If all (or even most) of the testimonies by his friends are sincere, one has to acknowledge that Grant gave some people the impression that he was Jewish and others that he was not. The extraordinary farrago of conjecture, confusion and wild theorising that this apparent inconsistency has engendered is at times almost comic in its incoherence. An outstandingly bizarre example is the contribution made by Grant’s first wife, Virginia Cherrill, who was convinced (on the rather scant evidence of his deep tan and the fact that he could perform a temsulka, which is a word of Arabic derivation for a special double forward somersault) that he was of Arabic origin.23 In 1983, Grant – then aged seventy-nine, long retired from acting and surely at a stage in his life when it made no sense to continue to be dishonest or evasive about such a matter – replied to a fan’s question about his late ‘Jewish mother’ by stating that she was not Jewish.24
The theory which has been most controversial, however, was put forward shortly after Grant’s death by two of his most assiduous biographers, Charles Higham and Roy Moseley.25 They claimed, with a suitably bold theatrical flourish, that Grant had been ‘the illegitimate child of a Jewish woman, who either died in childbirth or disappeared’.26 Although this thesis helps to make sense of the circumcision and of the possible reasons for Grant’s own inconsistent references to his background (Jews define Jewishness through the maternal line), it is not based on any documentary proof. Indeed, the authors strain one’s credulity with their scattershot references to such ‘circumstantial evidence’ as the fact that Grant’s relationship with his mother in later years appeared ‘artificial and strained’27 to some observers, and that ‘she consistently refused to visit Los Angeles’28 once Grant was established as a star. They do, however, make use of two further facts which are rather more intriguing: one is that, until 1962, Grant, in his entry in Who’s Who in America, listed his mother’s name as ‘Lillian’, not Elsie, Leach; the other is that in 1948 he donated a considerable sum of money to the new State of Israel in the name, according to the authors, of ‘My Dead Jewish Mother’.29
It is quite true that, until 1962, it is ‘Lillian Leach’ who is listed in Who’s Who in America as being Grant’s mother;30 it is also true – although Higham and Moseley do not refer to it – that the 1941 article on Grant in Current Biography refers to his mother as ‘Lillian’, whereas the 1965 edition reverts, without any explanation, to ‘Elsie’.31 This discrepancy, while certainly noteworthy, is not, in itself, ‘proof of the existence of Grant’s ‘real’ mother: the entries in both publications contain numerous inaccuracies, such as the spelling of Elsie/Lillian Leach’s maiden name as ‘Kingdom’ rather than ‘Kingdon’ (one would have expected greater care if these entries had been intended to set the record straight), the description of Fairfield Grammar School as the more American-sounding ‘Fairfield Academy’ and the inverted order of Grant’s forenames as ‘Alexander Archibald’.32 Higham and Moseley do not make it clear why Grant took the seemingly perverse step of ‘disowning’ Elsie while she was still alive and in a fragile condition and then reclaiming her more than two decades later: such inconstancy, surely, merits some kind of explanation. Another puzzling detail, if one is to take seriously the interpretation of these entries as some kind of rare act of candour on Grant’s part, is why, after acknowledging his secret Jewish mother, he then proceeded to describe himself as a ‘member of the Church of England’.33
It is a bewilderingly odd little mystery. Higham and Moseley, having convinced themselves that the ‘real’ mother of Archie Leach was a mysterious and hitherto unknown Jewish woman called ‘Lillian’, struggle to weave her into the facts of his life in spite of having no documentary (or even anecdotal) evidence that she, or anyone like her, ever existed. They also fail to explain why Grant, once Elsie Leach had died in 1973, did not make any attempt to acknowledge the identity of his ‘real’ mother at any point during the remaining thirteen years of his life. Other accounts shed no light on the question of Grant’s alleged Jewishness or the reason for the absence of any records which could corroborate it. We are left, in short, with one of those intriguing puzzles which together with others make up a peculiar constellation of ambiguities in the life of Cary Grant.
The first few years in the life of Archie Leach were marked by both material and emotional impoverishment. The Leach family moved house several times during Archie’s childhood, and each change of address marked a further decline in the Leaches’ finances.34 ‘We could afford only a bare but presentable existence,’ he later recalled.35 It did not take long for Archie to become conscious of the fact that his mother and father were increasingly unhappy in each other’s company. There were ‘regular sessions of reproach’ as Elsie castigated Elias for his failure to provide the family with a better standard of living, ‘against which my father resignedly learned the futility of trying to defend himself’.36 Elias started drinking more heavily and frequently – often, it seems, in the company of women who were more convivial than his wife. ‘He had a sad acceptance of the life he had chosen,’ said Grant.37 Elsie – partly out of necessity, partly by inclination – became the disciplinarian of the family, working hard to keep her young son under control.
Looking back, Grant observed that his old photographs of Elsie Leach failed to do justice to the complexity of her adamantine character, showing her as an attractive woman, ‘frail and feminine’,38 but obscuring the full extent of her strength and her will to control. When Archie was born, she became – rather understandably given the circumstances – single-minded in her concern for his well-being (she had, superstitiously, waited six weeks before allowing Elias to register the birth) and during his childhood she remained, if anything, a little over-protective of him; she ‘tried to smother me with care’, he said, she ‘was so scared something would happen to me’.39 She kept him in baby dresses for several years, and then in short trousers and long curls. In an attempt to provide him with an opportunity to have a better and more rewarding life than his father’s, and in the belief that her son was a bright and talented boy, Elsie arranged for Archie to start attending the Bishop Road Junior School in Bishopston; he was only four-and-a-half years old, whereas five was the usual age for admission. She also managed, on an irregular basis, to save enough money to send Archie for piano lessons. Such forceful ambition was not, one should note, so unusual within a working-class family at the time; Charlie Chaplin also recalled how his mother would correct his grammar and generally work hard to make him and his brother ‘feel that we were distinguished’.40
Archie did not escape from his mother’s influence when he started attending school. Although few of his new schoolfriends came from poorer families than his own, Archie was eye-catchingly smart; Elsie made sure that he wore Eton collars made of stiff celluloid, and she had taught him always to raise his cap and speak politely to any adult he met. His pocketmoney was sixpence a week, but he seldom received all of it; Elsie would fine him twopence for each mark he made on the stiff white linen tablecloth during Sunday lunch. Elias was uncomfortable with the idea of such exacting, sometimes overly fastidious, strictures governing Archie’s upbringing, but he rarely
