What He Hid From the World

THE DARKNESS OF HIS CHILDHOOD FOLLOWED THE LEGENDARY ACTOR FOR MUCH OF HIS LIFE

A TRAGIC CHILDHOOD

On a ski holiday in the French Alps, Audrey Hepburn’s ex-pat American character meets a charming man played by Cary Grant who isn’t who he claims to be. People tell lies “because they want something,” he explains in Charade. “They are afraid the truth won’t get it for them.”

Moviegoers who made this 1963 romantic-thriller a box-office success probably didn’t realize how much of Cary’s polished image was also a clever charade. “He created a completely different personality, a completely different alter ego, as a professional performer,” says Scott Eyman, author of Cary

Grant: A Brilliant Disguise. This new biography draws on sources, including the actor’s teenage diary, to chart his transformation from Archibald Leach of gritty Bristol, England, to Cary Grant, movie star. “Archie Leach creating Cary Grant was a means of solving Archie Leach’s problems with the world,” Eyman explains. The future star learned the value of self-reliance very early in life. Archie, the second son of Elias Leach, a tailor’s presser, and his wife, Elsie, a seamstress, never knew his older brother John, who died in early childhood — and his loss cast a pall over their family. “His mother was afraid to let Archie out of her sight. She was clingy and very neurotic — and she im

parted a lot of says Eyman.

Archie was 11 when his mother abruptly vanished.

His father, a chronic alcoholic, eventually told him she was dead. “He became a street kid,” says Eyman. Archie escaped by cutting school and going to the movies and the music hall. “His grades were very good, but at 14 he got himself kicked out of school,” says Eyman. “He just didn’t see a future there and he wanted out of Bristol. He had a street kid’s sense of expedience.”

With his father’s permission, Archie joined a troupe of acrobats, which began touring England. He studied dance, pantomime and acting and arrived in New York in 1920 at just 16. “He became a vaudeville performer and eventually got a contract to work in musicals,” says Eyman. On the stage, the actor’s handsome appearance stood out. A critic writing for the

New York Daily News predicted “a big future in the movies.”