Star got high on LSD to escape troubled love life
FRANCE: ‘‘Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,’’ Cary Grant once said.
‘‘Even I want to be Cary Grant.’’ The gulf between the actor’s public persona and his private self has been a source of fascination for filmgoers and scholars ever since his death in 1986.
Fresh insights are being offered in a documentary that received its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
Becoming Cary Grant uses previously private film footage and excerpts from the actor’s unpublished memoir to give details about his extensive use of LSD as a way of finding ‘‘inner peace’’.
Lines from the autobiography, read by the actor Jonathan Pryce, show that he credited the hallucinogen with allowing him to overcome a deep-seated mistrust of women that ruined three of his five marriages.
The actor, who was born in Bristol under the name Archie Leach, wrote that he was convinced his unhappiness stemmed from the loss of his mother, below, when he was 11.
‘‘I came home one day and she was gone,’’ he recalled. ‘‘It gradually dawned on me that she was not coming back. She left a void in my life, a sadness of spirit that affected everything I did. I always felt my mother rejected me.’’
Grant appeared to believe that she had died.
In fact, Elsie was committed to the Bristol Lunatic Asylum by his father, Elias, who later moved to Southampton to marry another woman.
It was only after Grant had travelled to America with a troupe of gymnasts and embarked upon a film career with Paramount that he learnt she was still alive.
He visited her regularly and made sure she had money, but the reconciliation did not undo the trauma.
Grant wrote that he had ‘‘peered from behind the face of Cary Grant’’ for many years.
‘‘[This is] both an advantage and a disadvantage. How could I see out if nobody could see in? You’re just a bunch of molecules floating around till you know who you are.’’
He tried hypnosis and yoga but made no breakthrough until Betsy Drake, his third wife, introduced him to Mortimer Hartman, a doctor who offered patients lysergic acid diethylamide.
Grant had weekly five-hour sessions for about two years and credited them with releasing his subconscious mind.
‘‘After weeks of treatment came the day when I saw the light,’’ he wrote. ‘‘I lost all the tension I’d been grappling with. I said, ‘Oh my God, humanity, please come in.’ ‘‘Now everything has changed. My attitude towards women is completely different. I can love now. At last, I’m close to happiness.’’
He concluded that his first three marriages had failed because he did not trust his wives to stay with him.
‘‘LSD made me realise I was killing my mother through my relationships with other women. I made the mistake of thinking that each one of my wives was my mother.
‘‘Once I realised you have all things inside you, love and hate, then you can use love to get rid of hate. The first big breakthrough came when I realised I was the one who was responsible for repeating the same patterns ... all the pain I thought my mother had caused me, I caused that pain too.’’
The actor, who gave up LSD long before it was criminalised in 1966, found peace - and had a daughter, Jennifer, with his fourth wife, Dyan Cannon - but never became carefree.
‘‘You cut off barnacles and you find more barnacles,’’ he wrote. The Times
‘‘After weeks of treatment (with LSD) came the day when I saw the light. I lost all the tension I’d been grappling with. I said, ‘Oh my God, humanity, please come in.’ Now everything has changed.’’