CARY GRANT

A Class Apart

Graham McCann

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published in 1997

First published in Great Britain in 1996 by Fourth Estate

Copyright © 1996 by Graham McCann

The right of Graham McCann to be identified as the author of this

work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9781857025743

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007378722

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Dedication

For Silvanaand in memory of my dear grandparents,Frank and Florence Geary

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

PROLOGUE

BEGINNINGS

I Archie Leach

II A Mysterious Disappearance

III A Place to Be

CULTIVATION

IV New York

V Inventing Cary Grant

Hollywood

STARDOM

VII Never a Better Time

VIII The Intimate Stranger

IX Suspicions

INDEPENDENCE

X The Actor as Producer

XI The Pursuit of Happiness

XII The Last Romantic Hero

RETIREMENT

XIII The Real World

XIV The Discreet Celebrity

XV Old Cary Grant

Epilogue

Filmography

Keep Reading

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes

About the Publisher

Epigraph

Everybody wants to be Cary Grant.

Even I want to be Cary Grant.

CARY GRANT

Interviewer: | Do you know the important people in the world today?
Two hour old baby: | Well, some. I don’t know, I’m not sure.
Interviewer: | You don’t know what you know?
Two hour old baby: | No.
Interviewer: | Do you know, for instance, Mickey Mantle?
Two hour old baby: | No.
Interviewer: | Queen Elizabeth?
Two hour old baby: | No.
Interviewer: | Winston Churchill?
Two hour old baby: | Ah, no.
Interviewer: | Fidel Castro?
Two hour old baby: | No.
Interviewer: | Pandit Nehru?
Two hour old baby: | No.
Interviewer: | Have you heard of Cary Grant?
Two hour old baby: | Oh, sure! Everybody knows Cary Grant!

Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, ‘The Two Hour Old Baby’

Prologue

A mask tells us more than a face.

OSCAR WILDE

Some might say they don’t believe in heaven

Go and tell it to the man who lives in hell.

NOEL GALLAGHER

Cary Grant was an excellent idea. He did not exist, so someone had to invent him. Someone called Archie Leach invented him. Archie Leach did not know who he was, but he knew what he liked. What he liked was what he came to think of as ‘Cary Grant’. He discovered that it was an extraordinarily popular conception. Everyone really liked the idea of Cary Grant. Archie Leach liked it so much that he devoted the rest of his life to its refinement.

It is easy to see why. Cary Grant was the man that most men dreamed of being, an exceptional man, the ‘man from dream city’.¹ He was that most unexpected but attractive of contradictions: a democratic symbol of gentlemanly grace. No other man seemed so classless and self-assured, as happy with the world of music-hall as with the haut monde, as adept at polite restraint as at acrobatic pratfalls. No other man was equally at ease with the romantic and with the comic. No other man seemed sufficiently secure in himself and his abilities to toy with his own dignity without ever losing it. No other man aged so well and with such fine style. No other man, in short, played the part so well: Cary Grant made men seem like a good idea. As one of the women in his movies said to him: ‘Do you know what’s wrong with you? Nothing!’²

There was nothing wrong with Cary Grant. His colleagues admired him. ‘Cary’s the only actor I ever loved in my whole life,’ said Alfred Hitchcock.³ ‘If there were a question in a test paper that required me to fill in the name of an actor who showed the same grace and perfect timing in his acting that Fred Astaire showed in his dancing,’ said James Mason, ‘I should put Cary Grant.’⁴ To Eva Marie Saint, Grant was ‘the most handsome, witty and stylish leading man both on and off the screen.’⁵ James Stewart described him as a ‘consummate actor’,⁶ and Frank Sinatra remarked that ‘Cary has so much skill he makes it all look so easy’.⁷ Stanley Donen, the director, regarded him as ‘absolutely the best in the world at his job’:⁸ ‘If you asked almost any man in those days who would he like to be, you’d often get the answer “Cary Grant” – much more often than you would get the answer “the President of the United States”.’⁹

There was nothing wrong with Cary Grant. Movie audiences loved to watch him. In the era when movies were made with and around stars, the initial attraction being the name above the title, no fewer than twenty-eight Cary Grant movies – more than a third of all those he made – played at New York’s Radio City Music Hall (the largest, most important and prestigious movie theatre at that time in the United States) for a total of 113 weeks – a long-standing record.¹⁰ Again and again he was acknowledged as that theatre’s leading box-office attraction. One of his movies was the very first to earn $100,000 in a single week; another was the first to earn $100,000 in a single week at a single theatre. In the pre-eminent popular cultural medium of the twentieth century, Cary Grant was one of its most successful stars. His pulling-power stayed with him until the end of a movie career which lasted for over three decades; even in the year of his retirement, the Motion Picture Association of America voted him the leading box-office attraction.¹¹ There was no decline, no fall from fashion. He was an exceptionally and enduringly popular star.¹²

There was nothing wrong with Cary Grant. Critics warmed to him. ‘We smile when we see him,’ wrote Pauline Kael, ‘we laugh before he does anything; it makes us happy just to look at him.’¹³ Richard Schickel suggested that ‘the only permissible response to him is bedazzlement’.¹⁴ In 1995, Premiere magazine lauded him as, ‘quite simply, the funniest actor the cinema has ever produced’.¹⁵ David Thomson judged him to be nothing less than ‘the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema’, in part because of his singular disposition, his ‘rare willingness to commit himself to the camera without fraud, disguise, or exaggeration, to take part in a fantasy without being deceived by it’,¹⁶ and in part because of the extraordinary richness of the results of this commitment, an art mature and elaborate enough to embrace the ambiguities of a self shown in close-up.

There was nothing wrong with Cary Grant. There was much, however, that was extraordinary about him. That accent: neither West Country nor West Coast, neither English nor American, neither common nor cultured, strangely familiar yet intriguingly exotic (as someone in Some Like It Hot exclaims: ‘Nobody talks like that!’). That expression: capable of blending light and dark inside a single look, hinting at much more than it holds up for show. That walk: confident, athletic and slightly rubber-legged, fit for slapstick as well as for sophistication. He was, in an unshowy way, unusually versatile: he could play submissive, naive, child-like characters (such as in Bringing Up Baby) or worldly-wise charmers (as in Suspicion) or world-weary cynics (as in Notorious). John F. Kennedy thought that Grant would be his ideal screen alter ego, but then so did Lucky Luciano;¹⁷ Grant’s exceptionally broad appeal was in part to do with his bright roundedness, the promise of completion, showing the coarse how to have class and the over-refined how to have the common touch, teaching the unruly how to behave and the repressed how to have fun. What was so remarkable was how Cary Grant himself seemed to be so conspicuously complete. No one else was quite like him. There was something odd, something peculiar even, about his perfection.

‘Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,’ said Cary Grant. ‘Even I want to be Cary Grant.’¹⁸ It was not meant as a boast, but rather as an admission of vulnerability. Cary Grant appreciated – more so than anyone else – how difficult it was to be ‘Cary Grant’, because he knew that he was far from perfect. ‘How can anyone’, asked David Thomson, ‘be “Cary Grant”? But how can anyone, ever after, not consider the attempt?’¹⁹ It is really not so strange that even Cary Grant could not always succeed in being ‘Cary Grant’. It is not as if Archie Leach had always found it easy to be Archie Leach. The difference is that everyone knows who ‘Cary Grant’ is supposed to be, everyone knows the rules, while not even Archie Leach was ever very sure of who Archie Leach was supposed to be.

Everybody knows Cary Grant. What everybody knows about Cary Grant, however, is largely what he wanted us to know. Leslie Caron, one of his last co-stars, recalled: ‘He would say, “Let the public and the press know nothing but your public self. A star is best left mysterious. Just show your work on film and let the publicity people do the rest.”’²⁰ He lived much of his life on the screen, in the movies, making us believe in Cary Grant, showing his image at each stage in its slow and subtle evolution. When he retired, he withdrew from view. There were no opportunities for disenchantment: no kiss-and-tell memoirs, no television specials, no embarrassing scenes, no political pronouncements, no diet books or diaries, no talk-show appearances, no authorised biographies, no comebacks, no second thoughts. He never told us how he had managed to be Cary Grant so well for so long. He cared too much, or too little, to let on; he liked to keep us guessing. To accept definition was to invite disqualification. He was content, it seemed, just to live with – or behind – the mystery. The mystery had, after all, served him very well. Why let in daylight upon magic?²¹ ‘Besides,’ he said, with a playful insouciance, ‘I don’t think anybody else really gives a damn.’²²

Cary Grant was an excellent idea. The last person who wanted to deconstruct that idea was Cary Grant:

Who tells the truth about themselves anyway? A memoir implies selectiveness, writing about just what you want to write about, and nothing else. To write an autobiography, you’ve got to expose other people. I hope to get out of this world as gracefully as possible without embarrassing anyone.²³

It was typically Cary Grant: polite, urbane, decent and discreet – and very much in control. He looked on with wry amusement as the old tales were retold and the new myths manufactured: he ignored all the parodies and pretenders, all the old quotations and well-worn misconceptions, all the ‘Judy, Judy, Judys’ and the ‘How old Cary Grants’. He did not rise to the bait. He refused to involve himself in the investigations. He kept his self for himself. ‘Go ahead, I give you permission to misquote me,’ he told his uninvited chroniclers. ‘I improve in misquotation.’²⁴

Cary Grant, in more than one sense, was a class apart. Socially, he was a glorious enigma, eluding every pat classification. Artistically, he was, in his own particular field, without peers. In a leading article in the Washington Post shortly after his death, it was said that the name ‘Cary Grant’, ‘in the absence of anyone remotely like him on the screen, continued to be a synonym for a set of qualities his friends and admirers inevitably summed up as “class”’.²⁵ Cary Grant did indeed have class. He was a master of the ‘high definition performance’, a term defined by Kenneth Tynan as ‘the hypnotic saving grace of high and low art alike’, characterised by ‘supreme professional polish, hard-edged technical skill, the effortless precision without which no artistic enterprise – however strongly we may sympathise with its aims or ideas – can inscribe itself on our memory’.²⁶

Everybody wanted to be Cary Grant. Everyone else, before and since, failed. It took someone special to succeed. It took Archie Leach.

BEGINNINGS

It is not dreams of liberated grandchildren which stir men andwomen to revolt, but memories of enslaved ancestors.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Peace. That’s what I’m looking for. I want peace. Withhappy hearts and straight bones without dirt and distress.

Surprises you, don’t it? Peace – that’s what us millions want,without having to snatch it from the smaller dogs. Peace – tobe not a hound and not a hare. But peace – with pride tohave a decent human life, with all the trimmings.

NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART

CHAPTER I Archie Leach

Don’t I sound a bounder!

CARY GRANT

Take it from me: it don’t do to step out of your class.

JIMMY MONKLEY

Cary Grant was a working-class invention. His romantic elegance, as Pauline Kael remarked, was ‘wrapped around the resilient, tough core of a mutt’.¹ It is one of the greatest and most mischievous cultural ironies of the twentieth century that the man who taught the privileged élite how a modern gentleman should look and behave was himself of working-class origin. It took Archie Leach – poor Archie Leach – to show the great and the good how to live with style. It was Archie Leach, born into such inauspicious circumstances, who became the man others liked to be seen with, a role model for the socially ambitious, the well bred and even the royal. ‘When you look at him’, said Kael, ‘you take for granted expensive tailors, international travel, and the best that life has to offer.’² Cary Grant exuded urbane good taste and inoffensive prosperity: ‘There were no Cary Grants in the sticks’; Grant represented the most distinguished example of ‘the man of the big city, triumphantly suntanned’.³

The transformation of Archie Leach into Cary Grant was contemporaneous with, but different from, that of James Gatz into Jay Gatsby. The mysterious and glamorous figure in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby ‘sprang from his Platonic conception of himself’,⁴ suddenly, out of sight, without explanation. Cary Grant, on the other hand, took time to take over Archie Leach. Both Leach and Gatz came from poor backgrounds, their parents ‘shiftless and unsuccessful’;⁵ both longed to grow, to change, to escape (Leach from Bristol, Gatz from West Egg, Long Island) and reinvent themselves as the kind of attractive, successful, stylish young man of wealth and taste ‘that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent’;⁶ and both possessed an extraordinary ‘gift for hope’,⁷ a quality commented on by another character in the novel:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.⁸

The two men differed, however, in their relationship with their old identities; Gatsby was a tense denial of Gatz whereas Grant was a warm affirmation of Leach. With Gatsby, all the careful gestures – the pink suits, the silver shirts, the gold ties, the Rolls-Royce swollen with chrome, the pretensions to an Oxford education, the clipped speech, the ‘old sports’, the formal intensity of manner – helped to conceal the unwelcome persistence of the insecure ‘roughneck’, James Gatz. With Grant, however, the accent, the mannerisms, the values, the sense of humour, continued to underline the strangeness of his cultivation. To Gatsby, any memory of Gatz, any recognition of the prosaic facts of his existence, represented a threat to his new identity. To Grant, on the contrary, Archie Leach remained with him, an intrinsic part of his life and character, an affectionate point of reference in his movies and his interviews: Archie Leach was no threat to his – or others’ – sense of himself. Archie Leach was the measure of his success and, in a profound sense, a reason for it.

Cary Grant’s life was lived in the midst of a vibrant American modernity, but Archie Leach’s English childhood was solidly Edwardian. Queen Victoria had died just three years before he was born, and he grew up in a world of gas-lit streets, horse-drawn carriages, trams and four-masted schooners. The culture of the time discouraged – and sometimes mocked – thoughts of upward social mobility. E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), for example, depicted the petit bourgeois Leonard Bast as limited fundamentally by his undistinguished background: he was ‘not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable’;⁹ he has a ‘cramped little mind’,¹⁰ plays the piano ‘badly and vulgarly’¹¹ and is married to a woman who is ‘bestially stupid’;¹² his hopeless pursuit of culture is curtailed when he dies of a heart attack after having a bookcase fall on top of him. This was the England of Archie Leach. In this England the story of Cary Grant would have seemed incomprehensible.

Archibald Alexander Leach¹³ was born on Sunday, 18 January 1904, at 15 Hughenden Road, Horfield, in Bristol. Elias James Leach, his father, was a tailor’s presser by trade, working at Todd’s Clothing Factory near Portland Square. He was a tall, good-looking man with a ‘fancy’ moustache, soft-voiced but convivial by nature and at his happiest at the centre of light-hearted social occasions. Elsie Maria Kingdon Leach,¹⁴ his mother, was a short, slight woman with olive skin, sharp brown eyes and a slightly cleft chin; she came from a large family of brewery labourers, laundresses and ships’ carpenters. She had married Elias in the local parish church on 30 May 1898. Some of Elsie’s friends felt that Elias was rather irresponsible and, worse still, ‘common’, more obviously resigned than she to their humble position; but it seems that she was, at least for the first few years of their relationship, genuinely in love with him. The family lived at first in a rented two-storey terraced house situated on one of the side streets off the main Gloucester Road leading out of Bristol. Built of stone and heated solely by relatively ineffectual coal fires in small fireplaces, the house was bitterly cold in winter and chillingly damp the rest of the time.

Archie Leach was born in the early hours of one of the coldest mornings of the year. Like most babies at that time, he was delivered at home in his parents’ bedroom. The uncomplicated birth, and the baby’s subsequent good health, were greeted with particular relief by the couple. Their first child, John, had died four years earlier – just two days short of his first birthday – in the violent convulsions of tubercular meningitis.¹⁵ Elsie had sat beside his cot night and day until she was exhausted; the doctor had ordered her to sleep for a few hours, and, as she slept, the baby died.¹⁶ The loss had left Elsie – who was only twenty-two at the time – seriously depressed and withdrawn, and Elias, living in the city that was the centre of the wine trade, had taken to drink. The marriage was put under considerable strain. Eventually, the family doctor advised the couple to try for another child to compensate for their loss. They did so. Archie was to be, in effect, their only child.

It is at this very early stage that one encounters the first of several points of contention in Grant’s biography. Archie Leach was circumcised,¹⁷ which was a fact that later encouraged some biographers to identify him as Jewish.¹⁸ It is not, however, as simple as that. Pauline Kael, among others, has suggested that Elias Leach ‘came, probably, from a Jewish background’,¹⁹ and it has been said by some that Cary Grant himself believed that the reason for the circumcision must have been due to his father being partly Jewish, but, curiously, there is no record of any Jewish ancestors in Elias’s family tree, nor is there any solid evidence to suggest that he thought of himself as Jewish. We do know that Elias and Elsie attended the local Episcopalian Church every Sunday. Circumcision was not, however, it has to be said, a common practice outside the Jewish community in England at that time;²⁰ it is possible, of course, that the Leaches were advised that it was – in Archie’s case – an action that was necessary or prudent for particular medical reasons (and, after the death of their first child, they would surely have taken any such advice extremely seriously), but, again, there is nothing recorded which could clarify the matter.

It is not even clear whether or not Cary Grant lived his life believing himself to be Jewish. His closest friends – indeed even his wives – have offered conflicting information and opinions on the matter. In the early 1960s, for example, Walter Matthau, who had heard the rumours that Grant was Jewish, was surprised when Grant denied it. ‘So, I asked him why everyone thought he was. He said, “Well, I did a Madison Square Garden event for the State of Israel and I wore a yarmulke.” He pronounced the r in “Yarmulke”. An Englishman wouldn’t pronounce the r, so I still think he might be Jewish. Besides, he was so intelligent. Intelligent people must be Jewish.’²¹ There is no reason to think that Grant would have tried deliberately to hide his Jewishness: he was a uniquely powerful and consistently popular star, less easily intimidated than most by anti-Semitic producers and gossip columnists, and he was a frequent contributor to, and supporter of, Jewish charities.²²

If all (or even most) of the testimonies by his friends are sincere, one has to acknowledge that Grant gave some people the impression that he was Jewish and others that he was not. The extraordinary farrago of conjecture, confusion and wild theorising that this apparent inconsistency has engendered is at times almost comic in its incoherence. An outstandingly bizarre example is the contribution made by Grant’s first wife, Virginia Cherrill, who was convinced (on the rather scant evidence of his deep tan and the fact that he could perform a temsulka, which is a word of Arabic derivation for a special double forward somersault) that he was of Arabic origin.²³ In 1983, Grant – then aged seventy-nine, long retired from acting and surely at a stage in his life when it made no sense to continue to be dishonest or evasive about such a matter – replied to a fan’s question about his late ‘Jewish mother’ by stating that she was not Jewish.²⁴

The theory which has been most controversial, however, was put forward shortly after Grant’s death by two of his most assiduous biographers, Charles Higham and Roy Moseley.²⁵ They claimed, with a suitably bold theatrical flourish, that Grant had been ‘the illegitimate child of a Jewish woman, who either died in childbirth or disappeared’.²⁶ Although this thesis helps to make sense of the circumcision and of the possible reasons for Grant’s own inconsistent references to his background (Jews define Jewishness through the maternal line), it is not based on any documentary proof. Indeed, the authors strain one’s credulity with their scattershot references to such ‘circumstantial evidence’ as the fact that Grant’s relationship with his mother in later years appeared ‘artificial and strained’²⁷ to some observers, and that ‘she consistently refused to visit Los Angeles’²⁸ once Grant was established as a star. They do, however, make use of two further facts which are rather more intriguing: one is that, until 1962, Grant, in his entry in Who’s Who in America, listed his mother’s name as ‘Lillian’, not Elsie, Leach; the other is that in 1948 he donated a considerable sum of money to the new State of Israel in the name, according to the authors, of ‘My Dead Jewish Mother’.²⁹

It is quite true that, until 1962, it is ‘Lillian Leach’ who is listed in Who’s Who in America as being Grant’s mother;³⁰ it is also true – although Higham and Moseley do not refer to it – that the 1941 article on Grant in Current Biography refers to his mother as ‘Lillian’, whereas the 1965 edition reverts, without any explanation, to ‘Elsie’.³¹ This discrepancy, while certainly noteworthy, is not, in itself, ‘proof of the existence of Grant’s ‘real’ mother: the entries in both publications contain numerous inaccuracies, such as the spelling of Elsie/Lillian Leach’s maiden name as ‘Kingdom’ rather than ‘Kingdon’ (one would have expected greater care if these entries had been intended to set the record straight), the description of Fairfield Grammar School as the more American-sounding ‘Fairfield Academy’ and the inverted order of Grant’s forenames as ‘Alexander Archibald’.³² Higham and Moseley do not make it clear why Grant took the seemingly perverse step of ‘disowning’ Elsie while she was still alive and in a fragile condition and then reclaiming her more than two decades later: such inconstancy, surely, merits some kind of explanation. Another puzzling detail, if one is to take seriously the interpretation of these entries as some kind of rare act of candour on Grant’s part, is why, after acknowledging his secret Jewish mother, he then proceeded to describe himself as a ‘member of the Church of England’.³³

It is a bewilderingly odd little mystery. Higham and Moseley, having convinced themselves that the ‘real’ mother of Archie Leach was a mysterious and hitherto unknown Jewish woman called ‘Lillian’, struggle to weave her into the facts of his life in spite of having no documentary (or even anecdotal) evidence that she, or anyone like her, ever existed. They also fail to explain why Grant, once Elsie Leach had died in 1973, did not make any attempt to acknowledge the identity of his ‘real’ mother at any point during the remaining thirteen years of his life. Other accounts shed no light on the question of Grant’s alleged Jewishness or the reason for the absence of any records which could corroborate it. We are left, in short, with one of those intriguing puzzles which together with others make up a peculiar constellation of ambiguities in the life of Cary Grant.

The first few years in the life of Archie Leach were marked by both material and emotional impoverishment. The Leach family moved house several times during Archie’s childhood, and each change of address marked a further decline in the Leaches’ finances.³⁴ ‘We could afford only a bare but presentable existence,’ he later recalled.³⁵ It did not take long for Archie to become conscious of the fact that his mother and father were increasingly unhappy in each other’s company. There were ‘regular sessions of reproach’ as Elsie castigated Elias for his failure to provide the family with a better standard of living, ‘against which my father resignedly learned the futility of trying to defend himself’.³⁶ Elias started drinking more heavily and frequently – often, it seems, in the company of women who were more convivial than his wife. ‘He had a sad acceptance of the life he had chosen,’ said Grant.³⁷ Elsie – partly out of necessity, partly by inclination – became the disciplinarian of the family, working hard to keep her young son under control.

Looking back, Grant observed that his old photographs of Elsie Leach failed to do justice to the complexity of her adamantine character, showing her as an attractive woman, ‘frail and feminine’,³⁸ but obscuring the full extent of her strength and her will to control. When Archie was born, she became – rather understandably given the circumstances – single-minded in her concern for his well-being (she had, superstitiously, waited six weeks before allowing Elias to register the birth) and during his childhood she remained, if anything, a little over-protective of him; she ‘tried to smother me with care’, he said, she ‘was so scared something would happen to me’.³⁹ She kept him in baby dresses for several years, and then in short trousers and long curls. In an attempt to provide him with an opportunity to have a better and more rewarding life than his father’s, and in the belief that her son was a bright and talented boy, Elsie arranged for Archie to start attending the Bishop Road Junior School in Bishopston; he was only four-and-a-half years old, whereas five was the usual age for admission. She also managed, on an irregular basis, to save enough money to send Archie for piano lessons. Such forceful ambition was not, one should note, so unusual within a working-class family at the time; Charlie Chaplin also recalled how his mother would correct his grammar and generally work hard to make him and his brother ‘feel that we were distinguished’.⁴⁰

Archie did not escape from his mother’s influence when he started attending school. Although few of his new schoolfriends came from poorer families than his own, Archie was eye-catchingly smart; Elsie made sure that he wore Eton collars made of stiff celluloid, and she had taught him always to raise his cap and speak politely to any adult he met. His pocketmoney was sixpence a week, but he seldom received all of it; Elsie would fine him twopence for each mark he made on the stiff white linen tablecloth during Sunday lunch. Elias was uncomfortable with the idea of such exacting, sometimes overly fastidious, strictures governing Archie’s upbringing, but he rarely interfered in matters concerning their son.

When Archie was eight years old, his father left the family for a higher-paying job (and, it seems likely, a clandestine love-affair) eighty miles away in Southampton. War had broken out between Italy and Turkey, and, while Britain was not involved directly, armament activities were accelerated. Elias was employed making uniforms for the armies. ‘Odd,’ said Grant, ‘but I don’t remember my father’s departure from Bristol … Perhaps I felt guilty at being secretly pleased. Or was I pleased? Now I had my mother to myself.’⁴¹ The job only lasted six months, in part because of the considerable financial strain on Elias of maintaining two households. He was, however, fortunate that, with so many workers entering into war-related industries at that time, his old presser’s job in Bristol was still vacant on his return.

Elias and Elsie were living together again, but their marriage had disintegrated further. Absence had hardened their hearts; neither person cared enough to communicate with the other. Elias was rarely to be found at home, preferring instead to spend most of his free time in pubs, and, when he returned in the evenings, he would retire immediately after finishing his meal in order to avoid any further confrontations with Elsie. Although Archie was often overlooked during this increasingly tense period, his parents would sometimes, separately, make an effort to entertain him.

Both Elsie and Elias enjoyed visiting the local cinemas, but, typically, they each did their movie viewing in their own distinctive way. Archie’s mother would, on the odd occasion, take him to see a movie at one of the more ‘tasteful’ cinemas in town; he soon became addicted to the experience, and started going on his own or with schoolfriends to the Saturday matinees. ⁴² ‘The unrestrained wriggling and lung exercise of those [occasions], free from parental supervision, was the high point of my week.’⁴³ Elias also found time to accompany him but, whereas Elsie usually favoured the rather refined atmosphere of the Claire Street Picture House (where tea and refreshments were served on the balcony during the intermissions and the movies tended to be romance and melodramas), Elias, who ‘respected the value of money’,⁴⁴ preferred to take Archie to the bigger, brasher and cheaper Metropole (a barn-like building with hard seats and bare floors, where men were permitted to smoke, fewer women were present and the movies were usually popular thrillers – such as the Pearl White serials⁴⁵ – comedies and westerns).

Archie was grateful for all such excursions, but he particularly enjoyed his visits to the Metropole. It was a loud, exciting place, with a piano accompaniment which, he recalled, tended to aim more for plangency than for any discernible tune. It showed the kind of movies and performers he liked most (such as slapstick comedies and stars like Charlie Chaplin, Chester Conklin, Fatty Arbuckle, Ford Sterling, Mack Swain and ‘Bronco Billy’ Anderson), and these occasions were probably the only times when he had the opportunity to establish any real rapport with his father, who sometimes treated him to an apple or a bar of chocolate.

Elias also took his son to the theatre. At Christmas it was pantomimes at such grand places as the Prince’s and Empire theatres. At other times of the year it was music-hall acts, such as magicians, dancers, comedians and acrobats. Elias, ‘in a tight-throated untrained high baritone’,⁴⁶ taught his son how to mimic some of the singers of the time (in such songs as ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’ and ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’), as well as encouraging him to learn some of the magic tricks he had seen. Archie was enchanted. He started to visit the theatre whenever he had the opportunity. He was often alone and unsettled at home, an only child who was ‘loved but seldom ever praised’,⁴⁷ but now he had found an attractive distraction. ‘I thought what a marvellous place.’⁴⁸

CHAPTER II A Mysterious Disappearance

Death merely acts in the same way as absence.

MARCEL PROUST

[I made] the mistake of thinking that each of my wives was my mother,that there would never be a replacement once she left.

CARY GRANT

Archie Leach was just nine years of age when it happened.¹ He had just arrived home, shortly after five o’clock, after an ordinary, quiet, uneventful day at school. He was shocked to discover that his mother had disappeared. She had said nothing to him on the previous day to prepare him for her absence. No one, in fact, had said anything to suggest to him that his mother might not be waiting for him, as usual, at this particular time on this particular afternoon. It was, quite simply, a mystery.

His mother had, it was true, grown stranger, more unpredictable in temperament and behaviour, over the past few months, and he had been aware, to some extent, of the change. She had become increasingly – perhaps even obsessively – fastidious: Archie had noticed that she would sometimes wash her hands again and again, scrubbing them with a hard bristle brush; she would also lock every door in the house, regardless of the time of day, and she had taken to hoarding food; there had even been odd occasions when, inexplicably, she would ask no one in particular, ‘Where are my dancing shoes?’;² and on some evenings she would sit motionless in front of the fire, saying nothing, gazing at the coals, the small room draped in darkness. Archie had also grown accustomed – but by no means immune – to the noisy quarrelling between his parents, as well as to the equally common periods of icy silence which usually followed these arguments.³ Nothing, however, prepared him for such a sudden and dramatic disappearance as this.

Two of his cousins were lodging in part of the house at the time, and, when he realised that his mother had gone, he sought them out to see if they knew of her whereabouts. According to one source, they told Archie that his mother ‘had died suddenly of a heart attack and had had to be buried immediately’.⁴ The more common version, however, first put forward by Grant himself, has Archie being told that his mother had gone to the local seaside town of Weston-super-Mare for a short holiday.⁵ ‘It seemed rather unusual,’ he recalled much later, with a bizarre attempt at English understatement which perhaps had come to serve, in public, as a relatively painless way of obscuring a painfully disturbing memory, ‘but I accepted it as one of those peculiarly unaccountable things that grown-ups are apt to do.’⁶

If his father attempted to reassure him that his mother would soon come home – and it seems that he did so – then it was not long before Archie realised that she was never going to return:

There was a void in my life, a sadness of spirit that affected each daily activity with which I occupied myself in order to overcome it. But there was no further explanation of Mother’s absence, and I gradually got accustomed to the fact that she was not home each time I came home – nor, it transpired, was she expected to come home.⁷

Towards the end of his life he admitted that, once some of the shock had worn off, ‘I thought my parents had split.’⁸

What had really happened to Elsie Leach was that her husband had committed her to the local lunatic asylum, the Country Home for Mental Defectives in Fishponds, a rustic district at the end of one of Bristol’s main tramlines.⁹ Elias had arranged for the hospital’s staff to collect her from their home earlier in the day, and then, after settling her in, he went back to work. He never told his son the truth about the matter.

The asylum at Fishponds was, by quite some way, the worst of the two institutions for the mentally ill in Bristol at that time. Conditions were filthy, and supervision negligible. It cost Elias just one pound per year to keep Elsie inside as a patient. She stayed there for more than twenty years, until, in fact, her husband’s death in the mid-1930s. Was he her gaoler? British law prohibits the unsealing of psychiatric case records until a hundred years after the patient’s death, and, as Elsie lived on until 1973, the actual reasons for her incarceration may remain ambiguous until well into the next century. Dr Francis Page, a Bristol physician, has said that it was ‘always presumed she was a chronic paranoid schizophrenic’, but he also acknowledged that he ‘never did know the official psychiatric diagnosis’ that had been used to keep her institutionalised.¹⁰ She was, it is clear, prone to periods of acute depression, and it is conceivable that she could have suffered a nervous breakdown at this time. It is not so obvious, however, why this in itself should have convinced Elias that the only possible solution would be to abandon her inside the most wretched institution he could find. Ernest Kingdon, a cousin, visited Elsie regularly in Fishponds, and he has insisted that he found her to be resilient and intelligent: ‘She used to write beautiful letters asking why she could not be released.’¹¹

Although the precise state of Elsie Leach’s mental health remains a matter for speculation, it is much easier to establish the reasons why Elias Leach was prepared – or perhaps determined – to have her committed and out of his life. It was a fact – a fact that Cary Grant never acknowledged or commented on in public – that Elias Leach had a mistress, Mabel Alice Johnson. It might have been the shock of her husband’s indiscretion which precipitated Elsie’s breakdown, although, by that time, their marriage was probably not much more than a sham, and Elsie was unlikely to have been entirely unaware of her husband’s numerous earlier affairs. Divorce was both socially unacceptable and financially impracticable. Once Elsie was shut away, however, Elias was at liberty to establish a common-law marriage with his lover and, eventually, have a child with her.¹²

Archie Leach was kept ignorant of his father’s other family. He and his father moved in with Elias’s elderly mother, Elizabeth, in Picton Street, Montpelier, nearer to the centre of Bristol. Elias and Archie occupied the front downstairs living-room and a back upstairs bedroom, while Archie’s grandmother (whom he later remembered as ‘a cold, cold woman’¹³) kept to herself in a larger upstairs bedroom at the front of the house. This arrangement provided, at least in theory, someone to look after Archie while his father was spending time with his new family, and it saved Elias the expense of renting two separate houses for his double life.

Archie Leach never knew the full extent of the extraordinary deception perpetrated by his father.¹⁴ Cary Grant discovered the truth (or at least a part of it) two decades later, in Hollywood, after the death on 1 December 1935¹⁵ of his father from the effects of alcoholism – or, as the official account put it, ‘extreme toxicity’¹⁶ – when a lawyer wrote to him from England to inform him that his mother was in fact still alive.¹⁷ Through the London solicitors Davies, Kirby & Karath, Grant arranged for the provision of an allowance and moved her to a house in Bristol. Elsie Leach was fifty-seven years old, her son thirty-two. She barely recognised the tall, well-dressed sun-tanned star who arrived back in England to be reunited with her. ‘She seemed perfectly normal,’ Grant would recall, ‘maybe extra shy. But she wasn’t a raving lunatic.’¹⁸ As Ernest Kingdon put it, ‘Cary Grant knew very little of his mother. She was a stranger. Late in life, they had to come together and learn to know each other. It was a tragedy, really – a great tragedy.’¹⁹

Suddenly to re-acquire a mother in one’s early thirties must have been, to say the least, a strange experience, just as the sudden reappearance of an adult son one last saw leaving for school at the age of nine must have been profoundly unsettling. ‘I was known to most people of the world by sight and by name, yet not to my mother,’²⁰ Grant would say. He, in turn, would never know how ill she had been. Their subsequent relationship, unsurprisingly, might best be described as ‘difficult’.

Opinions differ as to how difficult the relationship actually was. Any references to mothers in his movies – no matter how slight or frivolously comic – have been pounced upon by some writers for their supposedly deeper ‘significance’: in one, for example, his character – a paediatrician – has written a book entitled What’s Wrong With Mothers.²¹ According to his biographers Charles Higham and Roy Moseley, there was never any real warmth or affection shared by mother and son; Elsie, it is claimed, was a ‘hard, unyielding woman’ who never showed much gratitude for her famous son’s regular flights to Bristol, nor did she allow him ‘to make her rich’, and she ‘remained stubbornly independent and uninterested in his film career till the end’.²² She was not, according to some accounts, a physically demonstrative person, and she could sometimes appear aloof and brusque in the presence of strangers.²³ Dyan Cannon, Grant’s fourth wife, after spending some time with her new mother-in-law, described her as an ‘incredible’ woman with a ‘psyche that has the strength of a twenty-mule team’.²⁴ Grant himself, after her death in 1973, two weeks short of her ninety-sixth birthday, admitted that he had often been exasperated and sometimes hurt by Elsie’s stubborn and misplaced sense of independence:

Even in her later years, she refused to acknowledge that I was supporting her … One time – it was before it became ecologically improper to do so – I took her some fur coats. I remember she said, ‘What do you want from me now?’ and I said, ‘It’s just because I love you,’ and she said something like, ‘Oh, you …’ She wouldn’t accept it.²⁵

According to Maureen Donaldson, who lived with Grant for a brief period in the mid-seventies, he said that his mother ‘did not know how to give affection and she did not know how to receive it either’.²⁶ He is said to have told one interviewer that his mother – in part because of her prolonged absence – had been, until quite late on, ‘a serious negative influence’ on his life.²⁷ Bea Shaw, a friend of Grant’s, recalls him as being ‘devoted to his mother, but she made him nervous. He said, “When I go to see her, the minute I get to Bristol, I start clearing my throat.”’²⁸

It seems, however, that the relationship was not as grim as some have suggested. Speaking in the early 1960s, when his mother was in her eighties, Grant described her as ‘very active, wiry and witty, and extremely good company’.²⁹ According to some interviewers, Grant remembered visits to his mother when the two would talk and laugh together ‘until tears came into our eyes’.³⁰ In a letter to the Bristol Evening Post, Leonard V. Blake recalled first seeing Elsie – ‘a rather plainly dressed woman’ – in a department store in the city, telling someone, ‘I have heard from Archie.’ Blake went on to observe that she ‘would visibly glow as his name was mentioned … I believe she would wander around Bristol just waiting to talk about Archie. He was the Sun to her.’³¹ Clarice Earl, who was a matron at Chesterfield Nursing Home in Bristol, where Elsie lived during her last few years, describes how when Elsie knew that her son was due to visit she would dress herself up and become excited: ‘She would sit by my office and look along the corridor toward the front door. When she saw him, she’d give a little skip and throw up her arms to greet him.’³² Years earlier, when the strangeness of her son’s celebrity was far fresher in her mind, she still showed much more interest in him and his career than has usually been suggested. Writing to him at the end of 1938, for example, she confessed: ‘I felt ever so confused after so many years you have grown such a man. I am more than delighted you have done so well. I trust in God you will keep well and strong.’³³ After the end of the Second World War, when Elsie was almost seventy years old, she was interviewed by a Bristol newspaper about her son: ‘It’s been a long time since I have seen him,’ she said, ‘but he writes regularly and I see all his films. But I wish he would settle down and raise a family. That would be a great relief for me.’³⁴

Elsie Leach, it is true, did not accept her son’s offer – which was put to her on more than one occasion – to move to California, but her refusal was prompted by reasons other than any alleged ill-feelings towards her son. At the end of his life, Grant explained:

She wouldn’t join me in America. She told me: ‘Never lived anywhere but Bristol. Don’t want to [leave], only place I know.’ At her own request she lived in a nursing home but we kept her house although we knew she would never return there. I didn’t want to get rid of it. It would have seemed like I was packing her off.³⁵

Elsie was, it seems, as concerned about her son as he was about her. In 1942, when war prevented him from flying over to see her, she wrote to him: ‘Darling, if you don’t come over as soon as the war ends, I shall come over to you … We are so many thousands of miles from each other.’³⁶ A friend of Elsie’s recalled seeing two large chests of food which had been gifts from Grant. When she was asked why they remained unopened, Elsie is said to have replied, ‘I want to have them until they’re really needed … You never know … Cary might be hard up one day.’³⁷ When Grant tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade her to let him hire someone to do her housework for her, he was amused and impressed rather than upset by her negative response: ‘she avers that she can do it better herself, dear, that she doesn’t want anyone around telling her what to do or getting in her way, dear, and that the very fact of the occupation keeps her going, you see, dear’.³⁸

The earliest letter from Elsie in Cary Grant’s papers is dated 30 September 1937, sent from Bristol to Hollywood, and it gives one the impression of a much warmer, caring and humorous person than many biographers have described:

MY DEAR SON,

Just a line enclosing a few snaps taken with my own camera. Do you think they are anything like me Archie? I am still a young old mother. My dear son, I have not fixed up home waiting to see you. No man shall take the place of your father. You quite understand. I am desperately longing waiting anxiously every day to hear from you. Do try and come over soon …

Fondest love, your affectionate MOTHER.³⁹

In her letters and postcards – and Grant saved hundreds in his personal archive – she was usually rather garrulous and good-natured, addressing her son as ‘Archie’ or ‘My Darling Son’ and closing with ‘Kisses’, ‘Fondest Love’ or ‘Your Affectionate Mother’.⁴⁰ Grant, in turn, cabled or wrote to her regularly,⁴¹ usually addressing her as ‘Darling’, ending with ‘Love Always’ and ‘God Bless’, and signing his name as ‘Archie’. In one letter, sent in 1966 shortly before the birth of his (and Dyan Cannon’s) daughter, Grant wrote:

Watching, and being with, my wife as she bears her pregnancy and goes towards the miraculous experience of giving birth to our first child, I’m moved to tell you how much I appreciate, and now better understand, all you must have endured to have me. All the fears you probably knew and the joy and, although I didn’t ask you to go through all that, I’m so pleased you did; because in so doing, you gave me life. Thank you, dear mother, I may have written similar words before but, recently, because of Dyan, the thoughts became more poignant and clear. I send you love and gratitude.⁴²

Phyllis Brooks, who was once engaged to Grant in the late 1930s and who remained a close friend, remembered him being reunited with Elsie: ‘Cary called his mother a dear little woman. But he didn’t talk much about her. I didn’t probe. It was such a traumatic thing to have happen to anybody.’⁴³ If the reunion had been an act, prompted by fears of adverse publicity, he seems to have invested an unnecessary amount of time, energy and emotion in maintaining the union during the next thirty-five years. It seems likely that Grant and his mother did, slowly, develop a relationship that was, in the circumstances, relatively stable and mature.

It is probably true that he had found it much easier to feel affection for his father.⁴⁴ He had, after all, enjoyed an uninterrupted relationship with him, and, after his mother’s disappearance, he may have come to regard his father, like himself, as a victim of that traumatic episode.⁴⁵ His mother, it seemed at the time, had, without any explanation, deserted him, whereas his father had stayed and raised him. When Elias died, his son expressed the belief that his death had been ‘the inevitable result of a slow-breaking heart, brought about by an inability to alter the circumstances of his life’.⁴⁶ It would be wrong, however, to accept uncritically the common perception today of Elias as the deferential working-class man and Elsie as the somewhat snobbish woman with grand ambitions, just as it would be wrong to believe that Grant sided consistently and completely with one or the other of his parents. He once said that, when he looked back on the family arguments that dominated his childhood, he felt unable to ‘say who was wrong and right’.⁴⁷ Both Elsie and Elias Leach possessed a strong sense of working-class pride: in Elsie, this showed itself in her determination to avoid giving anyone an opportunity to regard her family as ‘common’, as well as in her dreams of financial security and her hopes for her son’s social advancement; in Elias, this pride evidenced itself in more prosaic and pragmatic ways, such as in his advice to his son to buy ‘one good superior suit rather than a number of inferior ones’, so that ‘even when it is threadbare people will know at once it was good’.⁴⁸ Elsie craved prosperity whilst Elias would have settled for the appearance of prosperity; Archie respected his mother’s boundless determination, as well as sharing some of her aspirations, and he also sympathised with his father’s gentle stoicism.

Eventually, Cary Grant came to look back on his childhood, and both of his parents, with a generous spirit: ‘I learned that my dear parents, products of their parents, could know no better than they knew, and began to remember them only for the most useful, the best, the nicest of their teachings.’⁴⁹ According to one of his friends – Henry Gris – it was only relatively late in his life that Grant ‘realised the depth of his guilt complex about his mother’s disappearance. He believed he was the subject of his parents’ many bitter quarrels.’⁵⁰ Archie Leach, however, during those traumatic months following the mysterious disappearance of his mother, was unable to come to terms with what had really happened to his family; he could only attempt to adjust to what he thought had happened, and he thought that his mother had deserted him. ‘I thought the moral was – if you depend on love and if you give love you’re stupid, because love will turn around and kick you in the heart.’⁵¹

CHAPTER III A Place to Be

Regardless of a professed rationalisation that I became an actor in orderto travel, I probably chose my profession because I was seeking approval,adulation, admiration and affection: each a degree of love. Perhaps nochild ever feels the recipient of enough love to satisfy him or her. Oh,how we secretly yearn for it, yet openly defend against it.

CARY GRANT

Our dreams are our real life.

FEDERICO FELLINI

Archie Leach’s adolescence was marked by absence: the absence of his mother, the absence of a stable home life, the absence of money, the absence, it seemed, of a promising future. Not long after his mother’s disappearance, his world was disrupted again: Britain was at war, and material conditions grew even worse for working-class families. His father, it seems, simply withdrew himself from his son’s life. There was no open breach; there was just a vague and gentle separation. They left the house at different times – Elias for work, Archie for school – and they returned at different times. They seldom saw each other. Archie became, in effect, a latch-key child.

In September 1915, at the age of eleven, he won a scholarship to the local Fairfield Grammar School¹ – a gabled, red-brick establishment about ten minutes’ walk from Picton Street. The Liberal government of the time offered ‘free places’ to a limited number of children whose parents could not afford to contribute financially to their education.² Archie still had to pay for his books, school uniform and other necessities, however, and, in the absence of his mother, he soon came to suspect that he would probably not be able to get through Fairfield on the little money that his father gave him. As a result, his ‘aspirations for a college education slowly faded’.³

Elsie Leach’s smart young son was now, according to one of his former classmates, ‘a scruffy little boy’⁴ who was a promising scholar and a good athlete, but who also had a mischievous streak and was often a disruptive influence. ‘It depressed me to be good, according to what I judged was an adult’s conception of good’, Grant recalled, ‘and matters around me were not going well.’⁵ When Cary Grant made his triumphant return to Bristol on a visit in 1933, Archie Leach’s old teachers told reporters of their memories of ‘the naughty little boy who was always making a noise in the back row and would never do his homework’.⁶ The irascible piano teacher whom Archie was obliged to visit had taken to rapping the knuckles of his left hand with a ruler (he was naturally left-handed,⁷ which caused him to struggle sometimes to play as she instructed). ‘My head seemed stubbornly set against the penetration of academic knowledge,’⁸ although he admitted, grudgingly, that he quite enjoyed studying geography, history, art and chemistry. What he did become was an avid reader of comics, such as The Magnet and The Gem, as well as a popular and eye-catching footballer (playing in goal and experiencing the ‘deep satisfaction’ of being cheered when making a good save – ‘one of those fancy ballet-like flying jobs’⁹). It was, in fact, as a result of his increasingly uninhibited sporting exploits that he suffered an accident that would alter his appearance in a subtle way: he snapped off part of a front tooth when he fell over in the school playground; the gap closed up in time, but he was left with only one front-centre tooth.¹⁰ Similar – if less dramatic – mishaps followed. His teachers began to give up on him: ‘I was not turning out to be a model boy.’¹¹

He found an additional outlet for his energies in the 1st Bristol Scout troop. At the end of his first year at Fairfield he volunteered for summer work wherever his Boy Scout training could be used for the war effort: ‘I was so often alone and unhappy at home that I welcomed any occupation that promised activity.’¹² He was assigned to working as a messenger and guide on the military docks at Southampton. For two months he watched thousands of boys not much older than himself sail off towards France; some had already lost an arm or a leg in combat but were being sent back for a second time. It was a poignant experience for him, but it was also, in an odd way, an exhilarating period in his life. When he returned to Bristol, he began to spend time at the docks, where schooners and steamships sailed right up the Avon into the centre of the city. ‘You always had a sense that Bristol was a port, a gateway to somewhere else,’ he said, and, seeing the ships ‘that could take you all over the world’, he came to see the city as ‘a place you could leave, if you wanted to, and, at that age, I did.’¹³ He was restless and lonely, and it appears that he contemplated signing on as a cabin-boy until he discovered that he was too young.¹⁴ Although, years later, he described Bristol as ‘one of my favorite places in the world’,¹⁵ he admitted that, at the time, ‘I didn’t like it where I was, and I wanted to travel’.¹⁶

Back at the dark, quiet, cramped house in Picton Street, he was aware that his father, on those irregular occasions when he saw him, was growing increasingly withdrawn and melancholic. ‘He was a dear sweet man, and I learned a lot from him,’¹⁷ but as a father he no longer exerted much influence on Archie’s life. The shadow of Elsie hung over them both. Years later, Cary Grant wrote of a long-held desire to ‘cleanse’ himself ‘perhaps of an imagined guilt that I was in some way responsible for my parents’ separation’.¹⁸

An opportunity to escape from the emptiness of his home life opened up unexpectedly when he encountered an electrician who was helping out in the school laboratory as a part-time assistant. Grant remembered him as a ‘jovial, friendly man’¹⁹ whose attitude towards his own family was considerably more responsible and positive than that of Elias Leach. This unnamed benefactor took a kindly interest in the bright but rather pathetic young boy who was clearly eager for companionship. He was also working at that time at the Hippodrome, Bristol’s newest variety theatre, which had opened in 1912; a fully electrified theatre was still something of a novelty in those days, and he offered Archie the chance to explore the house that he had helped to wire. Archie, without any hesitation, accepted:

The Saturday matinee was in full swing when I arrived backstage; and there I suddenly found my inarticulate self in a dazzling land of smiling, jostling people wearing and not wearing all sorts of costumes and doing all sorts of clever things. And that’s when I knew! What other life could there be but that of an actor? They happily travelled and toured. They were classless, cheerful and carefree.²⁰

From that moment on, Archie Leach spent as much time as he possibly could at the theatre. The electrician introduced him to the manager of the Empire, another Bristol theatre, where he was invited to assist the men who worked the limelights. There he began to learn the ways of showbusiness people, absorbing the lore of the theatre. This unofficial job came to an abrupt and embarrassing end when, working the follow spot from the booth in the front of the house, he accidentally misdirected its beam, revealing that one of an illusionist’s tricks was achieved with the aid of mirrors. Archie reappeared, his enthusiasm undimmed, at the Hippodrome, where he became a familiar sight, running errands and delivering messages backstage. His father and grandmother were, it seems, quite content to allow him to pursue his new activity without any interference. ‘I had a place to be,’ he said, ‘and people let me be there.’²¹

During 1918, Archie recorded his daily activities in his Boy Scout’s notebook and diary, a four-by-three-inch leather-bound volume which was preserved by Cary Grant in his personal archive. A few typical entries from January of that year give one a good sense of how his free time had come to be dominated by the theatre:

14 Monday. After school I went and bought a new belt. And a new tie. Empire in evening. Daro-Lyric Kingston’s Rosebuds.

17 Thursday. Stayed home from school all day. Went to Empire in evening. Snowing.

18 Friday. My birthday. Stayed home from school. In afternoon went in town. In evening, Empire.

21 Monday. School. Wrote letter to Mary M. Empire in evening. Not a bad show. Captain De Villier’s wireless airship at the top of the bill.

22 Tuesday. School all day. In evening, Empire. All went well, first house. But second house, wireless balloon got out of control and went on people in circle. Good comedy cyclist called Lotto.²²

He was nearing the age when he could leave school, and he was convinced that he wanted to work full-time in the theatre as soon as he possibly could. He was watching – and often meeting backstage – a broad range of music-hall acts, and he was eager to begin performing himself. At some unrecorded point during that period, probably late in 1917,²³ he made contact with Bob Pender, who was the manager of a fairly well-known troupe of acrobatic dancers and stilt-walkers known as Bob Pender’s Knockabout Comedians.²⁴ He had never achieved the kind of success enjoyed by Fred Karno, but he was an established and respected figure on the music-hall circuit.²⁵ Archie had heard that the troupe was being depleted regularly as the younger performers reached military age: ‘When I found out that there were actually touring companies who would let you perform, and take you around the world, I was amazed, and it became my ambition to join one of these travelling shows.’²⁶ In a letter on which he signed his father’s name, he wrote to Pender – who was on tour at the time – offering his services (but neglecting to note that he was not yet fourteen).²⁷ Pender replied favourably, inviting Archie to report to Norwich as an apprentice.²⁸

According to Cary Grant’s version of what happened, he intercepted Pender’s letter, ran away from home, caught the train to Norwich (paying the rail fare with money sent by Pender) and was placed in training with the troupe, practising cartwheels, handsprings, nip-ups and spot rolls.²⁹ It took Elias more than a week to find him, eventually catching up with him in Ipswich, but whatever anger he had felt was swiftly assuaged by Pender, who was, Elias discovered, a fellow Mason.³⁰ The two men agreed, over a drink, that Archie could return to the troupe as soon as he was allowed to leave school – an event that Grant later claimed he tried to hasten by getting himself expelled: doing his ‘unlevel best to flunk at everything’ and by cutting class after class.³¹

On 13 March 1918, for some undocumented reason, Archie Leach was suddenly expelled from Fairfield. In front of the school assembly, it was announced that he had been ‘inattentive … irresponsible and incorrigible … a discredit to the school’, and that he would be leaving immediately.³² There are at least four distinct versions of what had happened to precipitate such a radical measure. His own account, repeated and embellished in numerous interviews, was that he and another boy had been caught as they investigated the interior of the girls’ lavatories.³³ A second, rather less racy, version, put forward by a classmate, claims that he was found in the girls’ playground: ‘His expulsion was so unfair. Several of us girls were in tears over it, because we didn’t like to lose him.’³⁴ Another contemporary insists that the reason why he was expelled was that he had been ‘involved in an act of theft with two other boys in the same class in a town named Almondsbury, near Bristol’.³⁵ Years later, G. H. Calvert, a headmaster of Fairfield, could not clarify the matter: ‘I have heard various accounts of the reason for his leaving the school, but have no reason to suppose that any one of them is truer than another. Probably only Mr Grant and the headmaster of the day knew the facts of the matter, and memories play tricks …’³⁶ A fourth, and perhaps most plausible, theory is that the decision to expel Archie Leach was not inspired by some singularly dramatic misdemeanour but rather was the act of a broadly utilitarian headmaster (Mr Augustus ‘Gussie’ Smith) who had – along with the practically minded Elias Leach – reached the conclusion, after a string of petty incidents, that it would be best for all concerned if Archie Leach and Fairfield School parted company sooner rather than later.³⁷

Three days later, Archie rejoined Bob Pender’s troupe. His father, on this occasion, made no attempt to restrain him, and ‘quietly accepted the inevitability of the news’.³⁸ There was no legal hindrance to his re-employment. The contract between Bob Pender and Elias Leach, written in longhand, is preserved in Grant’s personal archive:

MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT

Made this day 9th Aug. 1918 between Robert Pender of 247 Brixton Road, London, on the one part, Elias Leach of 12 Campbell Street, Bristol, on the other part.

The said Robert Pender agrees to employ the son of the said Elias Leach Archie Leach in his troupe at a weekly salary of 10/- a week with board and lodging and everything found for the stage, and when not working full board and lodgings.

This salary to be increased as the said Archie Leach improves in his profession and he agrees to remain in the employment of Robert Pender till he is 18 years of age or a six months notice on either side.

Robert Pender undertaking to teach him dancing & other accomplishments needful for his work.

Archie Leach agrees to work to the best of his abilities.

Signed, BOB PENDER³⁹

He began taking lessons in ground tumbling and stilt-walking and acrobatic dances. He practised using stage make-up. He studied the best ways to make full use of a wide range of stage props. He was also coached in the ways of ‘working’ an audience, of conveying a mood or a meaning without having recourse to words, establishing silent contact with an audience – a skill that he later acknowledged as having helped prepare him for the special challenge of screen acting.

Archie Leach had found a teacher he trusted. Bob Pender, a stocky, robust man in his early forties, was one of the most experienced and versatile physical comedians in England at that time. His real name was Lomas, the son and grandson of travelling players from Lancashire. His wife and co-director, Margaret, was former ballet mistress at the Folies Bergère in Paris. Archie, once he joined the troupe, lived with the Penders and the other young performers, either in their house in Brixton (the area long established, because of its close proximity to the forty-one London music-halls, as the home base of many professional entertainers⁴⁰) or in boarding-houses on the tour circuit. It was an intense, practical and rapid education. Three months after he had left Bristol, Archie returned with the troupe to appear at the Empire. After the final curtain, Elias Leach, who had been in the audience, walked with his son back to his home. ‘We hardly spoke, but I felt so proud of his pleasure and so much pleasure in his pride, and I remember we held hands for part of that walk.’⁴¹ It was the closest that he had ever felt to his father.

The Pender troupe toured the English provinces and played the Gulliver chain of music-halls in London. The theatre became Archie Leach’s world, the source of his new identity; when he was not on stage, he was usually studying the other acts. ‘At each theatre I carefully watched the celebrated headline artists from the wings, and grew to respect the diligence it took to acquire such expert timing and unaffected confidence, the amount of effort that resulted in such effortlessness.’⁴² He became determined to learn how to achieve the illusion of effortless performance: ‘Perhaps by relaxing outwardly I thought I could eventually relax inwardly; sometimes I even began to enjoy myself on stage.’⁴³

While on tour, the troupe was informed that it had been engaged for an appearance in New York. It was an extraordinary opportunity for all the young performers. There were twelve boys in the company, but provision for only eight in the contract that Pender had signed with Charles Dillingham, a New York theatrical impresario. Archie Leach – much to his relief – was one of the first of the troupe to be selected. On 21 July 1920, he joined the others on the RMS Olympic – sistership to the Titanic – and set sail for the United States of America.

CULTIVATION

Hughson: | You’re a man of obvious good taste in, well, everything. How did you, I mean, why did you …
Robie: | You mean, why did I take up stealing? Oh, to live better. To own things I couldn’t afford. To acquire this good taste which younow enjoy.
Hughson: | You know, I thought you’d have some defense, some tale of hardship. Your mother ran off when you were young, your father beat you, or something.
Robie: | No, no. I was a member of an American trapeze act in the circus that travelled in Europe. It folded, and I was stranded, so I put my agility to a more rewarding purpose … TO CATCH A THIEF

David: | What do you want?
Aunt: | Well, who are you?
David: | Who are you?
Aunt: | Who are you?
David: | What do you want?
Aunt: | Well, who are you?
David: | I don’t know. I’m not quite myself today!

BRINGING UP BABY

CHAPTER IV New York

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess,and it was an age of satire. A stuffed shirt, squirming to blackmail in alifelike way, sat upon the throne of the United States; a stylish youngman hurried over to represent to us the throne of England.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Good manners and a pleasant personality, even without a collegeeducation, will take you far.

CARY GRANT

Archie Leach wanted to become a self-made man. The idea of being a self-made man appealed to him. It made sense. He had a fair idea of what he wanted to make of himself. As Pauline Kael observed, he ‘became a performer in an era in which learning to entertain the public was a trade he worked at his trade; progressed, and rose to the top’.¹ Archie Leach craved realism, not magic: he did not want to be dazzled, he wanted to learn: ‘Commerce is a bind for actors now in a way it never was for Archie Leach; art for him was always a trade.’² Not for Archie Leach the debilitating struggles with one’s conscience about the artistic merit of what one was doing; what he was doing was, it seemed to him, eminently preferable to what he would otherwise have been forced to do back home in Bristol. His initial struggles were, primarily, materialistic rather than intellectual; the practical experience he acquired furnished him with a certain toughness of spirit that subsequent generations of performers, from more privileged, middle-class backgrounds, lacked. In Bristol, he had seen the future, and it was work – work of the soul-destroying, demeaning kind which his father had come to accept as the bald and bleak sum of his life and identity. It was not a fate that Archie Leach was prepared to face: ‘I cannot remember consciously daring to hope I would be successful at anything, yet, at the same time, I knew I would be.’³

Archie Leach was there, at the ship’s rail, as the RMS Olympic steamed into New York harbour in the early morning sunshine of 28 July, and he thought he knew precisely where he was going; he had seen the famous sights of New York many times before, back in Bristol, on the movie screen. He had spent much of his free time, as a child, gazing at visions of American life in the dark. Archie Leach had imagined America long before he set foot on Manhattan Island.

The Pender troupe was met by a Dillingham representative, who took them directly to the Globe Theater. It was explained, as soon as they arrived, that the plans had been changed; instead of appearing in the comic Fred Stone’s show, the Pender troupe would now open in a new revue, Good Times, at the Hippodrome. Although there was little time for them to rehearse, the troupe was not disappointed about the unexpected change. The Hippodrome, then on 6th Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets, was the world’s largest theatre:⁴ it could accommodate several hundred performers at once on a huge revolving stage; it had a ballet corps of eighty, a chorus of one hundred, and it required around eight hundred backstage employees to mount a show that included over ninety of the most celebrated and spectacular acts from around the world; the auditorium seated 5,697 people.

Archie Leach and his companions had arrived at a fortuitous time. New York, in 1920, was the centre of the world’s blossoming entertainment business. Not only was it a period in which vaudeville theatres were attracting huge audiences, but it was also a period in which a new popular cultural medium – the movies – was in the process of transforming, and expanding, the realm of commercial entertainment in America.⁵ At the turn of the century, vaudeville exploited movies as a new attraction; a pattern of movie presentations as single acts in commercial vaudeville had soon been established, and, indeed, vaudeville provided the forum in which many urban Americans were introduced to the movies. By the 1920s, however, the relationship had changed, and one of the ways in which the heightened sense of competition between the two showed itself was the determined pursuit by vaudeville producers of increasingly grand and elaborate stage shows and a greater range of unusual and eye-catching acts.⁶ The Hippodrome housed many of the most spectacular of these.

When they arrived the Pender troupe, with its modest if expert knockabout routines, must have felt rather intimidated (or possibly even, as Cary Grant put it, ‘petrified’⁷). The other acts were certainly diverse: Joe Jackson, the tramp cyclist; Marceline the clown; the Long Tack Sam Company of Illusionists; ‘Poodles’ Hanneford and the Riding Hanneford Family; and, perhaps most memorable of all, Powers Elephants, described by Cary Grant as ‘an amazing water spectacle in which expert girl swimmers and high divers appeared in an understage tank containing 960,000 gallons of water’.⁸ Looking back, he reflected: ‘Today you cannot imagine the size of it … It really was show business.’⁹ The Hippodrome was not a place for the disorganised or the undisciplined: all performers were obliged to check in for work at a time clock – a necessary measure, as far as the management was concerned, in order to keep track of the extraordinary number of acts.

Archie Leach, along with the other boys in the troupe, lived under the authoritarian eyes of Bob and Margaret Pender in a cramped apartment just off Eighth Avenue. The Penders were severe taskmasters. After each evening’s performance at the theatre, the troupe would return to the apartment and line up at the kitchen sink to wash their socks, handkerchiefs, towels and shirts, and then on to the ironing-board – a ritual that usually lasted until well into the night. Leach was also given his own special duties, such as keeping accounts and cooking many of the meals. He grew up quickly.

Good Times was a considerable success, and the Pender troupe, although appearing in just one sequence in the show, attracted praise from several critics. Archie Leach found himself part of a ‘remarkable international family’, an ‘astonishing assemblage’¹⁰ of talented performers from diverse backgrounds, and he made the most of the opportunities open to him to learn everything that he could from all of the acts – including special acrobatic tricks, drunken walks, dance steps and illusions. It was an extraordinary time for him.

‘The first thing I loved about America’, he said, ‘was how fast it all seemed.’¹¹ He found New York itself endlessly fascinating. It was a place that breathed possibility. With the Hippodrome dark on Sundays, he was free to explore the city: ‘I spent hours on the open-air tops of Fifth Avenue buses … I contentedly rode from Washington Square, up the Avenue and across 72nd Street, to the beauty of Riverside Drive, with its quiet mansions and impeccably kept apartment buildings.’¹² He wanted to feel at home in New York, and, in time, he would do so, but, to begin with, he found it simply exhilarating: the size, the sights, the sounds, the scope, the pace, the opportunities (real and imagined) – the initial exoticism of it all was thrilling.

Good Times ran for nine months, giving 455 performances before closing at the end of April 1921. Exploiting the success of the show, Bob Pender was able to book the troupe on a tour of the B. F. Keith vaudeville circuit (the major vaudeville power at that time in the eastern United States), visiting most of the major cities east of the Mississippi River. In mid-1922, the tour closed with an appearance at the prestigious New York Palace, and then, without definite prospects, Pender – ever the pragmatic professional entertainer – decided to return to England. Not all of his troupe, however, agreed with the decision; some of the members, including Archie Leach, were keen to stay on in New York.

Although Pender clearly had a great deal of respect and affection for Leach, as, indeed, it was evident that Leach had for him, it seems that their relationship had, by the end of the tour, grown tense. Pender by now was tired, middle aged and increasingly cautious; Archie Leach was eighteen years of age, good looking, tall (6′ 2″), fit, energetic, with an increasingly forceful personality, and relishing life away from home. The manner in which they parted reflected the change in the relationship, with Leach, along with some of his fellow members of the troupe, deceiving Pender about their plans for the immediate future. Pender’s letter to Elias Leach not only marks – with regret and exasperation – the end of his association with Archie, but it also suggests that he had been knowingly misinformed as to Archie’s real intentions:

244 West Thayer Street,

Philadelphia, PA

May 21, 1922

DEAR MR. LEACH:

I am writing this to inform you that Archie is coming home. He leaves New York by the Cunard Liner Berengaria on May 29th and should arrive Southampton June 2 or 3. He has made up his mind to come home. I offered him 35 dollars a week which is about G8 [eight guineas] in English money, and he will not accept it, as he says he cannot do on it so I offered him £3/10 a week clear and all his expenses paid but he says he wishes to come home. The wage I have offered him is the same as my daughter and also another of my boys have been getting so I know he could do very nicely on it but I must tell you he is most extravagant and wants to stay at the best hotels and live altogether beyond his means.

I promised him if he improved in his work and was worth it, I will give him more money, but he is like all young people of his age. He thinks he only has to ask and have. I must tell you he has very big ideas for a boy of his age, and he seems to have made up his mind to come home.

He has been a good boy since he has been with me and I think he is throwing away a good chance but he does not think so. Mrs. Pender has talked to him but it is no use. He will not listen. So I should like to hear if he arrives home safely … I shall be glad to do anything for him when I return to England.

I remain,

Yours truly, BOB PENDER¹³

Recollecting the event forty years later, Cary Grant commented, ‘It must have been very disappointing and difficult for [Pender] to leave so many of his boys behind in America, our land of opportunity: but youth, in its eagerness to drive ahead, seldom recognises the troubles caused or the debts accrued while passing.’¹⁴ He was a young adult who, as he put it ruefully, ‘knew that I knew everything’.¹⁵ The only problem, it seemed to him at the time, ‘was just that I hadn’t seen everything’.¹⁶

Archie Leach, committing his immediate future to the US, spent most of the summer of 1922 searching for ways of making himself employable. Pender had contacts, Leach, thus far, had none; he was a young Englishman in America, with little experience and limited resources in a highly competitive business. ‘Before I made my way to some measure of success,’ he would recall, ‘I had many tough times, but I was always lucky.’¹⁷ He began from the outside in, acquiring ‘the corniest habits in my attempts to become quickly Americanised’.¹⁸ The obvious influences, for him, were from the theatre:

I’d been to the Palace to see the Marx Brothers, billed as the ‘Greatest Comedy Act in Show Business; Barring None’. I noticed that Zeppo, the young handsome one, the ‘straight’ man, the fellow I copied (who else?) wore a miniature, neatly tied bow tie. It was called – hold onto your chair – a jazz bow. Well, if that was the fashion, it was at least inexpensive enough for me to follow.¹⁹

The over-eager series of restylings did little to help him find regular work. After a few barren weeks, he was forced to start using up the ‘emergency money’ given to him by Pender for a return passage to England.²⁰ He had, however, during his search for the right kind of shows, managed at least to meet the right kind of people; Pauline Kael has suggested that he must have been ‘an incredible charmer’,²¹ because he was just eighteen, admittedly tall and good looking, yet found himself invited to a number of exclusive dinner parties in the company of the wealthy and famous. On one such occasion, as the escort of the opera singer Lucrezia Bori,²² he met George C. Tilyou,²³ whose family owned and operated the Steeplechase Park on Coney Island. The meeting resulted in a job: Tilyou hired him to walk around Coney Island on six-foot-high stilts while wearing a bright-green coat and jockey cap, long tube-like black trousers and a sandwich board advertising the race-track. If, in retrospect, the image of Cary Grant on stilts seems somewhat incongruous, one should also note that the image of, say, Ronald Colman, Rex Harrison or David Niven on stilts seems simply incomprehensible; Archie Leach, with his working-class background and his music-hall training, was, among all of the future Hollywood British, uniquely suited to the potential harshness of life in New York in the twenties. ‘If I hadn’t been badgered, cajoled, dared, bullied and helped into walking those high stilts when I was a boy in the Pender troupe, I might have starved that summer – or gone back to Bristol.’²⁴ The pay was forty dollars per week, which provided him with some steady cash while he searched for further vaudeville bookings. Another short-term scheme to earn money involved selling neckties hand-painted by his friend John Kelly (who later achieved fame as the Hollywood designer, Orry-Kelly).

He was experiencing other anxieties during this period. There seems – judging from the (incomplete) correspondence which has been preserved between Archie Leach and his father, Elias – to have been an ongoing series of increasingly acrimonious exchanges between Archie and Bob Pender. Elias Leach, in a letter to his son, refers to ‘the rumour of Mr. B. Pender action towards you’; he advises his son to ‘try and get in touch with the national vaudeville artists institute and ask them if they take up such cases as yours [if Pender] tries his game on’.²⁵ Judging from this letter, it seems that Pender may have attempted to force Archie to return the money he was given for his return fare back to England. It is not inconceivable, however, that Archie Leach, having spent at least part of this sum, was more concerned about the possibility that his father might discover that his account of his dealings with Pender had not been entirely truthful. Elias, rightly or wrongly, accepted his son’s version of events, and reassured him that ‘if I get any letters from B. Pender or anybody else from New York I will do as you have asked me to do and not take any notice of them’.²⁶ Elias (who had just become a father again and was struggling to support his new family) also thanked Archie for ‘another ten shillings note’,²⁷ which suggests that the pressure on Archie Leach to find more lucrative forms of employment was particularly great at this time.

At the end of the summer, Leach and other former members of the Pender troupe heard that the director of the New York Hippodrome, R. H. Burnside, was planning another extravagant variety show, Better Times, which would accommodate an act similar to that of the Penders. They began to practise together, and, in September, they returned to the Hippodrome for the new season, calling themselves ‘The Walking Stanleys’.²⁸ When Better Times closed, the troupe prepared a new vaudeville act which toured the Pantages circuit of theatres during 1924, travelling through Canada to the West Coast (giving Leach his first, brief, tantalising glimpse of Southern California) and back across the United States.

Upon returning to New York, the troupe disbanded. A few more went back to England, disenchanted after another exhausting and relatively poorly paid tour.²⁹ Archie Leach, however, once again, stayed on, living at the National Vaudeville Artists Club on West 46th Street ‘where I was again permitted to run up bills while trying to run down jobs’.³⁰ The Club was a good place for making contact with other – often much better-known – performers, and, sometimes, substitute for them on stage. Leach had to improvise with little or no time for rehearsal or reflection. He worked in juggling and acrobatic acts; he had a short spell as a unicycle rider; in the guise of ‘Rubber Legs’ (a self-explanatory pseudonym that owed much to his years as a stilt-walker) he played in several comic sketches; he also appeared as ‘Professor Knowall Leach’ in a mind-reading act; and he was a straight man for a number of comics. The most memorable engagement that he secured at this time, he told people, was a spot as a straight man with Milton Berle in a variety show at Proctor’s Newark theatre. Also on the bill was one Detzo Ritter, a man who wrestled with himself on stage, spinning himself through the air, locking himself into an agonising half-nelson before pinning himself, exhausted, to the mat for a spectacular finale.³¹ Archie Leach’s sense of the absurd – which was already fairly pronounced – could not have remained unaffected by such sights: ‘The experiences were of incalculable benefit because it was during these one – and two-day engagements that I began learning the fundamentals of my craft.’³² It was the kind of work that demanded a considerable degree of self-discipline; there was no room for egotism. Archie Leach was learning how best to husband his own energy; it was, indeed, probably from this period that he started to acquire the lasting reputation as a man who took direction well and did not exert himself to assert himself needlessly at the expense of others.

He learned a great deal from studying the best acts, such as George Burns and Gracie Allen, night after night, when they performed in New York:

George was a straight man, the one who would make the act work. The straight man says the plant line … and the comic answers it … The laugh goes up and up in volume and cascades down. As soon as it’s getting a little quiet, the straight man talks into it, and the comic answers it. And up goes the laugh again.³³

Archie Leach had stage experience, but only as a silent performer of physical comedy routines; he had not yet had cause to speak, but he was now, gradually, learning the techniques essential for verbal humour. As a straight man, he learned, in front of an audience, the importance of timing: ‘When to talk into an audience’s laughter. When not to talk into the laughter. When to wait for the laugh. When not to wait for the laugh. When to move on a laugh, when not to move on a laugh.’³⁴ As his performances improved, and he became more experienced and self-assured, he received more bookings; he once said that he felt at this time that he had played ‘practically every small town in America’.³⁵ The sheer variety, in terms of venue and composition and mood of audience, gave him further invaluable education in the art of comic technique:

Doing stand-up comedy is extremely difficult. Your timing has to change from show to show and from town to town. You’re always adjusting to the size of the audience and the size of the theater. We used to do matinees, supper shows, and late shows … the response would change from night to night and from town to town. The people in Wilkes-Barre and the folks in Wilmington don’t necessarily laugh at the same things.³⁶

While he was playing some short engagements in and around New York, he met Reginald Hammerstein, a stage director and the younger brother of Oscar Hammerstein II, who suggested, somewhat impetuously, that his true talent might lie in musical comedy. Receptive to the idea, Leach took voice lessons and was engaged on a ‘run-of-the-play’ basis by Arthur Hammerstein, Reginald’s uncle, for Golden Dawn, the opening production of the impressive new Hammerstein Theater.³⁷ Leach had a minor role as an Australian prisoner of war, and doubled as understudy of the juvenile lead. The production opened on 30 November 1927, and ran for 184 performances over a six-month period. Afterwards, Arthur Hammerstein re-engaged him for another musical, Polly, in the role that Noël Coward had taken in the London production.

Polly opened to largely negative reviews in Wilmington, Delaware, where one critic remarked that ‘Archie Leach has a strong masculine manner, but unfortunately fails to bring out the beauty of the score’.³⁸ Leach was replaced before the show reached Broadway. He was not, however, out of work for too long. Marilyn Miller, the popular musical comedy star, chose him to replace her current leading man in Rosalie. The show’s producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, agreed with the choice and asked Arthur Hammerstein – his arch-rival – to release Leach from his contract. Hammerstein was not at all pleased, and, over Leach’s ‘complaining voice’,³⁹ sold the contract to J. J. Shubert instead.

Shubert, along with his brother Lee, was Broadway’s biggest theatrical producer at the time.⁴⁰ Ironically, although Leach, impetuously, had tried to resist the move, the change could hardly have done his career more good. Within a few weeks, the Shuberts had cast him in a new musical, Boom Boom, with Jeanette MacDonald, and agreed to pay him $350 per week. For a young performer who had been in only two previous productions, one of which he had been fired from, this was a stroke of remarkably good fortune. Leach, to his credit, appreciated this fact, and worked hard to make a success of the role. The show opened in New York at the Casino Theater in January 1929. After a mere seventy-two performances it closed (Charles Brackett, The New Yorker’s critic, remarked acidly that Boom Boom could ‘teach one more about despair than the most expert philosopher’⁴¹), but both MacDonald and Leach were screen-tested at Paramount’s Astoria Studio,⁴² though no contracts were offered. Leach’s test was not positive; he was, according to the talent scout’s report, ‘bowlegged and his neck is too thick’.⁴³ This curt dismissal was not quite as injudicious as the now notorious verdict on Fred Astaire’s first screen test: ‘Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.’⁴⁴ There was, after all, no shortage of young, tall, good-looking would-be matinee idols seeking employment in Hollywood; the competition was great, and any blemish, any sign of a suspect temperament, could count against one. Archie Leach, at that time, was far from Hollywood’s – or, indeed, his own – idea of perfect, and he had not yet learned how to make a virtue out of his distinctive features and mannerisms. The talent scout was not guilty of any gross exaggeration. Leach’s collar-size was 17½ inches,⁴⁵ and, because he had a gymnast’s narrow, sloping shoulders, the thickish neck could sometimes seem even thicker than it actually was. He did indeed have a slightly bow-legged gait, which was not uncommon among those trained in his kind of specialised acrobatic work. The depressing verdict, therefore, was probably not entirely unexpected.

It was some consolation to Archie Leach that he was kept, in his words, ‘happily, gainfully and steadily employed’ by the Shuberts for almost three years.⁴⁶ He was, in fact, doing about as well in the theatre at that time as he would have done with comparable work in Hollywood. The Shuberts were paying him $450 per week, which allowed him to purchase his first car, a Packard sport phaeton, then considered one of the finest of American-made automobiles. He was a young man who was sharply aware of the value of appearances. ‘That was my trouble,’ he recalled, ‘always trying to impress someone.’⁴⁷

His next stage role was as Max Gunewald, a vain, superficial young man, in A Wonderful Night, Fannt Mitchell’s rather loose re-working of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. It opened at the Majestic Theater on 31 October 1929, two days after the blackest day of the Wall Street Crash, and closed, promptly, in February 1930. It had received mixed reviews, as had Archie Leach. One critic wrote, somewhat gnomically, that ‘Mr Archie Leach, as the soprano’s straying baritone, brings a breath of elfin Broadway to his role’, but another disagreed, claiming that Leach, ‘who feels that acting in something by Johann Strauss calls for distinction, is somewhat at a loss as to how to achieve it. The result is a mixture of John Barrymore and cockney.’⁴⁸

After a few weeks back working in vaudeville, Leach received a new assignment from the Shuberts, but at a somewhat reduced salary. On the verge of bankruptcy, the Shuberts were packaging streamlined versions of some of their earlier successes to offer to the public at ‘pre-war prices’ from three dollars down to fifty cents. Leach went on tour in the musical The Street Singer,49 for the next nine months, he toured through the provincial towns where unemployment was starting to put many people out on the streets. The show had to gross two thousand dollars a night just to break even. It failed, and was one of the contributing factors that caused the Shubert Corporation to file for receivership in 1931.

That year was the most dismal one for legitimate theatre in the US for two decades. Almost half of all Broadway theatres were closed. The only work that Archie Leach could find was at the open-air Municipal Opera in St Louis, Missouri, where J. J. Shubert produced a summer-long series of musical revivals. Although Cary Grant later recalled the 8,000-seat amphitheatre in Forest Park as being ‘delightful’,⁵⁰ and the summer season as ‘glorious’,⁵¹ it was gruelling work, with a new role to be learned every two weeks. The plots were often extravagant, the productions lavish and the lighting effects, in particular, were spectacular. Audiences were rather less discriminating than on Broadway, but they appreciated professional performances. Leach, usually playing the romantic lead, stood out as a darkly handsome young man. Local reviews were generally positive. He was noticed. When the season ended, and Leach returned to New York, he was invited to appear in a one-reeler movie entitled Singapore Sue. He was engaged on 8 May 1931,⁵² for six days, by the Paramount Public Corporation; the movie was shot at Paramount’s Astoria Studio, and he was paid $150 for his performance.

In the 1930s, short subjects served not only to flesh out an exhibitor’s bill, but also allowed the studios (particularly Paramount and Warners, who both had major production centres in New York which enabled them to lure stars from Broadway and vaudeville) to test new talent inexpensively. Singapore Sue was not destined for any special promotion, but it was, none the less, the first serious opportunity that Archie Leach had to attract the attention of Hollywood producers. He played one of four American sailors visiting the Chinese character actor Anna Chang’s café in Singapore. Dressed in a white tropical uniform, handsome in a rather over-ripe way and wearing make-up that made him appear eye-catchingly pale, he smiled falsely and mumbled, through clenched teeth, his few lines of dialogue without any conviction. It was, quite clearly, a discomforting experience, and one which remained a sufficiently painful memory to cause Cary Grant in 1970 to seek to persuade the organisers of the Academy Awards tribute to him to omit the planned excerpt from Singapore Sue.53 His friend Gregory Peck, who was president of the Academy at the time, sympathised:

In that early shot Cary hadn’t acquired the poise and confidence, the kind of looseness before the camera that he later had. He still looked like English music-hall. I know how I would feel if someone showed a lot of footage of me before I had smoothed out my craft.⁵⁴

Nothing came of the work.⁵⁵ In August 1931, Leach asked to be released from his Shubert theatre contracts. The Shuberts obliged. At the end of that month he was engaged to play a character named Cary Lockwood opposite Fay Wray in her husband John Monk Saunders’s play Nikki. It opened at the Longacre Theater in New York on 29 September 1931. Leach was paid $375 for each of the first three weeks, and $500 per week for the remainder of the run. The show, however, did not endear itself to audiences for whom the theatre was now an expensive luxury, and, although it was moved to the George M. Cohan Theater in a desperate bid to save it, Nikki closed after only thirty-nine performances.

In November 1931, shortly after Nikki closed, Archie Leach sub-let his small apartment and decided, along with his friend Phil Charig (who had written the music for the show), to visit California. Having worked steadily for more than three years, he felt he could now afford to take a vacation. Fay Wray, to whom he had become very close during the run of the show, had been offered a part in the movie that RKO Radio was planning from Edgar Wallace’s story King Kong. She had invited Leach to follow her.⁵⁶ Other people had, at various times during the previous two years, encouraged him to move on and attempt to establish a movie career in Hollywood, and now, after yet another show had ended – in his view – prematurely, the time, at last, seemed right.

CHAPTER V Inventing Cary Grant

Yes, despite his appearance, he was really a very complicated youngman with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest ofChinese boxes.

NATHANAEL WEST

I guess to a certain extent I did eventually become the characters I wasplaying. I played at being someone I wanted to be until I became thatperson. Or he became me.

CARY GRANT

If Archie Leach, as he left New York for Hollywood, had come to think of himself as a self-made man, then Cary Grant, as he stepped out into the Southern Californian sunlight, would come to think of himself as a man-made self. Archie Leach had learned a great deal in a short period about how to perform, but, so far, he had learned little about how best he might use this technical knowledge to lend a certain distinctiveness to his own performances. Cary Grant would bring an unusual, attractive, imaginative personality to complement the existing solid technique. The change of name, in itself, was banal; it was common practice in Hollywood, where words were put to the service of pictures and one’s name functioned as a sub-title for one’s image. The change of identity, however, was profound; the new name heralded a new self.

Archie Leach did not arrive in Los Angeles with any great expectation of such a rapid and dramatic transformation. He was hopeful of employment in Hollywood, but he was not desperate; he knew that the Shuberts were eager to use him again, should he wish, or need, to return to Broadway. He could afford, therefore, to approach this new challenge with enthusiasm rather than trepidation.

There are, perhaps predictably, several versions of how Archie Leach managed to secure for himself a studio contract. One account, which was popularised by Mae West, has it that she ‘discovered’ him when he was a humble extra on the Paramount lot.¹ This is quite untrue; indeed, it was a canard that continued to infuriate Cary Grant whenever he saw it in print.² He was never an extra, and he had made seven movies before he first appeared with Mae West. Another version – more plausible but still with no documented evidence to support it – was put forward by Phil Charig: according to his account, he took Archie Leach with him when he was summoned for an interview at Paramount’s music department, and, although he was not offered a job, the interviewer was sufficiently impressed by Leach’s good looks to recommend him for a screen test.³ There is, however, another version which, since it originated with Grant himself and there is no obvious reason to doubt him on this matter, may be regarded as authoritative: according to Grant, a New York agent – Billy ‘Square Deal’ Grady of the William Morris Agency – gave him the office address in Hollywood of his friend Walter Herzbrun, and Herzbrun, in turn, introduced him to one of his most important clients, the director Marion Gering.⁴

Archie Leach did not just have handsome features – plenty of other young, out-of-work actors in Los Angeles at that time were that good looking – he also had genuine charm. It is clear that Archie Leach found it remarkably easy to find people who were able and willing to support his embryonic career. As had happened in New York, Leach became a popular new guest at Hollywood social occasions, and it was not long before he had the opportunity to impress a number of producers and directors. His new, unofficial patron Marion Gering was planning to screen-test his wife, and he thought that Leach could play opposite her. Gering took Leach to a small dinner party at the home of B. P. Schulberg, the head of production at Paramount’s West Coast studio. Schulberg was, it seems, happy to accede to Gering’s request, and a screen test and the offer of a long-term contract (worth $450 per week) were the results.

Archie Leach had achieved, with what seems like remarkable ease, the basis for a movie career. Before he could begin acting in any movies, however, he first needed to work on his identity. As with many young contract players, the studio questioned the marquee value of his name: ‘They said: “Archie just doesn’t sound right in America.’” ‘It doesn’t sound particularly right in Britain either,’ was his rather embarrassed reply.⁵ He was told, without any intimation that the matter might be open to negotiation, that ‘Archie Leach’ was unacceptable, and was instructed to come up with a new name ‘as soon as possible’.⁶ That evening, over dinner with Fay Wray and John Monk Saunders (the author of Nikki), it was suggested that Leach might adopt the name of the character he had played in their show: Cary Lockwood. Leach liked ‘Cary’ as his first name, but he was told by someone at the studio that there was already a Harold Lockwood in Hollywood,⁷ and so the search for a new surname continued.⁸ The studio advised him to choose a short name: it was the era of Gable, Cooper, Cagney and Bogart. A secretary gave Leach the standard list of suggestions which had been compiled for such a purpose. ‘Grant’, according to his own recollection of the deliberations, was the surname which ‘jumped out at me’.⁹

Paramount, it seems, was equally satisfied with the combination. ‘Cary’ sounded pleasingly ambiguous, a supple name which, when pronounced to rhyme with ‘wary’, could suit a sophisticated image, and, when pronounced to rhyme with ‘Cary’, could fit with a more plebeian persona. The name’s new owner never seemed particularly interested in proposing a definitive pronunciation: some of his friends, such as Alfred Hitchcock, favoured the former, while others, such as David Niven, favoured the latter (he himself managed, typically, to find a subtle via media, and he only ever protested when anyone attempted to call him ‘Car’). ‘Grant’, on the other hand, sounded reassuringly American; it had more simple and solid connotations, a nod perhaps to the Hero of Appomattox, General Ulysses S. Grant, eighteenth president of the United States. Someone noticed that Cary Grant’s initials were the same as Clark Gable’s and the reverse of Gary Cooper’s; it seemed a good omen – Gable and Cooper were the most popular matinee idols of the day.

Cary Grant was born, in effect, on 7 December 1931,¹⁰ the day that he signed his Paramount contract and consigned ‘Archie Leach’ to relative – but by no means complete – obscurity at the age of twenty-seven years and eleven months. Cary Grant was not a new man, but rather a young one with the rare opportunity to restyle himself in a manner which would suit his aspirations. The name change itself was a fairly routine, pragmatic decision by the studio; it was not intended as an invitation to Archie Leach to embark on any profound voyage of self-discovery. Paramount had already decided who Cary Grant should be: a cut-price, younger, dark-haired substitute for Gary Cooper.¹¹ Cooper had joined Paramount in 1927; by 1931, he was complaining that he was being worked too hard. While he was filming City Streets that year, he suffered a near collapse from the combined effects of jaundice and exhaustion. When the movie had been completed, he left for Europe, and began to spend more time with the Countess Dorothy di Frasso than his studio felt was desirable. Archie Leach, smoothed out into the more refulgent form of ‘Cary Grant’, was to be used to remind Cooper – gently at first – that he was not quite as distinctive nor as valuable as he might have thought he was. The two men did have a number of things in common: both had English backgrounds (Cooper’s parents were both English, and he had been educated in Bedfordshire¹²); both were physically powerful men who could also show their vulnerability; and both were versatile enough to play comic as well as romantic roles.

Cary Grant, it was reasoned, could be groomed for stardom by taking the ‘Gary Cooper roles’ that Gary Cooper turned down, and, by playing on the perceived similarity between the two men, Paramount hoped that Cooper’s ego could be held in check by the constant presence of a possible replacement at the studio. A fan magazine of the time – possibly with some covert encouragement from Paramount’s publicists – noted that ‘Cary looks enough like Gary to be his brother. Both are tall, they weigh about the same, and they fit the same sort of roles.’¹³ Cooper had been warned. It was a common tactic employed by all studios at the time to prevent their most popular stars from becoming too ‘difficult’: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, for example, had brought in James Craig as a threat to Clark Gable, and Robert Young as a threat to Robert Montgomery. It was good insurance. If Gary became too demanding, Cary could take over (only a modest dash would need to be erased on the dressing-room door); it was considered unlikely, and, as often happened in similar cases elsewhere, it was probably thought more likely that Cary Grant would become a useful romantic lead in a string of relatively modest movies.

Cary Grant, however, had a quite different outlook on the possibilities opened up by his sudden change of identity. He did not wish to live indefinitely within quotation marks; he wanted to create a ‘Cary Grant’ that he could grow into. Whoever this ‘Cary Grant’ was to be, he would have to be someone who seemed real to Archie Leach as well as to others: ‘If I couldn’t clearly see out, how could anyone see in?’¹⁴ All that he started with, he admitted, was a façade, and ‘the protection of that façade proved both an advantage and a disadvantage’.¹⁵ It offered him both the chance to change and an excuse not to change. Archie Leach wanted to change. The playwright Moss Hart remembers him back in his New York days, mixing with a group of ‘have nots’ at Rudley’s Restaurant on 41st Street and Broadway. According to Hart, Archie Leach had appeared to be ‘a disconsolate young actor’ whose ‘gloom was forever dissipated when he changed his name to Cary Grant’.¹⁶

Archie Leach saw his reincarnation as ‘Cary Grant’ not as the end of his self-reinvention but rather as the start of it. The writer Sidney Sheldon, who came to know and work with Grant in the forties, used him as the prototype for Rhys Williams, a character in the novel Bloodline; Williams is described as ‘an uneducated, ignorant boy with no background, no breeding, no past, no future’, but, with ‘imagination, intelligence and a fiery ambition’, he transforms himself from ‘the clumsy, grubby little boy with a funny accent’ into a ‘polished and suave and successful’ man.¹⁷ Archie Leach was eager to learn, to absorb as much as he could from the places and people he encountered. His lack of formal education remained one of his lifelong regrets.¹⁸ Since his arrival in the US, he had made a point of making the acquaintance of people who were gifted and highly educated. Rather like the character in Bloodline, he ‘was like a sponge, erasing the past, soaking up the future’.¹⁹ He was not ashamed of his working-class background, but he did want to take every opportunity to pursue the project of self-improvement; he was, in part, eager to educate himself, but also he was reacting, with bitterness, to the memory of the routine humiliations suffered by himself, his family and his friends back in England. He studied other people’s dress sense, table manners, gestures and accents. He was not going to be ‘caught out’. The composer Quincy Jones, who formed a friendship with him in later years, remarked that when he was growing up, ‘the upper-class English viewed the lower classes like black people. Cary and I both had an identification with the underdog. My perception is that we could be really open with each other because there was a serious parallel in our experience.’²⁰ John Forsythe, who acted alongside him in the forties, made a similar point: Archie Leach had been ‘a poor kid. He did scrape his way to the top. That meticulous quality he had – knowing how to best use himself – was one of the key things to his nature.’²¹

The idea of America – its promise of liberty and equality – inspired Archie Leach, as it had inspired many other English people from similar backgrounds. Betsy Drake, who became Cary Grant’s third wife, recalled that ‘in Cary’s day you got nowhere – nowhere – with a lower-class accent. The fact that he survived all that speaks very well for him.’²² Though America had its own casual snobberies, it was, none the less, considerably more democratic in outlook and disposition than the England that Archie Leach had grown up in. Categories in England were particularly rigid then, and social distinctions emphatically made and scrupulously preserved. In America, on the other hand, Archie Leach could, to some extent, avoid such potential disadvantages. Only an expert in contemporary English class distinctions could have contemplated slotting him firmly into a particular niche; to most people he was just a good-looking and personable young man.

Archie Leach had some sense of what kind of person he wanted Cary Grant to be. Glamorous, for instance. Archie Leach wanted Cary Grant to be the epitome of masculine glamour. To this end his first chosen role-model was Douglas Fairbanks. He had met Fairbanks before he even set foot in America. Fairbanks and his wife, Mary Pickford, had been passengers on the RMS Olympic on the same voyage to the US as Archie Leach and the rest of the Pender troupe. The couple were returning to America after their much-publicised six-week honeymoon in Europe. Fairbanks fascinated Archie Leach. Tall, dark and handsome, an international screen idol, a ‘self-made man’ (with just a little help from Harvard), a fine athlete and, as his young admirer noted, ‘a gentleman in the true sense of the word. A gentle man. Only a strong man can be gentle.’²³ Archie Leach was thoroughly impressed by Fairbanks, off screen as well as on; Fairbanks symbolised the kind of man – and star – that the then still somewhat gauche teenage Archie Leach wanted one day to become. What is more, Archie knew enough of Fairbanks’s biography, gleaned from movie magazines and newsreels, to see that they had much in common: disrupted and largely unhappy childhoods, alcoholic fathers, acrobatic training, apparently limitless high spirits and a capacity to enjoy their own good luck. Fairbanks had triumphed; he had achieved fame, wealth and power, as well as marrying ‘America’s sweetheart’.²⁴ ‘For a man coming out of darkness into light,’ commented the critic Richard Schickel, ‘there was, possibly, a promise in Fairbanks.’²⁵

At one point, late on during the crossing, Archie Leach found himself (probably less fortuitously than he later liked to suggest) being photographed alongside his hero during a game of shuffleboard: ‘As I stood beside him, I tried with shy, inadequate words to tell him of my adulation. He was a splendidly trained athlete and acrobat, affable and warmed by success and well-being.’²⁶ Archie’s glimpses of Fairbanks on that first Atlantic crossing provided him with his initial, and possibly most enduring, image of modern elegance and style. Cary Grant always attributed his almost obsessive maintenance of a perpetual suntan to that first sighting of Fairbanks’s deeply bronzed complexion,²⁷ and he was also equally impressed by the relatively thoughtful and understated elegance of Fairbanks’s dress sense (he was not the only one: many of the studio bosses had started out in the clothing trade, and there were few sights more likely to have them purring with delight than that of a well-tailored suit²⁸). An Anglophile, Fairbanks had his suits made in Savile Row by Anderson & Sheppard, his evening clothes by Hawes & Curtis, his shirts by Beale & Inman and his monogrammed velvet slippers by Peel. Grant never forgot the subtle precision of that celebrated sartorial flair. Ralph Lauren has said that, years later, Grant described, in minute detail, how Fairbanks looked, and he urged Lauren to make a double-breasted tuxedo ‘like the one worn by Fairbanks, same lapel and all’.²⁹

Archie Leach was aware, however, that he could not, and should not, simply replicate the Fairbanks look. Cary Grant could not be another Fairbanks. Fairbanks was, at least on the screen, an all-American hero and Cary Grant, whatever, whoever, he might become, was never going to pass for an all-American hero. Gary Cooper would be able to grow into the role of the westerner, his voluptuous, gentle-looking face changing gradually – as though it had long been left thoughtlessly outside at the mercy of the elements – into a harder, rougher complexion, but Cary Grant could not go far in that particular direction. If Cary Grant’s future was American, his lineage was English. He could change the way he looked rather more effectively, and speedily, than he could change the way he sounded. His accent, when he arrived in Hollywood, was the oddest thing about him. Nobody talked like that, not even Archie Leach in earlier years.

There is no reason to believe that Archie Leach, during his childhood and early adolescence, sounded in any way different from other working-class Bristolians. There are, indeed, some who claim to be able to discern the distinctive ‘burr’ of his old Bristol accent beneath the assumed American tones.³⁰ It seems likely that Archie Leach’s accent first began to change during the period he spent in London with the Pender troupe. It was not just that he was, at the impressionable age of fourteen, exposed to the distinctive dialects associated with South London, but also, more specifically, that he was drawn into the London music-hall community, which had developed its own semiprivate patois, something described by one performer as ‘a mixture of Cockney, Romany and Hindustani’.³¹ Archie Leach, in time, would speak in his own odd hybrid of West Country and mock-cockney, with an increasingly distinctive staccato enunciation. Ernest Kingdon, his cousin, believed that this peculiar accent was to some extent the result of the fact that he was ‘trying to maintain English speech, and he had trouble with his diction … It’s not cultured English talk [but] very precise … as if he’d been taught elocution.’³² This very individualistic way of speaking was probably made even more noticeable during the years Leach spent touring the music-halls in Britain and America with the Penders. Peter Honri, a member of one of Britain’s most famous music-hall families, has noted that the so-called ‘music-hall voice’ relied not so much on volume as on ‘pitch and resonance’ – it was ‘a voice with a cutting edge’.³³

Archie Leach, as he struggled to survive in New York, realised that being – or, more pointedly, sounding – English limited the number of stage roles he could, with any seriousness, audition for.³⁴ ‘I still spoke English English, and I knew that to get jobs here, I’d have to learn American English.’³⁵ He was not trying consciously to erase the sounds that associated him with a certain geographic and class background; he was simply trying to make himself more employable in his new environment. As Richard Schickel has argued, he was probably aiming not for affectation but rather for ‘something unplaceable, even perhaps untraceable’, a malleable accent that could lend a ‘democratic touch of common humanity’ to an aristocratic role and a ‘touch of good breeding’ to the more raffish parts.³⁶

He did his best, and, of course, his accent had already begun to change during those first formative years he had spent in the United States,³⁷ but the transformation process was both slow and incomplete. Some New Yorkers during this time mistook him for an Australian,³⁸ and a number of his colleagues, for a brief period, took to calling him ‘Boomerang’, ‘Digger’ or ‘Kangaroo’ Leach (years later, in Mr Lucky, he referred back to this strange misconception, having his character explain his use of cockney rhyming slang by saying, ‘Oh, it’s a language I picked up in Australia’). Although his accent, once he had settled in Hollywood, grew gradually into its now-familiar transatlantic timbre, it continued to strike some American admirers as beguilingly exotic. The critic Richard Corliss, for example, writing on the occasion of Cary Grant’s death, recalled the ‘cutting tenor voice that refused to shake its Liverpool origins’³⁹ (which is rather like suggesting that James Stewart never quite managed to lose his Texan twang). Grant himself remained appealingly unpretentious and self-effacing when referring to his accent: when Jack Warner offered him Rex Harrison’s role in the movie version of My Fair Lady, he exclaimed, ‘I cannot play a dialectician – a perfect English teacher. It wouldn’t be believable … I sound the way ’Liza does at the beginning of the film.’⁴⁰

If the accent was, and would continue to be, unique, it was distinctive in the ‘right’ kind of way as far as Hollywood producers were concerned. There was a demand at the time for British (or at least British-sounding) actors, because the diction of so many American performers was, it was thought, ill-suited to the technical limitations of the early ‘talkies’. Although Archie Leach had arrived in Hollywood with his accent a volatile mixture of West Country, South London and New York, Cary Grant was able to attract attention by the way he sounded as well as by the way he looked. That accent, as a critic, Alexander Walker, has pointed out, gave the new personality an ‘edge’; it impressed on the voice ‘the sharpness that comedy needs if it’s to be slightly menacing’.⁴¹ It would, in time, become the kind of accent that could underline the humour in well-written dialogue and disguise the absence of it in the most mediocre of lines. Writers, as a consequence, were among Cary Grant’s most genuine admirers. Listen to the way, in The Awful Truth (1937), that Grant, serving a rival with a glass of egg-nog, manages to make the innocent question, ‘A little nutmeg?’ sound like a threat, or how, in The Grass is Greener (1960), he places such an artfully sardonic emphasis on the question, ‘Do you like Dundee cake?’, that it succeeds in mocking both the place-name and the antiquated mannerisms of his upper-class character. Cary Grant would become the kind of person who, as David Thomson put it, ‘could handle quick, complex, witty dialogue in the way of someone who enjoyed language as much as Cole Porter or Dorothy Parker’, with a memorably serviceable accent, caught between English and American, working-class and upper-class, that produced a tone that could be made to sound ‘uncertain whether to stay cool or let nerviness show’.⁴²

If Cary Grant was going to be someone who sounded unorthodox, he was also, in rather less obvious but equally significant ways, going to be someone who looked unorthodox. Whereas most other actors in Hollywood at that time were known either for their physical or verbal skills, Archie Leach, unusually, possessed both. Silent screen comedy had demanded performers who could be as funny as possible physically, noted the critic James Agee, ‘without the help or hindrance of words’. The screen comedian, before sound took hold of Hollywood, ‘combined several of the more difficult accomplishments of the acrobat, the dancer, the clown and the mime’.⁴³ The advent of the ‘talkies’ marked a change in direction. Archie Leach, with his vocal mannerisms and his acrobatic training, had the rare opportunity to make Cary Grant an appealing hybrid: a talented physical performer with a rare gift for speaking dialogue, someone who could, whilst remaining in character, utter a string of sophisticated witticisms before slipping suddenly on a solitary stuffed olive and landing ignominiously on his backside. One movie historian commented on what it was like to grow up in the 1920s with but one wish: to be ‘as lithe as Fairbanks and as suavely persuasive as Ronald Colman’.⁴⁴ Cary Grant had the rare chance to realise such a wish.

Archie Leach did not take long to see that the opportunity existed, and Cary Grant exploited it. He brought athleticism to elegance, physical humour to the drawing-room. It was the kind of unexpected versatility which undermined the rigid screen stereotypes, and it would help Cary Grant to become ‘an idol for all social classes’.⁴⁵ As Kael explains, other leading men, such as Melvyn Douglas, Henry Fonda and Robert Young, could produce proficient performances in screwball comedies and farcical situations, ‘but the roles didn’t release anything in their own natures – didn’t liberate and complete them, the way farce completed Grant’.⁴⁶ It was as though the grace of Fred Astaire had combined with the earthiness of Gene Kelly. David Thomson observed: ‘Only Fred Astaire ever moved as well as Cary Grant, but Grant moved with more dramatic eloquence while Astaire cherished the purity of movement. Grant could look as elegant as Astaire, but he could manage to look clumsy without actually sacrificing balance or style.’⁴⁷

Cary Grant’s potential could not be realised, however, until Archie Leach found the confidence to start acting like Cary Grant, and to start he needed first to develop a reasonably sharp sense of who Cary Grant should act like. Cary Grant, Archie Leach decided, should act like those stars who, up until then, had most impressed him. By his own admission, Cary Grant was in part, at the beginning, patterned on a combination of elegant contemporary Englishmen:

In the late 1920s I’d wavered between imitating two older English actors, of the natural, relaxed school, Sir Gerald DuMaurier and A. E. Matthews, and was seriously considering being Jack Buchanan and Ronald Squire as well; but Noël Coward’s performance in Private Lives narrowed the field, and many a musical-comedy road company was afflicted with my breezy new gestures and puzzling accent.⁴⁸

Coward’s unapologetically reinvented self – and accent – was of particular relevance. Alexander Walker comments how Coward’s example – above all others – probably encouraged Archie Leach ‘to abandon the stigmata of English class’.⁴⁹ Archie Leach had admired another British playwright, Freddie Lonsdale, because he ‘always had an engaging answer for everything’,⁵⁰ but Coward’s supremely confident manner and sparkling wit, as well as his success on both sides of the Atlantic (The Vortex had broken box-office records on Broadway), were particularly influential. Leach’s imitation, fixed as it was on the surface aspects of self, was graceless at first, but he learned from its limitations: ‘I cultivated raising one eyebrow, and tried to imitate those who put their hands in their pockets with a certain amount of ease and nonchalance. But at times, when I put my hand in my trouser pocket with what I imagined was great elegance, I couldn’t get the blinking thing out again because it dripped from nervous perspiration!’⁵¹

In addition to the English role-models, Archie Leach also looked to those examples he had noted of American charm and elegance. Fairbanks was, of course, an important influence, but so too were Fred Astaire and the man described by Philip Larkin as ‘all that ever went with evening dress’,⁵² Cole Porter (whom Cary Grant later portrayed – much to his discomfort and Porter’s delight – in the 1946 musical Night and Day). Another significant figure for Archie Leach was the actor Warner Baxter, described by one journalist at the time as ‘a Valentino without a horse’,⁵³ the ‘beau ideal’ who had been the first screen incarnation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1926) as well as the leading man in the first version of The Awful Truth (1925) – the re-make of which confirmed Cary Grant as a star.

A Hollywood star persona was cultivated, typically, through a combination of performance – carefully-chosen screen roles – and publicity – studio press releases and magazine stories.⁵⁴ Cary Grant emerged at a time when audiences had started reading rather more than before about the performers they saw on the screen; the fan magazine detailed every aspect of the stars’ lives, real and imaginary, and they sold by the million:

The success of the fan magazine phenomenon of the 1930s was a co-operative venture between the myth makers and an army of readers willing to be mythified. The magazines rewarded their true believers with a Parnassus of celluloid deities who climbed out of an instant seashell like Botticelli’s Aphrodite.⁵⁵

Motion picture magazines soon began referring to Paramount’s ‘suave, distinguished’ Cary Grant, a new star-in-the-making for whom, it was said, ‘the word “polished” fits … as closely as one of his own well-fitting gloves’.⁵⁶ He was, readers were told, a ‘handsome’ and ‘virile’ young man who ‘blushed “fiery red” when embarrassed’, and, it was added, he had the ‘same dreamy, flashy eyes as Valentino’.⁵⁷ While his studio worked hard to find the right kind of publicity to promote its own version of ‘Cary Grant’, he was advised, in the short term, to say little of any consequence himself. However, the studio soon realised that Grant was actually being rather too reticent for his own good. A Paramount publicist at the time came to regard the task of securing coverage for the relatively unknown Cary Grant as probably the most difficult and frustrating experience of her whole career as a press agent.⁵⁸ Having grown up with very few close personal ties, he had developed the habit of keeping his thoughts and beliefs to himself, and, having recently transformed his public self, he was over-cautious when subjected to journalistic requests for all the ‘facts’ about Cary Grant rather than Archie Leach. As one reporter noted after a very early encounter with him, ‘Anything he says about himself is so offhand and perfunctory that from his own testimony you get only the sketchiest impression of him.’⁵⁹ A writer on Motion Picture magazine was similarly frustrated: ‘Seldom have I seen a man so little inclined to pour out his soul, and you have to scratch around and dig in order to discover even the bare facts of his life from him.’⁶⁰

Paramount could package Cary Grant but it could not control entirely how he impressed himself on a movie audience. If Cary Grant was in danger of resembling a tabula rasa in the journalistic profile, on the movie screen he would soon seem, as Katharine Hepburn put it, ‘a personality functioning’.⁶¹ On the screen Cary Grant could be himself rather than explain himself (and that alone, in a sense, provided one with an adequate explanation). The actor Louis Jourdan has spoken of the impact that Cary Grant’s early movie performances had on him: ‘I was in awe of this persona, the look, the walk … The Cary Grant I fell in love with on the screen hadn’t yet discovered he was Cary Grant.’⁶² This new, unfamiliar, intriguing character called ‘Cary Grant’ was, as Jourdan appreciated, someone who did not fit neatly into the stereotypical roles but who was, on the contrary, a character in conflict with himself:

Behind the construction of his character is his working-class background. That’s what makes him interesting. That’s what makes him liked by the public. He’s close to them. He’s not an aristocrat. He’s not a bourgeois. He’s a man of his people. He is a man of the street pretending to be Cary Grant!⁶³

It was one of the most admirable achievements of Cary Grant: that he never had, or wished, to renounce his past in order to embrace his future. Unlike those stars who seemed ashamed of, or embarrassed by, their humble origins, Cary Grant seemed content to stand upon his singularity; it would, for example, have taken a reckless person to risk calling Rex Harrison ‘Reg’ to his face, but Cary Grant delighted in slipping references to his former name into his movie dialogue – such as the ad-libbed line in His Girl Friday (1940): ‘Listen, the last man who said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat.’⁶⁴ It was a knowing wink to the audience, his audience, a secret shared with strangers; it was the kind of gesture that would have endeared someone like Cary Grant to someone like Archie Leach.

Archie Leach did not cease to exist when Cary Grant was created. ‘Cary Grant’ was just a name, a cluster of idealised qualities. Cary Grant became something other than the sum of his influences, and he preserved more than it might have appeared from his own personal history in that charismatic conformation. Cary Grant was not conceived of as the contradiction of Archie Leach, but rather as the constitution of his desires. If Cary Grant succeeded, Archie Leach, more than anyone else, more than any other influence or ingredient, would be responsible. Cary Grant would always appreciate that fact. Fifty years after he changed his name, when he was the subject of a special tribute,⁶⁵ he requested that the cover of the programme for the occasion should feature a photograph of himself at the age of five – signed by ‘Archie Leach’.

CHAPTER VI Hollywood

Since I was tall, had black hair and white teeth, which I polished daily,I had all the semblance of what in those days was considered a leadingman. I played in the kind of film where one was always polite andperfectly attired.

CARY GRANT

You must not forget who you are …

FEDORA

It was an anxious Cary Grant who reported to work for the first time at Paramount. Archie Leach had a new name, but he had yet to make a new reputation. Here he was at the studio of Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier, Fredric March, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Claudette Colbert, Tallulah Bankhead, Miriam Hopkins, Sylvia Sidney, Carole Lombard and Harold Lloyd – big stars, experienced performers. The only person with whom Archie Leach was acquainted was Jeanette MacDonald, but her option had not been renewed and she was leaving the studio. Cary Grant was on his own.

If Cary Grant was intimidated by his new surroundings, he was not disheartened. Jean Dalrymple, who had given Archie Leach his first paid speaking role in vaudeville, recalled:

I had lunch with him at the Algonquin just before he went to California. He was so excited. He felt it was his great opportunity. I remember telling him not to get stuck in California but to come back to the theater from time to time.

I didn’t know he was going to be a sensational hit. He didn’t always have that marvelous, debonair personality. He was often very quiet and reserved. But when he got in front of a camera, his eyes sparkled and he was full of life. The camera loved him.¹

Cary Grant’s Hollywood was the Hollywood of the thirties. The effects of the Wall Street Crash were still being felt, and yet memories of the event, which had hit movie-makers in the West as well as more conventional businessmen in the East, were already – for some – receding. Audiences were still visiting America’s vast rococo and Moorish picture palaces, those strangely aristocratic arenas of the new democratic art where visitors were greeted with an anxious show of opulence – fountains and waterfalls, painted peacocks and doves, huge mirrors and grand arcades, thick carpeting and air-conditioning, all designed to project, for a few hours, an illusion of prosperity. If it seemed to the weary, depression-ridden citizen that the American dream could not be lived, then Hollywood studios worked hard to remind people that it could still be imagined. ‘There’s a Paramount Picture probably around the corner’, the studio told Saturday Evening Post readers. ‘See it and you’ll be out of yourself, living someone else’s life … You’ll find a new viewpoint. And tomorrow you’ll work … not merely worry.’² It was a relatively successful strategy. In the midst of the Great Depression, audiences were still exhibiting what in the circumstances appeared a remarkable appetite for the products of Hollywood. In the first half of the decade, however, Paramount, ruled by Adolph Zukor, lacked the rock-like business stability of, for example, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and the profit or loss incurred by one movie tended to affect unduly the studio’s financial climate.³ In the year that Cary Grant joined the studio, Paramount had made a sixteen-million-dollar loss, with possible bankruptcy ensuing.

Paramount – not surprisingly – had no intention of starting Cary Grant in important leading roles, but he would have more than enough opportunities to attract the attention of movie audiences. The company (after a policy of wild and rashly overoptimistic expansion during the second half of the 1920s) owned the largest circuit of theatres in the world, which it kept supplied by producing around sixty feature films per year. Operating on increasingly strict factory lines, it completed and shipped at least one new movie every week, so there was always a place for a new contractee somewhere along the assembly line. As a newcomer, Cary Grant was expected to work extremely hard for his $450 a week. He was there, without doubt, to do what he was told. It was a six-day schedule, Monday to Saturday, with no extra pay for overtime (which was common). The bare statistics of his first year with the studio reflect the production-line smoothness of the times: he made seven movies in 1932, working a full fifty-two weeks.

During Grant’s first few hectic weeks at the studio he found a supporter in Jack Haley, the comedian, who later achieved his greatest Hollywood success in the role of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (1939). As his son, Jack Haley, Jnr., remembers, Grant was grateful to know someone else who had made the transition from vaudeville to movies:

When Cary was first at Paramount, he made a bee-line for my father, who had already done six or seven pictures there … Cary wanted to know what making movies was all about. My father told him, ‘The first thing you learn is not to use your stage makeup. So find a good makeup person. And don’t talk to the leading actress. She’ll steer you wrong. She’s your competition. Talk to the character people. They’ll teach you the ins and outs.’

Cary loved Charlie Ruggles, Arthur Treacher, and all those character people who came from Broadway or vaudeville. He felt secure with them. Years later Cary told me, ‘Your father was the only one who gave me advice for my first picture’.⁴

Grant first appeared, billed fifth, in Frank Tuttle’s farce This is the Night. Playing the supporting role of an Olympic javelin thrower whose wife is having an affair with a millionaire playboy, Grant was described in the advertisements for the movie as ‘the new he-man sensation of Cinemerica!’⁵ Tuttle left Grant largely to his own devices, which were still those of a stage-trained actor, and, as a consequence, his performance showed no appreciation of the importance of underplaying. At eighth in the cast list, he was less noticeable as a rich roué in Alexander Hall’s Sinners in the Sun, his first of two disappointing movies with Carole Lombard, although he did have his first chance to show audiences how good he looked in evening clothes. Equally facetious, and even more devoid of opportunities for Grant to impress, was Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily we go to Hell, in which his contribution, billed ninth, was always going to be negligible. A slightly more promising role was then given to him by Marion Gering in The Devil and the Deep, the stars of which were Tallulah Bankhead, Charles Laughton and Gary Cooper.⁶

Of the three other movies in which Grant appeared in 1932 – Blonde Venus, Hot Saturday and Madame Butterfly – by far the most significant was Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus starring Marlene Dietrich. It was the first good, substantial, role he had been given, one that would provide him with a serious opportunity to show that he could convince audiences as a romantic consort. He was playing opposite the nearest thing that Paramount had at that time to a screen ‘goddess’, and she was treated accordingly; her custom-built four-room dressing-suite had cost the studio $300,000 (about sixty times the cost of an average US family dwelling in 1932), she had the right to veto her publicity and, with von Sternberg as her director and mentor, an unusually influential say in the selection, and production, of her starring vehicles.

It was while making this, his fifth, movie, and the first that Gary Cooper had rejected, that Grant’s image underwent a minor but significant cosmetic transformation. The director, von Sternberg, ever the meticulous auteur, changed Grant’s hair parting from the left to the right. According to Alexander Walker, the main reason why von Sternberg decided to change the parting was to annoy and unsettle Grant.⁷ ‘Joe loved to throw you,’ Grant told Walker. ‘Could you do anything worse to an actor than alter his hair parting just a minute before he starts shooting a scene? I kept it that way ever since, as you may have noticed. To annoy him.’⁸ It also, as he (and von Sternberg) probably knew, improved his appearance; his ‘best side’, for the camera, was his right (he disliked the mole on his left side), and the new ramrod-straight parting (which became the single most simple and straightforward thing about him) complemented his other features.

The inexperienced and under-confident Grant did not enjoy working for von Sternberg. There were periods when he was left to look on bemused as the director and the star argued with each other in German, and there were other times when the director seemed intent on turning his fury onto him: ‘I could never get a scene under way before Joe would bawl out “Cut” – at me, personally, across the set. This went on and on and on. I felt like someone doing drill who kept dropping his rifle, but wasn’t going to be allowed to drop out of ranks.’⁹ Grant was miscast as Nick Townsend, a politician (‘he runs this end of town’) who makes Dietrich his mistress, enabling her to pay for her ailing husband, played by Herbert Marshall, to travel to Germany in search of a cure for his illness. Marshall – who, as Richard Schickel has rather cruelly remarked, ‘always played civility as if it were a form of victimisation’¹⁰ – should have provided Grant with a useful contrast for his own characterisation; von Sternberg, however, allowed Grant to throw away even his passionate speeches, and for too much of the movie he appears so self-effacing as to be almost invisible. He was, however, beautifully lit and photographed – as were all the leading actors – and he looked good in his fine clothes and glamorous environment. It was, in short, a helpful movie for an ambitious young actor, even if von Sternberg left him feeling, if anything, even less confident than before.

Amidst the unfamiliarity of his new surroundings, Cary Grant, like countless other new arrivals with British backgrounds, sought and found, at least for a short while, a relatively reassuring sense of security and stability in that tightly-knit community of émigré English actors and writers sometimes referred to as the ‘Hollywood Raj’ or the ‘British movie colony’.¹¹ A few English performers, such as Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, had arrived as early as 1910 as refugees from Victorian music-hall, but the coming of sound had been the signal for a further wave of stage-trained English actors. Though the British mixed fairly freely with the rest of Hollywood society, they seemed, in spite of it, to retain a certain separateness. In the mid-thirties, the Christian Science Monitor, reporting on foreigners in Hollywood, was particularly struck by the obduracy of the British in their preservation of their culture:

Several English cake shops now exist, catering almost exclusively to the English, who maintain a stricter aloofness than do most other resident aliens; steak and kidney pies have miraculously made their appearance all over town and are sometimes even eaten by the natives; Devonshire cream is also manufactured, but in very small quantities … Once a year, on New Year’s Eve, the principal members of the British colony gather in a Hollywood café to hear the bells of Big Ben ring out over the radio … Billiards are now played regularly at the homes of most British stars, and officers of the British warships visiting in California harbors entertain and are entertained by a group founded by Victor McLaglen and known as the British United Services Club, comprised in large part of actors who have served in one of the branches of the British military; while on many a film set old members of the same London club [usually the Garrick], meet and fraternise.¹²

Many of these English actors had found work in Hollywood because of their ‘exotic’ qualities – their looks, their mannerisms and their accents. Their relative insularity, therefore, was not merely the result of homesickness or cultural taste but also, in many cases, professional necessity; to mix too freely and too frequently with one’s American colleagues was to risk becoming fully assimilated by, and acculturated in, American society. The commercial appeal of many English actors was their Englishness; English actors who looked and sounded American, unless they were remarkably talented, faced much fiercer competition for roles. Many of the most successful English actors of the time were well aware of the danger. Ronald Colman, Artur Rubinstein recalled, possessed a ‘beautiful’ English accent which actually ‘became better and more marked with time instead of becoming Americanised’,¹³ while C. Aubrey Smith, specialising in playing a limited range of crusty English colonel types, developed and preserved a lucrative cluster of echt-English mannerisms for the enchantment of American audiences. There were some for whom the need, or desire, to maintain their cultural distinctiveness caused them, gradually but usually inexorably, to settle into a comfortable form of self-parody. Aubrey Smith – who once summed up his experience of working with Garbo in Queen Christina in the remark, ‘She’s a ripping gel’,¹⁴ and who lived in a house on Mulholland Drive that boasted a weather vane made out of three cricket stumps, a bat and a ball – was a comically anachronistic figure even for most of his compatriots, while Gladys Cooper, taking tea one warm afternoon at the Pacific Palisades home of Robert Coote, reacted with typical mock-horror to the arrival of George Cukor by exclaiming disapprovingly: ‘Darling … there seems to be an American on your lawn.’¹⁵

Although as time went on Cary Grant continued to enjoy the company of many of the Hollywood British, he was not eager to become too closely identified with them. The least appealing aspect of the British colony was that it was a kind of microcosm of British society, with the same hierarchical structure and snobbery. There were other working-class Englishmen in Hollywood, but few of them seem to have embraced – or been embraced by – the colony. Chaplin was sufficiently powerful and secure to have no need of such a self-consciously exclusive community, whereas others from similar backgrounds, such as Stan Laurel, Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Laughton, found the prospect of enduring the old class tensions for a second time, this time on foreign soil, too unpleasant to contemplate for very long.¹⁶

At a time when Archie Leach was just beginning to get used to being Cary Grant, the stalwart members of the British colony – after the initial pleasantries were over with – were the most likely people to remind Cary Grant that he was ‘really’ just Archie Leach. Established members of the colony did nothing to disguise their privileged backgrounds: Aubrey Smith (Charterhouse and Cambridge), Basil Rathbone (Repton), Boris Karloff (Uppingham), John Loder (Eton) and Clive Brook (Dulwich) were among those who were known to attend the annual public-school dinner organised by the Hollywood British. David Niven (Stowe and Sandhurst), who arrived in 1934, found it relatively easy to ingratiate himself with this exclusive group,¹⁷ whereas Grant, who struck some of the expatriates as ‘socially insecure’,¹⁸ simply had no choice but to ‘go native’.

He became friends with another Paramount contract player, Randolph Scott, when the two co-starred in Hot Saturday, and they decided to pool their resources and share a house. Handsome, amiable and increasingly successful, the two men began to attract precious publicity as two of Hollywood’s most eligible young bachelors.¹⁹ Scott introduced Grant to Howard Hughes, who, in turn, provided Grant with an entrée into Hollywood’s most glamorous social circles, introducing him to a period of grand and incessant parties, sophisticated and affluent new friends, and all the paraphernalia of California high society. In a sense, Grant found that he could have the best of both worlds: the established British stars were, at least early on, useful contacts, while the rest of the Hollywood community appreciated his unusual sociability. Cary Grant became known as an Englishman who genuinely enjoyed – and felt comfortable in – the company of Americans, and that, in the early thirties, was a rarity which he exploited to the full.

On the movie screen, Cary Grant was still struggling to improve as an actor. Josef von Sternberg had made an ill-conceived attempt to shout him into producing a more assured performance, but the stiffness remained: ‘Joe bemoaned, berated and beseeched me to relax, but it was years before I could move with ease before a camera. Years before I could stop my right eyebrow from lifting, a sure sign of inner defenses and tensions. ’²⁰ The majority of the roles he was being given by Paramount simply capitalised on his good looks, putting him into smart uniforms or elegant evening clothes at every opportunity. His success, such as it was, struck him as shallow. Jack Haley Jnr. sympathised: ‘It must have been miserable for Cary. As a foreigner … he was at the bottom of the barrel in terms of parts. The first choice went to Gary Cooper. The second went to George Raft. Even Fred MacMurray was getting better parts than Cary.’²¹ A publicist put it more bluntly: ‘Gary Cooper or Freddie March, they were actors. Cary Grant? He was kind of a stick … He was there to look tall, dark and handsome.’²² When he was forced to play Lieutenant Pinkerton in the movie version of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, and sing ‘My Flower of Japan’ to Sylvia Sidney’s Cio-Cio-San, it seemed that his career, if it was progressing at all, was doing so painfully slowly.

Cary Grant’s fortunes changed suddenly and unexpectedly. Before he had finished shooting Madame Butterfly, he found himself cast in She Done Him Wrong, opposite Mae West. In his autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, von Sternberg boasted that he had ‘rescued’ Grant from a possible career of being ‘one of Mae West’s foils’ in order to launch him ‘on his stellar career’.²³ The memories of Hollywood celebrities are notoriously unreliable: as the call to work with West came some months after Grant had finished Blonde Venus, von Sternberg’s role in the advancement of Grant’s ‘stellar career’ was somewhat overstated. West claimed in her (equally unreliable) autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It, that she noticed ‘a sensational looking young man’ – Grant – on the Paramount lot, and cast him on the spot: ‘If this one can talk,’ she claims she said at the time, ‘I’ll take him.’²⁴ According to West, she saw immediately that Grant ‘had poise, a great walk, everything women would like’.²⁵ In truth, Grant was probably first spotted by West on the screen in one of his earlier movie appearances (‘I liked his voice first, but I saw right away that the rest of him measured up’²⁶). As far as his casting for She Done Him Wrong was concerned, it seems likely that B. P. Schulberg had favoured pairing his new leading man with the aggressive West,²⁷ and it is also known that Lowell Sherman, the director West had chosen for the movie, had liked Grant’s performance in Blonde Venus.²⁸

The movie was an adaptation of West’s stage success of 1928, Diamond Lil. She played Lady Lou, ‘one of the finest women who ever walked the streets’, who runs a Bowery saloon; Grant played Captain Cummings, from the nearby church mission, who is really ‘the Hawk’, a government agent. It was the first opportunity since Grant had been in Hollywood for him to make use of his vaudeville training as a straight man. ‘Haven’t you ever met a man who can make you happy?’ he asks her. ‘Sure,’ she replies, ‘lots of times.’ West had usually played opposite men who appeared as tough and as coarse as her own character, and Grant’s more vulnerable performance provided an interesting contrast to her brash sexuality. ‘Why don’t you come up sometime, see me?’ she says to him, staring into his eyes. ‘Come up. I’ll tell your fortune.’

Shooting began on 21 November 1932, and was completed in a mere eighteen days. For an outlay of $200,000, it earned $2 million within three months in the US alone. This movie, in effect, saved Paramount from bankruptcy. Cary Grant emerged from the triumph as someone who had the potential to be much more than a mere straight man to Mae West. As Pauline Kael observes, West brought out Grant’s passivity, giving him an aloof charm, ‘a quality of refinement in him which made her physical aggression seem a playful gambit’.²⁹ Kael also noted that the success of the performance was achieved in spite of Grant’s relative lack of confidence in his own abilities as a movie actor: he did not ‘yet know how the camera should see him’, and he appeared, when he had little to do in a scene, ‘vaguely ill at ease’, standing ‘lunged forward as if hoping to catch a ball’³⁰ (this might be a little unfair: Grant’s character was meant to seem uneasy in his duplicity, and his physical awkwardness provided West with the opportunity for yet more double entendres: ‘That’s right. Loosen up. Unbend. You’ll feel better’). He was, none the less, the ‘classiest’ leading man whom West had appeared with, and the critics appreciated that fact. ‘Hi, tall, dark and handsome,’ she said to him; it was a nice welcome for Cary Grant. His good looks, under-playing and good comic timing combined to suggest a very promising future. After roles in three more formulaic movies – The Woman Accused, The Eagle and the Hawk and Gambling Ship (all 1933) – Paramount seized on the opportunity to cast Grant alongside West for their second movie together: I’m No Angel. The weak story-line never threatened to distract one’s attention from the comic dialogue:

Grant: Do you mind if I get personal?

West: I don’t mind if you get familiar.

Although it was a poor movie in comparison with She Done Him Wrong, it was another great success at the box-office. Paramount raised his salary to $750 per week. Fan mail began to arrive in increasing amounts, and the fan magazines started to compete for his interviews.³¹

He was grateful for the exposure afforded him by his association with West – who was among the top ten box-office attractions in the country at that time – but he became increasingly resentful of the shameless way in which she sought to take all of the credit for his stardom: ‘She always got a great deal of publicity for herself … I could never understand the woman. I thought she was brilliant with that one character she portrayed, but she was an absolute fake as a person. You would shudder from it.’³² At the time, however, Grant – who thought more than most about the technique behind a performance – was well aware of what an excellent teacher in the art of screen comedy West was: ‘She knows so much … Her instinct is so true, her timing so perfect, her grasp of the situation so right. It’s the tempo of the acting that counts rather than the sincerity of the characterisation. Her personality is so dominant that everyone with her becomes just a feeder.’³³ One of the most impressive qualities of the young Cary Grant was this capacity for quiet observation; he never missed an opportunity to learn from performers more experienced, and more skilled, than himself, and he learned much of immense value from his working experience with Mae West.

Grant was now in the process of becoming something of a Hollywood celebrity. He inherited the dressing-room formerly occupied by George Bancroft, a star of silent movies who had recently been demoted to the ranks of supporting players. Paramount’s most illustrious top dozen stars were quartered side by side in implied order of importance. Mae West had taken possession of dressing-room number 1, followed by the other leading women: Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Sylvia Sidney, Miriam Hopkins and Carole Lombard. Then came the leading male stars: Gary Cooper, Fredric March, Bing Crosby, George Raft, Cary Grant and Charles Laughton. Grant’s personal life was also beginning to change: he became engaged in 1933 to Virginia Cherrill, who had played the blind girl in Chaplin’s City Lights, and in November he took her back to England,³⁴ where they were married on 9 February the following year. He was thirty years old. The marriage, however, was soon in trouble; in the spring of 1935 they separated, and Grant began a series of brief relationships with other women.³⁵ The couple were granted a divorce that March.

Professionally, the years 1934 and 1935 did not see Grant offered many movie roles by Paramount which provided him with much opportunity to exploit his new-found popularity. Thirty Day Princess, Born to Be Bad, Kiss and Make Up, Ladies Should Listen (all 1934) were largely forgettable affairs. After making Wings in the Dark (1935), Grant was given six months off; Paramount had a backlog of Grant movies which had yet to be released.³⁶ It seemed as though the studio was undecided as to how best it should utilise his talents, and his dissatisfaction with Paramount deepened: ‘They had a lot of leading men at Paramount with dark hair and a set of teeth like mine, and they couldn’t be buying stories for all of us.’³⁷ In November 1935 he returned to England to make The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss³⁸ for the independent company, Garrett Klement Pictures; if he had hoped to find temporary relief away from Hollywood, he was disappointed – during the filming, his father died.

When Grant returned to Hollywood early in 1936 he was anxious to sort out his future. He feared that he was in danger of being eclipsed by some of his contemporaries, such as James Cagney (who had just reached number ten in the list of top box-office draws) and Errol Flynn (who had starred recently in the very successful Captain Blood). It had become obvious to insiders that Grant was unhappy at Paramount. When Sylvia Scarlett, which he had made on loan at RKO the previous year, was released, the generally positive reviews of his contribution encouraged him to persevere in his struggle for more control over his career.

Grant later acknowledged Sylvia Scarlett as ‘my breakthrough’,³⁹ but it was, in many ways, a spectacular failure. Based on Compton Mackenzie’s picaresque novel, it starred Katharine Hepburn and was directed by George Cukor. Grant played Jimmy Monkley (‘gentleman adventurer’), a cockney con-man who teams up with Sylvia Scarlett (Hepburn) and her father (Edmund Gwenn) in various embezzlement schemes. The most unusual aspect of the movie was that the plot called for Hepburn to masquerade as a boy through most of the story.⁴⁰ Coded motifs and hidden implications abound in the script: Monkley wants to cuddle up to Sylvester ‘like a hot-water bottle’; a housemaid wants to daub a moustache on Sylvester and kiss ‘him’; and a bohemian artist is given a ‘queer feeling’ by his fascination with the boy. For a woman to appear on the screen in drag, in spite of the moralistic Production Code of the time, was a daring departure for a Hollywood movie, but the conceit was only allowed after Cukor had been ordered to add what he later described as ‘a silly, frivolous prologue, to explain why this girl was dressed like a boy, and being so good at it. We weren’t allowed to give the impression that she liked it, or that she’d done it before, or that it came naturally.’⁴¹

The movie proved to be both a personal watershed and a professional catastrophe for several of the people who made it. Its dismal reception set in motion Katharine Hepburn’s boycotting by the nation’s movie exhibitors as ‘box-office poison’. Hepburn’s accent flits from French to cod-cockney to Bryn Mawr, and, in her stylised boy’s clothes and principal-boy’s gestures, she appears – far from seeming unnervingly androgynous – merely epicene (an American cousin, perhaps, of the English camp comic actor Kenneth Williams). The dialogue – ‘why, then I won’t be a girl! I won’t be weak and I won’t be silly! I’ll be a boy and be rough and hard’ – did nothing to discourage her irritatingly mannered performance. At one point during the shooting of the movie, Hepburn confided in her diary: ‘This picture makes no sense at all.’⁴² It was a perceptive remark. RKO executives were furious long before Sylvia Scarlett was confirmed as the studio’s worst box-office failure of the year. The movie’s shell-shocked producer, Pandro Berman, told Hepburn and Cukor (but not Grant) that he never wanted to work with either of them ever again.⁴³

What was extraordinary was how Grant managed to emerge from this débâcle not merely unscathed but with an enhanced reputation. ‘That was really the beginning for Cary,’ Katharine Hepburn remembered. ‘He was the only reason to see Sylvia Scarlett. It was a terrible picture, but he was wonderful in it.’⁴⁴ One reason why Grant was so effective in it was the fact that he was playing an Englishman, and several scenes were set in a travelling fair (performing songs like ‘The Winkle on the Boarding ’ouse Floor’). There is, indeed, more than a trace of Archie Leach in Grant’s performance. Jimmy Monkley was formed by the same society that had shaped Grant: first glimpsed in a black hat and coat on a boat crossing the English Channel, he later refers to himself sarcastically as ‘a little friend of all the world, nobody’s enemy but me own’, and more soberly as ‘a rolling stone’ who is neither a ‘sparrow’ nor an ‘’awk’. ‘Take it from me,’ he tells Scarlett, ‘it don’t do to step out of your class.’ In contrast to Archie Leach, however, Jimmy Monkley sees no way of escaping, merely surviving. ‘You have the mind of a pig,’ Scarlett tells him. ‘It’s a pig’s world,’ he replies. As Richard Schickel has suggested, the role of Jimmy Monkley offered Grant the opportunity ‘to get in touch with what was usable in his past, lay it out in public, and discover that his bright new, light new world would not collapse inward upon him, that, indeed, it was capable of vast expansion’.⁴⁵ George Cukor agreed: until then, he said, Grant had been ‘a successful young leading man who was nice-looking but had no particular identity’.⁴⁶ This movie, he added, changed that: ‘Sylvia Scarlett was the first time Cary felt the ground under his feet as an actor. He suddenly seemed liberated. It was very exhilarating to see.’⁴⁷ The critics were also impressed: writing in Variety, one declared that Grant ‘steals the picture’, while the Motion Picture Herald reviewer praised Grant’s performance as ‘the most convincing’ and in stark contrast to the ‘overstrained’ attempts at characterisation by his more experienced co-stars.⁴⁸

Sylvia Scarlett, or rather Grant’s role within it, was his ticket to leave Paramount. His contract was about to run out, and the success of his portrayal of Jimmy Monkley, combined with the increasingly cavalier treatment he felt he was receiving from Paramount (vetoing his request to go on loan to MGM for Mutiny on the Bounty, putting him in a mystery called Big Brown Eyes, loaning him out again to MGM for a second lead in Suzy and then putting him in the insipid screwball comedy Wedding Present), made up his mind for him. He would refuse to renew his contract. Not only would he break away from Paramount, he would, he resolved, from that point on, after twenty-one movies, refuse to commit himself exclusively to any one studio.

It is difficult today to appreciate just how astonishing and courageous (or reckless) Grant’s decision seemed in the mid-thirties. No one of his stature had contemplated acting as a freelance performer since the days before the studio system took hold of Hollywood. He had, however, come a long way on his own, further than most, and, although his own vision of himself was still somewhat out of focus, it was considerably sharper than the vision of Cary Grant found among the producers at Paramount. It seems possible that even the executives at Paramount were beginning, grudgingly, to realise that this was the case. Adolph Zukor, who was anxious to keep him at the studio, offered Grant thirty-five hundred dollars per week to stay. Grant, however, was adamant that his future lay in independence and the freedom to choose not only his roles but also, eventually, his co-workers and his scripts. Jack Haley, Jnr., has stressed the peculiarity of Grant’s independent spirit:

He was constantly a maverick, rebelling against what everybody expected him to do. He had the confidence to say good-bye to Pender and look for work in the theater. Later he’d walk out on the Shuberts. Then he walked out on Paramount, which offered him a great deal of money to stay. And that was right toward the end of the Depression. It took cojones to do that.⁴⁹

Many other promising young actors were stunned by such an urgent and uncompromising attitude. ‘If I had stayed at Paramount,’ he said, ‘I would have continued to take pictures that Gary Cooper, William Powell, or Clive Brook turned down.’⁵⁰ The rivalry between Grant and Cooper, in particular, had been growing increasingly intense during the previous couple of years. Cooper had once dismissed the challenge of Grant by claiming that he was ‘a crack comedian, no competition for me’,⁵¹ but things had since become rather more unnerving, and Photoplay magazine said of the two men: ‘They know that they’re pitted against each other, and when the final gong sounds, one of them will be on the floor.’⁵²

In the autumn of 1936, Grant bought out what little remained of his contract and announced that he was open to offers from other studios. The first movie he accepted was Columbia’s When You’re in Love. While working on it, he was also offered a prominent role in The Toast of New York by RKO. He worked on the Columbia movie by day and the RKO project by night. Neither movie did particularly well at the box-office, but both studios were impressed with his performances and offered to sign him to contracts. His financial demands nearly deterred them: he asked for a flat fee of $75,000 per movie. Both studios felt the sum was exorbitant. The only way to break the stalemate was for Grant to prove to Columbia and RKO that he could find a similar offer elsewhere. Hal Roach approached him to co-star in the fantasy comedy Topper, offering to pay him $50,000 if the movie was successful. It was. For very little work (he was actually on the screen for far less of the movie than it seemed), Grant experienced his first undisputed commercial success as a star. He played an elegant ghost in a high society world of nightclubs, champagne, pink ladies and fast cars, a magical figure who exuded what would come to be thought of as the essence of Grant’s image – playful and unflappable sophistication. After its release there was a further huge increase in his fan mail, over two hundred letters each week. It showed producers that he could carry a movie, and it also marked the beginning of his reputation as one of Hollywood’s most gifted light actors. Through his agent, Frank Vincent, Grant worked out a unique deal whereby he would work for both Columbia and