Cary Grant and Randolph Scott’s Hollywood Story: “Our Souls Did Touch”

In the spring of 1933, Cary Grant told a fan magazine about his favorite fish dishes. The routine was standard for Modern Screen’s “The Modern Hostess,” a homemaker-targeted column that spotlighted “recipes for foods that we know men like”—or more specifically, that male celebrities would agree to discuss publicly. But when it came to his strongest piece of advice, Grant deferred to another up-and-coming actor’s tastes. “If you want to talk to a real authority on fish—particularly shell fish—you ought to get a hold of Scotty some time,” he said. “That lad’s a hound for lobsters and crabs and shrimps and such.” The publication took note. That fall, fresh off of 18 rounds of golf, Grant and his roommate, fellow rising Hollywood star Randolph Scott, were interviewed while lunching together in Los Angeles. It was Scott who ordered for the table.

This Modern Screen feature was at once utterly typical and utterly atypical of its period. In the ’30s, at the dawn of the talkies, fan magazines became a primary tool for studios like Paramount, which had both Grant and Scott under contract, to deliver coordinated and pseudo-intimate glimpses of their brightest stars’ private lives. Here they could exert some media control. But for two supposed close friends to play ball for a pithy joint housekeeping profile? Certainly out of the ordinary. Grant would nudge his seafood connoisseur to keep the good vibes rolling—prodding Scott to describe their preferred recipe for crabmeat chow mein, say—while Scott boasted of converting his buddy’s tastes for the better. “I’ve even gotten Cary eating shell fish with the same enthusiasm [as me], you’ll notice,” he said.

Their dynamic resembled that of the romantic couples profiled in those very same pages, and even 90 years ago some people wondered if there was more between Grant and Scott than met the eye. The notorious columnist Hedda Hopper reveled in fanning the homophobic flames against Grant, once implying he wasn’t “normal” and later asking in a letter, “Whom does he think he is fooling?”

From the moment they moved in together nearly a century ago, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were subjected to speculation about the nature of their relationship. They lived together on and off for about a decade, an arrangement that outlasted multiple marriages between them and paralleled Grant’s evolution into a Hollywood icon. Several men have since recounted queer sexual encounters with the pair, and still more have claimed to witness a romantic love between them. Other people who knew them firmly believed nothing went on beyond a rich friendship. Much is not—and cannot ever be—known about closeted gay life in pre-WWII America. In that messiness, biographers have been all over the map in their judgment of what exactly went on.

Crazy Grant and Randolph Scott playing backgammon.From RGR Collection/Alamy.

Yet none of that—the debates over gay or bi or straight, who witnessed what and when, the coding of certain photoshoots—approaches the question of what Grant and Scott meant to one another, or how this relationship shaped who they became both privately and on-screen. At least one acquaintance of theirs has even quoted Grant calling Scott the love of his life. Prior accounts of this relationship, ranging from biographies to documentaries, haven’t fully examined what was publicly known and disclosed at the time, instead relying on cheeky magazine photographs and headlines. But the intimate contents of those articles, combined with the eventual testimony of men who knew Grant and Scott, paint a unique portrait of cohabitation, codependency, and love—platonic at minimum, and very possibly romantic.

Who knows why Paramount agreed to have two of its hottest up-and-comers talk to Modern Screen about cooking and fine dining, just as career-ending—in those days, maybe life-ending—rumors started trailing them. The studio had talent to promote and a strange arrangement to navigate. “It was all very odd, not the least because it was all very open,” Anthony Slide wrote in his 2010 book Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine. “The two men, the writers, and the readers were either incredibly naïve or the actors were willing to risk the readers not guessing the truth of the relationship. Perhaps it was the sheer transparency of the couple’s life together…that kept it from ever becoming identified as a homosexual relationship.”

What we do know is that this transparency offers a brief window into how these actors spoke to each other, influenced each other, and found comfort in each other. Unwittingly, perhaps, it’s in the rigidly orchestrated publicity machine of ’30s show business that the story of Grant and Scott was told—hidden in plain sight.

The man named Cary Grant was only a few months old when he met Randolph Scott in 1932. Before then, he was a British troublemaker named Archibald “Archie” Leach, suffering through an unhappy upbringing: an alcoholic father, a deeply depressed mother, and never enough money to go around. When he was eleven, his mother was committed to a mental institution by his father, and years later he was expelled from his school due to erratic behavior. Leach ran away at 15 to pursue a performer’s life. Cramming his way into the world of vaudeville and New York café society marked his own roaring 20s. He was ruggedly handsome, an acrobat and a tightrope walker; he’d eventually hit Broadway, which would in turn bring him to Hollywood, but before that big break, he’d make money by walking on stilts outside the Capitol Theater and around Coney Island.

In 1927, Leach met Orry-Kelly, the Australian designer and costumer who’d leave New York around the same time to embark upon a great Hollywood career of his own. Orry-Kelly was gay and traveled in queer circles during that time, trading his small-town upbringing for a fashionable, fabulous life. Initially, an aspiring actor getting by on his tart wit, Orry-Kelly first spotted Leach holding only a “two-foot-square shiny black tin box which held all his worldly possessions,” he later recalled in his memoir. Upon this first impression, he took him in.

Randolph Scott and Cary Grant poolside at their Santa Monica house, 1935.Courtesy of the Everett Collection.

The pair lived together in a shabby one-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment for almost a decade. Though historians have suggested that they were a couple, Orry-Kelly did not confirm anything in his book. (Orry-Kelly’s memoir was published posthumously in 2015, following the Gillian Armstrong documentary about him, Women He’s Undressed.) He found Leach often in bad health, a whole lot of fun, and a far cry from the suave persona that would come to define Cary Grant. According to Orry-Kelly, Leach once drunkenly hit him after a long night with friends gone awry, and his style left much to be desired: “[He] returned from England wearing a plum-coloured suit the likes of which I’d only seen on cockney vaudevillians in Australia,” Orry-Kelly wrote. “I told him the purple plum shade made him look bilious.”

Leach was the first to leave for the other coast. At the end of 1931, when signing his five-year contract with Paramount just 10 days after landing in California, the wily English runaway known as Archie Leach officially transformed into Cary Grant, studio-mandated name change and all. Just months into his new identity, Grant met Randolph Scott on the Paramount lot. They were in production on different projects and bonded swiftly. Orry-Kelly claimed to be the one who suggested that Grant move in with Scott, before gradually losing touch as Grant immediately got to work on the seven movies released in 1932 alone—and starting his life with a new man. Grant and Scott moved in together first in apartments, then a small Beverly Hills home by year’s end. They could pool the rent as two struggling newcomers, the logic went, a fairly common practice at the time.

The Virginia-born, strikingly blond Scott had already been around the movies for a few years and wasn’t escaping a mysterious, tumultuous past like his new roommate. “While Cary ran away from home in his middle ‘teens and struggled for recognition for years, Randy had no bumps,” a 1935 profile said. “The Scotts were wealthy and willin’.” Scott oozed refinement, his thick Southern drawl blaring a kind of all-American authenticity. He loved Grant’s relatively loose sense of humor. Scott knew how to comport himself, and dressed impeccably. Then there was Grant, trying desperately to remove any trace of Brit in his accent, and still with some rugged edge to him by his screen debut in 1932’s This Is the Night. (He portrayed an Olympic javelin thrower.) According to the biographer Scott Eyman, the film director Henry Hathaway once dismissed Grant as “that Cockney guy with the long neck and the big ears,” pointing out the scarf he’d wear to hide his more distinctive physical features. “He’s no gentleman,” Hathaway said.

Actors Randolph Scott and Cary Grant show off their athletic prowess. Scott lifts weights while Grant punches at a speedbag.From Bettmann/Getty Images.

But Scott knew this rarefied world. From the moment he moved in with Grant, he showed him how they could live in it together. Eyman wrote of their packed calendars in their first year of knowing each other, “The boys were everywhere, social butterflys on a mad whirl”—greeting Amelia Earhart when she visited Paramount, attending glamorous parties for performers like Helen Kane. Their profiles were rising fast, with Scott redefining himself as a tender Western hero (Heritage of the Desert, which Hathaway directed) and Grant stiffly introducing himself as a dramatic heartthrob. Grant’s early movies (Blonde Venus, She Done Him Wrong) unveiled an actor out of his element, maybe misunderstood by the industry trying to make him the next big thing. But this was a creation starting from scratch, and only the first step on what would become an epic mythmaking quest.

During prohibition, underground gay nightclubs boomed in Los Angeles, even as homosexuality was still punishable by prison. “There’s B. B. B.’s Cellar where the boys dress up like girls,” read a 1933 Hollywood editorial, and “Jimmy’s Back Yard where the girls dress up like boys.” The crowd in these establishments—which Jenny Hamel has reported included the likes of Grant, Dietrich, and more big names of the era—varied greatly in terms of sexuality and gender, and stuck around even as intermittent raids threatened shutdowns and arrests. Until the war, the clubs remained robust, as did the free-for-alls taking place within them.

This was Grant and Scott’s social scene. They remained boldly public amid loudening whispers. The pair would occasionally, flamboyantly attend costume parties in women’s clothes, according to biographer Marc Eliot. “Randolph Scott and Cary Grant carry this buddy business a long way,” a Photoplay gossip blurb commented in April of 1933. “They go every place together and even share the same house.”

This item was printed a month after Grant and Scott gave their first extensive joint interview for Silver Screen. Their relationship had, by all accounts, reached the next level. They’d bid adieu to their cramped Beverly quarters for a secluded, eight-room Spanish abode on West Live Oak Drive, just outside the Griffith Observatory in Los Feliz and with a sweeping view of the city. The big living room featured a grand piano, modern paintings, and a fireplace that Grant would light after supper, while new dance music played on the radio in the adjoining library. The place came furnished, but was peppered with personal touches, like the coffee pot Scott bought when he was in a “domestic mood,” or Grant’s new Packard roadster parked out front beside Scott’s Cadillac.

This setup was first written about by Silver Screen’s Ben Maddox, a closeted gay journalist according to film historian William J. Mann. Maddox arrived on the occasion of Grant and Scott’s first dinner together in the new home since they’d moved in two weeks earlier (these were busy guys), and stuffed his article with playful innuendo. “Cary is the gay, impetuous one. Randy is serious, cautious,” he wrote. “Cary is temperamental in the sense of being very intense. Randy is calm and quiet. He must know a person for some time before he can break down and be absolutely natural.” At the time, the word temperamental was used among queer people to identify themselves.

The ghost of Archie Leach and his harsh cockney accent had all but “vanished,” Maddox wrote, and here was the charming Cary Grant instead, eating and relaxing and aimlessly chattering in his big house in the Los Feliz Hills beside the person with whom he’d chosen to share his life. Marc Eliot reported that Grant took ownership of how they dressed when out in the world, while Scott still oversaw decor and dining. It’s an image of stability at astonishing odds from what Grant had experienced in his early years. His friend Bill Royce once said that Scott taught Grant “what kind of man he wanted to be off the screen.”

This kind of conspicuous domestic profile fueled the rumor mill, of course, but still single and “eligible,” Grant and Scott proceeded with more intimate joint magazine features, like that aforementioned housekeeping column. They acted as if there was no noise around them—until, in the beginning of 1934, Grant wed the actress Virginia Cherrill. He later told Royce this was partly a result of newfound pressure from Paramount to distance himself from Scott. This was not a marriage of love. It took place against the backdrop of the Hays Code, which was adopted that same year with the explicit purpose of cracking down on, among other things, any presentations or tolerance of homosexuality. Hollywood had effectively banned its presence on-screen and within the industry. William J. Mann called the choice for LGBTQ+ people “conform or get out.”

From ARCHIVIO GBB/Alamy.

Eleven days into their union, the happy newlyweds were staying at the Algonquin Hotel, “exuding young love” for all to see. They gave an exclusive interview to Silver Screen that hinged on Scott’s persistent presence in his roommate’s life. You read that correctly: The boys were still living together. “Randy Scott has been constantly with us—the three of us get along so well,” Cherrill said, presumably through gritted teeth. (She’d eventually put her foot down and live with Grant alone until they divorced.) The “impetuous” Grant that Silver Screen had profiled a year earlier was nowhere to be found. After rambling through a defense of the three-way living arrangement—“It’s so huge Randy couldn’t possibly be in our way”—Grant asked the reporter if the dynamic was unconventional. When she assured him it was not, “Cary seemed so relieved.”

The trio finally moved out of the spacious Los Feliz home, with Grant and Cherrill finding an upscale apartment—and Scott leasing the unit next door. A Modern Screen reporter met Scott on the Paramount lot, conducting a one-on-one interview in, of all places, Grant’s dressing room—a location suggested by Scott, no less. “Randy seemed to be quite as much at home there as if they had been his own quarters,” the article said. Scott stretched comfortably on an armchair. He flung his hat onto a nearby table as if by pure habit. And he expressed a subtle, profound sadness the longer he talked, admitting to missing the “constant companionship” with Grant, the dinners they’d plan out in advance. He confessed his fear of coming between Grant and Cherrill, of causing his friend any unhappiness or burden. He stared at his hands, withdrawn, as they discussed the wedding. The reporter observed that “one instinctively feels the sense of loss and emptiness that has come into Randy’s life since Cary married Virginia Cherrill.” More callously, the story’s lede asked, “Is he jealous of the girl who now comes first in his pal’s affections?”

By the end of 1934, Grant had become testy when asked about Cherrill. “Gone was the Archie Leach full of fun,” Orry-Kelly wrote of his old friend during that period. The marriage was a swift failure. By 1935, Grant and Cherrill were bitterly divorced while the boys were reunited. “Well, well! That sterling couple, Cary Grant and Randy Scott are back together and keeping house again!” cheered a gossip blurb in Screenland. “No aspersions intended, boys, we all know you.”

Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and Edmund Gwenn in Sylvia Scarlett, 1935.Courtesy of the Everett Collection.

Cary Grant was all over the movies by this point, if not yet a star. Shortly after he moved in with Scott again, though, he entered his prime. In 1935 Grant starred in Sylvia Scarlett, his first movie with his famed collaborator Katharine Hepburn. He was on loan from Paramount, where he was flailing in thin, bland leading-man roles. (He’d soon leave the studio for a joint deal with Columbia and RKO.) But this daring and unusual romantic comedy, directed by the great George Cukor (My Fair Lady), loosened him up, subtly hinting at the screwball maestro that Grant would soon become.

In the film, Hepburn plays a con artist donning full drag as a man named Sylvester. She brings a bracing androgynous spark here, never more ignited than when she meets a fellow swindler played by Grant (one of the rare roles in which he deployed his native cockney accent). They meet in one scene on a train, and a steamy Grant unbuttons his shirt to reveal his bare chest to “Sylvester.” Hepburn turns away to conceal any expression of arousal; Grant keeps the vibe alive by suggesting they sleep in the same bed, reasoning, “You’ll make a proper hot water bottle.” He assumes Hepburn is a man throughout. This nearly explicit, frankly hot queer text—Cukor was gay, Hepburn long the subject of lesbian rumors—helps to explain the mass walkouts and disastrous box-office numbers that followed the release of Sylvia Scarlett. It’s also brilliantly, subversively enhanced by the presence of Grant, since those rumors about him never really went away.

Sylvia Scarlett—the movie that quietly introduced Cary Grant, Movie Star—made queerness and fluidity an irrefutable aspect of his screen persona. Grant’s commercial breakout followed two years later in The Awful Truth, one of the great divorce comedies; Marc Eliot wrote that it was “remarkable for the extent to which gender characteristics assigned to women could be presented as being desirable and attractive in a man.” The critic Pauline Kael once observed in The New Yorker that “Grant doesn’t yield to cartooning femininity or to enjoying it; he doesn’t play a woman, he threatens to—flirting with the idea and giggling over it.” The screwball era—its role reversals, its physical gags, its winks and nods and Code-skirting secrets—provided the mold for the modern star, and Grant sculpted it to suit his presence and his personality.

Cary Grant, laying down, in a scene from The Awful Truth, 1937.Courtesy of the Everett Collection.

After Grant’s divorce from Cherrill, he moved with Scott into a Santa Monica beachfront bungalow, boasting views of the Pacific. You’d see white everywhere you looked: white sand glistening beneath the tiled terrace; elegant white Venetian blinds gently welcoming sunlight in the mornings; white flowers that Grant would buy to zen up the living spaces; and of course, the rambunctious white Sealyham dog named Archibald running around and causing mischief. Screenland’s 1936 article on the property unfolds like a gloriously engineered Architectural Digest tour, infusing every corner of the home with fluffy backstory. The reporter called it “one of the cheeriest and joyous houses I’ve seen,” highlighting the long living room and shared desk, the backgammon setup in the den, the charmingly odd mealtimes. Grant at one point panicked, knowingly, about the beds not being made—in their separate bedrooms—while at another, he playfully battled Scott during the cutest, most ridiculous, and just maybe most clearly staged dog-shampooing mishap ever committed to print.

Some nights, both Grant and Scott would stay out working until late, and so they’d ask their cook to put dinner in the fridge. “When we come wandering in at some late hour, we have a feast,” Grant said. Scott chimed in, “I wonder why meals out of a refrigerator and eaten in the kitchen always taste so good.” (Grant’s theory: “Probably because we are still a bit primitive.”) They bickered about certain differences. Cary liked meat, while Randy liked veggies. Cary tea, Randy coffee. They both loved artichokes, but only Cary would eat them cold. Randy was the dessert guy. “Every morning when we aren’t working,” Grant said, “we jump out of bed, into bathing trunks, run for the surf, and sprint along the beach for a couple miles!”

Grant and Scott both remained under Paramount’s thumb for a little while longer. From the studio’s perspective, this portrait of codependency and late-night scrounging meant to serve, if anything, as a reminder that the stars were still very single and eligible. The excuse that they were too poor to live on their own had long expired, however, and so their life was their life—its contents unavoidably intimate. Scott married his childhood friend Marion duPont later that year, but she mostly still lived across the country; his relationship with Grant continued through to and beyond Scott’s 1939 divorce. In a profile for Modern Screen, Grant said at one point during Scott’s marriage, “Randy’s wife didn’t come between this pair of friends. On the contrary. Remarkable institution, women.”

Grant was uncomfortable doing press without Scott by his side. He gave dull, reticent, at times combative solo interviews, even to fan mags. In 1935, Scott told one reporter, “I’ve seen [Cary] actually lose sleep and weight after reading certain items that touched upon his personal life and thoughts.” In a Movie Mirror profile “Heart Whole and Handsome,” Grant curtly affirmed he was not looking for a romantic partner; his vow of independence met a disruption when Scott actually crashed the interview at their home, commenting, “To think you’ve been enjoying yourself like a bloated gentleman of leisure while I’ve put in a grueling day at the studio, making tests from nine o’clock this morning on, in order that you could continue living in the style I’ve accustomed you to.” The still-circulating, homoerotic-coded photos that accompanied the Screenland piece, meanwhile, visualized that lifestyle. They depicted Grant and Scott taking a swim, enjoying a meal, and playing with the dog together. In one sense, the imagery maintained the standard set for years, in terms of the public understanding of the Grant-Scott dynamic as bachelors just getting by; in another, they rather starkly illustrated what a years-long partnership would look like in the media’s prying gaze.

Cary Grant and Randolph Scott relaxing in their house known as the Bachelor Hall in Santa Monica, California which they purchased and shared for 12 years.From BFA/Alamy.

The photographer for the article was a younger gay man named Jerome Zerbe. Brendan Gill wrote in The New Yorker that Zerbe, an acquaintance of his, “was a lover of both Grant and Scott” during this time. According to Gill, Zerbe explained the tone of the pictures as intending to both “honor the prevailing Hollywood taboos” and generate favorable publicity. Zerbe journaled about “madhouse” parties at the home of Orry-Kelly, long nights spent with Grant that lasted past 1, sometimes 3 in the morning. One evening, he had dinner with Grant and Betty Furness, the actress pushed aggressively by the press as Grant’s romantic interest of the moment; after they finished up, Zerbe went to Grant’s home with Frank Horn, Grant’s gay private secretary, not getting back to his own place until 1:45 am.

The Santa Monica beach pad housed boozy, sexy gatherings and entertaining. Fred Astaire, a close friend of the couple, had a guest room essentially to himself. Other recurring guests included Howard Hughes, Noel Coward, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Moss Hart. Richard Gully, the “aide-de-camp” to Warner Bros exec Jack Warner, told Vanity Fair in 2001 that he was invited up to the home, where Grant expressed a “fleeting crush” on him. The noted fashion writer Richard Blackwell said he spent months with Scott and Grant, identifying them as a couple and finding them to be “deeply, madly in love.” He described romantic experiences with both in his memoir. “I envied what they felt for one another. But they knew as well as I did that this sort of relationship between two men was considered absolutely unspeakable,” he wrote. “Even in a crowded room, they saw no one else.”

Another guest, Scotty Bowers, was known as a pimp for the closeted in Hollywood (as explored in Matt Tyrnauer’s 2017 documentary Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood). He took a relatively graphic route in recounting his own sexual encounters with Grant and Scott: “The three of us got into a lot of sexual mischief together. Aside from the usual sucking—neither of them were into fucking, at least not fucking guys, or at least not me—what I remember most about that first encounter was that Scott really liked to cuddle, and talk, and was very gentle.”

On-screen, amid all this, Grant came into his own. He was a tease—endlessly seduced by his fictional pursuers, toying with his perceived unavailability to heighten his mystique. He found manic symmetry and met his physical match in Hepburn in their late ’30s classics, Bringing Up Baby and Holiday. He made for the most lovable fool in The Awful Truth and chewed on punchlines with delight in His Girl Friday. He always looked incredible—presenting characters who’d cultivated the finer things, who knew clothes and parties and food, not unlike his Santa Monica life that appeared fit for a king. He came off as infectiously happy in these movies, his boisterous smile all but ripped straight from Screenland’s pages. He upended romantic tropes, establishing a heroic archetype that skewered hetero conventions while remaining alluring. He could be, not himself exactly, but the myth he’d spent years building up off camera: Cary Grant. “The greatest movie stars have not been highborn; they have been strong-willed (often deprived) kids who came to embody their own dreams, and the public’s,” Kael wrote.

Scott’s career remained stable for a few more years, but never hit such an upswing. The honeymoon period between him and Grant could not last forever, and accounts diverge on how things fell apart toward the end of the ’30s. Eliot alleges they simply broke up as Grant soared and Scott flatlined—they reduced the frequency of time spent together, fought over the house, and drifted apart. But they faced a greater hurdle before going their separate ways: For all that Grant and Scott normalized their life together, the reality of the times remained unavoidable. “Whenever they were in public, they couldn’t even touch, and could hardly walk together or even speak to each other without being watched for the slightest sign of their feelings,” Blackwell said.

The likeliest explanation is that the romance, if it was that, ran its course because it could never fully progress. The biographer Donald Spoto wrote in his book Blue Angel about Marlene Dietrich, that RKO gave Grant an ultimatum: Stay with Scott, or renew his contract. He chose the latter option.

Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, and Randolph Scott in My Favorite Wife, 1940.Courtesy of the Everett Collection.

Severing ties is hardly ever so neat. Bookending their relationship, Grant and Scott starred together in RKO’s 1940 commercial hit My Favorite Wife, with Irene Dunne portraying the woman caught between them. Kael observed that Grant seemed distracted by Scott’s presence, uncharacteristically unable to provide “an underlayer of conviction” in his pursuit of Dunne. One scene finds Grant in a kind of confused stupor at Scott’s physique, watching him in a bathing suit by the pool. They filmed at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. “Cary and Randy Scott arrived as a pair and, to the total astonishment of myself, the director, and the ultra-macho crew, instead of taking separate suites [they] moved into the same room together,” Bert Granet, the script supervisor, once said, according to biographer Charles Higham. “Everyone looked at everyone else. It seemed hardly believable.”

Around the time of the breakup, Grant earned his first Oscar nomination for, naturally, a breakup movie. In 1941’s Penny Serenade, he reunited with Irene Dunne in a melodramatic take on a couple in crisis, whose mounting problems lead to a custody battle over their child, and send Grant’s Roger into a deep depression. Grant’s searing performance marked the beginning of a new era, both personally and professionally. If the ’30s saw him radiating joy on-screen and in print, the next decade saw the actor tapping into a darker side. He’d explore this intensity most intriguingly in Hitchcock thrillers such as the 1946 noir Notorious, opposite Ingrid Bergman, operating in a ravishing erotic haze and at his most sexually explosive when projecting a curious distance.

At a certain point around this time, Grant and Scott lost touch. In a 1941 profile for Motion Picture, Scott wistfully implied they might live together again one day, but only after the reporter forcefully addressed the persistent rumors around the pair as “the kind that you don’t talk to your mother about.” Anyone who believed the whispers was considered “garbage-minded folk,” the article scolded.

By the mid-40s, the story of Grant and Scott was effectively over—at least in the public record. They left behind a surprisingly, thoroughly documented timeline of their years together that’s since been too simply cast aside as a studio effort to promote two single, at times struggling actors under contract. The depth and breadth of the coverage indicate a more complex negotiation. Two decades later, a Photoplay article about Rock Hudson and his lover framed their dynamic as “two hunks living together to save a buck.” Sound familiar?

No matter the cynical motivations of the studios or the squeaky-clean packaging of the actors, the journalists behind these stories still believed in their work’s veracity and interpreted what they saw. Fan magazines were intrinsic to the Hollywood of their era, and cannot be dismissed on grounds of inaccuracy. “The real Gary Cooper or the real Alice Faye might not be quite as ‘real’ as the fan magazine writers claimed,” scholar Anthony Slide said, “but there was more than an element of truth in what they wrote.”

And who was Cary Grant, in and out of those pages, but a magnificent mask, anyway? Truth and fiction blended through his entire being, as did pain and joy. While Scott’s 1944 marriage to Patricia Stillman lasted until his death in 1987, Grant married twice more during the ’40s alone, and five times over his life. (His only child, Jennifer, was born in 1966 and doesn’t believe Grant was gay but in her memoir has acknowledged the possibility that he “experiment[ed] sexually.”) Sodomy remained a felony in every US state until 1961, and Grant’s separation from Scott closely preceded the Lavender Scare, a harrowing collective anti-gay panic borne out of the Cold War. The gossip lingered: In the late ’50s, Hedda Hopper wrote that Grant “started with the boys and now he has gone back to them.” In the ’70s, his girlfriend confronted him about the rumors and demanded an answer for why all of his secretaries were gay men. In 1980, Chevy Chase called Grant a “homo” on Tom Snyder’s talk show Tomorrow, retracting his words only after Grant responded with a slander lawsuit against Chase for $10 million. (They reportedly settled out of court for $1 million.)

For decades, Cary Grant sculpted the image of a Hollywood leading man with performances that both subverted gender roles and winked at the rumors surrounding him. Today, there’s still little acceptance of the possibility that his stardom—and, in turn, our collective understanding of stardom—was shaped by queerness. Consider the continued, utter absence of LGBTQ+ male A-listers a century later. Consider that only one openly gay man has ever been nominated for a best actor Oscar. Consider that, just as it would have for Grant and Scott, a public figure coming out today would see their image changed instantly—and permanently.

From Classic Cinema Archive/Alamy.

From Classic Cinema Archive/Alamy.

A few years after Chase’s on-air slur, the British journalist Maureen Donaldson published a book looking back at her romance with Grant in the late ’70s. The memoir was cowritten by Bill Royce, a close friend of hers (and later, Grant’s) and a writer who’d previously worked for a fan magazine. As recounted in his own 2006 book (published 20 years after Grant’s death), Royce ran into Scott one day in 1976 and then told Grant about the encounter. Grant reacted with a kind of melancholy wistfulness. By this point, he was in his early 70s and retired from acting. He decided to finally reveal the truth of what Scott meant to him. (Notably, none of this was included in Donaldson’s book.)

Grant set aside several hours to admit to Royce that he’d been in love with Scott from his earliest days in Hollywood. “Have you ever heard of gravity collapse? Some people call it love at first sight,” he said, according to Royce. “This was the first time I’d felt it for anyone.” Grant told Royce that he and Scott weren’t gay or straight but somewhere in between; that women as well as men slept over at their beach house; and that Scott never wanted Grant in the same way that Grant wanted Scott. They explored this attraction imbalance. Grant said that they did have sex, often awkwardly, and that they connected romantically. “There was no way Randy would have experimented with me…if he didn’t truly love me on some profound level,” he said.

He went on to remember Scott’s love for sweets and hatred for curse words, the way he cared more about golf and money than anything else on planet Earth, how he tended to cover his hot dogs in every condiment available at baseball games—mustard and ketchup and relish and onions. (“If they had petunias, he’d put them on there, too!”) Most poignantly, Grant confessed to the pain of saying goodbye to the love of his life, all those years ago: “It was dreadful having to let go of him in my heart.”

But as Royce remembered Grant in that moment, the man was ultimately at peace. “Our souls did touch,” Grant said. “What more could I ask?”

With research by Benjamin Murphey.

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