Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, A Quiet Love Story Hiding in Plain Sight
- Daniel Holland
- 1 hour ago
- 13 min read
You could almost miss it because it begins not with a kiss or a dramatic confession but with a chat about seafood. In the spring of 1933, Cary Grant told a fan magazine about his favourite fish dishes, and then he did something unexpectedly generous. He pointed the interviewer to his roommate, the fellow Paramount contract player who ordered for the table that day after eighteen rounds of golf. “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.” In a town built on image, this tiny aside was a quiet invitation to look more closely at the partnership of two rising stars who were learning how to live, work, and perhaps love together under the brightest lights in the world.
That same year, Modern Screen’s homemaker column ran its “recipes for foods that we know men like,” and there were Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, a natty pair eating lunch in Los Angeles, describing crabmeat chow mein and the charms of shellfish as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It was and it was not. These fan magazines were studios’ favourite theatre of controlled intimacy, a place where Paramount could signal wholesomeness and make marketable myths. Yet the presentation of two unattached men co managing a home life together was unusual enough to make readers lean in. Scott, the authority in question, was proud to say he had already shaped his friend’s tastes. “I’ve even gotten Cary eating shell fish with the same enthusiasm [as me], you’ll notice,” he said.
Their exchanges sounded, even then, like the talk of a couple. Hedda Hopper, ever ready to stir the pot, delighted in implying that Grant was not “normal” and, in a barbed letter later, demanded, “Whom does he think he is fooling?” The gossip was harsh, the context harsher. A few years later the Hays Code would codify intolerance, and the line between a good publicity story and a dangerous insinuation would become a canyon.
And yet the record of their voices together survived in those soft focus pages. The historian Anthony Slide would look back on the coverage and wonder at the openness. “It was all very odd, not the least because it was all very open,” he wrote. “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.” There is a paradox here that feels almost modern. By showing everything domestic, the magazines somehow hid the most important thing in plain sight.
Archie becomes Cary, and Cary meets Randy
The man we call Cary Grant was only a few months old when he met Randolph Scott in 1932, because the man who met him had only just become Cary Grant. He began as Archibald Alexander Leach, a Bristol boy with a gifted body and a difficult childhood, a mother committed to an asylum when he was eleven, a father who drank, and never enough money. He ran away at fifteen to chase the life of performers, acrobats, music hall dreamers, vaudeville caravans. New York gave him cafes, stilts outside the Capitol Theater, and afternoons at Coney Island. Broadway gave him a ladder to Hollywood. California gave him a five year Paramount contract and a studio name that fit like a tuxedo.
Before that flight west in 1931, Archie Leach had shared a shabby Greenwich Village flat with the Australian wit and future costume legend Orry Kelly. They met, Kelly wrote, when Leach arrived with a “two foot square shiny black tin box which held all his worldly possessions.” Kelly took him in. Their decade of domesticity is painted in rough strokes. Kelly remembered a young man of poor health and big appetites, a man who once came home from England “wearing a plum coloured suit the likes of which I’d only seen on cockney vaudevillians in Australia,” and he told him, with a needle of affection, “I told him the purple plum shade made him look bilious.” The friendship eventually loosened when Leach sailed west and became Grant, and in short order he met the Virginia born actor whose accent and carriage announced money and manners.
Randolph Scott had family resources, a thick Southern drawl, and a calm that made directors think of open skies and quiet strength. Grant at that point still had a scarf to hide a long neck and ears, as the director Henry Hathaway observed with tart frankness, calling him “that Cockney guy with the long neck and the big ears,” and then adding with a jab, “He’s no gentleman.” Scott knew precisely how to dress and how to be. Grant, still sloughing off Archie, paid close attention. They began in one of those economical arrangements common to film colony newcomers, sharing apartments, then a small Beverly Hills house, pooling rent, planing a future.
They were everywhere. As one biographer put it, the boys worked days and then fluttered through a social calendar that ran from studio parties to a visit with Amelia Earhart to dinners for Helen Kane. They also moved through a Los Angeles nightlife that was both free and fraught. During Prohibition, underground gay clubs thrived even as arrests loomed. “There’s B. B. B.’s Cellar where the boys dress up like girls,” read a puckish 1933 editorial, and “Jimmy’s Back Yard where the girls dress up like boys.” Names like Dietrich were on those dance floors. It was a world of masks and relief. In that world, Photoplay noted dryly, “Randolph Scott and Cary Grant carry this buddy business a long way,” and added, “They go every place together and even share the same house.”
A home with a view and a portrait of domestic ease
Their next house was a leap. They left cramped Beverly quarters for an eight room Spanish place on West Live Oak Drive near the Griffith Observatory, perched above the city. It came furnished, but Scott brought a favourite coffee pot for his “domestic mood,” and Grant added a Packard roadster to park next to Scott’s Cadillac. Ben Maddox of Silver Screen, a closeted gay journalist, came to dinner on their first shared evening at home since moving in. He could not resist the gentle code. “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.” The word temperamental was a signal in some circles, a way of saying what could not be said.
What mattered most was the mood. Archie Leach, with the harsh Bristol accent, had nearly “vanished,” Maddox suggested, replaced by a man comfortable enough to light a fire after supper and listen to new dance music in the library while the city below blinked. Stability was new to Grant. His friend Bill Royce would say later that Scott taught Grant “what kind of man he wanted to be off the screen.” That learning project, played out in the pages of magazines, turned into a kind of tutorial in two careers. Grant moved from stiff romantic leads to a looser style. Scott reshaped himself as a tender figure in Westerns.
Then came the Code and the weight of a studio system that did not tolerate ambiguity. At the start of 1934, Cary Grant married Virginia Cherrill. He would later tell Bill Royce that Paramount pressure played its part. The wedding landed, and yet the arrangement did not fully break. Cherrill told Silver Screen, “Randy Scott has been constantly with us—the three of us get along so well.” The relief Grant felt when a reporter assured him the situation was not unusual reads off the page. “Cary seemed so relieved.”
They tried a neighbourly compromise. Grant and Cherrill took an upscale apartment. Scott leased the unit next door. A Modern Screen reporter interviewed Scott on the Paramount lot but at Grant’s dressing room at Scott’s suggestion. The detail that stands out is how at home Scott seemed there, the hat tossed onto a table by habit, and how the tone turned melancholy. He missed the “constant companionship,” the ritual of dinners to plan, the ease of conversation. He did not want to be the cause of trouble. The story asked, a little cruelly, “Is he jealous of the girl who now comes first in his pal’s affections?” Within a year the marriage was over and the roommates were back together. “Well, well! That sterling couple, Cary Grant and Randy Scott are back together and keeping house again!” a Screenland blurb crowed. “No aspersions intended, boys, we all know you.”
A white bungalow by the Pacific and a carefully staged intimacy
The Santa Monica place felt like a film set, white sand and white blinds and white flowers that Grant liked to buy, a terrace looking over the Pacific, a shared desk, a den for backgammon, and a small white dog named Archibald who, in one artfully staged photo sequence, required a bath that ended in drenched shirts and laughter. Their shared habits had a comic rhythm. They often worked late, asked the cook to leave dinner in the icebox, and turned midnight into a kitchen picnic. “When we come wandering in at some late hour, we have a feast,” Grant said. Scott added with a smile, “I wonder why meals out of a refrigerator and eaten in the kitchen always taste so good.” Grant had a theory. “Probably because we are still a bit primitive.” Mornings off were for sprinting into the surf. “Every morning when we aren’t working,” he said, “we jump out of bed, into bathing trunks, run for the surf, and sprint along the beach for a couple miles!”
They did not always agree. Cary liked meat and cold artichokes. Randy liked vegetables and dessert. They hosted constantly. Fred Astaire had a guest room in practice if not in title. Howard Hughes, Noel Coward, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Moss Hart the list reads like a roll call. Some accounts from those circles were tender and frank. Richard Blackwell would later write that he spent months with the pair and saw them as “deeply, madly in love.” He added a sentence that explains their public stillness. “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.”
Others were more explicit. Scotty Bowers, the discreet organiser of assignations whose life later became a documentary, described “a lot of sexual mischief” with both men and said Scott “really liked to cuddle, and talk, and was very gentle.” The language is graphic, but the feeling inside it is ordinary affection.
The photo essay that made their domesticity iconic was shot by Jerome Zerbe, a younger gay photographer who, according to writer Brendan Gill, was close to both men. He meant the pictures to “honor the prevailing Hollywood taboos” while still giving audiences an image to cherish. Table scenes, sunbathing, that bath for Archibald, the candid laughter of people who know each other’s timings. It was an art form made to carry secrets and a life made to resemble art.
Grant, for his part, sometimes found solo interviews difficult and dull. He could be reticent and defensive. Scott once said, “I’ve seen [Cary] actually lose sleep and weight after reading certain items that touched upon his personal life and thoughts.” In one home interview, Scott wandered in with a theatrical groan. “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.” It is teasing, flirtation, theatre, and perhaps a small plea, all at once.
The screen persona that teased and transformed
As Grant reunited with Scott he also found the note on screen that would make him a star. In 1935 came Sylvia Scarlett with Katharine Hepburn. She plays a woman who dresses as a man named Sylvester. He plays a charming rogue who unbuttons his shirt before this supposed young man and says they can share a bed because “You’ll make a proper hot water bottle.” Queerness flowed through the frame with George Cukor directing, Hepburn at her most androgynous, the young Cary hinting at the anarchic physical comedy to come. Audiences did not know where to put it and walked out. But the signal remained.
By 1937 The Awful Truth made him a commercial force. The critic Pauline Kael saw how he could toy with gender codes without slipping into cruelty. “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.” That flirtation became part of the Grant signature, a suggestive playfulness that kept desire in motion. It is impossible to separate that openness from the private education of living with Scott, learning a shared elegance, curating a home, wearing double breasted suits as an armour that invited and deflected at once.
Scott’s work remained steady but never quite soared like that. He married Marion duPont in 1936 but lived apart for long stretches. The friendship continued. “Randy’s wife didn’t come between this pair of friends. On the contrary. Remarkable institution, women.” The quip only works because the bond was so evident.
Still, the limits of the time pressed in. One account suggests RKO offered an ultimatum to Grant about renewing his contract if he left Scott. Whether or not that precise moment occurred, the broad truth is hard to dispute. Public intimacy could not grow beyond a certain boundary without cost. “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 recalled.
They parted in fits and starts near the end of the decade, then met as co stars in 1940 for My Favorite Wife, Irene Dunne caught between them as the plot’s fulcrum. Bert Granet remembered a small, telling shock during production 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,” he said. “Everyone looked at everyone else. It seemed hardly believable.” On screen Grant seemed a little off balance in Scott’s presence, as Pauline Kael noticed. Real life seeped into the fiction and threw the rhythms a half step.
Soon after, Grant began a darker period in his work, opening himself to Hitchcock’s subterranean currents in Notorious and beyond, where erotic charge ran alongside reserve and danger. The comedy of the white bungalow gave way to something more angular. The friends drifted out of contact. A 1941 Motion Picture profile alluded to rumours as “the kind that you don’t talk to your mother about,” and scolded “garbage minded folk” who believed them. By the mid 40s the public story was over.
What was said and what was felt
The studio controlled magazines were never purely true, yet they were not pure fiction either. “The real Gary Cooper or the real Alice Faye might not be quite as ‘real’ as the fan magazine writers claimed,” Anthony Slide wrote, “but there was more than an element of truth in what they wrote.” In Grant and Scott’s case, the element of truth was the way they spoke to and about each other. It is striking to read how easily they described a shared routine and how often the most intimate note was a mild joke.
The gossip never entirely stopped. Hedda Hopper wrote in the late 50s that Grant “started with the boys and now he has gone back to them.” In 1980 Chevy Chase called him a slur on national television, then apologised when Grant filed a slander suit for ten million dollars. Off stage the law had been brutal. Sodomy remained a felony in every US state until 1961. The Lavender Scare policed queer life in government and culture. The cost of honesty was very high. Jennifer Grant, born in 1966, would later write that she did not believe her father was gay but accepted that he may have “experiment[ed] sexually.”
There is a quiet coda. In the 1970s, Bill Royce had a long conversation with Cary Grant about Randolph Scott. Grant was in his early seventies, retired, reflective. He spoke of seeing Scott in the 1930s and feeling something like a force of nature. “Have you ever heard of gravity collapse? Some people call it love at first sight,” he said. “This was the first time I’d felt it for anyone.” He resisted labels. He said the beach house was a place where men and women both stayed. He said Scott did not want him in quite the way he wanted Scott, but that there was love and there was sex. “There was no way Randy would have experimented with me…if he didn’t truly love me on some profound level,” he said.
The memories turned concrete, the way affectionate memory does. He laughed at Scott’s baseball hot dogs loaded with mustard and ketchup and relish and onions. “If they had petunias, he’d put them on there, too!” He described a gentle man who disliked cursing, who loved golf and money, who cared in calm, consistent ways. He admitted the break hurt. “It was dreadful having to let go of him in my heart.” Then he offered the line that feels like the ending of a film that understands itself. “Our souls did touch,” he said. “What more could I ask?”
Why this story matters now
A century after they met on the Paramount lot, the question of what to call Cary Grant is less interesting than the question of what those rooms by the Pacific reveal. Here were two people, both ambitious and a little scared, finding an adult self in the reflection of another. The fan magazine format, designed to deliver safe fantasies, unexpectedly preserved the sound of that work. The shellfish banter, the icebox picnics, the double bed joke in a movie that let desire cross a boundary for a beat, the way they turned domestic ease into a style guide and then into box office allure. The lesson is not about labels. It is about how carefully made masks can carry tenderness, how a public life can hold a private education, and how, in the most controlled medium of all, genuine feeling can still leak through.
When you read the old clippings you can still hear them, the gay one and the cautious one, the practical dresser and the primitive artichoke eater, lighting a fire, feeding a dog, teasing each other in a tone that says this is home. In that tone, the romance of Cary Grant on screen begins to make an even truer kind of sense.
Sources
Anthony Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, University Press of Mississippi
https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/I/Inside-the-Hollywood-Fan-Magazine
William J. Mann, Behind the Screen How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/112512/behind-the-screen-by-william-j-mann
Marc Eliot, Cary Grant
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/cary-grant-marc-eliot
Scott Eyman, Cary Grant A Brilliant Disguise
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Cary-Grant/Scott-Eyman/9781501192111
Pauline Kael on Cary Grant in The New Yorker
Lantern Media History Digital Library, searchable archives for Modern Screen, Photoplay, Silver Screen, Screenland
Ben Maddox feature on Grant and Scott in Silver Screen, 1930s issues via Lantern
Photoplay and Screenland gossip columns, 1933 to 1936 selections via Lantern
Matt Tyrnauer, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
Jennifer Grant, Good Stuff A Reminiscence of My Father, Cary Grant
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Good-Stuff/Jennifer-Grant/9780307888483
