The Sheila Variations

The Books: "Cary Grant: The Lonely Heart" (Charles Higham & Roy Moseley)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Cary Grant, The Lonely Heart, by Charles Higham & Roy Moseley

What confuses me is how it took TWO authors to write such a yawn of a book!

This is what happens when you try to "explain" your subject, as opposed to just describing his actions - and letting the actions speak for themselves. The Lonely Heart isn't a smear book. But it is interested in pulling Grant down off the pedestal. Now, I'm cool with that, in some ways: he was a man, after all ... and the practical choices he made, the everyday choices, went a long way towards creating that spectacular persona we all recognize. But all these two authors can really come up with in the end is, "Wow, Cary Grant is contradictory! THIS wife said he was loving, and THAT wife said he was paranoid! How can that be??" Uhm, maybe because Cary Grant was a human being, and we all have contradictions within us? Irreconcilable? We aren't just the same, through our lives - and if we are, we probably wouldn't get biographies written about us, because it would be the most boring biography ever written. I'm shy in some circumstances, and a raging extrovert in others. Some people would call me a bitch or cold, and then other people would declare to the moon that I was the best friend a person could ever have. That's life. If you fall down in shock over that, then you need to get out more. You need to expand your consciousness about, oh, what it means to be a human being. Higham & Moseley want to iron Grant out and in so doing completely miss the mark. It is, indeed, possible, to be two contradictory things at the same time. One woman reports that Grant was a sensitive caring lover. One woman reports that he was abusive, cold, and cheap. Yeah? So? Maybe he had chemistry with one, and felt threatened by the other. Who knows. I had to force myself to finish the book. I guess, in my opinion, you're better off not coming to conclusions about a person. Just let them be. To quote Philadelphia Story: "The time to make up your mind about people is never." I totally agree with that. Tell us what they did, and let the story speak for itself. I am thinking of the really good biographies now: Berg's Lindbergh, McCullough's John Adams, Ellmann's Joyce ... These are massive accomplishments. Each subject is highly complex. Alexander Hamilton thought one thing about John Adams, Abigail another. But of course. David McCullough does not try to reconcile those contradictions because they aren't to BE reconciled. Hamilton wasn't right, and Abigail wasn't wrong. They both are right, because, uhm, you know, we all have different perspectives in life, and different goals. Hamilton thought Adams was truly dangerous, and mentally unstable. Adams was also in his way. So of course he would have a negative reaction to Adams. Abigail was Adams' partner, his wife, his adviser in many ways. She also had a tribal sense of family, and if you dissed her husband, even if you were an old dear friend (calling Thomas Jefferson, call for Thomas Jefferson) - she would cut you out forever. That makes sense from HER perspective. McCullough doesn't seem baffled by this. He lets it stand. It's not for us to judge, or decide. Maybe it's for us to bring someone to the forefront (as has happened in the last 10 years with Alexander Hamilton, who is in vogue now) - and correct some misinterpretations that are out there in the public space ... But life is complex, we are all mixed bags, we cannot be nailed down to one or two adjectives ... because usually we are different in different situations. One of my boyfriends thought I was the best thing since sliced bread and still yearns for me to be in my life. One of my other boyfriends has let me go completely, probably thrilled that he escaped with his heart intact. I don't know. Doesn't confuse me at all.

So The Lonely Heart isn't good, is basically what I'm trying to say. It also really skimps on the movies. It's more interested in Grant's personal life, which, again, is rather interesting - I understand that ... For example: Can we please talk about Randolph Scott and the Christmas cards that they sent out to all of their friends?

This is just one example. The photos of those two together - roommates for many years - working out together, cooking, one of them wearing an apron ... This isn't tongue-in-cheek, either. What it is is "out" - no pretense, realizing the impression it made - and doing it for that reason - it fascinates me!

But then our co-authors have no idea how to talk about acting. They skip over it because they are completely out of their element. "Grant did a good job in North by Northwest and the public loved it." I'm not exaggerating. The movies are skipped over, they are just the context for the larger story about how CONFUSING it is that Cary Grant was so CONFUSING!!

And look, I'm fine with talking about that confusion. I think it is an essential part of Grant's long-lasting appeal. People like Pauline Kael and Richard Schickel - in their essays and books about Grant - go deeply into these contradictions, and how it either informed his work, or stayed out of his work, how he compartmentalized, but also how he knew which aspect of himself to bring forward in each particular role. They know how to talk about what it is that actors do. They also just flat out know how to write, and know how to make Grant's biographical details (that bit with his mother disappearing, and his possible long-term gay relationship with Randolph Scott) into fodder for his work. It becomes interesting, rather than prurient. Higham & Moseley are out of their element. And I guess I feel like: if you're going to talk about Cary Grant, you had BETTER be prepared to talk about acting in an intelligent way. You don't see David McCullough skipping over the whole "politics" section of his book, because he doesn't understand how politics work. You're gonna write about John Adams, then you had best learn it!

So. These are my thoughts. Take 'em or leave 'em. The Lonely Heart came out in 1989 and since then there have been many in-depth biographies (which are a bit more in vogue now than they were then) of Grant - some taking one focus, some taking the other ... there are books about his sense of style, or the gay esthetic of his life - closeted Hollywood and all that, his business sense, his development of the screwball comedy ... There's way more out there on the market now. The Lonely Heart has pretensions of importance, and to me, it comes off as banal. More than anything else, it made Cary Grant boring, and THAT I can't forgive!

I have always been interested in his long-term friendship with playwright Clifford Odets (one of my posts about Odets here).

By the time Grant and Odets met, Odets' star had fallen quite a bit from his meteoric rise in the 1930s. His reputation preceded him, but he had fallen short of what he had dreamt for himself. He was a huge drinker. He was volatile. He was a working-class boy who loved nice things and glitter and high-end nightclubs. Because of his plays which defined, in many ways, the "Left" in America in the 1930s - there had always been some kind of expectation placed on him, almost like he should be a pamphleteer or propagandist, rather than an artist. It nearly killed his art. He sat in Hollywood, struggling, fighting, writer's block, stymied by the business ... unable to function (Barton Fink, anyone?) He and Grant became friends (and remained so until Odets' death) - and Grant took a chance with Odets (and Grant was extremely cautious as an actor ... he only worked with directors he trusted ... reluctant to place himself in unknown hands - he was stubborn) - and starred in the first (and only) movie that Odets directed: None But the Lonely Heart.

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. I think it has some major problems but it has much in its favor. First of all, there's Odets' language. It gives me goosebumps. I LOVE Odets' style. Sylvester Stallone has clocked Odets as one of his major inspirations for the script in Rocky - that mix of street poetry and rough-and-tumble romanticism. Odets was an idealist. Much of his stuff can seem naive now, in our more "knowing" eyes, but the language stands alone. "Don't give me ice when your heart's on fire," snarls one of his characters. Odets is very difficult for actors to play. You cannot wink at the audience as you are onstage. You cannot condescend to it. You have to "go there". In None But the Lonely Heart, Cary Grant goes back to his roots (never far from his consciousness) and plays a Cockney drifter, kind of a mama's boy, struggling to get a leg up in the world (classic Odets). Grant was a giant star when he made that film, and he was more often in a tuxedo than any other kind of clothing. In None But the Lonely Heart he wears a cap, a vest, baggy pants ... he has the accent - not HIS accent that he created - but how he actually spoke, how he grew up speaking. It's a dark film. Large forces are at work, the world occurs as a grinding crushing entity, there to keep the good and honest man down. Odets was all about compromise - sometimes to a fault (Golden Boy with his Brute Force on the one hand and Sensitive Artist on the other - is a good example) - but to Odets that compromise was always there for an artist: can you be an artist in a capitalist society that only values money? ("Life isn't printed on dollar bills!" shouts one of his characters) Or ... can you succumb to the lure of money, just to get a leg up, an escape, and THEN go live the life of your dreams? Odets struggled with these issues and None But the Lonely Heart is all about that. Another thing to watch, and it's astonishing: the LOOK of the film. God, is this a great-looking movie. George Barnes was the DOP, so much of the credit goes to him, but part of the director's job is to convey his idea, his dream of the film, to his DOP ... and so None But the Lonely Heart, with its noir-ish darkness, and gleaming cobblestones, and smoky streetlamps ... shows Odets' vision as a director. Each frame is a work of art. Makes me wish Odets had directed more.

The public wasn't wacky about the film - nobody wanted to see Cary Grant in a downtrodden Cockney part ... but it did get critical acclaim and Ethel Barrymore won an Oscar for her portrayal of Grant's mother. And Grant was nominated. It was an experiment ... and it was also a project dear to Grant's heart. Years and years later, when Grant finally got his Honorary Oscar - Peter Bogdanovich was charged with putting together clips of Grant's films through the years. Grant didn't care about any of that, he let Bogdanovich do his thing ... but his only request was that the clip of him crying by his mother's bedside in None but the Lonely Heart was included. He had never been asked to show such emotion, and he really wanted it to be remembered.

Odets and Grant were unlikely friends - at the opposite ends of the spectrum, politically ... and Grant was frugal (to a fault), and cautious, and committed to physical fitness his entire life. Odets could be a mess. Grant would lend him money, would sit by him when he was sick near the end ... remained a friend even when all of Odets' other friends had faded away. It was a deep friendship. I would love to know more about it. Higham & Moseley are not the ones to tell that story, however ... but I figured I would pull out an excerpt having to do with this topic.

Tip of the iceberg.

But when you're talking about Cary Grant, it is my opinion that you are always only at the tip of the iceberg.

EXCERPT FROM Cary Grant, The Lonely Heart, by Charles Higham & Roy Moseley

Clifford Odets, a reigning playwright of the American stage, was in town that season, following a stormy protracted divorce from Luise Rainer and a disastrous relationship with Frances Farmer. Author of a string of highly praised plays written under the aegis of the Group Theatre, he had recently scored a great success with Golden Boy (which was filmed in 1940 with the twenty-two-year-old William Holden). Tall, dark, brooding, capable of flashes of wit and charm, but more often morose, difficult, and profoundly introverted, Odets fascinated Cary as few men had ever done. He was the first serious intellectual with whom Cary had come in touch. Odets was well read in a number of different cultures he had a commanding knowledge of music and painting; he had a fluent, sometimes pretentious, but always stimulating line of speech. Peering through scholarly spectacles, he would rivet people but then exhaust them with his excessive knowledge, which made them feel uncomfortable. He was in every possible way out of place in the movie community. Yet his hunger for the bodies of beautiful young girls was insatiable, as burning and fierce as his talent in its demands upon him. At the age of thirty-four, he was at the height of his physical strength and of his power as a dramatist, and few women could resist his fame, his looks, and his lean, athletic physique.

Odets would remain the one human being who reached into Cary's soul and understood it. Clifford Odets's son Walt comments upon his father's relationship with Cary. In conversation, he told Charles Higham:

Although I do not believe they had a physical relationship, I think I am right in saying that they had an intense love for each other. My father was also bisexual, and I know he and Cary discussed this. Also, it tortured both of them. Yet at the same time, whereas my father was extremely repressed in private, never revealing anything of the other side of his nature, Cary often acted quite overtly effeminate in our home, startling me and my sister. Of course, I'm talking about years later; I wasn't born until the late 1940s.

Some part of my father - that part of himself which came from his very ambitious, immigrant father - clearly aspired to be Cary Grant, so to speak. This is partly what kept him in Los Angeles hanging out with movie people. Cary, on the other hand, must have aspired in some serious way to be like my father ... Both men seem to have been quite conflicted and pained about ... private parts of themselves. This was one of the reasons their friendship was often difficult; each was especially sensitive to the other's expectations, because those expectations also came from within.

Although it would be several years before they would work together, they remained in touch even when Odets was in New York and even though their politics were in opposition. Odets was a creature of the traditional left, Cary was still a dyed-in-the-wool Republican.

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