commitment, an art mature and elaborate enough to embrace the ambiguities of a self shown in close-up.
There was nothing wrong with Cary Grant. There was much, however, that was extraordinary about him. That accent: neither West Country nor West Coast, neither English nor American, neither common nor cultured, strangely familiar yet intriguingly exotic (as someone in Some Like It Hot exclaims: ‘Nobody talks like that!’). That expression: capable of blending light and dark inside a single look, hinting at much more than it holds up for show. That walk: confident, athletic and slightly rubber-legged, fit for slapstick as well as for sophistication. He was, in an unshowy way, unusually versatile: he could play submissive, naive, child-like characters (such as in Bringing Up Baby) or worldly-wise charmers (as in Suspicion) or world-weary cynics (as in Notorious). John F. Kennedy thought that Grant would be his ideal screen alter ego, but then so did Lucky Luciano;17 Grant’s exceptionally broad appeal was in part to do with his bright roundedness, the promise of completion, showing the coarse how to have class and the over-refined how to have the common touch, teaching the unruly how to behave and the repressed how to have fun. What was so remarkable was how Cary Grant himself seemed to be so conspicuously complete. No one else was quite like him. There was something odd, something peculiar even, about his perfection.
‘Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,’ said Cary Grant. ‘Even I want to be Cary Grant.’18 It was not meant as a boast, but rather as an admission of vulnerability. Cary Grant appreciated – more so than anyone else – how difficult it was to be ‘Cary Grant’, because he knew that he was far from perfect. ‘How can anyone’, asked David Thomson, ‘be “Cary Grant”? But how can anyone, ever after, not consider the attempt?’19 It is really not so strange that even Cary Grant could not always succeed in being ‘Cary Grant’. It is not as if Archie Leach had always found it easy to be Archie Leach. The difference is that everyone knows who ‘Cary Grant’ is supposed to be, everyone knows the rules, while not even Archie Leach was ever very sure of who Archie Leach was supposed to be.
Everybody knows Cary Grant. What everybody knows about Cary Grant, however, is largely what he wanted us to know. Leslie Caron, one of his last co-stars, recalled: ‘He would say, “Let the public and the press know nothing but your public self. A star is best left mysterious. Just show your work on film and let the publicity people do the rest.”’20 He lived much of his life on the screen, in the movies, making us believe in Cary Grant, showing his image at each stage in its slow and subtle evolution. When he retired, he withdrew from view. There were no opportunities for disenchantment: no kiss-and-tell memoirs, no television specials, no embarrassing scenes, no political pronouncements, no diet books or diaries, no talk-show appearances, no authorised biographies, no comebacks, no second thoughts. He never told us how he had managed to be Cary Grant so well for so long. He cared too much, or too little, to let on; he liked to keep us guessing. To accept definition was to invite disqualification. He was content, it seemed, just to live with – or behind – the mystery. The mystery had, after all, served him very well. Why let in daylight upon magic?21 ‘Besides,’ he said, with a playful insouciance, ‘I don’t think anybody else really gives a damn.’22
Cary Grant was an excellent idea. The last person who wanted to deconstruct that idea was Cary Grant:
Who tells the truth about themselves anyway? A memoir implies selectiveness, writing about just what you want to write about, and nothing else. To write an autobiography, you’ve got to expose other people. I hope to get out of this world as gracefully as possible without embarrassing anyone.23
It was typically Cary Grant: polite, urbane, decent and discreet – and very much in control. He looked on with wry amusement as the old tales were retold and the new myths manufactured: he ignored all the parodies and pretenders, all the old quotations and well-worn misconceptions, all the ‘Judy, Judy, Judys’ and the ‘How old Cary Grants’. He did not rise to the bait. He refused to involve himself in the investigations. He kept his self for himself. ‘Go ahead, I give you permission to misquote me,’ he told his uninvited chroniclers. ‘I improve in misquotation.’24
Cary Grant, in more than one sense, was a class apart. Socially, he was a glorious enigma, eluding every pat classification. Artistically, he was, in his own particular field, without peers. In a leading article in the Washington Post shortly after his death, it was said that the name ‘Cary Grant’, ‘in the absence of anyone remotely like him on the screen, continued to be a synonym for a set of qualities his friends and admirers inevitably summed up as “class”’.25 Cary Grant did indeed have class. He was a master of the ‘high definition performance’, a term defined by Kenneth Tynan as ‘the hypnotic saving grace of high and low art alike’, characterised by ‘supreme professional polish, hard-edged technical skill, the effortless precision without which no artistic enterprise – however strongly we may sympathise with its aims or ideas – can inscribe itself on our memory’.26
Everybody wanted to be Cary Grant. Everyone else, before and since, failed. It took someone special to succeed. It took Archie Leach.
It is not dreams of liberated grandchildren which stir men andwomen to revolt, but memories of enslaved ancestors.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Peace. That’s what I’m looking for. I want peace. Withhappy hearts and straight bones without dirt and distress.
Surprises you, don’t it? Peace – that’s what us millions want,without having to snatch it from the smaller dogs. Peace – tobe not a hound and not a hare. But peace – with pride tohave a decent human life, with all the trimmings.
NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART
Don’t I sound a bounder!
CARY GRANT
Take it from me: it don’t do to step out of your class.
JIMMY MONKLEY
Cary Grant was a working-class invention. His romantic elegance, as Pauline Kael remarked, was ‘wrapped around the resilient, tough core of a mutt’.1 It is one of the greatest and most mischievous cultural ironies of the twentieth century that the man who taught the privileged élite how a modern gentleman should look and behave was himself of working-class origin. It took Archie Leach – poor Archie Leach – to show the great and the good how to live with style. It was Archie Leach, born into such inauspicious circumstances, who became the man others liked to be seen with, a role model for the socially ambitious, the well bred and even the royal. ‘When you look at him’, said Kael, ‘you take for granted expensive tailors, international travel, and the best that life has to offer.’
