Cary Grant by Scott Eyman

Author:Scott Eyman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In what was probably the early part of 1952, Leo McCarey wrote an undated memo to himself—a sort of spiritual pep talk. “My aim is to reestablish myself as a creative producer—director-writer, and to regain my autonomy… so that neither Hollywood nor our country need be ashamed, either at home or with our foreign release.”

After 1945’s The Bells of St. Mary’s, a sequel to Going My Way that was the most successful film RKO had released up to that time, McCarey had made Good Sam, a Gary Cooper vehicle that made a little money but was regarded as a disappointment. And then he sold his Rainbow Productions, which had produced The Bells of St. Mary’s and Good Sam, to Paramount.

There followed three years of planning and political upheaval during which McCarey was a friendly witness during the House Un-American Activities hearings in October 1947. It was a strangely irrelevant testimony; McCarey gave every indication of wishing he was elsewhere. What seems to have happened is that McCarey, like Gary Cooper, did not want to testify, but the committee wanted them for marquee value. Both McCarey and Cooper negotiated what they would and would not say in advance, which resulted in them saying as little as possible.

Robert Stripling, the committee’s chief investigator, asked McCarey if Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s had been successful in Russia.

“We haven’t received one ruble from Russia on either picture,” replied McCarey.

“What is the trouble?”

“Well, I think I have a character in there that they do not like.”

“Bing Crosby?”

“No; God.”

Stripling went on to ask McCarey if he had noticed communists in any specific group in Hollywood. “Yes, I have, particularly in the writer’s group,” said McCarey, before specifying the ways in which writers could slant stories: “In the suppression of ideas that are pro-American. Many a script never sees the light of day because it is rejected before we ever get to read it.… The dialogue in the script could be ostensibly quite innocuous but they can cast a character so repulsive when you take one look at him you don’t like the man who is portrayed as a capitalist, a banker or whatever part he is portraying.”

Although McCarey said that he had personal encounters with communist writers who tried to insert propaganda into his pictures, Stripling never asked for any names, nor did McCarey offer any. When Stripling asked him a leading question about producing anticommunist pictures to counter the commie wave, McCarey demurred, saying “Pictures should be entertainment.… I believe it only tends toward causing more enmity if we are partisan and take any sides in our pictures.”

In his letter to himself, McCarey enumerated his roster of professional errors. He believed that selling Rainbow had been a cataclysmic mistake. “After heading a corporation that acquired assets of over two and a half million dollars, I suddenly found I had not only sold out my assets but I had sold myself out, too.” McCarey went on to enumerate his plans for the future.

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