Archie Leach’s Beginnings

Archie Leach (later Cary Grant) arrived in New York City as a boy of 15, having joined the Bob Pender acrobat troupe. They performed at the Hippodrome (God, to have been in New York in those days!!! WHAT I would give to have a time-machine and go back!!) The Bob Pender troupe was a big hit at the Hippodrome, so they took the show on the road, traveling all over America. Quite an education for a feisty trouble-making (and troubled) Cockney boy with no other prospects. The troupe came back to New York City, and were preparing to sail back to England to tour in Europe.

Archie Leach and a friend decided to stay behind in America. Of course they were minors, and their parents had had to sign contracts with Mr. Pender, giving Pender guardianship of their children. Archie Leach knew this, and knew that no one would give him permission to stay on by himself – so he (nobody quite knows the rights of the story) lied to Mr. Pender, making up some bull-shit story about why he would stay on in America temporarily, and that he would soon return to join the troupe.

Pender was fooled by whatever bull-shit story it was, and gave Archie Leach some money for his promised return home.

Archie Leach pocketed the money, and stayed on in America, using the dough to live on for a couple of months. He had NO intention of ever returning to his father in England, to his old life. Bob Pender was angry at being tricked, and also robbed – and wrote a whiny beleaguered letter to Elias Leach (Archie’s father), saying, basically: “Your son has lied to me. He said he would return. I gave him money for the passage, and now I see he’s taken that money and isn’t coming back… blah blah blah.”

Elias Leach promptly wrote to his rebellious teenage son, now shacking up in a boarding house all the way across the ocean with the other acrobat-runaway, and said, “I’m proud of you whatever you do. I will take your word over Mr. Bob Pender’s any day … I hope you keep safe and healthy – be a good boy … ”

Paraphrase, obviously, but the gist of it was: Go. Make your fortune. Be a good boy.

And so Archie Leach, who had one suit and an indecipherable Cockney accent, started his career. Which began very randomly. He walked on stilts on the boardwalk … he and a couple other friends formed a tumbling troupe, and they traveled through America with it … Archie started getting cast as “the straight man” to stand-up comedians. Basically, he would just stand there, and ask the questions which would set up the ba-dum-ching jokes. Cary Grant’s later words on comedy, and the rules of comedy, are fascinating. It’s a science, it really is. “Straight men” are often highly under-rated, but without them – there would be no laughs. George Burns was a “straight-man” to Gracie for half a century!

There are some great stories about his early poverty-struck hustling days in New York City. He was an odd bird, unplaceable: he was over 6 feet, and had that face. But there were things which didn’t fit: he had a Cockney accent, he was an acrobat, and he had a tendency to laugh so hard that tears streamed down his face. He wasn’t suave, not in those days. He also had this kind of strange ramrod military-esque walk – which was just how he moved, and how he walked til the end of his days. He used it to great comedic effect in Bringing Up Baby – you think it’s an act, but it wasn’t – that was really how the guy walked.

So yeah, there was the cleft chin, the black hair, the gorgeous-ness, his height – but because of all the other stuff (his stiff physique, his accent, his playful sense of humor) – it was difficult for him to get jobs. At least acting jobs, where he had to speak. His personality was too rowdy to be crammed into the small box of most leading-man roles. Cary Grant would become one of the first actors to blend leading-man sex appeal and comedy (I would even venture to say he is still one of the only ones who has been able to pull such a thing off). Normally, the romantic lead in movies is kind of a drip, and it’s usually the best friend who is the wise-cracking funny one, the character actors. So Archie Leach/Cary Grant was a character-actor in the body of a leading man. Now it all makes perfect sense, because he became a huge star, and everything seems inevitable in retrospect, but when he was 18, 19, trying to get jobs, he had a rough time.

Archie Leach knew he had to re-create himself. He didn’t want to be pegged as a British actor. So he consciously got rid of his accent, and yet – he somehow didn’t American-ize himself. It’s a strange accent, mercurial, a chameleon – You can project onto it whatever you want. It’s English, it’s not English, it’s not quite American, it’s … what the hell is it?? It’s Cary Grant’s voice. It is a sheer invention.

Fascinating.

Of course, at the time, Archie Leach was just trying to wrench his own voice into something more presentable, more hire-able. And now: his voice is one of his defining characteristics. But it began as a survival technique: I can’t speak in my normal voice, I will never work, I have got to change that voice!

He and a couple friends decided to give Hollywood a shot. California, and its weather, its heat, its blew skies, blew the English boy away. He decided: “I want to always live, from now on, where it is warm.” And he did.

He did a screen test. He had no acting training. His experience was of the vaudevillian variety, he had no idea how you had to DO LESS with the camera. The guy was a quick study, though. Any time anyone gave him a tip in those early days, he would assimilate it quickly into his bag of tricks. He forgot nothing.

An older actor said to him, “Don’t befriend the leading ladies. They are your competition. Make friends with the character actors. They’re the ones who will be generous, and they’re the ones who know everything about acting.”

In those early Archie Leach days, he looked like he had just rolled out of the English music hall. Nobody knew what the hell to do with him. The second he started talking, with that in-between accent, the leading-man expectations went out the window.

One of the people who saw his screen test wrote notes about him: “Very handsome. Odd accent. His neck is too thick.”

But slowly … he started getting jobs, doing movies. He changed his name to Cary Grant, at the insistence of the studio.

The jobs he was getting, however, did not match the inner life. That’s what I find so damn interesting about this actor, in particular. The LOOKS which are so strikingly handsome … are almost a shield. Nobody could perceive the ability that this actor had for comedy, nobody saw how he had a gift for absurdity. They just saw the handsomeness. If he had been a kooky-looking fellow, it would have been no problem.

However: kooky-looking character actors are a dime a dozen. But a physical comedian who looks like Cary Grant?? You could probably count them on one hand.

Mae West always claimed she discovered him, and that she saw him hanging out on the studio lot with a bunch of other extras, and said, “If that man can talk, I’ll have him.”

Cary Grant, always the gentleman, never spoke badly of anyone, he never answered the question: “Who was your favorite leading lady”, etc … but he did have some choice words for Mae West in regards to this, which he only spoke about much much later:

“She did not discover me. She likes to think she created me, pulled me out of the crowd … Nothing can be farther from the truth. I had done 8 movies by that point, I wasn’t just an extra. But Mae West was never in love with the truth. She was a true original, and yes – she did give me some great roles.”

In the 1933 film She Done Him Wrong (which I watched last night), Cary Grant plays the pious missionary-worker who meets Mae West in the chaotic crime-ridden music hall right next to the mission. He looks so damn YOUNG in the film. I mean, he must have been in his late 20s, but still – there’s something unformed in him. Something soft. He also is obviously wearing makeup, some eyeliner, some lip color – like Rudolph Valentino did, like all male actors did in those days. Cary Grant hated that male-movie-star-with-makeup look so much from his early films that he kept a perpetual suntan for the rest of his life so that he would never have to wear makeup on screen again.

It’s in this old film that Mae West says the very famous (and famously misquoted) line: “Why don’t you come up some time and see me?”

She says it right to Cary Grant, the pious missionary worker who is trying to reform her.

Cary Grant is obviously cast in the film just to look gorgeous. The film is through the perspective of Mae West … and so we look at him as SHE looks at him – like a piece of meat. HE’S the sex object in the movie. She’s like the man, and he’s like the woman. He’s objectified, we watch her snarling at him with desire … and he’s strangely passive (until the totally hot last moment of the movie when he leans in to kiss her, saying, in a suddenly purposeful way, “You bad girl …” Grrrrr) – But up until that moment, she is the leader. She pursues him. He tries to reform her, tries to talk to her about her soul … she, of course, bats him off with those classic one-liners.

Like he says to her: “Haven’t you ever met a man who could make you happy?”

She purrs, “Sure, lots of times.”

The things about him which would later become trademarks are in evidence in this early film: – the semi-crankiness of his delivery (he seems constantly on the verge of becoming irritated), the purposeful almost military way he had of walking, how damn good he looks in a suit, and how – when the time comes for him to turn on the sex – he can do it like no one’s business …

It’s just that nobody really noticed all of this yet. Nobody was capitalizing on it, exploiting it. Nobody saw how SPECIFIC this guy really was. How he was NOT just another leading man.

Mae West just thought he was hot. Everything could have ended there for Cary Grant. He was NOT just hot, and when he was cast as JUST THE HOT GUY he is not all that convincing. Because – he’s too cranky, he has too many hard edges, he has the potential for having a dark side … “The hot guys” are not supposed to have all that complexity. But he did.

It would take George Cukor, who directed him the next year in Sylvia Scarlett to take the reins off of this odd trans-Atlantic duck – and basically say to him: “Do whatever the hell you want to do. If it’s too much, I’ll let you know, and we can pull it back – but feel free to do whatever you want to do. You know this character better than I do. GO.”

The difference between Cary Grant’s acting in She Done Him Wrong and Sylvia Scarlett is startling. And exhilarating, too. It’s exhilarating to watch a break-through. A break-out. The films are one year apart but he might just as well have been 2 different actors. In a way, I guess he was.

Cukor said years later, “It was in Sylvia Scarlett that he found the ground beneath his feet. He was liberated.”

This entry was posted in Actors and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

13 Responses to Archie Leach’s Beginnings

  1. Mjf says:

    Awesome..i love him too…have you seen the pictures of him cavorting with his roommate, Randolph Scott(also gorgeous)before they were famous? Scott became a big cowboy star. I’ve read some more interesting stuff about that time in New York..all the people he hung with and their decision to move to New York..i share your obsession. Can’t wait to see you!!!

  2. red says:

    How much would you have loved to hang out at the Cary Grant/Randolph Scott house? JEEZ!!

    Apparently, David Niven and Errol Flynn shared a house next door which they referred to as: “Cirrhosis-by-the-sea”.

  3. Mjf says:

    …now that’s a neighborhood…if only Olivier and Danny Kaye had a two-flat love nest down the street..it would have been gayer than Angela Lansbury singing “Rose’s Turn”!!!

  4. red says:

    I think Cary Grant got Randolph Scott a role in one of his movies (when they became famous, I mean).

    The one about the woman stranded on the desert island who comes home to find her old husband had moved on. Sort of like Castaway. Only with Cary Grant. I haven’t seen it, whatever it is … My Dream Wife?? No idea.

    Something’s Gotta Give was a planned re-make of the film – starring Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis and Cyd Charisse – only she died before they completed filming.

  5. Kaptin Marko says:

    Red,

    Have you ever considered penning a book on your obsession?

    You have plenty of material, you are obviously in love with the guy and could do him justice, your writing makes for reading that sucks you in, the reader can hear the excitement in your voice, it might fulfill your writers jonez for a while AND you might get paid for it.

    Just a thought.

  6. bill says:

    keep writing about him sheila. I can read all day!

  7. jackie says:

    Shee, have you seen Blonde Venus? I rented it the other night……. C. Grant, very sexy and young. And I am now a huge Marlene Dietrich fan. She is gorgeous and an incredible actress.

    J

  8. jackie says:

    Shee, have you seen Blonde Venus? I rented it the other night……. C. Grant, very sexy and young. And I am now a huge Marlene Dietrich fan. She is gorgeous and an incredible actress.

    J

  9. homebru says:

    “Straight men” may be under-rated but, in compensation, they traditionally are named first in the team’s billings.

    Burns and Allen. Abbot and Costello. Martin and Lewis.

    Straight man first, comedian second.

  10. red says:

    Jackie –

    I haven’t seen Blonde Venus – It’s on the list! I saw it at my new video store, so maybe I’ll get it tonight.

    I will NEVER forget the first time I saw Blue Angel – it was on a rainy night at the Music Box – and it was one of the most haunting and upsetting movies I had ever seen.

    She was tremendous!

  11. red says:

    homebru:

    Excellent point!

  12. red says:

    Kaptin –

    The thought has indeed crossed my mind. I have a veritable archive of this stuff now … Thanks for the compliment, my friend … perhaps something will come of it!

  13. CW says:

    You should write a book red…

    also, although completely irrelevant, your post reminded me of Errol Flynn, who reminded me of pirates, which reminded me that Sunday was Talk Like A Pirate Day and I missed it!

Comments are closed.