Cary Grant: Dark Angel

by Geoffrey Wansell

  Shortly after one o’clock in the morning of 18 January 1904, with the rain beating against the windows, Elsie Leach gave birth to her second son in the front bedroom of that tiny terraced house in Hughenden Road. The baby had her huge, dark brown eyes and olive complexion, and his father’s grin, and she decided to christen him Archibald Alec. He was became the sole reason for her life. There were to be no more children.

  As the black-haired baby grew into a sloe-eyed little boy, Elsie Leach’s fascination with her son deepened into an obsession. She never wanted his childhood to end. Archie Leach was kept in baby dresses, with his hair in ringlets around his shoulders, long after he had grown out of the black upright pram in which his mother so solemnly wheeled him out most afternoons.

  ‘My mother was not a happy woman,’ Cary Grant remembered sadly years later, ‘and I was not a happy child because my mother tried to smother me with care. She was so scared something would happen to me.’ The prim-faced young woman wanted a dependent being, a child unable to exist without her love and attention. It was an attitude that was first to annoy and then to horrify his father. ‘She and my father fought about me constantly,’ Grant was to explain. ‘He wanted her to let go. She couldn’t. I never spent a happy moment with them under the same roof.’

  The intensity of his mother’s love was to haunt Cary Grant for the rest of his life. Nothing could quench Elsie Leach’s ambitions for her son. By the time Archie was four, she had already started to teach him to dance and sing, and she was about to arrange for him to have piano lessons. He was not to be condemned to life in the back streets of Bristol as she was. Each afternoon she would take him for walks through the city’s finest Georgian streets to prove there was a life beyond Hughenden Road. In her mind, he was just as entitled to be a ‘little gentleman’ as the sons of the solicitors and merchants who lived there. The walks were an experience he was never to forget, for they fuelled his dream of affluence and of achieving the success that his mother so dearly wanted for him.

  Elsie Leach also impressed on her son that money ‘didn’t grow on trees’ and that he must look after his clothes ‘because they’re not made of iron’. When he stood in the hall before their afternoon walk, she would straighten the folds of his coat and smooth his long hair. He was her little prince, apart from the world. It was a feeling that he loved. Not that he was not capable of defying her. ‘He can be the very devil with his temper,’ she would confess from time to time, patting him on the head as she spoke.

  Elias Leach, in contrast, sometimes frightened his son. He would take him out into the garden and push him so high on a swing that he had constructed for him that Archie was terrified. His father wanted him to be ‘a real boy’, the kind who got into trouble and got his knees dirty. But no matter how hard he tried he could not make that happen. His wife was too powerful a personality. The garden swing made no difference. It served only to make Archie forever frightened of heights.

  Finally, at the age of four and three-quarters, Archie, whose right shoulder had developed slightly lower than his left and who had also become left-handed (rather to his mother’s dismay, for she disapproved of left-handed people), escaped the smocks and girlish dresses of his early years. He found himself instead in dark tweed shorts with thick woollen socks up to his knees. The law demanded that every boy should attend school from the age of five, but Elsie wanted her son to be there sooner.

  ‘Very gradually, I grew accustomed to associating with other children,’ Cary Grant was to remember, ‘or rather, mostly with other boys. Little boys.’ He was asked to be the goalkeeper in the playground football matches at the Bishop Road elementary school — largely because no one else wanted the responsibility. That memory, too, was to remain with him for the rest of his life. ‘If the ball slammed past me, I alone — no other member of the team, but I alone — was held responsible for the catastrophe.’

  The experience may have been terrifying, but it also made him appreciate applause. ‘Right then and there I learned the deep satisfaction derived from receiving the adulation of my fellow little men. Perhaps it began the process that resulted in my search for it ever since. No. money, no material reward is comparable to the praise, the shouts of well done, and accompanying pat on the back of one’s fellow man.’

  His mother disapproved. She did not want her son getting dirty playing football. If he spilled even a morsel of his food on the starched white tablecloth she laid for lunch on Sunday, she would fine him twopence from the six he received as weekly pocket money, and there were other penalties for untidiness. It meant that young Archie hardly ever received any pocket money at all. For the rest of his life Cary Grant would refuse to eat at a dining table if he could avoid it, just as he would keep his houses meticulously clean and tidy.

  There were some diversions. His father took him to Bristol’s new Metropole Cinema to see silent serials like The Clutching Hand, where the audience stamped and hissed as the villain terrified its heroine, Pearl White. ‘We loved each adventure,’ he remembered, ‘and each following week I neglected a lot of school homework conjecturing how the hero and heroine could possible get out of the extraordinary fix in which they’d been left.’ Archie Leach was hooked. He took to going to the new Pringles Picture Palace on Saturdays. ‘The unrestrained wriggling and lung exercise of those matinees, free from parental supervision, was the high point of my week.’

  The cinema was a haven from the tensions of home, tensions that his father too had been feeling. Finally, in the summer of 1912, Elias Leach announced that he had been offered a better job eighty miles away in Southampton, making khaki army uniforms, and that he had decided to take it. What he did not tell his wife was that he had also found another woman. In the years to come Cary Grant would hardly remember his father’s departure, which had happened when Archie was eight years old. He said only, ‘Perhaps I felt guilty at being secretly pleased. Now I had my mother to myself.’

  GRANT’S MOTHER, ELSIE LEACH, WHO DISAPPEARED FROM HIS LIFE FOR TWENTY YEARS WHEN HE WAS ten.

  Elias Leach’s bid for freedom failed. The cost of two houses and two lives proved too great, and within nine months he was forced to back to Bristol. But her husband’s return did nothing to brighten Elsie Leach’s demeanour. Quite the opposite: she became steadily stranger. She took to locking every door in the house and asking no one in particular, ‘Where are my dancing shoes?’ She also washed her hands repeatedly, brushing them every time with a stiff-bristled brush. Though her son did not realize it, the fragile balance of his mother’s mind was beginning to fail.

  BROADWAY’S ‘PLEASANT NEW JUVENILE’: ARCHIE LEACH IN THE MUSICAL GOLDEN DAWN IN 1927.

  In the early spring of 1914, Elias Leach privately consulted the family’s doctor and the local magistrates about his wife’s state of mind. Then, in May, without telling his son, he committed her to the local mental hospital at Fishponds. He simply told his only child that his mother had ‘gone away for a rest’. Though he would sometimes imply she had sent him a message, Elias Leach would never say whether Elsie would ever come back. He never explained to his ten-year-old son why his mother had disappeared.

  As Cary Grant put it bleakly many years later, ‘I was not to see my mother again for more than twenty years. By which time my name was changed and I was a full-grown man living in America, thousands of miles away in California. I was known to most people in the world by sight and by name, yet not to my mother.’

  The pain of his mother’s disappearance drove the young Archie Leach deeper into himself. He took to wandering through the streets of Bristol alone, sitting for hours at the town’s quayside watching the ships ease their way out into the Bristol Channel on the evening tide. He would walk home in the gathering dusk, a boy who no longer knew where he belonged, or what was home.

  Without his mother’s influence, he first became a scruffy boy — whose scout troop once forcibly washed his neck after its dirtiness had lost them a competition — and then suddenly developed an obsession
with cleanliness. ‘I washed myself constantly, a habit I carried far into adulthood in a belief that if I scrubbed hard enough outside I might cleanse myself inside: perhaps of an imagined guilt that I was in some way responsible for my parents’ separation.’

  The outbreak of war in August 1914 brought hard times. There was less work at the clothing factory, and Elias Leach was forced to move into his mother’s house in Picton Street, Bristol, near the city centre. ‘He was a dear, sweet man,’ his son remembered, ‘and I learned a lot from him. He first put into my mind the idea of buying one good superior suit rather than a number of inferior ones. Then, even when it was threadbare, at least people will know at once it was good.’ But Archie Leach stayed out of his father’s and his grandmother’s way at Picton Street. He started to look after himself, scrounging around in the kitchen looking for food whenever he was hungry, another habit that he was never to lose.

  In the first months of 1915 he won a place at the Fairfield Secondary School, not far from his new home. But within a year school had become an irrelevance. He hated mathematics and Latin, although he did not mind geography — ‘because I wanted to travel’. Archie Leach had become a secretive boy with a rebellious streak. If he was caught doing something naughty he would open his dark eyes and raise a single eyebrow in a quizzical style the world would one day come to recognize. And when another boy knocked him over in the playground, snapping one of his front teeth in half, he himself paid out of his pocket money for the remaining piece to be pulled out; for weeks afterwards he kept his mouth closed while the gap closed. By doing so, he perfected the tight-lipped smile that was to become one of his hallmarks on the screen.

  As the war dragged on in France, Archie Leach grew taller and further apart from his father. He still roamed the wharves and docks of Bristol, once applying for a job as a cabin boy only to be turned down ‘because I couldn’t bring permission from my parents’. Then, on a Saturday afternoon in the autumn of 1917, a part-time teacher at Fairfield School, who had been helping to install the new lighting switchboard at the Hippodrome, Bristol’s largest theatre, invited him to go backstage with him. The experience changed young Archie’s life forever.

  ‘I suddenly found myself inarticulate in a dazzling land of smiling, jostling people wearing and not wearing all sorts of costumes and doing all sorts of clever things,’ he remembered later. ‘That’s when I knew. What other life could there be but that of an actor?’ The lonely thirteen-year-old wanted to become one at once, and took to hanging around the Hippodrome at every opportunity. Then he was introduced to the manager of another of the city’s theatres, the Empire, where he was asked to help to move the new arc-lights and change the coloured carbon filters. Archie Leach was hooked.

  Before long he had become a part-time call-boy at the Hippodrome, and it was there in the last months of 1917 that he asked one of the performers, the stocky comedian Bob Pender, whether he could have a job as one of the boys in Pender’s silent troupe of ‘Knockabout Comedians’. Pender was tempted. Some of his boys were about to be called up to fight in Flanders, and he was looking for replacements. He told the stage-struck call-boy that he might consider it — ‘providing your parents approve’.

  As he ran out of the theatre, the only thing a delighted Archie Leach neglected to tell Pender was that he was not yet quite old enough to leave school. Instead he rushed home and wrote a letter ‘purportedly from my own father’ giving him permission to join the troupe. Within ten days Pender had written back, inviting him to Norwich, where the troupe was performing, and enclosing the train fare. Archie did not hesitate. Just before six the following morning, he let himself quietly out of his grandmother’s house and set off for Norwich. And when he arrived at the Theatre Royal, ‘They gave me a short, handwritten contract stipulating that I was to receive my keep and ten shillings pocket money a week.’ That day Archie Leach began his career in show-business — by learning how to be an acrobat, another art he was never to forget.

  Though Elias Leach was to reclaim his son a few days later, and take him back to school in Bristol, Archie’s future had been settled. In March 1918, two months after his fourteenth birthday, and after making sure that he was expelled from school for inattention and irresponsible behaviour, he was back with Pender’s Knockabout Comedians, as a permanent member of the troupe.

  ‘Touring the English provinces with the troupe,’ he recalled long afterwards, ‘I grew to appreciate the fine art of pantomime. No dialogue was used in our act and each day, on a bare stage, we learned not only dancing, tumbling and stilt-walking, but also how to convey a mood or a meaning without words. How to establish communication silently with an audience, using the minimum of movement and expression; how best immediately and effectively to effect an emotional response — a laugh or, sometimes, a tear.’

  Night after night he would stand in the wings after the troupe’s act was finished and watch the show’s other performers: ‘To respect the diligence it took to acquire such expert timing and unaffected confidence.’ Archie Leach took the lessons to heart. ‘I strove to make everything I did at least appear relaxed. Perhaps by relaxing outwardly I thought I could eventually relax inwardly; sometimes I even began to enjoy myself on stage.’

  The process worked. Archie Leach became one of the eight boys Pender chose to take with him to Broadway in July 1920. In New York, the Pender troupe joined a new revue, Good Times, at the huge Hippodrome on Sixth Avenue. They played ‘the Hipp’ for the next nine months, doing twelve shows a week, including matinees every day except Sunday. When they weren’t at the theatre, the boys lived with the Penders in an apartment near Eighth Avenue, taking it in turns to cook, wash the dishes and make the beds. In his spare time, Archie Leach would ride up and down Fifth Avenue on the open-air buses, drinking in Manhattan as it drank in the first years of the Roaring Twenties.

  HIS FIRST FILM ROLE, AS AN AMERICAN SAILOR OPPOSITE ANNA CHANG IN SINGAPORE SUE.

  BROADWAY’S LATEST LEADING MAN: ARCHIE LEACH IN 1931.

  When Good Times closed, the Pender troupe moved on to B.F. Keith’s vaudeville circuit, playing theatres from Cleveland to Milwaukee, and in July 1922 the eight young members of the Knockabout Comedians appeared at the Palace Theatre on Broadway, the pinnacle of vaudeville. Archie Leach was just eighteen.

  Now six feet one inch tall and with a distinctive cleft chin, Archie Leach decided to strike out on his own. He took a room in Greenwich Village and tried to find work as a solo performer. The only problem was that there were very few jobs on offer in vaudeville that summer. So, to supplement his income, he sold ties from a suitcase on Broadway. He had befriended the Australian-born artist and designer Jack Kelly, later to become the costume designer Orry-Kelly. Kelly would buy ties for a dollar each, paint them and then give them to Archie to sell for three dollars. They shared the profits.

  One evening in the late summer of 1922, Archie Leach found himself at a dinner party sitting beside George Tilyou, the owner of the Steeplechase Park racecourse on Coney Island. When Tilyou heard that Archie could walk on stilts, he suggested that he could advertise his new track by walking through the crowds at Coney Island on stilts. Archie was in no position to refuse. He needed the money.

  Within a week he was on top of six-foot stilts, wearing a sandwich-board and dressed in a bright green coat with long black trousers, being jostled by the milling New Yorkers on Coney Island. His pay was three dollars every weekday and five dollars on Saturday and Sunday, but he soon drew such large crowds that his salary was doubled. Shortly afterwards he began supplementing even that with free hot dogs for standing beside one of the island’s hot-dog stands. Then I fixed up a deal with a restaurant and an ice cream palace, and I got all the food I wanted free.’

  Archie Leach was to put the experience to good use. A few weeks later he and Bob Pender’s son Tommy were offered a booking back at the Hippodrome in a show called Better Times. They decided to call themselves the Walking Stanleys, not least because part of the act was t
o be done on stilts. When Better Times closed, Pender and Archie moved on to Alexander Pantages’s circuit on the west coast of the United States, and in the first months of 1924, at the age of twenty, Archie got his first glimpse of the city that was to become his home. He arrived in Los Angeles as one of the Walking Stanleys. ‘I saw palm trees for the first time in my life, and I was impressed by Hollywood’s wide boulevards and their extraordinary cleanliness in the pre-smog sunshine,’ he was to recall later. ‘I didn’t know I would make my home there one day. And yet I did know....’

  One thing Archie Leach certainly knew was that in 1924 performers who talked were usually paid more than silent comedians. And if he wanted to become an actor he would have to start talking on the stage. The only difficulty was his voice. He thought he sounded like an Australian, and so did his friends — so much so that they took to calling him ‘Kangaroo’ and ‘Boomerang’. Orry-Kelly remembers him as ‘having a rather thick English accent, though he was losing it fast’. After struggling and failing to make himself understood, Archie Leach accepted the inevitable. He could not alter the sound of his voice overnight. It was going to be some time before he could become an actor. He settled instead for being a straight man to stand-up comedians. And in the next five years, he played almost every small town in America. ‘I learned to time laughs. When to talk into an audience’s laughter. When not to wait for a laugh. In all sorts of theatres, of all sizes, playing to all sorts of people, timing laughs that changed at every single performance.’

  And he never stopped standing in the wings watching vaudeville’s great straight men, like George Burns. Years later Cary Grant acknowledged that he took his style as a comedian from Burns. ‘The straight man says the plant line, and the comic answers it. He doesn’t move while that line is said. That’s the comedy line. The laugh goes up and up in volume and cascades down. As soon as it’s getting a little quiet, the straight man talks into it, and the comic answers it. And up goes the laugh again.... George was an absolute genius, timing his laughs with that cigar.’