Chapter 10
Chapter 10, covering the year 1934, explores the jealousy and insecurity that haunted Cary Grant during his short-lived marriage to Virginia Cherrill, which ended in a drunken fiasco that was reported in the press as a suicide attempt. Grant denied attempting suicide, and the chapter argues that he was likely imitating a scene from one of his recent films, Ladies Should Listen (1934), in which his character attempts to lure his lover to his bedside by faking a suicide attempt. The chapter also considers Paramount’s attempt to remake his screen image, casting him in comedies, including one written by Preston Sturges, Thirty Day Princess (1934), which was his best film of this period. He was also cast as an “art deco dandy” in a string of weak comedies that flopped at the box-office: Kiss and Make Up (1934), Ladies Should Listen, and Enter Madame! (1934). The chapter ends with Cherrill’s courtroom claims that Grant abused her physically and emotionally, and Grant’s explanation, in later years, that her charges were not true but were the legally required “grounds for divorce” in the 1930s.