Friend reveals:

Hollywood womanizer Cary Grant loved this man

The "roommates" Randolph Scott and Cary Grant in their beach house in Santa Monica

(Bild: Everett Collection / picturedesk.com)

He was considered the ultimate macho man in Hollywood's golden era. In his films, Cary Grant melted women's hearts, seduced beauties such as Grace Kelly and Sophia Loren and married five times (most recently to a woman 46 years his junior). But now the magazine "Vanity Fair" reveals that Grant's love of his life was a man and that the star had hidden his homosexuality.

While the rest of the world was kept clueless, Hollywood insiders are said to have suspected Grant's real sexual inclinations early on. The notorious gossip columnist Hedda Hopper is said to have once asked: "Who does Cary think he's fooling?" While all five of his wives and his only child always insisted that the actor was only into women, a friend of many years now claims the opposite.

Bill Royce claims to have directly addressed Grant in 1976 about the rumor that he had a homosexual love affair with his best friend Randolph Scott.

Cary Grant and Randolph Scott

(Bild: Ronald Grant / Mary Evans / picturedesk.com)

"Bachelor Hall"
In the early 1930s, the two fellow actors shared a beach house in Malibu nicknamed "Bachelor Hall".

Officially, it was because they wanted to save money. In reality, according to Grant - who was already 72 at the time and no longer feared for his career - it was anything but platonic.

He confessed the truth to Royce about his feelings for Scott: "Have you ever heard of how gravity can just break down? Some people call it love at first sight. It was the first time I'd ever felt anything like that for a person."

He went on to explain to the then editor of "Fan Magazine" that neither he nor Scott were homosexual or heterosexual-"but something in between". Which is why they both had romances with both men and women.

Royce: "Tragically, Scott never had the same strong feelings for Grant that he had for him. Cary confessed to me that he had had sex with Scott. He said, 'Randy would never have experimented with me if he didn't really love me in a profound way.

"He wanted to have children"
Royce also claims to have asked Scott, who died in 1987 after a 43-year marriage to Patricia Stillman, about his relationship with Grant. Royce then confided to Grant biographer Scott Eyman that the star was initially gay, then bisexual and finally straight.

And: "As Grant got older, he no longer found the homosexual lifestyle fulfilling. He wanted to have children." His only daughter Jennifer, from Grant's fourth marriage to Dyan Cannon, said in an interview with the Daily Mail: "I never saw a single sign that my father was gay. I would have known, even if I hadn't minded." However, Jennifer Grant also did not want to rule out the possibility that her father had affairs with men when she was young that she never found out about.