The Many Facets of Cary Grant

I never used to understand how people could devote themselves to studying one topic or one person. I used to think biographers must get so tired of reading constantly about one person all the time. But I can understand that continuous fascination now - at least, in regards to Cary Grant.

I've only seen six or seven of his movies, and they're all from the 1930s, the decade of Screwball Comedy, which is wonderfully underrated these days. Every once in a while, I'll get on a Cary Grant kick, and become absorbed in watching movies starring him or reading more about him. When I first started reading Marc Eliot's biography of him, before I knew anything about Cary Grant, I wasn't expecting very good writing - it's over 380 pages. Granted, he went into pretty rich detail about many of Grant's 70+ films and about what Hollywood was like back then, but even without all the extra depth, it'd still be a long book: Cary Grant was fascinating.

As an actor, he was amazing. I haven't seen him in any of his more serious roles, but I will soon. Even without that, Cary Grant was wonderful at comedies. On screen, he was charismatic, charming, witty, and quick-tongued; since he was originally trained as an acrobat for Vaudeville performances, he was great at physical comedy as well, from trips to double takes and pratfalls in general. Yet you would never mistake him for a slapstick actor: he always did it gracefully and made it look so easy. The funny part is, everything he did was calculated. He didn't like performing spontaneously, he didn't like improvisation - he liked rehearsing over and over until everything was perfect. As much as he could, he chose his roles and directors carefully, never wanting to be the pursuer - always the pursued. In the comedies, he was the quintessential leading man; in the more serious films, his darker side came out beautifully. Hitchcock perfected that, it's said. I also read once that Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart were Hitchcock's favorite leading men for his films - he directed them four times each over the course of their careers - because Cary Grant represented Hitchcock as he wanted to see himself, and Jimmy Stewart represented Hitchcock as he existed.

As a part of classic Hollywood, Cary Grant is legendary. Even disregarding his status as a performer. He was the first major actor to break the studio system. It used to be that an actor signed an exclusive contract with a studio and could only make movies for that studio, unless the studio heads agreed to lend him out to another studio for another picture. The actor didn't have much say in his career decisions. Cary Grant, though, got his agent Frank Vincent to negotiate nonexclusive contracts with both Columbia and RKO simultaneously. The Academy punished him for that. He never won an Oscar; the only Academy Award he received was an honorary one in the 1970s. 1973 I believe. There are several films where this is conspicuous - you can look at the list of who was nominated for the film, and the absence of his name is extremely noticeable, like The Philadelphia Story - Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Ruth Hussey (the other 3 leads) were all nominated, and it was also nominated for Best Screenplay, Director, and Picture. Jimmy Stewart won (though he said it was his reward for not winning the year before for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) and it won Best Screenplay. Grant didn't even to go the ceremony.

His early family life wasn't boring either. He came to the U.S. as a teenager in a Vaudeville troupe. His mother Elsie was committed to a mental institution before then; she'd been considered mad since her first son, Cary's older brother, died as a little boy. This was back when Cary Grant was still just Archie Leach from Bristol. He lived in New York with the troupe for a while, eventually finding his way to Broadway. His last stage role was a character named Cary Lockwood, then he signed with...Paramount I think. Publicists recommended he change the "Lockwood" because, I think, another star already had a similar name. Since the C and G initials were apparently doing Clark Gable and Gary Cooper well, he chose Grant.

He was married five times. His first wife was jealous of his relationship with friend/housemate and possible lover Randolph Scott. His second wife was an heiress who was giving money to her Nazi-supporting ex-husband. He had to start spying on her for J. Edgar Hoover so as not to be sent back to Britain and be drafted for the war. His third wife got him into the psychotherapy program she was in - which got him into LSD when the drug was still in experimental stages. His fourth wife gave him his only child, his daughter Jennifer, when he was about 62. And his fifth wife was still Mrs. Cary Grant when he died at 83.

The idea of the "real" Cary Grant still mystifies people. On screen, he had that charming, comedic, leading-man persona. So that's who he became in real life. He worked hard to maintain his physique, and to make sure he was always dressed impeccably. The man isn't still a style icon for nothing. In life, his look was carefully planned, yet on screen, he carried himself with a careless grace in such a way that you didn't think of him as a distant, unobtainable star, but as a human. The comedies focused on his light, ideal romantic side, while it's said that Hitchcock brought out the real Cary Grant by focusing on the dark, which I love. I like to think that the lines between the actor and the person blurred in his own confusion, and I hope there was a side to him that no one ever truly discovered. Everything about him was calculated - he shaped an image and persona and career that he wanted people to identify him with - and I heard a critic say that he stands out among actors from that period in that he never let himself become identified with an era. Clark Gable and Gary Cooper aren't seen today the way Cary Grant is, and their body of work doesn't hold up the same way his does.

"Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant. I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant; unsure of either, suspecting each. I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until I finally became that person. Or he became me."
- Cary Grant