Cary Grants in the sticks’; Grant represented the most distinguished example of ‘the man of the big city, triumphantly suntanned’.3
The transformation of Archie Leach into Cary Grant was contemporaneous with, but different from, that of James Gatz into Jay Gatsby. The mysterious and glamorous figure in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby ‘sprang from his Platonic conception of himself’,4 suddenly, out of sight, without explanation. Cary Grant, on the other hand, took time to take over Archie Leach. Both Leach and Gatz came from poor backgrounds, their parents ‘shiftless and unsuccessful’;5 both longed to grow, to change, to escape (Leach from Bristol, Gatz from West Egg, Long Island) and reinvent themselves as the kind of attractive, successful, stylish young man of wealth and taste ‘that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent’;6 and both possessed an extraordinary ‘gift for hope’,7 a quality commented on by another character in the novel:
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.8
The two men differed, however, in their relationship with their old identities; Gatsby was a tense denial of Gatz whereas Grant was a warm affirmation of Leach. With Gatsby, all the careful gestures – the pink suits, the silver shirts, the gold ties, the Rolls-Royce swollen with chrome, the pretensions to an Oxford education, the clipped speech, the ‘old sports’, the formal intensity of manner – helped to conceal the unwelcome persistence of the insecure ‘roughneck’, James Gatz. With Grant, however, the accent, the mannerisms, the values, the sense of humour, continued to underline the strangeness of his cultivation. To Gatsby, any memory of Gatz, any recognition of the prosaic facts of his existence, represented a threat to his new identity. To Grant, on the contrary, Archie Leach remained with him, an intrinsic part of his life and character, an affectionate point of reference in his movies and his interviews: Archie Leach was no threat to his – or others’ – sense of himself. Archie Leach was the measure of his success and, in a profound sense, a reason for it.
Cary Grant’s life was lived in the midst of a vibrant American modernity, but Archie Leach’s English childhood was solidly Edwardian. Queen Victoria had died just three years before he was born, and he grew up in a world of gas-lit streets, horse-drawn carriages, trams and four-masted schooners. The culture of the time discouraged – and sometimes mocked – thoughts of upward social mobility. E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), for example, depicted the petit bourgeois Leonard Bast as limited fundamentally by his undistinguished background: he was ‘not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable’;9 he has a ‘cramped little mind’,10 plays the piano ‘badly and vulgarly’11 and is married to a woman who is ‘bestially stupid’;12 his hopeless pursuit of culture is curtailed when he dies of a heart attack after having a bookcase fall on top of him. This was the England of Archie Leach. In this England the story of Cary Grant would have seemed incomprehensible.
Archibald Alexander Leach13 was born on Sunday, 18 January 1904, at 15 Hughenden Road, Horfield, in Bristol. Elias James Leach, his father, was a tailor’s presser by trade, working at Todd’s Clothing Factory near Portland Square. He was a tall, good-looking man with a ‘fancy’ moustache, soft-voiced but convivial by nature and at his happiest at the centre of light-hearted social occasions. Elsie Maria Kingdon Leach,14 his mother, was a short, slight woman with olive skin, sharp brown eyes and a slightly cleft chin; she came from a large family of brewery labourers, laundresses and ships’ carpenters. She had married Elias in the local parish church on 30 May 1898. Some of Elsie’s friends felt that Elias was rather irresponsible and, worse still, ‘common’, more obviously resigned than she to their humble position; but it seems that she was, at least for the first few years of their relationship, genuinely in love with him. The family lived at first in a rented two-storey terraced house situated on one of the side streets off the main Gloucester Road leading out of Bristol. Built of stone and heated solely by relatively ineffectual coal fires in small fireplaces, the house was bitterly cold in winter and chillingly damp the rest of the time.
Archie Leach was born in the early hours of one of the coldest mornings of the year. Like most babies at that time, he was delivered at home in his parents’ bedroom. The uncomplicated birth, and the baby’s subsequent good health, were greeted with particular relief by the couple. Their first child, John, had died four years earlier – just two days short of his first birthday – in the violent convulsions of tubercular meningitis.15 Elsie had sat beside his cot night and day until she was exhausted; the doctor had ordered her to sleep for a few hours, and, as she slept, the baby died.16 The loss had left Elsie – who was only twenty-two at the time – seriously depressed and withdrawn, and Elias, living in the city that was the centre of the wine trade, had taken to drink. The marriage was put under considerable strain. Eventually, the family doctor advised the couple to try for another child to compensate for their loss. They did so. Archie was to be, in effect, their only child.
It is at this very early stage that one encounters the first of several points of contention in Grant’s biography. Archie Leach was circumcised,17 which was a fact that later encouraged some biographers to identify him as Jewish.18 It is not, however, as simple as that. Pauline Kael, among others, has suggested that Elias Leach ‘came, probably, from a Jewish background’,19 and it has been said by some that Cary Grant himself believed that the reason for the circumcision must have been due to his father being partly Jewish, but, curiously, there is no record of any Jewish ancestors in Elias’s family tree, nor is there any solid evidence to suggest that he thought of himself as Jewish. We do know that Elias and Elsie attended the local Episcopalian Church every Sunday. Circumcision was not, however, it has to be said, a common practice outside the Jewish community in England at that time;20 it is possible, of course, that the Leaches were advised that it was – in Archie’s case – an action that was necessary or prudent for particular medical reasons (and, after the death of their first child, they would surely have taken any such advice extremely seriously), but, again, there is nothing recorded which could clarify the matter.
It is not even clear whether or not Cary Grant lived his life believing himself to be Jewish. His closest friends – indeed even his wives – have offered conflicting information and opinions on the matter. In the early 1960s, for example, Walter Matthau, who had heard the rumours that Grant was Jewish, was surprised when Grant denied it. ‘So, I asked him why everyone thought he was. He said, “Well, I did a Madison Square Garden event for the State of Israel and I wore a yarmulke.” He pronounced the r in “Yarmulke”. An Englishman wouldn’t pronounce the r, so I still think he might be Jewish. Besides, he was so intelligent. Intelligent people must be Jewish.’21 There is no reason to think that Grant would have tried deliberately to hide his Jewishness: he was a uniquely powerful and consistently popular star, less easily intimidated than most by
