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THE LEGEND FINALLY FOUND HAPPINESS AFTER YEARS OF TORMENT

To fifth wife Barbara Jaynes, Cary Grant was even more charming in real life than he was on film. In the ’80s, “he had a twinkle in his eyes,” Barbara, 67, tells Closer. “Sometimes I would come back from shopping and he would meet me in a top hat and his pajamas and do a funny walk. He was amazing.”

Yet he endured decades of romantic discord before he finally achieved marital bliss. “I hurt every woman I loved,” he wrote in a series of autobiographical articles published by Ladies’ Home Journal in 1963. A new Showtime documentary, Becoming Cary Grant, draws on these writings to explain why it was so hard for him to make love last.

LONELY HEARTS

The difficulty sprang from Cary’s conflicted relationship with his mother. “She wasn’t a happy woman,” Cary wrote. “And I wasn’t a happy child, because my mother tried to smother me with care.” When Cary was 11, his mom suddenly disappeared, and for 20 years he thought she’d left him and died, before learning his dad had committed her to an asylum. “He had trust issues with women — he feared they would be here today and gone tomorrow,” says the documentary’s director, Mark Kidel. Adds biographer Mark Glancy: “His first four wives all said he was wonderful, but once they were married, he became very suspicious, distrustful and insecure.”

Cary’s abandonment issues doomed his first marriage to gorgeous actress Virginia Cherrill in 1934. “My possessiveness and fear of losing her brought about the very condition I feared: the loss of her,” he wrote. In 1942, he sought security by marrying Barbara Hutton, the world’s richest woman, but “our marriage had little foundation,” said Cary, who’d grown up poor in England. “Our backgrounds were completely unalike.”

His third marriage, to actress Betsy Drake, lasted through the ’50s, and she urged him to go into therapy and take drugs to seek relief from his psychic pain. “LSD made me realize I was killing my mother through my relationships with other women,” Cary wrote. Still, his unions to Drake and actress Dyan Cannon proved untenable, though the latter provided Cary his first true love, daughter Jennifer, born in 1966. As she wrote in her 2011 memoir Good Stuff, “I was given the extraordinary privilege to experience the full, vital passion of his heart.”

So, too, was Barbara. “He was a much happier person in his later life,” says Barbara, who was with Cary when he suffered a fatal stroke at 82 in 1986. “He would want to be remembered as a kind, thoughtful, loving man, which indeed he was.”

— Bruce Fretts, with reporting by Katie Bruno “He was incredibly protective,” says daughter Jennifer, with mom Dyan Cannon in ’66.