• Cary Grant - the lonely charmer
Chris Hallam explores the real-life romances of Hollywood’s most eligible leading man and tries to discover why happiness seemed so elusive
Few people have ever combined charm, wit and sophistication as effectively as Hollywood heartthrob, Cary Grant. Tall, dark, handsome and with a distinctive English accent which hinted at his humble origins in Edwardian Bristol, it is little wonder Grant charmed countless numbers of women both on screen and off.
Over 30 years, Grant appeared in more than 70 films, more often than not playing the guy who got the girl by the end of the final scene. But the reality for Grant was very different. He married five times, four of his marriages ending in divorce. Grant was suave and handsome and, by most accounts, thoroughly decent too. So why was he unable to achieve an enduring romantic relationship?
THE REAL CARY GRANT
In many ways, Cary Grant was surprisingly similar off screen to on. “Oh my God. He talks just like he does in the movies!” exclaimed a starstruck Clint Eastwood to the rest of the room on meeting him. Others report that the only real difference was that the genuine Cary Grant laughed far more in real life than he would ever have got away with on screen.
But who was ‘the real’ Cary Grant? He had changed his name from the distinctly unglamorous ‘Archibald Leach’. “Archie just doesn’t sound right in America,” the studio told him. “It doesn’t sound particularly right in Britain either,” Grant admitted. Such name changes were not uncommon. But while never ashamed of his past, the working-class Bristol boy Archie Leach completely reinvented himself as the suave and debonair Cary Grant.
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Grant emerged as a star in the Thirties at a time when the typical Hollywood man was a much tougher character. As Bob Hope joked: "A James Cagney love scene is one where he lets the other guy live."
Grant soon faced rumours that he was homosexual or at least bisexual. These rumours grew strengthened after Grant’s decision to live with fellow actor Randolph Scott, sharing a beach house in Malibu with him for 12 years. Grant seems less concerned about what was said about him than most, perhaps fanning the flames of gossip in the process.
In later years, however, he spoke out: “If someone wants to say I am gay, what can I do? I think it’s probably been said about every man who’s been known to do well with women. I don’t let that sort of thing bother me. What is important, is that I know who I am,” adding later. “Now I don’t feel (it’s) an insult. But it’s all nonsense”.
Maybe it was. But Cary Grant had a dark secret in his past which would affect his relationships with women forever.
Cary Grant’s mother had vanished when her son was just nine years old. He had returned home from school to find her gone. His father, an alcoholic, told him his mother had taken a short holiday. Over time, the young boy came to realise his mother was never coming back. He later assumed his parents had simply split up.
Grant only learnt the truth more than 20 years later when his father died in 1935. His mother was still alive and his father had had her committed to a lunatic asylum. Grant, by now a rising Hollywood star in his 30s visited Britain and, finding his mother relatively well, moved her into a house in Bristol. Now effectively strangers, they enjoyed a slightly awkward relationship for the rest of her life.
Grant’s mother had always been eccentric. However, it seems likely his father had her institutionalised at least in part to free himself up to continue his relationship and ultimately start a second family with his mistress. The absence of a mother figure at such a crucial period in Grant’s life, must surely have impacted his future relationships with other women. Grant himself certainly thought so. “(I made) the mistake of thinking that each of my wives was my mother, that there would never be a replacement once she had left.”
ViRGinia and BaRBaRa
The news that his mother was still alive came soon after the failure of his first marriage to actress Virginia Cherrill. The beautiful actress was best known for playing a blind girl in Charlie Chaplin’s film, City Lights. “My possessiveness and fear of losing her brought about the very condition I feared; the loss of her,” Grant later said. The marriage lasted barely seven months.
At this point in 1932 Grant had been on the cusp of stardom. By the time of his second marriage to Barbara Hutton in 1942, he was a full-blown star. Hutton was an immensely rich woman, having inherited the Woolworth business fortune. Some dubbed the couple ‘Cash and Cary’. In fact, although it was not made public at the time, Grant had signed a prenuptial agreement which ruled him out from claiming any stake in her fortune, should they ever divorce as they, in fact, did in 1945. Grant disliked Hutton’s upper class “phony noble” friends and expensive dinner parties. They were essentially living in different worlds. Hutton ultimately married seven times and by the time of her death was close to bankruptcy. She did however say, “Cary Grant had no title and of my husbands, he is the one I loved most… he was so sweet, so gentle. It didn’t work out, but I loved him.”
nEw hORizOns
Cary Grant’s third marriage to actress Betsy Drake in 1949 led to some big changes in his life. He had announced he was quitting acting forever and soon after that, he was experimenting with drugs. Neither of these developments were to prove as dramatic as they sounded. They were not decisions he took because of Betsy Drake, although she certainly did exert a big influence on
“When I’m married I want to be single, and when I’m single I want to be married” Cary Grant
him at this point.
Grant’s ‘retirement’ from filming in fact proved very shortlived. But he was determined to make his third marriage work. Perhaps experiencing something a mid-life crisis as he entered his late 40s and 50s, he experimented with yoga, mysticism and LSD, at the time a drug legally sanctioned by the US government.
Grant took the hallucinogenic drug more than 100 times in the hope of enhancing his ability to connect with women. “LSD made me realise I was killing my mother through relationships with women. I was punishing them for what she had done to me,” he theorised.
For a while, he was a strong advocate of the drug claiming: “I learned to accept the responsibility for my own actions and to blame myself and no one else for circumstances of my own creating… At last I am close to happiness.”
In time, Grant came to feel, "taking LSD was an utterly foolish thing to do but I was a self-opinionated boor, hiding all kinds of layers and defences, hypocrisy and vanity. I had to get rid of them and wipe the slate clean."
It also did not save his third marriage. He and Betsy split up in 1958, divorcing in 1962. It was easily his longest marriage, at 13 years, but still some way off the enduring permanent relationship he sought.
BRinging Up BaBy
In the mid-Sixties, Cary Grant really did quit the movie business for good. Although remarkably well preserved, Cary was getting older. But he had also “discovered more important things in life”. He had finally fulfilled a long-term ambition. At 62, he had become a father.
“She is my best production,” Grant said of his daughter Jennifer. "My life changed the day Jennifer was born… To leave something behind… That's what's important."
Grant proved a devoted father but sadly his marriage to Jennifer’s mother, actress Dyan Cannon, some 33 years his junior ended in a bitter and public court case in which Grant’s use of LSD was cited. As might be expected, Grant showed little concern for his own reputation or for pursuing any campaign against Dyan. His main abiding fear was the possibility of losing access to Jennifer. Happily, this didn’t happen. He married just once more in 1981, to Barbara Harris, a British hotel public relations executive, some 47 years his junior. The two remained together until his death in 1986, aged 82. Grant tended to be his own harshest critic where the failure of his marriages was concerned. Speaking after his third divorce, he said, “They all left me. I didn’t leave any of them. They all walked out on me. Maybe my marriages were all heavily influenced by something in my subconscious that’s related to my early years and the way I envisioned my mother… Maybe they just got bored.” Whatever the truth in this, he was definitely wrong. Too boring? Cary Grant was certainly never that.