Cary Grant’s “Sleight of Hand”

Another excerpt from Marc Eliot’s biography of Cary Grant.

Just as amazing, if not even more impressive, the film career of the actor whom Time magazine once described as “the world’s most perfect male animal” began relatively late, according to Hollywood’s quick time clock. Grant was twenty-eight years old when he first went west to seek his fortune in films, having spent the better part of his twenties as a steadily rising leading man in a succession of Broadway musicals and comedies.

Over the next three and a half decades, his impact on movies was so enormous, he would virtually redefine the cinematic image of the romantic American male. In the hands of Hollywood’s immigrant-bred, mostly Jewish studio moguls endlessly obsessed with female WASP beauty, British Archie Leach was reborn as the projection of their own idealized American selves and presented to the world as Cary Grant.

Yet, despite his physical beauty (and that was, with rare exception, all the moguls ever really required of him), Grant early on sensed something was lacking in his acting, that there was an internal disconnect between his manufactured cinematic image and his inner being. Indeed, without a masterful script to provide a compelling character, without a brilliant costume designer to dress him up, without an artful makeup man to apply the sheen to his skin, without a tasteful set designer to enshrine him, without a skillfuyl editor to exact his comic timing, without a sharp-eyed cameraman to place him in the most favorable light, without a beautiful costar to externalize desire, and without a director to impose his own unifying personality, Grant feared that, at heart, he was less than the sum of his movie-star whole, a spiritless cinematic symbol.

Moreover, once a performance was constructed and frozen on film, he knew he would forever have to compete with that symbol in a battle against time in reality he could never win. That is why, in to the fifties (both his own and the century’s), he became increasingly more selective in his choice of screen roles and directors, choosing only those parts and the men who guided him in them, directors who best knew how to help him perform that special Grant sleight-of-hand on audiences over and over again without ever once giving the trick away.

Grant was rarely miscast. He kept a tight rein over his career (very rare in the days of the studio system). He knew his image was, in its essence, a delicate one. It required careful handling. He worked with the same directors over and over again. He would re-write his part – so that there wouldn’t be any possibility of him coming off as LESS than “Cary Grant”. He re-wrote all the love scenes in Charade – because he knew, instinctively, that it would be kind of creepy to have a 60 year old man pursuing the younger Audrey Hepburn. He wasn’t vain – he was just practical. For the film to work, SHE needed to pursue HIM. Anyone see that movie? I love it.

Audrey Hepburn, swooning over him: “Do you know what’s wrong with you?”

Cary Grant, bemused, detached: “What?”

Audrey Hepburn, dreamy smile: “Nothing.”

If you want to boil down an audience’s response to Cary Grant – it is in that exchange. It’s a fantasy, yes. Cary Grant, as a human being, had plenty wrong with him. Cary Grant worked on those things offscreen – went into therapy, kept up his good friendships, always had a support system … But Cary Grant the film icon? He protected that image – and when the image could no longer be protected, when his own age threatened to derail the fantasy – he quit.

A class act.