Cary Grant ‘gay’ images were a studio publicity campaign
HE WAS one of the biggest stars of the golden age of Hollywood, with Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly among his leading ladies on-screen and five wives in real life.
But photographs leaked in the Thurties of Cary Grant with his friend and fellow actor Randolph Scott have led to the assumption that he preferred men.
Intimate shots showed them sunbathing shirtless on adjacent loungers, sitting on a diving board, with Scott’s hands seemingly poised to encourage his friend into the water or even to caress his shoulder, and a romantic silhouette of them together.
But the apparently suggestive shots now have another explanation as it emerged that the photographs were actually commissioned by the actors’ studio and carefully staged by a professional photographer in a home that they shared. Evidence in the studio’s archives reveals that they were part of a publicity campaign promoting both stars as Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors.
The discovery has been made by Mark Glancy, a film historian, who told The Daily Telegraph: “Previous biographers have mistaken these for photographs of their real home life that somehow got leaked or mistakenly released to the press.
“But I went to the Paramount Pictures archive and found that actually these photographs were commissioned by Paramount as part of a publicity campaign that ran throughout the Thirties, that promoted their relationship as that of two bachelors who were very heterosexual, and they used it for them to endorse products such as soups.