. So who was Lucy? Beulah Bondi in MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW, Irene Dunne in THE AWFUL TRUTH, Ann Sheridan in GOOD SAM and Helen Hayes in MY SON JOHN play variants on this name. And Anita? Joyce Compton in WILD COMPANY, Ruth Hall in THE KID FROM SPAIN and Fay Bainter in MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW all play Anitas. Leo was named after his French mother, Leora. (My friend Lawrie once claimed that John Guillermin’s peculiar temperament derived from his Franco-Irish parentage. Leo had the same problem.) There are several Pats and Michaels too, of both sexes, and several Joes and Marys, but I don’t attach much significance to these commonplace names. Tuesday Weld is the only Comfort Goodpasture you’ll find in Leo’s filmography.

Dotting one’s mistresses names through one’s dramatis personae would fit well with Leo’s telling interviewers how THE AWFUL TRUTH was based on his own marriage, except the adultery part (then why include it? It barely makes sense in the film) and then hinting that maybe that too was an inspiration.

THE OLD SEX THING AGAIN

McCarey told Charles Laughton that he regretted his philandering, “But here I am sitting next to a pretty girl in the commissary, and I find myself saying to her, ‘You eat your lettuce so pretty.’ I’m love and I can’t help it.”

He also told Bogdanovich that the phone booth scene in MY FAVORITE WIFE in which Cary Grant calls Gail Patrick and says he’s at the airport, then exits his booth and collides with her, really happened to him — but he declined to describe the circumstances.

I guess the sexual ambiguity in MY FAVORITE WIFE is probably just a result of the screwball genre’s burlesquing of societal norms, and a natural response to certain qualities in the Cary Grant persona. MY SON JOHN is harder to account for, and it’s hard to see why the Catholic and avowedly straight Leo would be drawn to such a theme if it had no personal resonance for him. Unless… his brother?

These stories are drawn mainly from Jerome McKeever’s excellent essay cited yesterday. The lurid speculations are my own.

The McCarey Treatment

Revisiting Leo McCarey for an upcoming project. MY FAVORITE WIFE recombines so many of the successful elements of THE AWFUL TRUTH it’s practically a remake, or else a dream-sequel. Like the earlier film, it ends at a mountain cottage, modeled on the one McCarey owned for real, but just before filming began, McCarey was driving back from that cottage at night at ninety miles an hour (drink may have been taken, a hypothesis strengthened by the presence of Gene Fowler in the passenger seat) when he collided with another vehicle. The accounts don’t bother to relate what happened to the non-famous collidee, but McCarey was thrown 126 feet from his tumbling vehicle, suffering serious injuries, and Fowler was pronounced dead at the scene — only to surprise everyone by coming round in the ambulance.

So McCarey was chairbound during production of MFW, leaving Garson Kanin to take over most of the direction, with McCarey supervising as best he could. Kanin is usually blamed for the film not being quite as good as the incomparable THE AWFUL TRUTH, though he could be a very good director of comedy (BACHELOR MOTHER is terrif). I’d rather blame McCarey not being in top form, for obvious reasons.

The movie begins with Grant attempting to declare one wife dead so he can marry another — Gail Patrick, screwball comedy’s perennial other woman. There’s a marvelously tetchy judge, played by Granville Bates — Peter Bogdanovich would recycle the character as Liam Dunn in WHAT’S UP, DOC?* McCarey is using his own experience as an unsuccessful lawyer here, but he reports that Patrick, who had studied law, also helped.

Then Irene Dunne turns up as the not-dead wife. Basically, she’s Ulysses, come to slay his wife’s suitors. McCarey emphasises this by having her show up in drag, as a Portuguese fisherman, and having the family dog be the only one to immediately recognise her. This being a screwball, she doesn’t physically slaughter Gail Patrick, she just bamboozles her and produces a series of confusions and impersonations, including an embarrassing southerner routine self-plagiarised from THE AWFUL TRUTH.

Reacting to the sight of one’s children after seven years’ separation is a tough task for any actor. The divine Irene overdoes it a bit. In the unfinished remake, SOMETHING’S GOT TO GIVE, Marilyn Monroe tries to underplay, but just manages to look as if she wants to have sex with her children.

Grant’s first sight of Dunne is one of the great double-takes of the forties. In Japanese tradition, by the way, if you get a partially occluded view of a dead loved one (as in Miike’s AUDITION), it means said departed one has unfinished business, which Dunne certainly do, I mean does.

The scenario keeps ringing the changes on Grant’s failure to inform his new wife about his late wife, cunningly devising situations where he can make the worst possible decision. But the sit. can’t keep generating com. all by itself forever, and so a new romantic rival is introduced, health fanatic Randolph Scott, who it turns out has spent the seven years of Irene’s supposed death on an island with her, shipwrecked and alone. Calling each other Adam and Eve, continuing the mythic theme. This, deliciously, allows Grant to obsess over Scott, supposedly with jealousy, but with a double entendre for anyone aware of the Hollywood lore about this cohabiting pair. A tiny phantasmal homunculus of Scott torments Grant’s imagination from a trapeze. Scott’s physique makes Grant break out in a sweat.

Grant’s character, by the way, is Nick Arden, the surname suggesting Shakespeare’s forest in AS YOU LIKE IT where names and jobs and genders become comically fluid. The first name comes into play in the movie’s final mythic reference ~

*Bogdanovich would also borrow some of McCarey’s reminiscences about his lawyering days for the opening of NICKELODEON. And he seems to have borrowed large parts of Serge Daney & Louis Scorecki’s interview in Cahiers du Cinema for his own McCarey interview in his magnificent book Who the Devil Made It? It seems likely that Bogdanovich met McCarey and got the anecdotes about the early parts of his life on tape, but McCarey’s rapidly failing health prevented him from going on. At any rate, many of the longer answers in Bogdanovich’s piece are word-for-word the same as those in the earlier interview, a remarkable feat of memory for a dying man.