Cary Grant: Dark Angel
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DARK ANGEL
Geoffrey Wansell
Arcade Publishing • New York
PREFACE
The opportunity to return to a subject is a rare privilege for a biographer, and that is why this book means such a great deal to me. Cary Grant is, was, and always will be one of the great movie stars, but when I first came to write a biography about him, fifteen years ago, I don’t think I appreciated fully the marvellous subtlety of his talent.
For me, then, Grant was a star we knew and loved, but he was also a man who was somehow always hiding a secret behind the dark, polished sheen of his charm. That was why I first set out to write about him, to see whether I could understand what lay behind his permanently dazzling smile.
My first biography began in a small stuffy flat in Mayfair, when I met the man who always introduced himself by saying, ‘Hello, I’m Cary Grant’ (even though hardly a man or woman in the world would not have recognized him instantly), and finished in Los Angeles, where I talked to old actors and directors who had worked with him. But looking back, I am not certain that my first portrait did not underestimate the depth of Grant’s talent, and the meticulous precision of his acting, by so carefully considering the personal drama that lay behind it. It brought the dark side of his character to life, certainly, but did not quite balance it with proper tribute to his incandescent screen presence.
That is why I was so pleased to be given this opportunity to return to Grant’s life, and to write a new, illustrated biography. This time, more than a decade and a half later, I hope I have managed to balance both sides of his life, the pain of his childhood against the pleasure that his particular, exquisite talent has brought to millions. In doing so, I hope I have demonstrated that he was, though troubled, still one of the screen’s finest actors.
The journey to refine my thoughts took me back to Los Angeles, and introduced me to many more people who knew and loved Cary Grant. It also took me to libraries and archives in both Britain and the United States, and to seek the help and advice of critics and actors, directors, fellow stars and friends. It is impossible to name them all, but I hope that they will all accept these personal and heartfelt thanks.
But I must thank a handful of people in particular. Juliet Brightmore researched the pictures quite brilliantly, Caroline Taggart did every bit as good a job on the text, and Penny Phillips at Bloomsbury orchestrated the whole process with consummate skill. As ever, my agents Rivers Scott and Gloria Ferris were an unfailing source of support and advice. None, of course, is to blame for my conclusions; those are mine alone. But they each helped me immensely to pay tribute to one of the cinema’s authentic stars.
Geoffrey Wansell
1996
FOR MY MOTHER
Copyright © 1996, 2011 by Geoffrey Wansell
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-310-2
Printed in China
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
ARCHIE LEACH
CHAPTER TWO
DARK VENUS
CHAPTER THREE
SCREWBALL
CHAPTER FOUR
MR LUCKY?
CHAPTER FIVE
NOTORIOUS
CHAPTER SIX
LONELY HEART
CHAPTER SEVEN
FINAL BOW
CHAPTER EIGHT
JENNIFER AND BARBARA
FILMOGRAPHY
INDEX
PROLOGUE
‘There is a frightening side to Cary that no one can quite put their finger on.’
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
STAR IN THE MAKING: GRANT IN MADAME BUTTERFLY IN 1932. ABOVE RIGHT: THE FINISHED ARTICLE, OPPOSITE GRACE KELLY IN TO CATCH A THIEF, MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS LATER.
To millions of movie-goers around the world, Cary Grant will forever epitomize the glamour, and the style, of Hollywood in its golden years. With his dark hair and even darker eyes, mischievous smile and effortless elegance, he was, is and always will be indelibly one of the great movie stars. Since his death in 1986, the incandescence of his screen image has not dimmed for a single moment.
In a career spanning four decades, Cary Grant became the man every woman longed for. As Burt Reynolds once put it, ‘He was touched by the gods. When he walked into a room you had to look at him. Men liked him as well as women, and that is incredibly rare.’ Certainly if the women in his audience were hypnotized, their male partners never for one moment felt threatened. They only wished that they could match his ageless, apparently effortless appeal. The actor and comedian Steve Lawrence summed it up neatly when he said, ‘When Cary walked into a room, not only did the women primp, the men straightened their ties.’
Yet Cary Grant could, with the arch of an eyebrow or the merest hint of a smile, question his own image. He managed to blend irony and romance in a way that few other stars have ever done, by slyly never appearing to take himself too seriously, and mixing his own unique mixture of naivete and worldliness. As a result, the veteran critic Charles Champlin believes he was one of the last ‘great unconscious prototypes’ of the cinema, a star who helped to define wit, charm, refinement and romance. There was, in Champlin’s words, ‘never anyone quite like him’.
In seventy-two films between 1932 and 1966, Grant meticulously furnished and then burnished his own screen image. He transformed himself from the tall, dark and handsome matinee idol of Madame Butterfly in 1932 to the brilliant farceur C.K. Dexter Haven in The Philadelphia Story in 1941; only then to refine himself still further, first as the ambiguous, brooding government agent Devlin in Notorious in 1946 and then as the enigmatic John Robie in To Catch a Thief in 1953.
It was a remarkable achievement, and one which ensured that Grant’s unique appeal hardly dimmed in the years after his retirement in 1966. His image shines out from advertising hoardings even now, a decade after his death.
ABOVE: TALL, DARK AND HANDSOME: GRANT IN THE TOAST OF NEW YORK IN 1937. BUT THERE WAS MORE TO HIM THAN LOOKS, AS HE PROVED WITH KATHARINE HEPBURN IN BRINGING UP BABY (BELOW RIGHT) AND THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (OPPOSITE).
When Time Out magazine in London in May 1995 asked more than a hundred leading film directors and producers to list their favourite movie actor of all time, Cary Grant came second on their list, even though he had not appeared in a new movie for very nearly three decades. Only Marlon Brando got more votes. James Stewart, Robert Mitchum, Robert de Niro, Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart were all considered less successful film actors than Cary Grant by a group of directors and producers as diverse as Pedro Almadovar, John Milius, Billy Wilder, Jeremy Thomas, Nik Powell, Stephen Frears and Fred Zinnemann. And no fewer than four of Grant’s films made it into their choice of the hundred best films of all time — Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, Notorious and North by Northwest.
Over the years
, some of Hollywood’s greatest directors shared their view. Cary Grant made five films with Howard Hawks, four with Alfred Hitchcock (who called him his favourite leading man), four with Leo McCarey, three each with Stanley Donen and George Cukor, not to mention others with Michael Curtiz, Clifford Odets, Joe Mankiewicz and Frank Capra. To Capra, Cary Grant was ‘Hollywood’s greatest farceur’, while George Cukor called him ‘the greatest exponent of a very subtle kind of human comedy’.
The great directors, like the audiences, recognized Grant’s delicate subtlety as an actor. His was an insolent charm, once seen never forgotten. And he carefully sustained his performance off the screen as well as on, maintaining his image as the suave, romantic leading man in his private life every bit as determinedly as he did in his films.
As the critic Pauline Kael once said, ‘Everyone likes the idea of Cary Grant. Everyone thinks of him affectionately, because he embodies what seems a happier time, a time when we had a simpler relationship to a performer. We could admire him for his timing and his nonchalance.... He appeared before us in radiantly shallow perfection and that was all we wanted.... We didn’t want depth from him, we asked only that he be handsome and silky and make us laugh.’
Yet though we seemed to know him so well, somehow Cary Grant also remained eternally elusive, always able to make his escape. In 1934 Mae West was asking him to ‘Come up sometime and see me’ in She Done Him Wrong, while thirty years later Audrey Hepburn was doing the same thing in Charade: ‘Won’t you come in for a minute? I don’t bite, you know, unless it’s called for.’ But neither leading lady ever quite managed to capture him. Even the magnificent Marlene Dietrich did not land him in Blonde Venus, and neither did Marilyn Monroe in Monkey Business.
THE DARK AND MENACING SIDE TO GRANT THAT ALFRED HITCHCOCK CAPTURED IN NOTORIOUS IN 1946.
For me, it was this elusive quality that came to fascinate three generations of film makers and filmgoers. The disarming smile was always in place, as was the mannered charm, but somehow there was always something going on behind it, something that defied description; something dangerous, even slightly threatening. As Alfred Hitchcock once put it, ‘There is a frightening side to Cary that no one can quite put their finger on.’
It was this darker, more mysterious side that Hitchcock himself drew out of Grant in four films, most spectacularly in Notorious. But it did nothing to detract from his enormous appeal to audiences in material of all kinds, especially romantic comedy. The director Peter Bogdanovich calls him ‘the ideal leading man, the perfect zany, the admirable dandy and the most charming rogue’. But Cary Grant also turned down, or sidestepped, some of the most important roles in the cinema in the quarter of a century between 1940 and 1965. He wanted to play James Stewart’s role in Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, and Monty Woolley’s in The Man Who Came to Dinner, but in the end decided against them both. He was offered Bogart’s part in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina, Gregory Peck’s in Beloved Infidel, Ronald Colman’s in A Double Life, Gary Cooper’s in Love in the Afternoon and James Stewart’s in Hitchcock’s Rope, but turned them all down. He declined David Niven’s role in Around the World in Eighty Days and James Mason’s in Cukor’s A Star Is Born, just as he turned down Mason’s role in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita and William Holden’s in The Bridge on the River Kwai. He refused to play Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, and insisted that Robert Preston, not he, should play The Music Man.
Had he played even half of these roles, there would be few who would deny that he was, in the words of the critic Richard Schickel, ‘not merely the greatest movie star of his era but the medium’s subtlest and slyest actor as well’. But his determination never to abandon the security of playing the character he had so carefully created for the screen made him unwilling to experiment or to display his extraordinary talent as a film actor in unexpected roles.
For no matter how debonair Grant may have appeared, both on the screen and off it, there was a darker side to his character that he took pains never to allow to surface in public. Almost the only occasions when it did so were when his first four wives sued him for divorce, and then he had no control over events. But if there were fears and insecurities hidden behind that ageless, self-deprecating smile, Grant took care to hide them.
Though he experimented with psychoanalysis, and took the hallucinogenic drug LSD on more than a hundred occasions during therapy sessions in the 1960s, he would always introduce himself to a stranger by saying, ‘Hello, I’m Cary Grant’, even though his was one of the best known faces in the world. He saw himself as a product, a personality that had been tested in the marketplace and should never be allowed to display its weaknesses. His was a mask behind which he preferred to remain, and it is one reason why he refused an offer of $5 million to write his life story: to see him on the screen was enough. That was where Cary Grant came to life.
Grant managed to conceal the contradictions in his personality with the same steely professionalism that he brought to his screen performances. No matter how many times he may have fussed on the set, dithered over details of his deals, refused to spend money needlessly, tried to avoid autograph hunters, declined to appear on television, claimed to be nervous in public and insisted that he was ‘a bum’ at home, not one single member of his audience every truly believed him. To millions of his fans around the world he was forever the fairy-tale hero, the king of hearts, one of the handful of stars who could make the world seem a more glamorous and romantic place.
As the American writer Tom Wolfe put it, ‘To women he is Hollywood’s lone example of the Sexy Gentleman. And to men and women, he is Hollywood’s lone example of a figure that America, like most of the West, has needed all along: a Romantic Bourgeois Hero.’ The fact that he was born into a working-class family in Bristol, the lonely child of a poor trouser presser, can never detract for one moment from Cary Grant’s place as one of the icons of the modern cinema: Hollywood’s dark angel.
‘AW... YOU CAN BE HAD.’ TWO OF THE MANY WOMEN WHO SET THEIR SIGHTS ON GRANT ON THE SCREEN: MAE WEST IN THE CLASSIC SHE DONE HIM WRONG IN 1933 (TOP), AND AUDREY HEPBURN IN CHARADE EXACTLY THIRTY YEARS LATER (ABOVE). THE FAMOUS CROP-DUSTER IN NORTH BY NORTHWEST IN 1959 (LEFT) CAME CLOSER THAN EITHER.
CHAPTER ONE • ARCHIE LEACH
‘I became an actor for the usual reason - a great need to be liked and admired.’
BEFORE HOLLYWOOD: GRANT AS A STAR IN LIGHT OPERA ON BROADWAY WHEN HE MADE HIS FIRST SCREEN APPEARANCE IN THE SHORT SINGAPORE SUE IN 1931.
It could hardly have been a less likely beginning. Cary Grant, the man destined to become the cinemas ‘fairy-tale hero’, was born Archibald Alec Leach, the only child of a poor tailor’s presser and an obsessed, doting mother, in a small terraced house on the outskirts of Bristol just four years after the turn of the century. But his birthplace and his childhood were to leave an indelible mark on the actor Marlene Dietrich called ‘Hollywood’s only true prince’.
The boy born Archie Leach never lost a fondness for his real name or the town of his birth. When he first settled in Hollywood in 1932, he called his new Sealyham terrier Archie Leach. And in film after film, from Gunga Din to His Girl Friday and Arsenic and Old Lace, Cary Grant made jokes about a miserable chap called Archie Leach.
Archie Leach’s parents were Victorians. His mother, Elsie Kingdon, was the daughter of a shipwright. She did not care for alcohol or tobacco, and certainly did not believe in spoiling the child, especially not her own. With dark eyes and a dark olive skin, which she passed on to her son, this thin, wiry woman had a waspish temper. By contrast, Archie’s father, Elias Leach, was the raffish son of a potter, and there was always a twinkle in his eye. The mustachioed Elias Leach married Elsie Kingdon in May 1898. He was twenty-five, she barely twenty-one.
The new Mrs Leach had been married only a few weeks when she realized she was pregnant. She began to prepare for motherhood with the studied precision that she was to bring to the rest of her life. For his part, Elias Leach pressed as many trouser
s, coats and waistcoats as he could manage at Todd’s Clothing Factory in Bristol, determined to provide as best he could for his new family. Their first child, a boy whom they christened John William Elias, was born on 9 February 1899.
But John Leach was a sickly child. Throughout the first year of his life he suffered from regular bouts of fever, and his mother worried herself into illness. She would spend night after night sitting beside his cot, willing him to catch his breath as he struggled against the fever. Then in January 1900, a door was accidentally slammed on John’s thumbnail while he was in his mother’s arms, and within a week gangrene had developed. Once again a distraught Elsie Leach stayed up to watch over him, until, finally, two days before her son’s first birthday, the local doctor told her firmly that she had to rest. That night she put her son into his cot and reluctantly retired to her own bed. Young John never woke up.
THE LONELY BOY FROM BRISTOL: ARCHIBALD ALEC LEACH, BORN ON 18 JANUARY 1904.
The conviction that her first son’s death had somehow been her fault was never to leave Elsie Leach. The suspicion that she was blighted remained with her for the rest of her life, and she hoarded his memory within her, just as she hoarded his clothes in the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers in her bedroom. By the time she and Elias had moved into a new house in Hughenden Road in Bristol in 1901, she had become the embodiment of Victorian womanhood, turned to stone by grief and a sense of duty. Nevertheless, Elsie Leach was determined that she should bear another child.
It was not until the late spring of 1903, shortly after her twenty-sixth birthday, that she became pregnant again. Her husband was pleased enough, but he felt a little detached from the fierce, chill young woman with whom he now shared a meticulously tidy house.