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Cary Grant
country
Archie Leach's father was a drunk and
his mother was committed when he was nine years old. But somehow
the Bristol-born boy turned himself into a screen legend. Now
Bristolians have rediscovered the Hollywood hero and are claiming
him as their own
Cary Grant is standing in an
east London foundry. He is balanced on the ball of his right foot,
one hand thrust in his jacket pocket, the other clutching the
script for To Catch a Thief. He has a dimpled chin, a dickie-bow
and a strap around his neck that has winched him to the scaffold
overhead. He has been waxed, blasted and is awaiting a final coat
that will tan his dun pallor a rich reddy-brown. Cary Grant is
almost done.
The plan was to stand him in the
centre of Bristol, opposite the Hippodrome theatre where he once
worked as a stagehand. But the city council has discovered that
there is a cast-iron water-main right under the proposed site, and
the unveiling has been bumped back from September to the end of
the year. This scuppers a scheme to coincide the unveiling with
next month's mammoth Cary Grant retrospective at London's National
Film Theatre, and has forced a hasty rescheduling of local
festivities. But the council is taking no chances. "They've
had these water-mains explode in the past," explains David
Long, who has instigated and managed the ongoing Cary Grant Statue
Campaign. "And we don't want to send Cary into orbit."
One could argue that Bristol sent
Cary into orbit a long time ago. Born lowly Archibald Leach, the
West Country boy would remodel himself as one of the world's great
movie icons. As Cary Grant - graceful, dashing, debonair - he
would be embraced as the epitome of silver-screen sophistication.
Those who didn't know the history assumed that Grant had simply
been born that way. Those who did held him up as the ultimate
American success story, a poor kid from an English backstreet who
shed his past to become someone else entirely. Bristol? That was
just the place he ran away from.
Today, Grant registers as a
flitting, ghostly presence in the city. Recognition has been
pricked by the statue campaign, widely covered in recent months by
the Evening Post newspaper; but many inhabitants still have only a
foggy notion of who he was and what films he appeared in. "He
did a lot of comedies, didn't he?" wonders the wiry geezer
smoking a roll-up on Broad Quay. "Wasn't he a bit like
Charlie Chaplin?"
Inside the Hippodrome, they're more
up to speed. "Oh, we're all very proud of him," insists
Sally Houston, who manages the box office. "Everyone knows he
was from Bristol, and that they're putting up a statue to
him." But she's unsure precisely where the statue will stand
("we've got a lot of drainage problems around here").
Nor is she convinced that he ever worked at her theatre. "No,
he never had a job here. I don't think so anyway." A quick
call through to one of her colleagues. "Oh yes. He did. He
worked front of house." Houston directs me down to Millennium
Square, the possible alternative site for the Grant statue. It is
a flat, glittering expanse of flagstones, glass and steel; the
hang-out for a gaggle of teen skateboarders who could not be less
interested. "He made black-and-white films," sniffs
14-year-old Tim Metcalf. "Bo. Ring."
Grant did indeed make black-and-
white films. He appeared in colour productions, too. He made
comedies and thrillers and romances and adventure flicks (though
he was always more of a mercurial jester than a brawny action
hero). Grant was the first major Hollywood player to escape an
exclusive studio contract and tout himself as an independent star
for hire; the first to negotiate a 10% profit deal on his
pictures. His CV reads like the listings on Turner Classic Movies:
Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, An Affair to Remember,
Only Angels Have Wings, Charade, Notorious, His Girl Friday, North
by Northwest. The American Film Institute recently placed him
(behind Humphrey Bogart) as the second greatest "screen
legend" ever. In the opinion of the film critic David
Thomson, "He's the best and most important actor in the
history of cinema." Grant's achievements were always
historic. When set against his humble origins, they sound
positively ludicrous.
Archibald Alexander Leach was born
in 1904, the only child of a protective, fastidious mother and an
alcoholic father, who worked as a tailor's presser. His upbringing
was harsh and verging on the itinerant. At the age of nine, Leach
returned from school to be told that his mother was holidaying in
Weston-Super-Mare. In fact, she had been committed by her husband
to a nearby mental institution. Grant was not to learn of her
whereabouts until his father's death in 1935.
In the meantime, the boy won a
scholarship to grammar school but was expelled for stealing. Spare
evenings were spent working at the Hippodrome. As soon as he was
old enough to forge his father's signature, he signed up with a
travelling troupe of acrobatic comedians. He was the same age as
those skateboarders in Millennium Square.
Up in the steep Victorian suburbs
to the north of town, Archibald Leach has left more obvious
traces. His two schools, Bishop Road Primary, Bishopston, and
Fairfield Grammar in neighbouring Montpelier, now boast discreet
plaques. There is another on the terraced two-up in Horfield where
he was born. At the time the Leaches rented it, the Horfield house
was in virtual slumland. "The loo would have been at the
bottom of the garden," says Hazel Sumner, the building's
present owner. "The garage across the road used to be a
pigsty." These days, it is eminently respectable: all
double-glazing and window boxes and old coves sitting out on their
front steps.
A retired mental health worker,
Sumner moved into Grant's old house 10 years ago. During that time
she has seen few tourists. She recalls a couple of film students,
a pair of nosy Americans and an elderly man on crutches on a
pilgrimage from Cornwall. "I'd just finished knocking down
the wall in the back garden. I asked him, 'Do you want to take a
brick away with you?' He wrote to me later and said he had the
brick on his mantelpiece." Sumner says that the house's past
didn't affect the price when she bought it, and she doubts it
would now. "I don't think the name means anything to anyone
under 30. People now say, 'Who is he?'"
It's not just the young either.
Outside in the spotting rain, a middle-aged woman is lugging her
shopping home. "Who?" she says, when I wonder if she's
heard of Cary Grant. "Who?" She's looking at me
pop-eyed, incredulous, as though I've just asked her the
whereabouts of the tooth fairy. "I don't know where he
is."
All of which should be depressing
yet somehow isn't. It shows that Bristol is a city living in the
present and not the past. Modernistic Millennium Square is part of
a mammoth new development built over the derelict harbourside
district. Montpelier has found a new lease of life as a kind of
boho Bristolian Notting Hill. Sad old Horfield has turned brightly
middle-class. Life moves on and cultures change. Grant merely
moved and changed more than most.
"People ask me what Cary Grant
ever did for Bristol," admits statue frontman David Long.
"But I don't think that's the issue. The real criterion is
what he can do for Bristol now." Long reckons that a public
memorial will boost tourism in the city and reclaim dazzling,
complex Archie Leach as one of their own. The Cary Grant Statue
Campaign has been funded by donations from the people of Bristol
and various old friends and relatives abroad. Although the
campaign is still £14,000 short of its £60,000 target, the
bronze figure is ready to go. It will be unveiled on December 7 in
the presence of Grant's widow Barbara Grant-Cohen and his only
child, Jennifer, now 35. It will stand as a reminder to the
outside world that Grant hailed from Bristol. A reminder, too, for
many of the people who live there.
Still, the question is valid. What
did Grant ever do for Bristol? On the face of it, very little. He
got out of the place as soon as he could, ditched his accent and
assumed the stance of a millionaire playboy even before he
actually was one. Alighting in the US as part of Bob Pender's
acrobatic troupe in 1921, Leach assimilated quickly. He earned a
crust in vaudeville or stilt-walking in Coney Island. Later, he
ventured across to Hollywood. When Paramount Pictures demanded
that he change his name, he offered no objection. Archie just
doesn't sound right in America, they told him. It doesn't sound
particularly right in Britain either, he replied.
Cary Grant was to prove Archie
Leach's greatest production. Perma-tanned in tailored suits, he
was the sort of dreamy paragon of poise, wit and glamour that only
a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks could come up with.
In his book A Class Apart, Grant biographer Graham McCann likens
his subject to F Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby, another lowly lad with
a surfeit of charm who changed his name and his diction and
reinvented himself as a new American aristocrat. "If
personality is a series of successful gestures, then there was
something gorgeous about him," wrote Fitzgerald of his hero,
"some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life."
Fitzgerald's words would later find an echo in Katharine Hepburn's
more loaded description of Grant as "a personality
functioning".
Grant was a fiction, but he was a
brilliant fiction. He was not real but he looked it. Even away
from the camera, he lived the life, with his beach-front homes,
glitzy parties and succession of glamorous wives (spouse number
two was Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton). The most expert
observers could have been forgiven for forgetting his origins. In
later years, Grant befriended millionaire businessman Peter
Cadbury (of chocolate fame). Cadbury was a native of Bristol
himself, albeit from the more posh end of town. For him, however,
Grant never rang remotely false. "I never associated him with
being a working-class kid, I must say," Cadbury, now 82,
tells me. "I don't want to sound snobbish about it, but he
never had any sort of Bristol accent. From the first time I met
him, he always impressed me as the model gentleman. I thought he
was Cary Grant offscreen, in real life. But that's what made him
such a good actor." Cadbury doesn't say it, but the
implication is plain. Even when he wasn't working, Grant was
playing a role.
But perhaps the truth is more
tricky than that. After all, Grant was nothing if not complicated.
His appeal always seemed more layered than that of a conventional
matinee idol. Certain aspects of his life - the rumoured affair
with Randolph Scott, the admitted experiments with LSD - never
quite squared with the accepted version. The more you pick at that
seamless image, the more shaded and ambiguous it becomes.
"Cary is a will-o'-the-wisp," fellow Brit David Niven
once remarked. "The most truly mysterious friend I have. A
spooky Celt really, not an Englishman at all."
Added to this is the fact that
Grant never entirely turned his back on Bristol. After getting his
mother released from the asylum, the actor installed her in a
nearby home and would visit every year until her death in 1973.
Slippery and evasive when questioned about his private life, he
could be startlingly open about his past. "You'd think that
when he changed from Archie Leach into Cary Grant, he'd really
want to deny his humble roots," says David Long.
"Strangely enough, he never wanted to do that. He was always
happy to say where he came from."
From time to time, the ghost of
Archie Leach would pop up on screen, too. In Gunga Din, Grant
plays a character named Archie (he chose the name himself). In His
Girl Friday, he offers a seemingly throwaway remark that would
have sailed right over the heads of most audiences: "The last
man to say that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut
his throat."
The most personal film Grant ever
made is one you've probably never heard of. Shot in 1944, None But
the Lonely Heart provided the role he claimed was closest to his
real self. He plays Ernie Mott, a dirt-poor cockney struggling to
provide for his aged mother (Ethel Barrymore) in the slums of
London. Grant developed the project himself, hired left-wing
playwright Clifford Odets to write and direct, and badgered the
set designers into duplicating the cramped Victorian interiors of
his youth. Grant had high hopes for the film. The trouble was that
the public had grown accustomed to seeing their hero as suavity
incarnate. The film bombed, and Grant would later seem almost
angry at having been caught out: "People say that audiences
want realism. They say it has to be garbage cans and two-bit
violence. I don't see why it can't be laughs and the Plaza. That's
part of life too." By and large, that's exactly what he gave
them.
But have another look at those
quintessential Cary Grant movies: those giddying black-and-white
screwballs at the start, those Club Class colour escapades near
the finish. They're deeper than they look. In almost every one, in
almost every scene, you have a lingering sense of Archie Leach
playing Cary Grant, of a playful, pratfalling kid who's somehow
inveigled his way into high society and has made the viewer a
co-conspirator in his deception. In the early years, this sleight
of hand secured his reputation as the perfect gentleman for an
egalitarian, democratic America. Later, Alfred Hitchcock would tap
into this duplicity to explore a darker side to the actor's image
- casting him in Suspicion (in which he plays a suspected killer),
Notorious (a cold-blooded US agent) and, most famously, as the
blank slate Roger O Thornhill (the O stands for nothing) in North
by Northwest. "The essence of [Grant's] quality can be put
quite simply," writes David Thomson. "He can be
attractive and unattractive simultaneously; there is a light and a
dark side to him but, whichever is dominant, the other creeps into
view. It may be that this is Grant (or Archie Leach) himself
transmitted by camera and screen thanks to a rare willingness...to
take part in a fantasy without being deceived by it." Pauline
Kael put it simpler still: "Cary Grant's romantic elegance is
wrapped around the resilient, tough core of a mutt, and Americans
dream of thoroughbreds while identifying with mutts. So do
moviegoers the world over."
Put it down to the Bristol
connection. Instead of a guilty secret, his background was the
making of him. Rather than a disowning of Archie Leach, Grant was
just Leach's immaculate conception of himself, honed through a
bizarre combination of circus training and a rigorous study of the
upper classes. He was a mutt impersonating a prince while
retaining all his muttish speed and cunning; a mongrel idol that
was part Horfield backstreet, part Hollywood Boulevard. "I
have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie
Leach and Cary Grant," he would once remark. "Unsure of
each, suspecting each." It is this tension that made him so
fascinating. It's also what makes him such a devil to get hold of.
Grant died in 1986, having retired
from movies two decades before. He departed quietly, with a
minimum of fuss. On his wishes, the body was cremated and there
was no funeral service. What became of the ashes has never been
made public. They are believed to have been scattered in the hills
above California, thrown to the winds in the land where he cast
off his impoverished past to become the American Dream in a
spotless tuxedo.
Back in his London foundry, Cary
Grant stands a life-sized 6'2" and weighs a hefty 121kg (you
wouldn't want to lift him). He looks fine: fluid and perfectly
proportioned; a movie icon preserved in the prime of life. And yet
you can't help wondering if a static bronze is the best means of
catching Grant. Didn't the man's appeal hinge as much on his
acrobat's movement and his oddball delivery (that uniquely dry
transatlantic twang) as it did on the way he looked? To root him
in one place seems to go against a life lived in constant motion.
Turning him into a statue is like trying to paint a fire by
looking at a fireplace.
Sculptor Graham Ibbeson admits it
was a struggle. "People know him for the way he moved and the
way he spoke. But how do you capture that? It was without a doubt
the hardest challenge I've ever had in 30 years of figurative
sculpture. I was glad when they came and took it away, because I'd
still be working on him now. He was driving me potty."
In a way, Ibbeson has a lot in
common with Archie Leach. They both worked hard at creating Cary
Grant, at conjuring base matter into movie legend. "The thing
about Grant was that he made everything look so easy," says
Ibbeson. "What people don't realise is that there was a lot
of hard graft that went into that. It was the same with the
sculpture. The way he stands there, he looks like he doesn't have
a care in the world. But he was a pain in the bloody arse to make."
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