It's an evolutionary story really. Look at where he starts and where he finishes. A ragamuffin kid with serious psychological damage rises to the heights of world fame. Author Scott Eyman on Cary Grant, the subject of his new biography
Hollywood's king of charm, Cary Grant, worked to conceal a fractured sense of self
The other people I have written about — they knew who they were. But Grant had the central dilemma of his dual identity between Archie Leach and Cary Grant. Biographer Scott Eyman
Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise Scott Eyman Simon and Schuster
For decades, he was the most charming and debonair presence on the screen. And even today, 34 years after his death, Cary Grant remains a potent testament to Hollywood's golden age. Indeed, one of the defining images in popular culture is that famous scene from Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest in which he flees the lethal assault of a crop-dusting aircraft.
But was “Cary Grant” for real? Hitchcock, who worked with Grant four times, saw behind the facade, observing that there was “only one actor in the world so formidably skilled that he could fake a charm he did not possess.”
Hitch was talking about Grant, whose confident aura of star power concealed fears and insecurities so extreme that he spent much of his life preventing an adoring public from meeting the man he really was. Eventually, he would face up to his demons sufficiently to talk openly of the decades he spent living someone else's life — the life of Cary Grant. “I helped create this guy, but I didn't believe in him for one second.” Meanwhile he kept pushing loved ones away from him, afraid they would discover his hollowness as a man.
Scott Eyman's new biography, Cary Grant, carries a tantalizing subtitle — “A Brilliant Disguise.” — and with good reason. Eyman is an accomplished Hollywood historian who delivered an acclaimed biography of John Wayne in 2014. But with Grant, he faced the daunting challenge of probing the enigma of the man who was born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England, in 1904, and then spent a lifetime trying to escape the emotional ravages of those early years.
“The other people I have written about — they knew who they were,” Eyman explains. “But Grant had the central dilemma of his dual identity between Archie Leach and Cary Grant. None of my other subjects posed this level of difficulty.”
Grant reached for gold and won it. But behind the glamorous exterior, there lurked the reality of an unhappy but resilient kid named Archie Leach, son of an alcoholic dad and a missing mother who, as he would discover to his horror 20 years later, had secretly been committed to an asylum. By that time, this bright but troubled boy who had left school at 14 to work as an acrobat in a travelling music-hall troupe had made it to Hollywood where he was on the verge of stardom and a triumphant succession of films that are among the best and most enduring in history. But in the background there would remain the frightened youngster obsessed with safeguarding the commodity that was Cary Grant.
“It was a franchise,” Eyman tells Postmedia from his home in Florida. “He understood that he was a franchise. He had an underlying horror of ever going back to becoming Archie Leach.”
However, the drive to succeed was bolstered by an innate intelligence, Eyman notes. “He had a very good instinct for directors and scripts that would showcase him to his benefit.” Yet, it was never just about himself: Grant's generosity on the set was legendary, which is why co-stars like Katharine Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman loved working with him. “He would work hard to make everyone look good,” Eyman says. “That shows a level of selflessness that a lot of movie stars don't have.”
Grant had a natural affinity for physical comedy. He could play a ruthless newspaper editor in His Girl Friday with the same comic ease that he displayed in his portrayal of a neurotic paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby and a pompous French officer in I Was a Male War Bride. And he was secure enough professionally to extend his range — romping through a robust action epic such as Gunga Din, venturing into darkness in Hitchcock's Notorious and embracing the glorious escapism of North By Northwest.
But he did enter an emotional danger zone in 1944 with None But the Lonely Heart. That self-revealing movie earned Grant his only Oscar nomination, but after making it, Archie Leach scurried back into hiding and the public facade of Cary Grant resumed control.
“He wanted to prove himself as a dramatic actor but he never went there again,” Eyman says. “I think the rewards were insufficient to the stress and strain of playing someone so much like himself ... making this movie about a disaffected lower-class Englishman who can't establish a relationship with his mother. That's pretty close to the bone. It's the story of his life.”
Archie Leach needed to be kept safely in his shell. Yet, he's a constant presence in this book. He's there in the five marriages (four of them failures), in his inability to sustain close emotional relationships, in the tightwad who never picked up the cheque at a restaurant, in the outbursts of mindless jealousy, in the sexual promiscuity, in the experiments with LSD.
Eyman is circumspect when it comes to Grant's sexuality — and distances himself from obsessive attempts by other writers to convince the world that Grant was gay. The book's detailed look at the actor's middle-aged passion for Italian actress Sophia Loren — who consumed him with her “overwhelming” sexuality — is sufficient to muddy the credibility of the tabloid speculation.
“I don't write that kind of book,” Eyman says firmly. “I grew up abhorring such books. I thought they were trash. I don't want to go through anybody's dirty sheets — that's not the focus of my research. So I simply lay out the evidence about his relationships and readers can make up their own mind.”
The book's measured conclusion: “There is plausible evidence to place him in any sexual box you want — gay, bi, straight or any combination that might be expected from a street kid with a street kid's sense of experience.”
Grant quit acting at the age of 62, entered a final happy marriage, experienced the joy of parenthood (daughter Jennifer being the product of his turbulent fourth marriage) and spent his last years touring with a one-man show about his career. It was during one of those tours that he died at 82.
“It's an evolutionary story really,” Eyman says. “Look at where he starts and where he finishes. A ragamuffin kid with serious psychological damage rises to the heights of world fame. It's amazing that he was able to conquer and vanquish his own insecurities — but he finally did.”