Cary Grant’s Vaudeville Days

Another excerpt from Marc Eliot’s biography of Cary Grant. I love the description of his hair in the last paragraph – and how he began to hone an image for himself. The genius of Cary Grant is that the entire thing was a calculated impersonation … and yet – he ended up being one of the most successful movie stars ever. He was a box office draw for 34 years or something like that. Now … NOBODY has ever beat that. The only person who has come close is Harrison Ford. In my opinion, he is still a valid leading man. Depends on who he’s paired with, I suppose – If you pair him with a 22 year old starlet, then he looks ridiculous. But put him with a real woman, and you still want to see him do love scenes, all that leading man stuff. But for most actors: You’re a leading man for a certain amount of time, and then you have to face reality and segue into character parts, father parts, and then grandfather parts. Cary Grant – when he could sense that that would have to happen – retired. And that was that. But think about it – he did Charade with Audrey Hepburn – he was in his 60s, I think. And he remained a valid leading man. Amazing. (Ooops, just thought of another one: Sean Connery. Dude’ll be a sex symbol when he’s 80.)

Here is an excerpt describing his early vaudevillian days … when he was unsure, insecure, and trying to craft some kind of personality for himself that would ease him through the social shoals of life. He was not relaxed. And so he decided to imitate relaxed people. Amazing how well he pulled it off.

The revue ran on Broadway for another nine months, then embarked on a year-long tour on the famous B.F. Keith vaudeville circuit, which took them to the major cities east of the Mississippi. As it happened, the Keith circuit traveled the same route as the New York Giants baseball team, and because all the games were played in daylight, Archie was able to see a good number of them. Having never heard of baseball before coming to America, he became endlessly fascinated by the intricacies of the game and developed a love for it that would last a lifetime.

He also met quite a few successful actors on the circuit (and a few unknowns, mostly understudies and last-minute fill-ins, among them a young New York hoofer by the name of James Cagney), but none amused him or impressed him more than the Marx Brothers, whose vaudeville routines later became the basis for many of their zany movies. While the rest of the country preferred Groucho, Zepp, the good-looking straight man and romantic lead, was Archie’s favorite, the one whose foil timing he believed was the real key to the act’s success. Not long after, Archie began to augment his already well-practiced “suave” Fairbanks look and dress with a Zeppo-like fancy bowtie (called a jazz-bow, or jazzbo, during the Roaring Twenties) and copied his brilliantine hairstyle, adding Dixie Peach, the favorite pomade of American black performers and show business leads, by the palmful to his thick dark mop, to give it a molded, comb-streaked blue-black Zeppo sheen.