The colourful life of Cary Grant: ‘So much talent, so many mysteries’
A restless man tortured by his childhood; an actor fully committed to his craft who also loathed his profession — two new accounts illuminate Cary Grant’s life.
It’s a publisher’s nightmare. Two books on the same subject — the life of legendary film actor Cary Grant — appearing simultaneously. It’s happened before, in 1996, when Graham McCann’s Cary Grant: A Class Apart and Geoffrey Wansell’s Cary Grant: Dark Angel vied for pride of place in bookshops. And now it’s happening again.
The perceived market for Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise and Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend might be the so-called “general reader”, but who, aside from fervent film enthusiasts, is likely to fork out for both? And when someone goes looking for “that Cary Grant biography I read about”, might the books be seen as interchangeable?
Publishers’ (and booksellers’) problems aside, what about the poor authors who are doomed to have their efforts assessed by way of comparison?
In this case, one is veteran American film historian Scott Eyman, whose previous subjects include Ernst Lubitsch (in 1985), Mary Pickford (1990), John Ford (1999), Louis B. Mayer (2005), John Wayne (2014), Henry Fonda and James Stewart (together, in 2017).
The other is the (so far) less prolific British academic and historian Mark Glancy, who wrote Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain: From the 1920s to the Present (2013) and a 2002 monograph on Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, as well as eight of the History Revealed audiobooks about the cinema.
Conceived around the same time, their Grant biographies have much in common. Like their antecedents — there’s an abundance — both trace the relatively well-known contours of the famous actor’s life and can be categorised as “star-is-born” stories (even if the hero dies at the end). And even casual observers are likely to be familiar with much of the information.
Born Archibald Alec Leach in Bristol on January 18, 1904, Grant was separated from his mother two weeks after his 11th birthday. She’d been institutionalised nearby, but he was told she’d died, only learning from his ailing father years later that she was still alive.
He fell in love with the movies and vaudeville as a kid before joining the Pender Troupe of music hall performers which toured the country and then travelled across the Atlantic to America.
Via Broadway (where his first role was as an Aussie bloke named Anzac in Golden Dawn, an Arthur Hammerstein operetta), he eventually made his way to Hollywood, assorted marriages, affairs and dalliances as well as global fame as a result of his work in a series of classic films made between the 1930s and the 1960s.
To any filmgoer whose frame of reference precedes century number 21, many of their titles will be familiar: The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, An Affair to Remember, North by Northwest, Charade.
Both Eyman and Glancy are good writers and storytellers, well-equipped to colour in the above outlines. But they go about their business in very different ways.
Eyman brings a snarky edge to the picture he paints of the actor and of the world he inhabited, and his biography suffers from it, whereas Glancy’s approach is more measured and illuminating.
“So much talent, so many mysteries,” Eyman writes of Grant near the start of his book. And while neither he nor Glancy ever really get to the heart of what made their shared subject tick — can a biography ever do that? — both offer a distinct impression of the adult Grant as a collection of contradictions: a troubled, restless human being who meant well but was tortured by a traumatic childhood; an actor fully committed to his craft who also loathed his profession and the celebrity that came with it; a total charmer who was unable to sustain lasting relationships.
They also present him as an incomparable on-screen force whether or not he had agreeable material or people to work with. Needless to say, while the mysteries are never satisfactorily solved, both writers find plenty to explore.
Glancy is generally more generous in his estimates of the people who become characters in his story: the wives, the collaborators, the friends, the acquaintances, and Grant himself. On the other hand, Eyman is more inclined to sit in judgment on everyone’s failings, and can’t resist an amusing or salacious anecdote about them, no matter where it comes from.
On the subject of the rumours about Grant having been involved in a homosexual relationship with fellow actor and longtime housemate Randolph Scott, though, Eyman remains sensibly circumspect. Glancy, however, persuasively challenges the claims made by previous biographers that the men were secret lovers, pointing to the ways in which studio publicity shots of the couple’s life together have been taken out of context.
In the process, Gillian Armstrong’s 2015 documentary, Women He’s Undressed, about famous gay Australian costume designer Orry-Kelly (who was a friend of Grant’s during his early years in Hollywood), is chided for its mistaken assumptions about the relationship.
Glancy is far more trustworthy as a critic than Eyman, whose flip assessments of films and actors’ performances are ill-judged and out of place.
That said, Eyman is good on Grant’s comic persona and the way it works: “The basic joke, repeated with variations in most of Grant’s comedies, was the gradual but increasing discombobulation of his impeccable surface.”
Glancy is also perceptive about it, looking at the ways in which Grant “became a master of a kind of contrived nonchalance that allows him at once to be within the screwball world and at the same time outside of it, laughing with the audience at its absurdity”.
Glancy delves perceptively into the ways in which Grant’s personal life was filtered through many of the films he made. For example, he tracks down the ways in which Grant’s 1942 film for writer-director Leo McCarey, Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942), deliberately draws on “some broad parallels with (Grant’s) relationship with Barbara Hutton”. And he constructs a persuasive case for why “North by Northwest is about Cary Grant”, even though, as he points out, director Alfred Hitchcock initially considered James Stewart for the lead.
Eyman provides some choice quotable quotes (“Grant was to romantic comedy what Fred Astaire was to dance”) and he casts Hollywood as a place where Archie Leach was right at home playing Cary Grant (“Everyone was passing, one way or the other”).
But while the apocryphal and often racy anecdotes gleaned from a variety of not-always-reliable sources make for a fun read, they finally don’t allow us to see Grant as much more than a shadow passing through while people make up stories about him.
Neither writer ever met Grant. The closest Eyman came was as an audience member at Fort Lauderdale for one of the retired-but-touring actor’s conversation sessions with paying customers.
Nevertheless, both he and Glancy have extensively researched their subject, largely drawing on the same sources. Glancy, who was the consultant for the solid 2017 documentary, Becoming Cary Grant, is much more sceptical about them, frequently correcting their inaccuracies and warning readers in his introduction that some of them “have taken the form of exposés, with gossip, hearsay, and invention serving as their primary sources”.
Both writers agree that, while Grant was almost always good on-screen, not all the films in which he starred were worthy of him. What neither suggests is that Grant, who exerted an ever-increasing control over the projects he took on, might have been better off with less power, if he’d been willing to put himself more at others’ disposal rather than using them to achieve his own ends.
Similarly, neither raises the possibility that his “wanderlust” as a kid was part of the same pattern that defined him as an adult, with the movies providing an ongoing refuge for him, first as a boy gazing in awe at the big screen and then as an actor, escaping into roles where he could become somebody else.
Tom Ryan is a Melbourne-based film critic. His most recent book is The Films of Douglas Sirk: Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions.
Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise
Simon & Schuster, 576pp, $55 (HB)
Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend
Oxford University Press, 568pp, $55 (HB)
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