Cary Grant the Legend

From The London Review of Books:

Archibald Alexander Leach was born on 18 January 1904 in a terraced house in Bristol. His father, Elias, was a clothes presser by trade. His mother, Elsie, had nothing to do but look after her men and, as Archie would realise, she had a need to be in control that could get out of hand. Elias was less than faithful, so Archie carried the extra weight of pleasing his mother. Archie didn’t know that there had been a previous son, who had died just before the age of one. That he didn’t know this is a sign of the oppressive secrecy that affected so much of life in Britain – and hasn’t gone away. Why do the British act so well? Perhaps because so much feeling has been pushed beneath the surface. To come to terms with Grant on screen is to wonder about the things his characters know that aren’t in the script.

It was not a happy household, but it seemed stable enough despite Elsie’s fits of temper. Until one day, when he was 11, Archie came home from school and Mum wasn’t there. Had she gone away? Would she come back? The matter was suspended in doubt. Elias wondered aloud if she was dead. In fact, he had placed her in an asylum in the Bristol suburb of Fishponds because she was ‘queer in the head’ – or more than he could take. She heard voices in the walls and felt she was being watched. Elsie’s confinement seems to have been accomplished without much medical questioning. So she was kept in a building that Archie knew and which he must have passed now and then without a thought. Glancy is careful to say that this was not a Dickensian asylum, or a ‘snake pit’. For that period, it was a decent place. Still, Elsie was held against her will and without anyone asking whether she should have been there.

Archie was quite good at school but had no taste for it, and no need once his mother was gone. He preferred picture shows and music hall at the Bristol Hippodrome. So he went away, too. He was apprenticed to the Pender Troupe of variety players and learned to be a ‘tumbler’. He could do a backflip with a full-body twist and tease a girl with straight-faced insolence. He’d been just a kid when he picked up the habit of parting his hair on the wrong (or right) side. Now he was growing to be tall, dark and handsome. The stage meant so much: the warmth from audiences was the most convincing he had known.

In the summer of 1920 Archie went with the troupe to New York and a rising career in vaudeville. That took him from 16 to 26, by which point his physical dexterity was matched by an ability to pass in America as debonair, charming and easy-going. Those would be the keynotes of Cary Grant. But he was still Archie, until the actress Fay Wray urged a name change (they had performed together in 1931 in a musical, Nikki, which flopped on Broadway, and he was smitten with her). ‘Cary’ was the guy he had played in Nikki; ‘Grant’ came out of the phone book. Thus equipped, he took on Hollywood. Glancy notes that in his screen debut, This Is the Night (1932), Grant kept his hands stuffed in his pockets because he didn’t know what else to do with them. But in the next few years, he benefited from playing with Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, and with Mae West in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel. Best of all – albeit in a big failure – he met George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn on a film, Sylvia Scarlett, that was too daring for its time, in which he played Jimmy Monkley, a Cockney con artist, and felt able to be himself. (Read more.)

 

From The Criterion Collection:

Festival director Charlotte Crofts has recorded a Zoom conversation with Mark Glancy, who explains that, with his new book, Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend, he aims to counter the prevailing perception of Grant as a man whose public persona belied his private life. The debonair hail fellow well met we see on the screen was portrayed in the slew of biographies that appeared in the fifteen years or so after his death in 1986 as a dark bundle of deep insecurities. Glancy, who has been digging deep into archives in Los Angeles and Bristol, argues that the truth is more complicated, that the man had his bright sides as well.

It’s hard not to wonder what Glancy might have to say about Scott Eyman’s new book, Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise. “Biographers believe that lives resolve into themes, and the theme of Cary Grant’s life was anxiety, because he always had difficulty assimilating Archie’s angers and fears into his prodigious creation of a predominantly suave acting alter ego,” writes Eyman in a brief introduction at Air Mail. “He made no secret about any of this. His famous line—‘Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant’—was not a joke. Rather, it was an admission.”

Eyman has written books on the friendship between Henry Fonda and James Stewart, on the advent of sound in the movies, the style of Hollywood’s golden age, and on the lives of John Wayne, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford, and Ernst Lubitsch. In Cary Grant, Eyman “supplies what feels like the ‘true gen’—the real lowdown—on the directors, producers, and studio heads with whom Cary Grant worked,” writes Joseph Epstein in his review for the Wall Street Journal. (Read more.)

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