Cary Grant described her as the “sweetest-smelling actress” he’d ever worked with. Orson Welles was less kind (see below).
But in either case our Monday Quiz subject — Irene Dunne — was a formidable figure for decades at the Hollywood box office. She was thought of as the essence of refined ladyhood, but she also could turn on the sex appeal when called for.
Dunne began as a singer (born in 1898 in Louisville, Kentucky, she had studied at the Chicago College of Music), and remained a solid vocalist for the remainder of her career. Her primary claim to justified fame was her ability as a versatile actress in a variety of formats — she was great in comedies, for example, but could also turn on the tears in “weepies.”
It has been said that Dunne is the best actress in Hollywood history never to have won an Academy Award. Ok, so how much did you know about her? Let’s get to our Monday Quiz answers and find out. (To review the questions, refer to the blog below.)
1) Question: When it came to the Oscars, Dunne was always a bridesmaid never a bride. She was nominated in the best actress category for five films. Which one of the following was she NOT nominated for? a) Cimarron; b) The Awful Truth; c) Theodora Goes Wild; or d) The Secret of Madame Blanche.
Answer: Dunne did NOT received an Oscar nomination for d) The Secret of Madame Blanche, a 1933 MGM melodrama. (Irene plays a cute showgirl.)
2) Question: Throughout her career, Dunne held fast to a private secret to looking young. What was it? a) Drinking lots of red wine; b) Repeated mud baths and lots of sex; c) Staying out of the sun; or d) Getting as much sleep as possible.
Answer: Dunne’s beauty secret was d) getting a lot of sleep. Her studio working schedule was in line with what used to be known as “bankers hours.”
3) Question: What was Dunne’s nickname? (Hint: check out today’s introduction.) a) Red Hot Momma; b) Miss Goody Two-Shoes; c) First Lady of Hollywood; or d) My Girl Marie.
Answer: As suggested in our introduction, Dunne was known as c) the “First Lady of Hollywood.”
4) Question: Who of the following was most instrumental in starting Dunne’s career? a) Irving Thalberg; b) Sypros Skouras; c) Howard Hughes; or d) Richard Dix.
Answer: d) Richard Dix, a popular actor-producer at RKO in the late 1920’s, who picked Dunne to costar in her first big hit, 1931’s Cimarron. No stopping Irene after that.
5) Question: Which one of the following Dunne titles was her personal favorite movie? a) Love Affair; b) 1935’s Magnificent Obsession; c) 1935’s Roberta; or d) 1952’s It Grows On Trees.
Answer: Dunne’s personal favorite of her movies was a) 1939’s Love Affair, a romantic drama costarring Charles Boyer. He and Dunne have plenty of onscreen chemistry in the picture, perhaps Irene’s sexiest. The movie was remade in 1957 as An Affair To Remember with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr.
6) Question: Not all of Hollywood’s classic leading men found Dunne irresistible. Which one of the following is on record as saying, “I hated her as an actress?” a) Yul Brynner; b) Adolph Manjou; c) Orson Welles; or d) Dean Jagger.
Answer: It was c) Orson Welles, who said years later that he turned down the male lead in 1946’s Anna and the King of Siam (which went to a young Rex Harrison) because Dunne was in it. “Such a goody-goody.” Added Welles, “To me she was a non-singing Jeanette MacDonald, you know. And I hated her as an actress.” (Part of Welles disdain was based on politics; Dunne was a lifelong Republican, Welles a dedicated leftist.)
7) Question: What did Dunne and actress Peggy Wood have in common? a) They each plowed through multiple offscreen marriages; b) Both were straight arrow types; c) Both were ahead of their times by playing forceful womens’ roles; or d) Both played Marta Hansen, the immigrant Norwegian mother in “I Remember Mama.”
Answer: d) Both Dunne and Peggy Wood played the Norwegian immigrant mother in 1948’s I Remember Mama (for Irene) and in the Mama tv series (for Wood), which ran on U.S. network tv from 1949 through 1957. Both were based upon the Kathryn Forbes’ novel, Mama’s Bank Account, about a close-knit family adjusting to America.
8) Question: Dunne scored multiple screen successes playing the wives of Cary Grant in how many movies? a) five; b) three; c) nine; or d) seven. Can you name them?
Answer: Dunne played Grant’s wife in b) three movies — 1937’s The Awful Truth, 1940’s My Favorite Wife and 1941’s Penny Serenade.
9) Question: Which classic Broadway musical is most closely identified with Dunne’s classic acting career? a) Flying High; b) The Band Wagon; c) Show Boat; or d) Of Thee I Sing.
Answer: c) Show Boat. Dunne was discovered by Hollywood talent scouts while performing in a road company production of the 1927 musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. She landed at RKO.
10) Question: Dunne considered all of the following — with one exception — her closest Hollywood friends. Who is the exception? a) Loretta Young; b) Bob Hope; c) James Stewart; or d) Orson Welles.
Answer: Obviously, d) Orson Welles was not counted among Dunne’s Hollywood friends.
Well, just for those very few ‘readers’ and even fewer COMMENTers on here, I thought it best to open-up the ‘conversation’ with a look at IRENE DUNNE’s favorite leading man CARY GRANT…
“I appeared with many leading men. But working with Cary Grant was different from working with other actors – he was much more fun! I think we were a successful team because we enjoyed working together tremendously, and that pleasure must have shown through onto the screen.”
Outside of Hollywood debate raged for years about matinee idol Cary Grant’s sexuality. Was he heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual? He had lovers from both sexes, so I guess that makes him bisexual, although I admit I have no real idea if that is the sole criteria used to assess such things. From what I have read down the years, he appears to have been deeply in love with two people, one woman (Sophia Loren) and one man (Randolph Scott). His feelings for Sophia were not returned, but his affair with Scott went on for around 40 years!
He and western actor Randolph Scott shared a house for ten years, from 1932 to 1942, until Cary married Woolworths’ heiress Barbara Hutton. During that period Cary also wed actress Virginia Cherrill on orders from the studio, but that only lasted 13 months from 1934-5, before he and Scott moved back in together again. Cary had once shared a house with Hollywood’s most loveable gay actor William Haines. Later still, he lived for a while with the equally gay Noel Coward who wrote his famous song, ‘Mad about the Boy’, for Cary. Nevertheless, and despite his five marriages, Cary’s great love was Randolph Scott, and it was mutual until well into their latter years.
Actor Jim Hutton worked with Cary on WALK, DON’T RUN in 1966. ‘One thing Cary Grant did admit when we worked together – the two of us, sitting talking between scenes’, he said, ‘was that he had a crush on Elvis Presley. He didn’t say the word ‘crush’, but that’s clearly what he meant’. I’d heard tales that Howard Hughes had been more than Grant’s best man. That they were very close, but I didn’t pursue that.’ Writer Truman Capote made the following comment about his own and Grant’s drug taking during the sixties. ‘Mostly, I took drugs to please Cary Grant. He was trying LSD, back when it was legal. He had the notion that he could become heterosexual with it’. In all, Cary attended about 100 LSD sessions and always said they benefited him greatly.
Even as late as 1980, when he was in his 76th year, he was still denying his homosexuality. ‘I have nothing against gays’, he told a rather pushy interviewer. ‘I’m just not one myself’. It was totally untrue, of course. All Hollywood knew of his and Scott’s romance. It had gone on for decades. He was forced to marry Virginia Cherrill in 1934 by the studio, just to get news hounds of his back, but he was thoroughly miserable about the whole arrangement and even attempted suicide after a few months. Virginia stated in her complaint that he was ‘drunk and sullen for the duration’. The problem was apparent to all who knew him. He missed Scott.
The delightfully outspoken Carole Lombard knew everybody’s secrets and she also knew how deep the love between Grant and Scott was even if, as she put it, ‘Their relationship is perfect. Randy pays the bills, and Cary mails them.’
She was referring to Cary’s legendary tight-fisted approach to money. In 1959, he was paid $450,000 for making NORTH BY NORTHWEST, plus a percentage of the profits, plus an additional $315,000 because the shoot went nine weeks past his contracted time. Having been a star since the 1930’s, he was a very wealthy man, yet Eva Marie Saint recalled her bemusement at seeing him charge fans 15 cents a time for his autograph! When he died in 1986 his estate was valued at $60 million.
Just a few days from completion of filming PENNY SERENADE in 1941, the tragic news reached Cary that the Luftwaffe had bombed Bristol, the hometown he had left twenty years earlier, killing five members of his family – an aunt and uncle, their daughter and son-in-law, and their grandchild. Cary was still a British citizen, but his star was on the rise in Hollywood so he opted not to return to Britain. Instead, he donated half his salary to British War Relief. Given his reputation as a miserly penny-pincher this was probably a considerable wrench for him. Needless to say, his generous donation was made fully public by the studio.
In 1940, Cary and Randy made their only movie together, a light-hearted romantic comedy called MY FAVORITE WIFE, which had a script that required them to feud over the female lead Irene Dunne. Those who know about the camera say it picks up on chemistry between people. Both men clearly appear more at ease with each other than they do with Dunne, the woman they are supposed to be madly in love with.
Columnist Hedda Hopper wrote in her personal papers after Cary divorced his first wife: ‘Whom does he think he’s fooling? He started with the boys and now he’s gone back to them.’ Hedda was another who knew everything that went on in Tinsel Town.
While he was in Spain in 1956 making THE PRIDE AND THE PASSION, Cary fell hopelessly in love with his co-star Sophia Loren and asked her mentor Carlo Ponti to secretly agree to her playing the female lead in his movie HOUSEBOAT (1958) when it was ready to go into production the following year. Ponti gave him the green light, unaware of the feelings fifty-two year-old Cary held for his 22 year-old protege. Grant coldly arranged the deal, knowing full well that his own wife at that time, Betsy Drake, had already been promised the role he now gave to Loren.
By the time filming began, however, Sophia was very much in love with Ponti. Undeterred, Grant showered her with flowers and gifts and even proposed marriage. While he awaited an answer, Sophia and Ponti slipped across the border into Mexico and quietly tied the knot. They returned to the set on the following Monday in time to shoot the final scene in the movie which, ironically, happened to be the wedding between Sophia’s character and Grant’s. Ouch!
Grant and Scott were in love most of their adult lives. Sadly for them, it was in an era when others, with a lot at stake, had the power to order them to be apart, hence the loveless marriages for both men. When faced with a choice to either live their lives together in obscurity, or to continue hiding their affection and maintain their status as highly paid movie stars, they opted for the latter. So, literally for decades, they tried to keep their affections from the media. One evening, when both men were in their seventies, the maitre d’ of the Beverly Hillcrest Hotel observed them seated in a quiet booth after the place had emptied. They were holding hands.
One final word on the subject: Cary’s daughter wrote her memoir, Good Stuff, which was released in January 2015. In it she dismissed the talk of her father’s homosexuality as ‘gossip’, nothing more. Not surprisingly, her book is mostly about him, and she devotes several pages to the ‘rumors’. Randolph Scott, her father’s ‘best friend’ for nearly fifty years, is not even mentioned!
Form your own conclusions on that if you will…
But regardless of their sexuality, both Cary Grant and Randolph Scott kept us well entertained all those years we were “in the dark” as it were.
As George Burns used to say…
“Sincerity – if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
And unfortunately, that’s what most things in life including HOLLYWOOD, are all about!
Graham, obsessing with other people’s sex lives is not exactly the sign of a healthy mind.
Well, thank you Margaret for taking the time to at least read what I write, whether you like it or not is certainly your choice as is your response…
Ordinarily I wouldn’t respond to your thinking my mind might be ‘unhinged’ and ‘unhealthy’ as it does a disservice to both of us to go that route… But I was asked by several people to respond, so here is my first and might well be my only reply to you…
So many, many COMMENTS on the internet end up with personal name calling and pointless infighting, so let’s not start with it on this wonderful site.
In the last five decades I’ve seen so much prolonged and heated debate, sometimes even physically violent, from movie fans over their favorite actors and movies, and often over the most trivial and pettiest of details, because for many of them it is almost like a religious belief.
Most of what I write is based on the scholarly research of others, coupled with so much of it being personally verified by the hundreds of industry people I have worked with and interviewed in my career… So you don’t have to take my word for ANYTHING!
In fact, I can provide you with a great deal of compelling evidence of what I write, and it’s not just from Scotty Bowers or other ‘tell-all’ books, and it’s no conspiracy theory either.
As for “obsessing with other people’s sex lives,” I’d say no more so than you or anybody else, specially at my age.
So if you don’t want to know a lot more about the story and simply prefer the standard PC/PR version instead, again that is your choice.
And so in parting, may I suggest as not to get you further upset, offended, or possibly burst your HOLLYWOOD bubble… next time to avoid all that discomfort, just simply skip over what I write and read the other ‘COMMENTS’ instead, that is if there are any!
Graham Hill,
The Nazis and communists used people’s private sexual dalliances as leverage for potential blackmail and public humiliation, so congratulations on taking such a lowbrow approach. Like the Nazis and communists, your impetus for attempting to expose other people’s sexual dalliances also has a political objective, however your political objective emanates from an entirely different motive.
Since puberty, you’ve felt marginalized by peers and society due to your “somewhere over the rainbow” loneliness, thus you’re on a scorched earth crusade to expose this person and that person as gay because you seek to subvert the conformist ideals of the 20th century American middle class out of revenge for feeling like an outsider as a youth.
Fact is, most Americans believe that a person’s private life is their private life, but you obviously don’t believe people are entitled to such dignity. You believe your political objectives are more important than honoring the dignity and private lives of other human beings.
You may veil your sleazy tabloid motives behind the premise of “film scholarship,” however, most people consider scholarship of Hollywood cinema to be the study of the actual films rather than the study of who Cary Grant was allegedly holding hands with in the dark corner of a restaurant at closing time during his retirement years.
You loathe the “conformity” of 20th century middle America, yet you’re the one who insists that everyone conform to your ideals.
… and that’s why Jennifer Grant can’t even write a memoir about her long-deceased father without you attacking her for the *crime* of preserving the privacy of her father’s private life.
Graham, I’m a long time Cary Grant fan. In fact, he was my first introduction to classic film and for that I’m thankful. I don’t know why his sexuality is such a big deal to so many people. Myself, I could care less. I’m just grateful for his legacy on screen (which has nothing to do with his personal life.)
Brittaney or should I say ‘storyenthusiast,’ I totally agree with you, as I wrote at the end…
But if you’re more than just a fan, but also a writer and historian as well… then Cary Grant and everyone else in public life, specially those that are idolized and looked up to, then you have a responsibility to present the whole picture, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and then it’s up to the reader to decide if they can still enjoy their performances as a result of it.
I personally accept that, and appreciate it when others write the same. Otherwise, what’s the point of reading just a fake PR handout of your favorite star, politician or trend setter, we’re more than lied to enough already.
And even though I made a fair living at writing fictional storylines for HOLLYWOOD, I’m really much more interested in the truthful, non-fiction backstory of history.
You have a wonderful and comprehensive blog, and your own writing is so much more refined and better than what most so-called ‘name’ writers can put together.
And you have a very original iconic looking logo!
Graham Hill, people are entitled to CHOOSE to keep their love lives under wraps. There’s something very vulgar and hostile in your assertion that we have a responsibility to publicly expose the private lives of old Hollywood actors who’ve been dead for over thirty years. My enjoyment of a film is neither affected by who Cary Grant kissed beneath the mistletoe, nor by what he thought about tax policy, nor by what I think of his favorite breakfast cereal. It sounds like you have a personal rooting interest in exposing public people for their homosexual secrets. Perhaps it makes you feel like you’re not alone in the world, although I imagine someone so desperate to air everyone else’s secrets is probably someone who always feels lonely — even when surrounded by people. Get. A. Life.
Margaret,
I think you should know, specially in the state-of-mind you’re in with this… That you should have my read my response to you more closely…
“Most of what I write is based on the scholarly research of others, coupled with so much of it being personally verified by the hundreds of industry people I have worked with and interviewed in my career…”
I DID NOT write the article you’re having a problem with, Australian author Alan Royle did, and he published it on his site May 6, 2015 as CARY GRANT – The Loves In His Life.
The one time I forgot to credit someone, not exactly my style of writing, but his facts are correct. And it was not offered up as part of an anti-gay agenda, but merely to show the monumental and poetic irony of two big stars perceived as heterosexual icons, being gay in reality.
And I have to tell you, not that it’s any of your business of course, that my late dear aunt was gay, many of my friends are gay, specially having spent a lifetime in HOLLYWOOD… And you know something, a lot of them know the truth about all those that didn’t come out-of-the-closet and they can even raise a laugh at the irony without becoming.
If you hadn’t noticed by now, my ‘COMMENTS’ each day are really separate supplementary articles to what Joe & Frank write, and sometimes they let me write the main article, but the point is none of us do this for the very few COMMENTS we do get…
And as the vast majority of my own articles are not in the least about sexuality, but tend towards condemning those that enslave mankind with debt, misery and destruction, what you think of as all looney conspiracy theory, then you might understand that it’s the BANK$TER$ that are the real Nazi’s and Communists, and we should all hate them right!
Anyway, if I can’t reason with you with any of what I’ve just said, if I can’t get you to see sense in just agreeing to disagree without the name calling, then Margaret -this is the FINAL reply from me…
And if you have any sense of humor left in you at all, you’ll recognize the irony from one of your idol’s most famous quotes…
“To succeed with the opposite sex, tell her you’re impotent. She can’t wait to disprove it.”
Cary Grant
Dear Mr. Graham Hill,
You are pathologically dishonest in what you wrote to Margaret.
In this very thread, you actually wrote this to another commenter;
*********
“But if you’re more than just a fan, but also a writer and historian as well… then Cary Grant and everyone else in public life, specially those that are idolized and looked up to, then you have a responsibility to present the whole picture, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and then it’s up to the reader to decide if they can still enjoy their performances as a result of it.”
*********
You said it right there – that film writers and historians have a “responsibility” to expose the private details of people in public life, especially those who “are idolized and looked up to.”
That is borne out of your desire to be subversive.
The rational mature critic can delineate the art from the artist.
Seeking to smear people by exposing their most personal secrets is an awful way to live.
What does your therapist think about your desire to subvert successful people in this way?
By the way, just like a stand-up comedian doesn’t laugh at his or her own jokes and doesn’t tell the audience *when* to laugh, an essayist shouldn’t tell his or her audience *how* they should react to their essay. Just from reading a few of your comments, I notice that you have a pattern of telling people *how* they should react to what you write.
Graham, earlier you may have “forgotten” the fact that you literally thanked me for reading what you wrote.
“Well, thank you Margaret for taking the time to at least read what I write, whether you like it or not is certainly your choice as is your response…”
Then, after I exposed your glass house, you lashed out at me for somehow not *knowing* that you didn’t ACTUALLY TRULY write the stuff you earlier thanked me for reading!
“I think you should know, specially in the state-of-mind you’re in with this… That you should have my read my response to you more closely…I DID NOT write the article you’re having a problem with,…”
LOL
Here’s what I find most amusing about allegedly courageous provocateurs such as yourself;
while standing atop a hill pounding your chest like Tarzan insisting that as a film historian you have a responsibility to expose sexual secrets of long deceased actors in order to challenge the sensibilities of middle America, you’ve already suggested you will be avoiding my responses in the future. In other words, you want to expose deep secrets of people, yet you don’t have the intestinal fortitude for some give and take on the internet. LOL
Orry-Kelly was someone who really knew…
httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcuuQuymhOc