This is part of an ongoing series, where Mitchell and I discuss actors. I pick the names. I ask Mitchell to describe them in one word. And then we discuss. We “did” Cary Grant. Of course.

CARY GRANT

SOM: One word.

MF: Did you say Cary Grant?

SOM: I did.

MF: [deep sigh] My feelings are … I’m gonna say complicated. My feelings about him are so complicated. I think Cary Grant … is probably … the greatest movie actor of all time.

MF: Talk about never seeing somebody acting. And once you know more about him and you realize that he’s actually acting as another person … like that wasn’t even his voice. He got himself a new voice. Eventually obviously it became his voice, in the same way that I don’t have a Rhode Island accent anymore so I’m not putting on a voice but it’s not the voice I started with.

And, depending on what parts of the story that you believe about his sexuality and his marriages and his relationship with Randolph Scott, it doesn’t matter: he created an image. I mean, to this day, people say, “Oh so-and-so’s the new Cary Grant.” Cary Grant was acting in 1930. We’re talking 70 years ago. Almost 80 years ago, and we’re still referring to people as the “new Cary Grant”. Well, guess what, there’s no such thing. If 80 years later, you’re still trying to find someone to be the next so-and-so, there is nobody. It’s only him.

MF: There was also a cultural zeitgeist – please edit out that word – there was a cultural thing going on that allowed that sort of suave thing to happen with Grant. Cary Grant’s influences – men like Noel Coward, Jack Benny – those types just don’t exist anymore.

MF: Cary Grant built a career that lasted that long with that much integrity? That takes a lot of smarts. There are a lot of rumors about different people being in the closet or gay that I think are apocryphal but – and this is just my theory – I do think that he was with Randolph Scott on and off for 20, 30 years. Between their marriages, they were together, they were best friends and they were lovers.

MF: Like I say, he’s complicated. On some level, he’s the ultimate closet case. And we’ll never know. Although the most telling moment was Betty White letting slip once on The View: “We all knew that he was gay”. She sort of got shit for it, but Betty White does not make a habit of gossip or lying. It’s not her MO as a celebrity.

So I have complicated feelings because how amazing it would be if he had left some evidence. As an actor, Cary Grant could be a buffoon, he could be dapper, you wanted to hang out with him, you wanted to fuck him and get fucked by him at the same time. He had such mass appeal. Men liked him because they wanted to be that suave, that elegant, that charming, and of course he was so beautiful that women loved him. He was the perfect movie star.

MF: Like Joan Crawford was. In a lot of ways, Joan Crawford was the perfect movie star. I think she was a fantastic actress, but I think Grant was a much more consistently good actor than she was, but they both did something first, which was create a movie star image that wasn’t really who they were ultimately, originally, and then we believed it for 80 years. We still believe it.

MF: When I talk to younger people who don’t understand old movies or that kind of acting that you and I recognized very young as a distinct and beautiful style of acting – what they don’t get and which I try to explain is that those actors were making it up. Actors now have a history of film acting to study, whereas someone like Crawford or Grant or Barbara Stanwyck, they were making it up because it was a new artform. Cary Grant was making up how to be a male movie star, and how to deal with lighting and cameras and movement, and all of that. They were the pioneers. And he perfected it in a way that still feels contemporary. It’s like Judy Garland. Even if you watch Judy in a period-piece like Easter Parade, her acting is utterly contemporary.

SOM: That’s my whole thing with her. My feeling is that her acting with the hourglass in Wizard of Oz is a precursor of Brando and Montgomery Clift. She pre-dates all of them. She is saying as a 16-year old in that moment: “This is where we are going in acting. And if you don’t do it this way, if you don’t go this deep, then you’re not doing it.” And she was a child!

MF: That was not acting, what she was doing in that scene. She was having a breakdown on camera, on cue, when they said “Action” and they had to do it 10 or 15 times, which is what we expect now of our actors. She was Method before there was a Method. And I think Cary Grant was doing that too. I think what Cary Grant was doing was what we now think of as casual kitchen-sink acting – so easy. It’s really very difficult to find him acting. Except maybe in his early movies with Mae West, where he was hired as a prop for her to rub her vagina against.

SOM: The only one I can think of is Arsenic and Old Lace and he was pushed into that performance by Capra. I mean, he falls on his ass in Bringing Up Baby on that olive and he does it totally deadpan and mortified and so real.

MF: Or when he jumps up and says “I just went gay all of a sudden” and it’s so real, it comes out of his frustration.

SOM: He was embarrassed by the performance in Arsenic and Old Lace. I think his taste for himself was exquisite.

MF: I think you’re right. I think his expectations of himself were very high.

SOM: Very competitive. An athlete, obviously. He was a tumbler, a gymnast.

MF: You know what I love about him was, he was a tumbler, yes. What tradition he came out of even more than circus was variety, and it was really the lowest form of entertainment. Eventually, vaudeville became excellent performers but most of them were hacks. Variety was the lowest of the lowest form of performance, like performing monkeys, it was a means to an end. That was the tradition he came out of. I’ll do whatever I have to do and I’ll become good at tumbling and falling down and doing schtick so that I can make a living.

SOM: And then he happens to be the most beautiful man who ever lived.

MF: I wonder sometimes if people who succeed on that level have the confidence of their appearance and it propels them forward, and with someone like Barbra Streisand, it was the opposite, and that propelled her forward.

SOM: I think this about Elvis, too. Anyone who’s at that level – John Wayne – there are people who become literally like stars in the sky. Not just the good stars of the day but icons who embody something for millions of different kinds of people. You can’t predict who that’s gonna be.

MF: That’s what I meant by the zeitgeist. You can’t have a new James Dean. James Dean came at a time – and in a lot of ways it’s true of Elvis, too. Elvis was extraordinarily talented but if Elvis came out today, would he even be given a chance?

SOM: He was touched. He was touched by something Divine. It had to happen and it had to be him. Also if Elvis looked like Bill Haley, would it have happened? Bill Haley was the star of the year before, and everyone thought rock and roll was going to break, but Bill Haley looked like a manatee. He wasn’t “the one”. “The One” had to look like Elvis.

MF: I was just talking about this the other day with a friend of mine and we were listening to a Broadway Pandora station. And something from Annie Get Your Gun came on. And so I was singing like Ethel Merman in the back seat and I was saying how interesting it was how that style of singing is so out of style now, and yet every great composer wrote a musical for Ethel Merman’s voice. Irving Berlin, Gershwin, Cole Porter. Jule Styne. They all wrote musicals for that voice, and she couldn’t get a job today. These people came up in an era when it all worked out for them. If Barbra Streisand came of age now, I’m not sure she’d have the opportunity. Not in the same way.

SOM: She’d be working too much like these young actresses all do and so they dissipate their personas. They don’t take time off. They don’t create careers. They work too damn much, and they don’t work carefully. You don’t need a million colors, you need to be able to bring yourself to the screen.

MF: The thing about Cary Grant is: the fact that I have complicated feelings about him does not take away from the fact that I will always watch a Cary Grant movie. I love him so much, and I think he’s so brilliant and I can’t even figure out how he did what he did, and yet there’s a part of me as a gay man that thinks: What an interesting life that he led and I so wish that he had had a moment at the end of his life where he told the story so that we would get to reap the benefits of that information. He could have put it in a vault and have it not opened up until after his death. I just want to know what happened. I want to know what was going on in Greenwich Village and they were all hanging out, and then Hollywood called so they all went out there and had fake marriages. I think I remember telling you I read this great article about how people in Hollywood used to refer to Jack Benny and his wife as Mary and Mary Benny. In the Village before they all went out to Hollywood, Jack Benny was out. He was gay. And then he married this woman, and everyone loved her, and she was a friend, and then suddenly he was Mr. Old Married Man. So many of them did that and Cary Grant was part of that crowd.

SOM: And they didn’t tell on each other. It was a different time.

MF: It was a different time and I wish someone had written about that time. I wish somebody really in it had written about it. Not somebody on the periphery where we can’t necessarily believe every word they say.

SOM: When you look at Cary Grant’s vast career, if you had to pick a role that was your favorite, do you have one?

MF: Oh, God. That’s a really hard one for me. I really do like him in Notorious. I like him when he’s a little bit darker.

But then of course I love him in Holiday or Bringing Up Baby when he’s so goofy and sweet. I love him when he’s rakish, like in Philadelphia Story. And then I love him when he was sort of distinguished and charming like in Charade. It’s so hard to choose but I think probably him and Ingrid Bergman together in Notorious. That is the image for me of Cary Grant at his hottest. Him carrying her down the stairs.

SOM: Did you read the piece I wrote about that role?

MF: Yes.

SOM: It’s his best work.

MF: He’s so good in it. He’s charming, but there’s a dark side to his charm, which of course he does brilliantly, too. If I wanted to show somebody who wasn’t familiar with Grant a movie that shows him at his best- it’d be Notorious.