I’ve been a fan of Cary Grant for a very long time. I love his smooth and debonair style, his handsome and tanned good looks and that rather languid transatlantic brogue of his.
In the TV series Archie currently streaming on ITV X they seem to be saying that all of that was an invention, an invention by an Englishman called Archie Leach who transformed himself into a successful Hollywood film star named Cary Grant.
Grant was born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England in 1904. He had a poor upbringing and his mother suffered from depression and his father was an alcoholic. The young Archie was interested in the theatre and performing and his mother was keen on him having piano lessons. His older brother had died before reaching the age of one and this perhaps made his mother a little over protective of the young Archie. Even so, his mother was not a woman who was able to give or receive love easily and the older Cary Grant blamed his childhood relationship with his mother for his problems with women in later life.
When Archie was 9 years old his father placed his mother in Glenside Hospital, a mental institution, telling his son that she had gone away on a long holiday and later, that she had died.
Archie befriended a group of acrobatic dancers known as The Penders and he was able to eventually join them and there he trained as a stilt walker and became part of their act. Later the group toured America and Archie decided to stay, following in the footsteps of others before him like Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel who had made their way to the USA in an almost identical way.
On Wikipedia they mention that on the trip over to the USA Archie met Douglas Fairbanks and was greatly impressed by him, so much so that Fairbanks became a role model for the young Archie Leach.
In New York Archie worked in vaudeville with various comedy and theatrical groups. He joined the William Morris theatrical agency and began to pick up many theatre roles. In 1932 he had his first screen test and was given a five year contract with Paramount Pictures. B P Schulberg the general manager of Paramount decided that Archie Leach was not a good enough name for films so Archie came up with the name Cary Grant taking Cary from a stage character he had played and Grant chosen randomly from a telephone directory.
Cary Grant worked hard at his profession and in the TV series Archie they claim that Cary was a role or a part that Archie built up over time. Jason Isaacs who plays Grant says Cary would never be filmed or recorded during an interview because then he was being himself not playing at being Cary. The actor tracked down a recording of Grant made secretly by a student journalist who interviewed Cary over the phone and felt that for the first time he was hearing the real Archie who came over in the recording as very English rather than the usual mid Atlantic voice that we are used to hearing.
It seems to me that many stars who use a different name in the film world are in a way creating a character which they present to the public. You could argue that Marilyn Monroe was a similar personality and that she was a creation of Norma Jeane in the way that Cary Grant was created by Archie Leach.
A breakthrough role for Grant was starring with Mae West in the film She Done Him Wrong and the follow up, I’m No Angel. Grant went on to star in many famous films and amazingly, even though he was a star in Hollywood’s golden years, he was actually the first big star to not be a part of the studio system. He was a freelance actor, not contracted to any studio until 1937 when he signed a four-picture deal with Columbia.
In his early years in Hollywood, Grant shared a house with actor Randolph Scott leading to claims of the two being gay lovers. Still, young bachelors sharing a house with others is not uncommon. David Niven famously shared a house with Errol Flynn and we can hardly class those two as being gay.
Somewhere in my fairly huge book collection I have a biography of Cary Grant but despite an intensive search I couldn’t find it. I also have a copy of David Niven’s Bring on the Empty Horses which if I remember correctly has a short chapter on Grant. Now where did I put that book?
I did do some quite considerable research to produce this blog post. Firstly, I had to watch the four episodes of the TV series Archie, currently streaming on ITV X. That wasn’t anything difficult of course, it wasn’t a chore, in fact it was very enjoyable. Archie is a wonderful four part series and Jason Isaacs plays an outstanding part. He doesn’t try to impersonate Cary but he did manage to create a look of the late star and he caught Grant’s voice and enunciation perfectly. Most of the series follows Cary in later life when he becomes involved with and later marries Dyan Cannon, Dyan was his fourth wife and she was the mother of his only child Jennifer and she and her mother co-produced the series which is definitely well worth watching.
Next, I searched for the biography I had of Cary but despite searching the entire house I couldn’t find it. Oh well, I have a few copies of Bring on The Empty Horses about the house so I thought ok, I’ll grab that and have a read of the chapter on Cary. Once again, I searched through the entire house but could I find that book? No! Eventually I started to put everything back where I had found it and it was only after idly looking in a box of books that I had only recently packed away and had earlier dismissed, that I finally found it.
Anyway, I had a break from writing to look for that book and after a while when I couldn’t find it I popped the TV on. I wasn’t altogether surprised to find there was a Cary Grant film showing. It was An Affair to Remember, a love story in which Grant’s character, a playboy type meets Deborah Kerr on a transatlantic voyage and the two fall for each other. On arrival in the USA they decide to have a 6 month break from each other as they are both in other relationships and then meet at the top of the Empire State building in New York. It’s not really my cup of tea, in fact it’s overtly sentimental but then, sometimes a small dose of sentimentality is good for you. Cary Grant plays, well, Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr plays a very English New Yorker.
I have two of Grant’s other films on DVD, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest, both directed by Cary’s favourite director, Alfred Hitchcock.
OK, enough TV watching for now. Getting back to Bring on the Empty Horses, David Niven wrote about Cary Grant in a short section of his book called Long Shots and Close Ups where he gives his readers a quick sketch about various film people. The section on Cary is only three and a half pages and not the full chapter I was expecting but Niven clearly liked the man and in those three and a bit pages, picked up on some essential elements of Grant’s character. Niven remembers Cary Grant as an intelligent man, particularly with money and he listed people like multi millionaire Howard Hughes among his friends. Grant invested his earnings well and became one of the richest people in Hollywood. He had an obsession with his health, embarking on various health pursuits and then moving on to the next one. Niven remarks that once when Cary was taking swimming lessons to learn the crawl, Niven mentioned that Cary could already swim the crawl. Grant answered ‘yes but I want to swim the crawl perfectly!’ Cary gave up smoking by hypnotising himself and Niven also mentions his use of LSD during his treatment by a psychiatrist which is also brought up in Archie.
Cary Grant retired from films in 1966 the year his daughter was born and he and Dyan Cannon divorced in 1968. Many tried to bring him out of retirement for various films including his favourite director Alfred Hitchcock but he declined. He must have wanted to keep on working though because he did accept a position on the board of Fabergé.
He died in 1986 aged 82 and left behind an estate reputedly worth around 80 million dollars. Archie is a well made and quite fascinating piece of TV. Look out for it, it’s well worth watching.
This will be my 592nd post and as you can imagine I sometimes struggle for new ideas. Scrolling through the internet the other day I chanced on something about Robin Williams and the post mentioned the film Dead Poets Society. It isn’t one of my favourite films but if you’ve ever seen it you might remember the poem O Captain My Captain by Walt Whitman which features a lot in the film. It got me thinking about Captains so I thought I might kick of this post with a few words about my favourite captain, James T Kirk.
I’m not sure which came first for me, the book or the film but I actually think it was the book. The Godfather was written by Mario Puzo and is the story of Don Vito Corleone, the head of one of the five mafia families of New York. The book opens with the wedding of Don Corleone’s daughter and Puzo sets the scene and introduces the various characters.
Francis Ford Coppola was the director of the film version and was also the co-writer of the screenplay along with Mario Puzo. Coppola wanted Marlon Brando to play the part of Don Corleone even though Brando at the time was rather unpopular with the producers. He was expensive, his last few films had not done well and his time wasting attitude had added huge expenses to his pictures. After the director had made the producers understand how important Brando was, they set various conditions for his employment. He would have to work for a reduced salary and put up a bond to ensure he would not delay the production. Another was that he had to have a screen test. Coppola has told the story in various interviews how he and his film crew had entered Brando’s house like ninjas and quietly set up their equipment. Brando slicked down his hair with shoe polish and stuffed cotton balls into his mouth to make the transformation into the aging mafia boss.
Coppola decided that instead of finding the horse at the end of his bed like in the book, it would be better if Woltz awoke, was disturbed by something wet, pulls the bedclothes away to see blood and then uncovers the horse’s head. The head was the actual head of a horse, procured from a dog meat factory and Coppola mentions on the commentary to my DVD version that lots of animal lovers sent him hate mail about the horse, even though the horse had been condemned to its fate anyway.
As previously mentioned, the book does have some storylines which were not used in the film but one chapter was a look at the beginnings of Vito Corleone. Born Vito Andolini in the Sicilian village of Corleone, Vito’s father was murdered by a local mafia boss and the young Vito was smuggled away to America. In America he took the name of Corleone and seemed to slip quietly into the role of mafia Don by murdering Fanucci, a New York Sicilian Godfather who preyed on his fellow Italians. Although this element of the story wasn’t used, Coppola kept the storyline for use in The Godfather Part II. The follow up film was a film classic in its own way.
This isn’t a post about my 
In the film William Bast played by Michael Brandon, leaves Dean in a restaurant and Dean later asks why Bast left. Bast was intimidated by Dean’s important looking friends and Dean replies that he was judging by surface appearances. When Bast questions Dean further, Dean produces his favourite book, The Little Prince and then goes on to read his favourite passage.
Donald Campbell was the son of a famous racing driver and record breaker, Sir Malcolm Campbell. Campbell first broke the land speed record in 1924 at Pendine Sands in Wales which was the first of his nine land speed records. He also set the water speed record in his boat Bluebird K4. He was knighted in 1931 and died in 1948 aged 63. He was one of the few racing drivers and land speed record holders of his era to die of natural causes as many of his rivals were killed in crashes. His son, Donald Campbell, was determined to equal and even surpass his father’s achievements.
This is perhaps where this post might start to unravel. I know the Donald Campbell link was a little tenuous and only based on a film but this next one was based on my own memory which can be prone to failure. I knew Noel was a great fan of the children’s writer E Nesbit and I’m sure I had heard or read somewhere that when he died, he was reading his favourite of that author’s books, The Railway Children. A quick bit of internet research and I see that Noel died after reading Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle. Coward was a lifelong fan of E Nesbit who wrote a series of children’s books. He discovered the books as a child and revisited them many times during his life. In his diary he wrote this about the author:
Woody is one of my 
I had a huge amount of recorded music of course. By the mid-seventies my record collection was already pretty big and I was buying vinyl records, usually 45 rpm singles, every week. My tape recorder had a built-in radio so I could record my favourite tracks straight onto tape for free and I spent a lot of time taping the new top twenty which came out every Tuesday. The other thing I could do with my tape recorder was record myself with a microphone.
Friday was another cold and wet day here in the north west of England. We had planned to dine out at a nearby Italian restaurant and then walk over to the Pier Inn for a few beers and listen to the music. I wasn’t feeling at my best even though Liz and I knew our friend Ray would be performing and we do like his music. There was a 30% off deal at Allegria, the Italian restaurant in question but the catch was this: to get the 30% off, diners have to book a table 24 hours in advance. We hadn’t booked and that meant paying the full price. There was only one thing for it, I had to call for help. I quickly dialled the Northern Association of Tightwads and I was soon through to an advisor.
It’s been a little chilly this week although here in the north west we had one rather sunny day in which I was able to give the lawn and the privets a final trim before the winter.
Perhaps that’s a consequence of nearing the latter stages of my journey through life. Recently when we were travelling through France motoring along through the endless country lanes of the Loire valley, it seems as if I only became aware of the speed when I reached a new village or hamlet and had to slow down. Perhaps that’s the way it is with time too, that you only notice the passing of time with some new event, something that brings time into perspective.
I’ve had 67 birthdays now which is quite a considerable number and one thing is certain, I won’t get another 67. This year I took my birthday off Facebook, I’m not sure why, perhaps I just don’t want people to know I’m so ancient. Perhaps inwardly I’m ashamed of being old but either way, Liz posted birthday wishes on Facebook so removing my birthday was a pretty pointless exercise. Anyway, together, Liz and I had a pretty lovely week.
