the times | Saturday November 14 2020 1GR saturday review 13
smoke screen Cary Grant had a distrust of intimacyArchie, the ultimate screen idol
Y
ou end this book wondering
what might have happened if
the working-class boy who was
born plain Archibald Leach had
never left his native Bristol. The
suave actor we know as Cary Grant would
never have existed, and we would never
have had a chance to watch some of the
most polished performances in the history
of cinema. Where would Archie have end-
ed up if he had never sailed to New York
with a troupe of vaudevillians in 1920?
It’s one of the merits of Scott Eyman’s
well-researched and grace-
fully written biography that
you are always conscious of
the contrast between the actor
we have come to know so well
— the perfectly groomed lead-
ing man blessed with a sophis-
ticated mid-Atlantic accent —
and the insecure individual
who seemed haunted by mem-
ories of an unhappy childhood.
In a household where money
was tight Archie’s parents, Elias
and Elsie, were always at logger-
heads. Elsie, a housewife and
daughter of a shipwright, suf-
fered from nervous disorders,
and in 1915 Elias, who pressed
suits in a clothing factory, com-
mitted her to a psychiatric hospi-
tal, where she spent the next two
decades. Archie was not given
warning of his father’s decision;
he arrived home to discover that
she was gone. Little was said thereafter.
Early on, Eyman — a film historian
whose other books include a biography of
the director John Ford — gives us a bleak
image of a young Archie being taken to
Marks & Spencer by Elsie for the first time.
Dazzled by all the activity, the boy runs
over to a counter, only to realise that his
mother is not with him. Frightened and
alone amid the crowds, he waits and then
begins to cry. No one pays any attention.
Then he feels his mother’s hand holding
his. She kneels in front of him and says:
“You see, Archie, nobody wants you. No-
body came for you, did they? I’m the only
one — the only one — who cares about you.
Nobody else. And don’t you ever forget it,
because the next time you let go of my
hand and wander off, I won’t come back.”
Grant remained loyal to her after she was
released from the institution. Elias had died
by then. For the rest of Elsie’s life — she died
in 1973, only 13 years before her son passed
away at the age of 82. Grant was a loving son
who undertook regular trips back to Bristol
to see her. Yet there was little in the way of
genuine intimacy.
The theatre was the place where Archiecould find
an alternative
family. He had
been dazzled
by the Victori-
an glamour of
the Bristol
Hippodrome,
and going on
to the stage as
a career of-
fered an es-
cape from the
joblessness
of home.
Working in a
music hall
troupe as an
acrobat and all-round entertainer gave him
the physical dexterity that he exploited in
his later comedy films. When his ship left
Southampton en route to an engagement
in New York a new chapter beckoned.
Before too long he had graduated to act-
ing in the theatre, working hard to elimi-
nate any trace of his West Country accent.
(“I was very conscious of my lack of educa-
tion when I started. I didn’t want it to show,
so I invented an accent... The rest I stole
from Noël Coward.”) Eyman notes that
there was a hint of cockney in the new
voice too, a remnant of mixing with his
East End pals in the music hall act.
By 1931 he had shifted to Hollywood.
Cary Grant was born. Eyman takes us
through the newcomer’s gradual rise to
stardom — he had his share of flops until
the 1937 comedy The Awful Truth estab-
lished him as the kind of VIP who could
join Clark Gable, Tyrone Power and the
like at celebrity parties.
The successes kept coming, from The
Philadelphia Story to Arsenic and Old Lace,
not forgetting, of course, the collabora-
tions with another British expat from a
lowly background, Alfred Hitchcock. Forall his box office appeal, Grant never won
an Oscar, although in 1970, years after he
had retired, he was given an honorary Aca-
demy award, presented by his friend Frank
Sinatra. Perhaps he was the victim of our
age-old habit of favouring the tragic over
the comic, the dark over the light. Could it
be that he made everything look too easy?
As Eyman puts it, discussing the likes of
Bringing Up Baby: “Romantic comedy is an
insufficiently respected genre that didn’t
really do much for the careers of other fre-
quent practitioners such as Melvyn Doug-
las, Ray Milland, or in the modern era,
Jennifer Aniston or Matthew McCo-
naughey. But Grant was to romantic
comedy what Fred Astaire was to dance —
he made something that is extremely
difficult look easy.”
Meanwhile, Grant skipped from one
marriage to another. His experiences with
his dysfunctional mother appear to have
left him with a distrust of intimacy. It has
long been assumed that he had a secret gay
life, yet Eyman comes up with little in the
way of firm evidence. The photograph of
him working out in skimpy shorts along-
side his long-time housemate Randolph
Scott certainly looks ridiculously camp
(gossip about the two men was always in
the air). Eyman, however, isn’t convinced.
Always elegantly dressed, always
poised, Grant glided through movies.
There was turmoil just beneath the sur-
face, though. Around the time he was mak-
ing arguably his greatest film, Hitchcock’s
North by Northwest, he was discovering
the therapeutic possibilities of LSD. In the
years that followed Grant was so happy to
spread the word about how the hallucino-
genic had helped him to cope with his
inner demons that Timothy Leary, the
counterculture prophet, arranged a meet-
ing with him and discussed making a mov-
ie about LSD. The mind boggles. Can you
imagine Cary Grant on acid?Cary Grant was
haunted by his dark
childhood in Bristol,
says Clive Davis
Cary Grant
A Brilliant Disguise
by Scott EymanSimon & Schuster,
576pp; £c
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tChickens came home to roast
The Elizabethan naturalist and
physician Thomas Muffet
thought chicken was “so pure
and fine a meat” that it was
worthy of only the finest of
diners and “no man I think is
so foolish as to commend them
to ploughmen and besomers
[labouring women]”. Most
spit-roast red-meat obsessed
Brits were entirely at home
with Thomas Muffet’s idea that
the poor had no business
eating something so fine.
According to one Georgian
bird-fancier, Britain had never
been much of a chicken-eating
nation. British farmers generally
ignored it (except for the eggs)
and it was a
luxury — usually
unattainable —
for “the lower
or middling
orders of
the people”.
Even at
the endof the 19th century, as the
condition of the labourer was
improving and he could afford
more meat, chicken very rarely
appears in the expenditure
tables; he and his family aspired
to beef, mutton or pork, and
subsisted on the ubiquitous
bacon or salted pork.
That was changed when the
practice of battery hens was
developed in the US in the early
20th century by a businessman
who realised that you could
separate chickens into meat
providers and egg layers, and
farm both more intensively.
Battery farming spread to
Britain and the rest of the
world so that chicken became
cheaper than
“butcher’s meat”
for the first
time in the
1960s.From
ScoffPOPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES