Family secret that left Cary Grant unable to trust women
A new documentary reveals that the Hollywood star took LSD in a desperate bid to resolve the agony of abandonment dating back to the day his mother entered a psychiatric hospital
Cin Los Angeles ARY GRANT was only 11 years old when his mother disappeared one cold February afternoon. He was Archibald Leach in those days, living in a freezing home in suburban Bristol, a decade before reinventing himself as Hollywood’s most charmingly debonair leading man.
“I came home from school one day and mother was gone,” he recalled. “My cousins told me that she’d gone to a local seaside resort. It seemed rather unusual but I accepted it as one of those unaccountable things that grown-ups do. But the weeks went by and there was no further explanation of mother’s absence and it gradually dawned on me that perhaps she wasn’t coming back at all.”
As he grew up, Grant assumed that his father had simply glossed over his mother’s tragically premature death. But the truth was far more shocking, as Grant revealed in a previously unpublished memoir, which forms the basis of a new documentary, Becoming Cary Grant, which premiered this week at the Cannes Film Festival.
His mother, Elsie Leach, was alive but had been incarcerated in the Bristol Lunatic Asylum, where she had been committed by her husband who promptly ran off to Southampton with another woman, abandoning Grant to his grandmother. His tormented childhood, under the oppressive hand of a mentally troubled mother and distant alcoholic father, is finally exposed in the actor’s own words.
The ordeal left Grant unable to trust women, struggling through five marriages and tortured by self-doubt even as he became Hollywood’s most desirable heartthrob. “I hurt every woman I loved,” Grant confessed in his secret memoir. “Surrounded by all sorts of attractive girls, I was never able to BAD START: With Virginia Cherrill WARY: His widow Barbara Harris fully communicate with them. Most of the women with whom I formed attachments eventually made it evident that I was, from their point of view, impossible.”
It took a radical psychological treatment – 100 LSD trips under a therapist’s direction – for Grant to begin to comprehend his anguished psyche. His emotional insecurity and sometimes ambivalent sexual identity were products of his painful childhood, concluded the star of movie classics including The Philadelphia Story, An Affair To Remember, Suspicion, To Catch A Thief and North By Northwest
“I was born in Bristol in a suburban house lacking modern heating, kept only one step ahead of freezing,” he said. “My mother was a delicate, black-haired beauty with olive skin, frail and feminine.” Yet she dominated him with “her strength and her will to control”.
Older brother John had died aged five, four years before Grant was born, but it haunted his own childhood. “My mother accidentally closed the door on his thumb,” Grant said. “He developed gangrene and died. She blamed herself for the rest of her life. She wasn’t a happy woman. I wasn’t a happy child because she tried to smother me with care. She kept me far too long in baby dresses and curls.”
An infant Grant stares from a faded black-and-white photo, wearing a dark tartan dress down to his ankles, topped by a white pinafore with a lace neck like an over-sized doily. His dark eyes stare morosely from his unsmiling face. “Perhaps for a while I wasn’t sure if I was a boy or a girl,” Grant mused. “My father was a handsome, tallish man, who earned his money pressing suits for a clothing manufacturer, but progressed in that firm too slowly to satisfy my mother’s dreams. The relationship between them seemed to grow unhappier.”
Grant was permanently scarred when his mother vanished: “There was a void in my life, a sadness of spirit that affected everything I did. I felt she had rejected me.” The asylum admissions book dated February 3, 1915, reveals that Elsie was committed solely on the word of her boozing husband, Elias.
He reported that she “has been queer in the head for some months and thinks that several women are concealed in the home, and that they put poison in her food. She hears voices through the wall and thinks she is being watched”.
Suspiciously, as soon as Elsie was in the asylum his father abandoned him and ran off with his new lover and their child.
GRANT’S shattered childhood undermined his future love life. He first wed Virginia Cherrill, who had starred in Charlie Chaplin’s classic City Lights but she divorced him after barely a year. He said: “My possessiveness and fear of losing her brought about the very condition it feared: the loss of her.”
Through subsequent marriages to America’s wealthiest woman Barbara Hutton, and actress Betsy Drake – 19 years his junior – his mother’s ghost haunted Grant still: “I was killing my mother through my relationships with other women. I was punishing them for what she had done to me… thinking that each of my wives was my mother.” His fourth marriage, to actress Dyan Cannon, 33 years younger than he was, lasted three years and Grant was 77 when he wed his final wife, British publicist Barbara Harris, 47 years his junior, who recalls in the film: “He was a little bit wary of women. Somewhere in the depths of his mind was the fact that women were not always going to be there.”
After 20 years believing his mother was dead, Grant learned the terrible truth. He sailed to England, removed her from the asylum and paid for her care in Bristol. But she still struggled to show emotion and would only give Grant a small “peck on the cheek”, said friends.
The documentary shows candid home movies of Grant swimming, playing tennis, clowning around, and on film sets, enjoying the film star existence. But the words of his unpublished memoir strike a darker tone: “All my life I’ve been going around in a fog. You spend your time getting to be a big Hollywood actor – then what?”
For Grant, the answer came in the shape of an unlikely psychiatric therapy, hallucinogenic drugs: “All my life I’ve been searching for peace of mind. I’d explored yoga, hypnotism and mysticism. Nothing seemed to give me what I wanted until this LSD treatment.”
For more than two years Grant underwent weekly five-hour acid trips under medical supervision, struggling to understand the demons that drove him: “The shock of each revelation brought with it an anguish and sadness because of… the wasted years of ignorance. I finally realised that all the pain I thought my mother had caused me, I had caused her pain too.”
Belatedly, he realised that reinventing the impoverished Archibald Leach as the suave, urbane Cary Grant had failed to bring the peace of mind he craved.
“Little did I know I would still be seeking serenity 30 years later,” he confessed. “I don’t know what I’ve learned about love. It took a long time for me to even try to understand it.”