The Books: “Cary Grant: A Class Apart” (Graham McCann)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Cary Grant: A Class Apart, by Graham McCann

I have written more words on Cary Grant than on any other topic, I believe. It’s an inexhaustible obsession.

So the question for me, the fascination, (with Cary Grant more so than any other actor) has always been:

How did this:

become this?

There’s a mystery at the heart of Cary Grant, which is why I believe he is our greatest movie star, and why he stands head and shoulders above his peers. He’s not pin-down-able. He’s a true odd duck. But odd ducks don’t usually look like THAT. I mean, imagine the career he might have had, if he wasn’t … well … who he was. Just based on his looks (excluding his bizarre now-you-see-it now-you-don’t personality) it all could have been conventional and forgettable. His looks (especially as a younger man, before he filled out) were of the soft squishy leading-man quality, he was handsome, yes, but he did many films where he didn’t “show up”, to coin a phrase. Meaning: if you watch his earliest films, it’s strange to see him before he found himself … It’s almost like he’s not in his face yet. What a transformation! He showed the promise of his later movies in such early films as She Done Him Wrong with Mae West. The way Cary Grant says “You bad girl” in the last moment of the film is prophetic of the movie star he eventually would become. You can see it ALL, there, in that small moment. The gloves come off, and out comes this reeeaaaallly masculine tough sexy guy … sexy by today’s standards, sexy by any day’s standards. He was basically hired to be the hottie to stand around for Mae West to ogle … Cary Grant is usually “the object” in all of his films (see Pauline Kael’s great essay about that) … but in the “You bad girl” moment, you’re suddenly like, “Who’s that??”

Stars had personas in those days. They did not only play one thing (watch Joan Crawford in movie to movie, and you will see how deft she was at manipulating her persona, highlighting this or that aspect) … but they were “types”. Acting, back then, was not about how versatile you could be with accents or rubber noses or limps or total transformation … Humphrey Bogart always LOOKED like Humphrey Bogart … and what I love so much about these early films is how much variety is in each persona (if the actor is good, I mean. Many actors were just their “types”. Nothing wrong with that … that’s the definition of “character actor”. You want a crazy leering sweet drunk in a film? You call Walter Brennan. Who else you gonna call?) What is fascinating about Cary Grant is how deliberately he set about creating his persona. This is a man with a pretty dark damn background. He was born into lower-class Bristol in England, and there is some mystery surrounding his birth. Is he Jewish? People need to know! His mother is a mysterious character. One day, when Archie Leach was 9, he came home from school and his mother was not home. He was told his mother went away on vacation to the seaside. He wondered about that. Why would she go on vacation without the family? His mother never returned. She was never mentioned again. It had to have been devastating, what the psychologists call a “break in belonging”. A moment when you are forever changed. Years and years later, when Cary Grant was now a major movie star, he found out that his mother actually was alive, and had been alive all this time. His father had had her committed into a mental institution – where she still lived. !!! Cary Grant reintroduced himself – the oddity of being a man the entire world knows, but unknown to his own mother. He had a relationship with her until she died. She was an odd woman, but probably NOT mentally ill. Maybe emotional, maybe a little unstable, but hell, I’m emotional and unstable! Whatever the diagnosis … his mother was virtually erased from his life when he was a tiny boy … and his father was a rather cold man, not someone Grant could lean on … so when he was about 15, he ran away and joined the circus. Literally. He joined a tumbling troupe (Grant was always an incredible acrobat) which took him to America … and the rest is history. But still: Grant’s background is not at all clear. Even to himself. After all, his childhood was based on a lie: “Your mother is on vacation …” I’m going on about these biographical details because it’s so interesting to me, in lieu of who he would become: this was not a man who grew up belonging anywhere. He was a low-class Cockney. He had no mother. He went backstage once at the Bristol Hippodrome, when he was a young kid, and was blown away by the atmosphere:

The Saturday matinee was in full swing when I arrived backstage; and there I suddenly found my inarticulate self in a dazzling land of smiling, jostling people wearing and not wearing all sorts of costumes and doing all sorts of clever things. And that’s when I knew! What other life could there be but that of an actor? They happily traveled and toured. They were classless, cheerful, and carefree. They gaily laughed, lived, and loved.

I think it’s interesting that he used the word “classless”, a very British sensibility … and something that would obviously be very attractive to a young boy born to poor parents. BUT: he didn’t come to America and play British people. Yes, he did create an incomprehensible accent (which just cracks me up – it is so HIM) – but he wasn’t like, say, David Niven … or the other “Brits” in Hollywood at that time. Cary Grant created an amalgam of British-ness and American-ness and neither side could be pinned down. That’s what I think is so fascinating about Grant: his slipperiness. Gary Cooper was pretty straight-up who he was. (Thank God.) He was Grant’s main competition when they were starting out (notice that Cary Grant chose a screen name with the same initials, only in reverse, as Gary Cooper). But Cooper wasn’t slippery in the way Grant was. Usually someone as mysterious as Cary Grant comes off as “shady” on film, which can be a very literal medium. Films like to nail things down. Grant won’t BE nailed down.

He is a great chameleon.

Not to mention the fact that that persona he created was his, and his alone. He worked at it consciously. He practiced posing in the mirror, putting his hand in his pocket. This was not a man who felt at home in the world. So he practiced poses (imitating people like Douglas Fairbanks and Noel Coward) who SEEMED at home in the world. How extraordinary. So often when we try to act like something we are not, the results come off stiff, stilted. And in Grant’s earlier films, you can see some of that. He’s not owning it, yet. Mae West leers at him, and he is vaguely cranky (Grant’s characters are usually a little bit cranky) … but apart from that (and the toe-curlingly sexy last moment, “You bad girl …”) – nothing indicates that this is going to be one of the biggest stars the world has ever known. Grant talks about the creation of his persona, which fascinates me no end:

To play yourself — your true self — is the hardest thing in the world. Watch people at a party. They’re playing themselves … but nine out of ten times the image they adopt for themselves is the wrong one.
In my earlier career I patterned myself on a combination of Englishmen — AE Matthews, Noel Coward, and Jack Buchanan, who impressed me as a character actor. He always looked so natural. I tried to copy men I thought were sophisticated and well dressed like Douglas Fairbanks or Cole Porter. And Freddie Lonsdale, the British playwright, always had an engaging answer for everything.

I cultivated raising one eyebrow and tried to imitate those who put their hands in their pockets with a certain amount of ease and nonchalance. But at times, when I put my hand in my trouser pocket with what I imagined was great elegance, I couldn’t get the blinking thing out again because it dripped from nervous perspiration!

I guess to a certain extent I did eventually become the characters I was playing. I played at someone I wanted to be until I became that person. Or he became me.

9 times out of 10, such self-conscious effort will show in the results. But Cary Grant was a genius. It’s like he created the space for himself before hand … and then, when he was good and ready, stepped into it. Inhabiting it like he had been there all along. To say this is “rare” is to completely under-state what the word “rare” means.

Graham McCann’s book is not, strictly, a biography. And you can tell from the title that it’s biased towards its subject. Biographical details are discussed, of course, with lots of nice quotes from people who knew him when … but I loved the book for its analysis of the creation of Cary Grant – by Archie Leach. Almost like an entirely other personality. Astonishing. And to have it work so well!! McCann takes a look at the steps Grant took to being so successful at this self-created personality (there’s a whole chapter called “Inventing Cary Grant”) – and I very much appreciated that aspect of the book. It made me see Cary Grant’s in another light. I’m a “fan” of Grant, yes, but as anyone who reads me knows – when I get obsessed, I need to learn more. I need to watch all the films chronologically first of all, so I can watch the development. I need to read the critical studies of him, as well as the current-day reviews … so I can see the response to his efforts. Graham McCann’s book was hugely important to me when that obsession-thing came over me. He was able to articulate, in elegant yet every-day language, what it was that happened in, say, Sylvia Scarlett, with Katharine Hepburn, that was such a breakthrough. I saw it in a new light then.

I am going to excerpt today from the chapter about The Awful Truth, which really began Cary Grant’s spectacular 1937-39 run (I would call it more successful than any other actor at any time, ever). In those years, Grant appeared in The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, Gunga Din and Only Angels Have Wings. Excuse me?? Then of course in 1940 came His Girl Friday and Philadelphia Story … so it was just an incredible time in his life, which dovetailed with the height of the studio system, and the golden age of movies, and screwball comedy, and all that … Seriously. Can’t get any better.

In George Cukor’s weird little Sylvia Scarlett, Cary Grant played a Cockney conman named Jimmy Monkley – and although he’s the “bad guy” (in a movie where no one is truly bad – everyone’s weird and on the edge … it’s like Midsummer Night’s Dream) you miss him when he’s not on screen. Cukor said that it was the first time Grant “felt the ground beneath his feet” as an actor. Sylvia Scarlett was not a hit, but it gave Grant more confidence. That was in 1936.

In 1937, Grant appeared with Irene Dunne for the first time, in Leo McCarey’s screwball to end all screwballs The Awful Truth.

And it was with that film that Grant suddenly became important. A giant star. No turning back. You watch those early Mae West films, only a couple of years before, and it is amazing to think that it is the same person. And whatever it was that Grant did in those intervening years remains somewhat mysterious … he can tell us he practiced putting his hand in his pocket and imitating Douglas Fairbanks … and that probably made sense to him … but to us? It can’t explain everything. Putting your hand in your pocket does not always end up with Cary Grant. You have to leave room for magic. Genius. Invention. (Not to mention Cary Grant’s unerring sense of business smarts – which played no small part in his success. He never had an agent, for God’s sake. He was a freelancer!! In a time when NOBODY freelanced. And he negotiated that extraordinary deal for himself.)

The Cary Grant persona was breezily upper-class, full of privilege and assumptions. Martinis, tennis whites, tuxedoes. That was the world of the screwball comedy. But Grant came from poverty, his background was harsh and rough … nothing was handed to him … and I am sure that a lot of his far-seeing business decisions (getting himself Producer credit, for example – which now is done all the time – but then??) came from the deprivations of his childhood. He didn’t forget being poor. He was notoriously cheap (it became a joke amongst his friends), and he, unlike many actors at that time, planned ahead. Later in life, he became good friends with Quincy Jones (who is quite eloquent about their bond and where their mutual affection and understanding came from – that the Cockneys in the England of Grant’s youth were like the blacks of America in Jones’ youth – and so they felt comfortable with one another, very similar attitudes towards life) … but anyway Jones tells a funny story about money and Grant:

The way I expressed things cracked Cary up because it was so un-British. For instance, I would say, ‘I’m getting to the age where I’ve got to start making some more horizontal money.’ He asked me what that meant. I explained, ‘Well, when I’m up in the studio conducting, that’s vertical money. But when you’re at home watching TV and An Affair to Remember comes on, that’s horizontal money.’ Cary talked about that for years. He told all his friends.

Grant, way back when in the 1940s, began “producing” his films – which meant he would always have “horizontal money”, even as an old man. He would not rely only on ACTING to pay the bills. He would make his acting career a business.

A phenom, that guy.

The excerpt below has to do with The Awful Truth, and Grant becoming a star. It’s a star performance … but let’s not forget: he WASN’T a star when he made it. It’s my favorite kind of moment in an actor’s life: when he, unaware that he is about to become a star, gives a star-level performance. And you can see – in his face – the years and years of work that will follow. Not every actor has that moment. But when one does? I love to pick it apart, look at it closely, examine …

So does McCann.

(Excerpt below, as well as a clip from The Awful Truth – hard to choose a favorite part, but this sure is at the top of the list. Cary Grant busts into a room, thinking he will find his soon-to-be-ex- wife in another man’s arms … only to find that … well, she’s singing a private concert for an uptight group of people. And Grant does a pratfall which goes on FOREVER – at around the 3 minute point … which I never ever get sick of. And make sure to watch Irene Dunne … singing and starting to laugh … and she finds herself laughing in tune. Brilliant!)

EXCERPT FROM Cary Grant: A Class Apart, by Graham McCann

It is a delightful moment: in a nightclub, on the dance floor, a large, cumbrous man is engaged in a frenzied jitterbug with his slight, refined, embarrassed-looking partner; a handsome young man in evening dress has just bribed the orchestra leader to repeat the music, thus sentencing the embarrassed-looking woman – who is actually his ex-wife – to further public agitation opposite her dancing partner – who is actually her over-eager new suitor; the handsome young man in evening dress, having accomplished his scheming, pulls up his chair to the edge of the dance floor, sits down, crosses his legs, folds his arms, breathes a self-satisfied sigh, and smiles a broad, contented, joyous smile as he faces the dancers, and, implicitly, the camera, and us, his audience. This man – elegant, blithe, mischievous, delightful – carries the holiday in his eye; he is a man, quite simply, having the time of his life. This man is a star. This man is Cary Grant.

The movie in which this scene takes place is The Awful Truth (1937). It was the first of a remarkable run of five movies – the others were Bringing Up Baby (1938), Holiday (1938), Gunga Din (1939) and Only Angels Have Wings (1939) – which not only justified Grant’s gamble on a freelance career but also established him, beyond any doubt, as one of Hollywood’s most distinctive and popular movie stars. Each of these movies would come to be thought of as a classic of its kind, each one was quite different from the others, and each one added something extra to Grant’s range as an actor. Two years, five movies and, at the end of it, one hugely successful performer, secure in his on-screen identity and confident of his ability to attract and entertain his audience. There would never be a better time for Cary Grant; there would, of course, be more good movies, more memorable performances, more box-office records, more critical plaudits, but never again would all of the crucial components – the roles, the story, the dialogue, the directors, the cast, the mood – combine so felicitously and consistently to provide Cary Grant wtih quite so memorable, so rewarding, so rich a succession of starring vehicles. This, more so than any other, was Cary Grant’s moment.

This extraordinary period in Grant’s career began, oddly enough, darkly, with Grant coming close to dropping out of The Awful Truth, demoralised, convinced that he had made a disastrous error of judgment. The critic Richard Schickel has described the movie as ‘a kind of tuning fork; by its reverberations one can test the comic pitch of almost any movie on a similar theme – and find them, to varying degrees, just off the note’, yet it was made in spite of the fact that all of the co-stars (Grant, Irene Dunne and Ralph Bellamy) spent the first few days of shooting in various states of nervous tension. The director, Leo McCarey, had made his name at Hal Roach’s studios, first as a gag writer and then as the director of movies by Charlie Chase, W.C. Fields, Mae West, the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy. His methods, however, bemused and alarmed the cast of The Awful Truth. Ralph Bellamy remembers the unnerving sense of chaos early on in the production: ‘McCarey came in every morning with a small piece of brown wrapping paper on which he’d written his ideas. He’d say, “Cary, you come in that door on the right, and Ralph, you come in over there on the left. I’ll runt he dog through, and Irene, you come through …” ‘ Hal Roach, who had worked with Grant on Topper, knew that he would be surprised and unsettled by McCarey’s ‘odd’ methods: McCarey, said Roach, ‘kept improving on things. He’d give Cary something in the morning and then tell him, “I’m not going to do that.” Cary decided that Leo didn’t know what the hell he was doing and tried to get out of the picture.’

‘At the end of the first day,’ Bellamy recalled, ‘Irene was crying – she didn’t know what kind of a part she was playing. Cary said, “Let me out of this and I’ll do another picture for nothing”.’ At the end of the first week of filming, Grant sent an eight-page memorandum entitled ‘What’s Wrong With This Picture’ to the head of Columbia, Harry Cohn. He also offered to pay five thousand dollars in return for being released from his contract. Cohn ignored it.

It was not long, however, before Grant started to change his mind. One of the things that helped reassure him was McCarey’s eagerness to exploit certain aspects of his actors’ own personalities in order to make the characters more believable: for example, when Bellamy told McCarey that he did not even know what his character should wear, McCarey told him, ‘The jacket and trousers you have on are just what I want!’; when McCarey discovered that Bellamy could not ‘get from one note to another’, he tricked him into accompanying a strained-looking Irene Dunne in a rendition of ‘Home on the Range’ (‘you just blast it out with your Oklahoma accent’). Grant began to see that McCarey was well aware of his strengths and more than willing to help him put them to good use. Once he trusted McCarey, Grant felt liberated by the absence of a settled script and seized the opportunity to improvise. ‘Cary caught on quickly,’ said Bellamy. ‘It was right in his groove, his kind of comedy, of humor … He could laugh with you as you were watching him. He knew you were laughing and he was encouraging it.’