Archie was eight years old, his father left the family for a higher-paying job (and, it seems likely, a clandestine love-affair) eighty miles away in Southampton. War had broken out between Italy and Turkey, and, while Britain was not involved directly, armament activities were accelerated. Elias was employed making uniforms for the armies. ‘Odd,’ said Grant, ‘but I don’t remember my father’s departure from Bristol … Perhaps I felt guilty at being secretly pleased. Or was I pleased? Now I had my mother to myself.’41 The job only lasted six months, in part because of the considerable financial strain on Elias of maintaining two households. He was, however, fortunate that, with so many workers entering into war-related industries at that time, his old presser’s job in Bristol was still vacant on his return.
Elias and Elsie were living together again, but their marriage had disintegrated further. Absence had hardened their hearts; neither person cared enough to communicate with the other. Elias was rarely to be found at home, preferring instead to spend most of his free time in pubs, and, when he returned in the evenings, he would retire immediately after finishing his meal in order to avoid any further confrontations with Elsie. Although Archie was often overlooked during this increasingly tense period, his parents would sometimes, separately, make an effort to entertain him.
Both Elsie and Elias enjoyed visiting the local cinemas, but, typically, they each did their movie viewing in their own distinctive way. Archie’s mother would, on the odd occasion, take him to see a movie at one of the more ‘tasteful’ cinemas in town; he soon became addicted to the experience, and started going on his own or with schoolfriends to the Saturday matinees. 42 ‘The unrestrained wriggling and lung exercise of those [occasions], free from parental supervision, was the high point of my week.’43 Elias also found time to accompany him but, whereas Elsie usually favoured the rather refined atmosphere of the Claire Street Picture House (where tea and refreshments were served on the balcony during the intermissions and the movies tended to be romance and melodramas), Elias, who ‘respected the value of money’,44 preferred to take Archie to the bigger, brasher and cheaper Metropole (a barn-like building with hard seats and bare floors, where men were permitted to smoke, fewer women were present and the movies were usually popular thrillers – such as the Pearl White serials45 – comedies and westerns).
Archie was grateful for all such excursions, but he particularly enjoyed his visits to the Metropole. It was a loud, exciting place, with a piano accompaniment which, he recalled, tended to aim more for plangency than for any discernible tune. It showed the kind of movies and performers he liked most (such as slapstick comedies and stars like Charlie Chaplin, Chester Conklin, Fatty Arbuckle, Ford Sterling, Mack Swain and ‘Bronco Billy’ Anderson), and these occasions were probably the only times when he had the opportunity to establish any real rapport with his father, who sometimes treated him to an apple or a bar of chocolate.
Elias also took his son to the theatre. At Christmas it was pantomimes at such grand places as the Prince’s and Empire theatres. At other times of the year it was music-hall acts, such as magicians, dancers, comedians and acrobats. Elias, ‘in a tight-throated untrained high baritone’,46 taught his son how to mimic some of the singers of the time (in such songs as ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’ and ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’), as well as encouraging him to learn some of the magic tricks he had seen. Archie was enchanted. He started to visit the theatre whenever he had the opportunity. He was often alone and unsettled at home, an only child who was ‘loved but seldom ever praised’,47 but now he had found an attractive distraction. ‘I thought what a marvellous place.’48
CHAPTER II A Mysterious Disappearance
Death merely acts in the same way as absence.
MARCEL PROUST
[I made] the mistake of thinking that each of my wives was my mother,that there would never be a replacement once she left.
CARY GRANT
Archie Leach was just nine years of age when it happened.1 He had just arrived home, shortly after five o’clock, after an ordinary, quiet, uneventful day at school. He was shocked to discover that his mother had disappeared. She had said nothing to him on the previous day to prepare him for her absence. No one, in fact, had said anything to suggest to him that his mother might not be waiting for him, as usual, at this particular time on this particular afternoon. It was, quite simply, a mystery.
His mother had, it was true, grown stranger, more unpredictable in temperament and behaviour, over the past few months, and he had been aware, to some extent, of the change. She had become increasingly – perhaps even obsessively – fastidious: Archie had noticed that she would sometimes wash her hands again and again, scrubbing them with a hard bristle brush; she would also lock every door in the house, regardless of the time of day, and she had taken to hoarding food; there had even been odd occasions when, inexplicably, she would ask no one in particular, ‘Where are my dancing shoes?’;2 and on some evenings she would sit motionless in front of the fire, saying nothing, gazing at the coals, the small room draped in darkness. Archie had also grown accustomed – but by no means immune – to the noisy quarrelling between his parents, as well as to the equally common periods of icy silence which usually followed these arguments.3 Nothing, however, prepared him for such a sudden and dramatic disappearance as this.
Two of his cousins were lodging in part of the house at the time, and, when he realised that his mother had gone, he sought them out to see if they knew of her whereabouts. According to one source, they told Archie that his mother ‘had died suddenly of a heart attack and had had to be buried immediately’.4 The more common version, however, first put forward by Grant himself, has Archie being told that his mother had gone to the local seaside town of Weston-super-Mare for a short holiday.5 ‘It seemed rather unusual,’ he recalled much later, with a bizarre attempt at English understatement which perhaps had come to serve, in public, as a relatively painless way of obscuring a painfully disturbing memory, ‘but I accepted it as one of those peculiarly unaccountable things that grown-ups are apt to do.’6
If his father attempted to reassure him that his mother would soon come home – and it seems that he did so – then it was not long before Archie realised that she was never going to return:
There was a void in my life, a sadness of spirit that affected each daily activity with which I occupied myself in order to overcome it. But there was no further explanation of Mother’s absence, and I gradually got accustomed to the fact that she was not home each time I came home – nor, it transpired, was she expected to come home.7
Towards the end of his life he admitted that, once some of the shock had worn off, ‘I thought my parents had split.’8
What had really happened to Elsie Leach
