CARY GRANT
A BRILLIANT DISGUISE
SCOTT EYMAN
Simon & Schuster, 576pp, £25
Born to working-class parents in Bristol, Archibald Leach effected one of the greatest transformations of the 20th century in becoming Cary Grant, the suave and sophisticated performer who remained at the pinnacle of Hollywood stardom for three decades until his retirement in 1966. He was ‘a hoax so sublime his creator struggled to escape him’, wrote Tanya Gold in her Spectator review. ‘He was a metaphor, too, for the transformative magic of cinema, for its lies; and for the artifice and social mobility of the 20th century itself.’ His mother, who had doted on him after losing another child, was committed to a mental asylum when he was a small boy. Years later, Grant took LSD under psychiatric supervision in order to open up about his psychic scars.
Louis Bayard, who reviewed the book for the Washington Post, enjoyed the way Eyman ‘rightly homes in on his inner chiaroscuro, that never-resolving oscillation between dark and light – or, if you like, between Archie Leach and the man he became. Refracted through a camera lens, that struggle cohered into something like magic; in real life, it dissolved into its two combatants... Eyman, treading as carefully as a bomb-disposal team, declares, “There is plausible evidence to place him inside any sexual box you want – gay, bi, straight, or any combination that might be expected from a solitary street kid with a street kid’s sense of expedience.” Mealy-mouthed? Or just the resigned sigh of a biographer who can no more get a handle on his subject than his subject could?’
Calling it ‘the most entertaining and enlightening star biography in years’, Douglass K Daniel, in the
Chicago Tribune, noted that Eyman ‘surrounds his deep dig into Grant’s personal life with fan-pleasing details of movie productions, vignettes of the wonderful characters who joined Grant in making movies, and a sense of the business side of Hollywood that too often eludes writers caught up in the magic and madness. The result is a captivating look at a captivating star.’