The Hughman Factor : Unhappy Side of Stardom Is Nothing New to Grant

The Saturday before his arrest on charges of engaging in lewd conduct with a prostitute, Hugh Grant sat in his suite at the Four Seasons hotel, enduring the last of a daylong barrage of interviews promoting “Nine Months,” his first full-dress Hollywood movie since “Four Weddings and a Funeral” catapulted the 34-year-old actor into international stardom.

Shoes off, legs flung over the arm of a chair, unruly chestnut hair flopping boyishly across his brow, Grant looked exhausted and weedy--or “knackered,” as he prefers. Still, he soldiered on, blithely dispensing quotes that, in three days time, would assume outrageous and unintended irony:

“American justice is amazing to me.”

Or:

“I’d like to try and do something that would really hit home.”

Or:

“I’m under pressure from American actors, all of whom are deep into analysis, who say: ‘Hugh, you gotta go.’ No, I’d rather just gently implode in neurosis and lunacy.”

Lunacy, indeed. Grant’s arrest made a mockery of 20th Century Fox’s “Nine Months” press junket, which had been carefully choreographed to generate fluffy coverage for the movie and its principals. Instead, L.A. television stations gleefully aired video shot at the junket of Grant joshing “Nine Months” co-star Tom Arnold, “Did you have a good time with those hookers last night?” Footage from the movie’s trailer that showed Grant’s character posing for a mug shot was juxtaposed with Grant’s mug shot from his arrest.

Psychiatrists went on camera to speculate about why Grant would allegedly open his car door to 23-year-old Stella Marie Thompson (a.k.a. Divine Marie Brown), who police say is a known prostitute, when half the women of Los Angeles might have been his for the asking.

All the while, the fate of Grant’s relationship with model and sometime actress Elizabeth Hurley, 29, was hand-wringingly pondered. After what the British press described as a chilly reunion with Grant at a rented house in the English countryside, Hurley decamped without Grant, for France. The couple’s humiliation deepened when a London tabloid published an interview with Thompson detailing her alleged encounter with Grant, including her appraisal of Grant’s anatomy and his supposed remark to her: “I always wanted to sleep with a black woman--that’s my fantasy.”

Thompson was photographed wearing the revealing Versace dress fastened with safety pins that Hurley made famous at the premiere of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” last year.

As scandals go, Grant’s alleged peccadillo--for which he apologized in a groveling mea culpa issued through his publicist--was borderline bush league. Although the box-office fallout won’t be tested until the release of “Nine Months” on Wednesday, the consensus in Hollywood is that the damage, if any, will be minimal.

The flap may actually boost the fortunes of both “Nine Months”--in which Grant plays a bachelor coming to grips with his girlfriend’s pregnancy--and his other summer movie, the low-budget “An Awfully Big Adventure,” which opens July 21. (Grant portrays a small-time gay theatrical director.)

A source close the marketing of “An Awfully Big Adventure,” who said the film had been deliberately scheduled to exploit the publicity Grant would receive from “Nine Months,” said: “In a sick way, it’s incredibly helpful.”

Whatever the outcome, it’s still worth considering what would cause an actor on the cusp of consolidating his stardom with mainstream audiences, whose grinning face is plastered on posters across town for a movie that celebrates treacly family values, to allegedly troll for illegal sex on Sunset Boulevard. One film industry publicist offered a bracingly succinct theory. “Hubris,” she said flatly.

No one, of course, knows the answer except Grant. And the actor--spirited out of L.A. to London, his remaining appointments with the foreign press canceled--wasn’t talking. Grant is scheduled to appear this evening on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno and to attend the “Nine Months” premiere in Century City Tuesday night.

But during an interview the weekend before his arrest, Grant acknowledged grappling with the enormous fame that hit him after “Four Weddings.”

“I feel excitement and nerves,” Grant said, running his fingers distractedly through his hair. “But the downside is paranoia and fear. When all eyes are upon you, I think it’s fear of failure, fear of everyone jeering at you.”

*

Although Grant has been making movies since his days at Oxford University in the early ‘80s--including critically lauded performances in Merchant-Ivory’s “Maurice” and “The Remains of the Day”--broad popularity eluded him until “Four Weddings” apotheosized from a hand-sewn romantic comedy into an international blockbuster. In the aftermath of the film’s success, Grant was inundated with movie offers, and his asking price shot to between $4 million and $5 million a film.

“It’s so rare to be given this opportunity, especially for an English actor, to do some big-budget Hollywood films,” he said. “I’m a bit sick of making films no one goes to see.”

Added Mike Newell, director of “Four Weddings” and “An Awfully Big Adventure”: “He’s had two years of this heady, heady stuff, and he’s not ready for it to go away.”

Comparisons to Cary Grant and David Niven--not to mention “Nine Months” director Chris Columbus’ penchant for referring to Grant in interviews as “the fifth Beatle”--have hardly lessened the pressure on the actor. Add to that his and Hurley’s ongoing crucifixion at the hands of the British tabloid press, and Grant finds himself at that curious juncture of contemporary celebrityhood where reward and punishment merge.

“Life’s bad in England for us at the moment,” Grant said, referring to his and Hurley’s stint in “tabloid hell,” blissfully unaware of just how much worse it would soon become. “That’s a horrible lot of pressure, because I’m unaccustomed to it and had to deal with it. Every time they lie about you, I would be on the phone to a lawyer. Now, I just think, ‘Oh, [expletive] it, it’s gone in a day and what do I care?’

“It’s so dreadful,” he continued, “but I’m as nasty as the next one, really. When I see those people I knew at Oxford who are now writing for the broad-sheet papers and are also nasty about me, I would do the same about them if they’d suddenly got successful. On the other hand, just at the moment, it’s pretty unpleasant.”

Grant seems especially bewitched over his place in Hollywood’s famously slippery pecking order. “What is a complete black art to me is this business of ‘heat’ in Hollywood: why all these people suddenly want to employ you, or why they don’t. If this film [“Nine Months”] makes no dollars at the box office, do I go back to being half-hot? Stone cold? Three-quarters hot? No one will tell me.”

Nevertheless, Grant is hardly a babe in the woods. He recalled with relish a meeting at the powerful Creative Artists Agency, which represents him, in which he tweaked CAA honchos Mike Ovitz and Ron Meyer about the standard fee paid to agents. “I found myself discussing if 10% was really the right figure,” Grant laughed. “It went down like a cup of cold sick. The look of astonishment had to be seen to be believed.”

“He doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” Newell said. “He has two strands in him: one is the sloppy-haired, I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing [persona]; the other is very WASPish, who takes a certain delight in keen, possibly cruel judgments. If Hugh had not had this success, I can see that his intelligence would have run away with him, and he might have drifted into a kind of bitterness.”

Grant is famous for marinating interviewers in British cheek and charm, while revealing little about his true feelings, though he has admitted he finds it difficult to cry on screen and off. “Well, I’ve always dreaded those scenes--I see them in the script and I go, ‘Oh, Christ’--but I’m getting a bit better at them,” he said. “In real life, I’m more emotional. The older I get the more I weep. I sat here in floods of tears watching ‘Awakenings’ the other day. At 10 in the morning. Very absurd.”

At this point, one can only speculate about how Grant’s emotions are holding up. At best, being arrested only blocks from where Joey Buttafuoco was popped for solicitation would seem to appeal to Grant’s British sense of the absurd. On the other hand, there’s little upside for an urbane English actor in joining Buttafuoco, Rob Lowe and Pee-wee Herman in the tabloid rogues gallery. “He’ll be humiliated for a long time,” predicted a publicist at one of the major studios.

Director Newell, speaking about Grant’s wrestle with fame before his arrest, said: “One of the things that is truly endearing about him is that he is both witty and self-puncturing enough to see that nobody can predict how this may come out. He must shrug in the face of all this, and he does have the grace to know that that’s what he must do.”

And as Grant himself noted, in yet another of those unintentionally ironic quotes the Saturday before his date with the L.A. vice squad: “The funny thing about publicity here in America is that it actually does seem to help you. It boosts you. Whereas the more publicity you get in England, the more people hate you.”