The Grace of Cary Grant

 

The body never lies.

 
Instead, it keeps score, with our very gestures and walk and physical eccentricities speaking to the traumas and desires we’d like to keep hidden. But there are some people so aware of this truth, and the power of self-mythology, that they can almost transcend it, using their bodies to reflect not the person they are but the person they want to be. Archibald Alexander Leach, born in 1904 in Bristol, England, was one such person. He was able to transform himself from the working-class son of Elias James Leach and Elsie Maria Kingdom Leach—from the latter of whom he reportedly inherited his beauty and moods—wrecked by the horrors of his childhood domestic terrain, into the silkenly confident, uproariously funny, physically assured Cary Grant, one of the greatest stars Hollywood has ever had.
 
It is axiomatic, perhaps, that Cary Grant was as much a creation as the films he starred in. His grace was learned in part while working the vaudeville circuit as a young man, beginning as an acrobat traveling Europe and the United States in the 1920s, exhibiting a hunger and precision he carried into his film career. His voice—with the cinematically rooted mid-Atlantic accent, clipped and fast as sparked dynamite—was born from nowhere. He scrubbed away from the surface the markers of his Bristol childhood to become an aristocratically inflected portrait of the masculine ideal of the Western world, the man who had it all.
 
But Grant’s manner and movements always carried echoes of his past—those working-class rhythms bleeding through—and the ideal he formed for the world, we now know acutely, did not reflect the private man. That confidence? It was largely a concoction. Grant was notoriously anxious and riddled with self-doubt. In his recently released, achingly thorough biographical tome Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise, historian Scott Eyman details the sharp divide between Archie Leach and Cary Grant—noting his issues with anxiety and depression, his ambivalence toward and distrust of women, and most importantly, where these issues were born in part from: his father forcefully committing his mother to a mental asylum she didn’t need to be in while lying to the young Archie by saying she died. It was only as an adult, somewhat new to the fame that would rewrite the course of his life, that he learned the truth.

 
So when we watch Grant grow supine leaning over to catch a glimpse of the wife he thought was dead (Irene Dunne) as an elevator door closes, arch shock on his face, in My Favorite Wife (1940), or jump up with emphatic mania shouting “I’ve gone gay all of a sudden” while wearing a fur-lined peignoir in Bringing Up Baby (1938), we know that lightness and ease—that essence of Cary Grant—is not just about the character or the star  or who he was as a human being but a masterful blending of all three, a hard-won persona he carried into public life as well.  Grant himself was aware of the divide between his public and private selves, commenting later in life, “I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant, unsure of each, suspecting each.” It is easier to track this duality and its effect on his performances in Grant’s darker-hued dramas, which show how cold he could be, like the towering and slippery Alfred Hitchcock masterwork Notorious (1946). But what can we learn when we set his life against his considerable work as a comedian, both boldly physical and romantically seductive? This doesn’t bog down his witty comedic performances but instead makes them even richer texts to consider, for how they show us both the gaps between Grant’s public and private selves and his artistry as an actor and creator of the identity he tried to live his life by. In many ways, his comedic performances are the most revealing of his career.

Grant’s comedic work is, in a word, effervescent. It is easy for me to get lost in the manic grooves of His Girl Friday (1940) or the utter lunacy of The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947). To watch Grant is to come to an understanding of just how expressive our bodies can be. Grant treats his as a canvas on which ideas of desire, power, class, and masculinity are painted. His physicality, at first blush, is marked by a poise that speaks to a bodily confidence and control most actors dream of. But what makes him so amazing within this context isn’t his considerable beauty or his charm, although each is important. Instead, it’s how he subverts the expectations that come with his suave, glistening surface with pratfalls and acrobatics, perfectly timed, that allow him to be silly, even foolish, but retaining an assured sensibility that means he never becomes the fool. Beyond the supreme quality of his physicality and the way he used his voice, there’s the way he looked at and related to women in the romantic comedies he appeared in that provide these works their wonder. This grows all the more remarkable when you consider the vexing and complex ways he related to women in life.

 
But Grant wasn’t an immediately formed star. Few are. It takes time to feel out the persona you’re destined to project on-screen. Paired with Mae West in the 1933 sexual comedies She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, we meet a Cary Grant who has yet to live up to the legends that soon attach to his name. He’s handsome, undeniably. He wears clothes with a marked understanding of their power. But there’s no dimension, no depth. He fails to capture the imagination here. Part of the problem is how his role functions. He’s only meant to look good and hit his marks. He functions, like men often deliciously do in women’s pictures, as an accoutrement to the real story, which is about her. It took another four years for Grant to become, on-screen at least, the man we have come to revere in the uneven and mostly forgettable Topper. But it is the delightful screwball confection The Awful Truth, also from 1937, that his star persona and its wonderful possibilities in comedy truly crystallizes.
 
The most evocative composition in Leo McCarey’s film comes about five minutes into the story. Grant plays Jerry Warriner with bemused yet growing annoyance as he hosts a small get-together at his home while his wife, Lucy (Irene Dunne), is curiously and notably absent. When she bounds into the home with “darling” exuberantly leaving her lips, he wraps her in a kiss, which we see from behind. The camera then takes a vantage point from the opposite side of the couple. He is wrapped in Lucy’s embrace, her magnificent white fur coat obscuring the lower half of his face, so we see the reaction to the other man Lucy has brought home with her in the lurching of his eyebrows. Jerry and Lucy Warriner don’t seem all that happy together. But they don’t want either moving on to someone else either, which is where the film roots its humor.
 
Early in the film, when Lucy is entertaining the affections of poor Ralph Bellamy’s Oklahoma momma’s boy, Daniel Leeson, Jerry decides to crash their dinner with a woman he’s been talking to who sings at the club. “I just met her,” Jerry says with amusement as he watches his once-date sing while her dress gets blown up in what’s supposed to be an uncomfortably racy number. What comes soon after is even better when Jerry slyly tells Daniel how much Lucy loves to dance, after Grant makes a hilarious “what the hell?” face to Daniel’s suggestion that she doesn’t. His eyes volley between the newly minted couple; the more uncomfortable Lucy grows, the more mischievously delighted Grant plays Jerry. It starts as a simple waltz between Lucy and Daniel until the tempo picks up and he starts haphazardly dancing in ways she struggles to enjoy or keep up with. As her embarrassment deepens, Jerry smiles serenely, gets up from his chair and finds one closer to the dance floor to better watch this mayhem, all in one fluid motion.

 
The persona Grant embodies in The Awful Truth, which he would continue to play within, subvert, and expand upon throughout the decades of his career, is one of refinement. Everything from his slicked hair to the way he wears suits speaks to the grace of the character, his romantic bona fides, his unending allure. He’s who everyone wants to be and be with. It’s important to understand that Grant was a pioneer, crafting a persona and stardom at a time when the medium and its business were still fresh. The mold of the modern male movie star hadn’t been set. He created it. Grant was keenly aware of his own creation and what it took to maintain it. Yes, there was his charm and his talent. Yes, there was his shrewd business sense. But there was magic too. Something as tricky to capture as smoke in your hands. And Grant’s skillset as an acrobat—the timing, the understanding of audience expectation, the physicality—is integral to this persona as well. In many ways, Grant is at his best in comedy when his smooth veneer is disturbed.
 
About forty-eight minutes into The Awful Truth, Cary Grant falls flat on his face. Literally. He’s snooping to see if Lucy is having an affair with her opera instructor, Armand (Alexander D’Arcy). He’s tripped by Armand’s servant. His tall and lean body falls smoothly to the floor face first, legs propped against the door that when opened will provide his answer. He gets in a skirmish with the servant trying to open the door when they both bust in, entangled, to see Lucy giving an opera performance. But that’s only the beginning of his pratfalls. Jerry tries to quietly sit down, thumbing his hat and sheepishly looking over the small audience. He leans back in his chair only to fall over completely, his limbs tangled in the chair and end table he brings down with him. As he tries to gain his bearings and stand, he only creates more of a ruckus. His brow sweats. His clothes get ruffled. His hair unfurls from its unmoving sheen, revealing curls resting along his brow that leave him looking as disheveled as a man like Grant can ever look. In The Awful Truth, Grant’s persona reveals itself to be a marriage of opposites and complications: a supreme sense of control and confidence with the ability to undercut that with silliness; a man who seems to tower above the rest in charm and gallantry yet always feels human thanks to the humor he laces through pivotal gestures. Grant was able to create a conspiratorial relationship with his audience, letting us in on the joke and creating an intimacy all stars need to survive. The next year he would best the already considerable physical artistry he uses here to bring his character to life in Holiday (1938).
 
George Cukor’s Holiday is ostensibly a romantic comedy but has a touchingly melancholic heart. Here, Grant doesn’t play a rich and powerful man as he does so convincingly in films like That Touch of Mink (1962). Instead he calls upon his own background, fashioning Johnny Case as a common man. “I’m a plain man of the people,” he tells his exceedingly rich fiancée Julia Seton (Doris Nolan). Johnny doesn’t know much about Julia. He didn’t know her family were the powerful and well-connected Seton banking family. He just knows how he feels about her. But their romance is riven by the class dynamics. Enter, Julia’s iconoclastic sister, Linda, played with remarkable sincerity by Katharine Hepburn. Cukor and his collaborators don’t make an ostentatious display of what we can expect to happen—Julia and Johnny falling in love. Instead, it’s a suggestion that runs and grows through the film, thanks in no small part to Grant’s physical presence. There’s a moment early on, when Johnny has just met Linda and she reaches out her hand with a half-eaten apple. “Want a bite?” she asks in that brittle voice that Hepburn made legend. He bends down without hesitation and takes a bite. There’s something immediately intimate about how Grant moves in spaces with Hepburn that speaks to his character’s growing fondness for Linda. His body language is open, even yearning, when he’s around her. His eyes soften when she supports his beliefs in not being run down by work, forever hustling, and instead getting out of the banking game after making a small nest egg. Julia doesn’t understand. As Linda says earlier, money is the family’s god. “There’s no such thrill in the world as making money,” Julia says, parroting her father’s beliefs. It’s an especially hilarious statement considering she’s inherited her money and not worked a day in her life.

 
Grant’s physical boundlessness appears early on. Johnny has just visited his older friends, Professor Nick (Edward Everett Horton) and Susan Potter (Jean Dixon), ecstatically telling them about his newfound love with Julia. “You know me, fellas. When things get tough, when I feel a worry coming on, you know what I do”—then, dressed in a full suit, coat, and hat, Grant does a front flip with ease, landing on his feet. He smiles and blows a kiss at his friends, hitting directly in the center of the frame as if it were a kiss meant for us.
 
Julia and Johnny’s engagement is meant to be announced at a New Year’s Eve party in the Setons’ grand home. Grant looks crisp and refined, almost at ease amongst the Seton family, if not for the worry marking his brow. However, he soon finds himself, decked in tuxedo and tails, performing acrobatics with Linda in the upstairs playroom instead of at the party downstairs with his fiancée. In the playroom, entertaining an audience of the Potters and the alcoholic but kind brother, Ned Seton (Lew Ayres), Linda and Johnny vault from the coach. Johnny helps her stand on his shoulders, still decked in a marvelous gown, of course. They lean then perform a forward tumble. I always find myself mesmerized by Grant, despite the fluttering greatness of the performances around him. He adds little touches to the character—the curiosity in his manner as he straddles a kid’s bicycle, the light behind his eyes whenever he looks at Linda, the lightness of his gait despite the heaviness of the character’s life—he has been working since he was twelve. Actors who understand the meaning of their bodies are able to create shapes and postures that take us from reality into the land of archetypes and fables and myth. And it’s in this territory that essential human truths can be found. Grant demonstrates this better than the pallid stars we are meant to be entertained by today. In doing so, he is able to consider the terrain of desire—how it’s found, kept, and sometimes lost—as well as add new texture to the expectations placed on Western masculinity. Grant isn’t guarded with his emotions as an actor, although there is sometimes an air of mystery to him; instead he wears them with an understanding of their preciousness. In Holiday he moves through space with a precision that reflects a trenchant understanding of character. But even though his acrobatics don’t extend into his later career with the same force as in Holiday, his physicality remains lucid and enchanting.

 Another important part of Grant’s physical presence, aiding in the comedies and running through his career, is perhaps the most important—how he looks at women to communicate the lust and complications that come with romance. That quality is on full display in the 1958 Stanley Donen production Indiscreet, where Grant not only delights with physically attuned comedic aplomb but enchants as a romantic lead. In films like To Catch a Thief (1955), Grant is the one being chased by the woman, a tactic that highlights his allure. In Indiscreet, the chase is mutual, albeit the flirtation is set off by famed actress Anna Kalman, played by a luminous and hilarious Ingrid Bergman, reuniting with Grant after their previous collaboration in the markedly different Notorious and her comeback following her denigration on the floor of the U.S. Congress for her affair with director Robert Rossellini. When Philip Adams (Grant) is introduced, walking into Anna’s apartment and life, he takes up space in the frame of the doorway that shows just how well Grant knew the power of drafting the right silhouette and posture. When the two lock eyes it’s clear immediately that they fancy one another. He extols her work on stage, while she wipes cold cream off her face. This moment reveals the immediacy and force of Grant’s persona as a romantic lead but also how he gives his romantic partners room to shine, playing with both his image and his character. He has everything it takes: the lightning bright charisma, the gallantry and respect that allows the woman to feel as real as his character. But ultimately it comes down to those chocolate eyes.

 
Indiscreet, at first, is a charming and breezy romantic comedy charting the beginnings of Philip and Anna’s relationship. Their dynamic is complicated by Philip’s home life—he’s married and can’t get a divorce despite being separated from his wife. Anna decides she doesn’t care and goes along with the subterfuge necessary for the relationship to work and her career to remain unscathed. There’s a telling moment when Anna prostrates herself on Philip’s lap, “Could you possibly get a divorce and marry me?” In a flash the ease of his body vanishes, he tenses up as quickly as the words escape her lips. But then Indiscreet reveals itself to have more cutting humor when the film takes another turn: Philip isn’t married at all. He’s been lying to Anna because he has no interest in being married. She finds out. Instead of telling him off in anger she devises a scheme to wreck him emotionally. This allows Grant to lean into the comedy of the story. Grant could have easily peaked during the time of the screwball comedy, which made him a star. But he found a way to transition from decade to decade, refining his skills and elaborating the dynamics of his persona, without losing sight of the attributes that made him Cary Grant.
 
There’s a devilish scene late in the film where Anna pretends she doesn’t know the truth as she attends a gala alongside Philip, her sister, and her brother-in-law. Philip is wholly unaware of what’s going on, never quite catching Anna’s face when it falls from her put-on joy into festering anger. Grant dances with abandon—jumping into the air as if a ballet star decked in an evening suit, swinging Anna around without much care of how she lands. He’s giddy and silly in a way a child can be. But even with his inconsideration, Grant is able to make Philip seem like the ultimate catch with a charm that elucidates the beauty of flirtation and romance. It’s this skill that makes the romance feel real and allows the end notes of the film to sing.
 
How Grant treated women in life proved to be far more complicated and fraught than the romantic treatises he was able to create on-screen. While Eyman notes his sterling rapport with co-stars like Irene Dunne, Grace Kelly, and Ingrid Bergman, this wasn’t exactly the norm with regards to his relations with women, romantic and otherwise. Frances Farmer, who appeared with him in The Toast of New York (1937), noted that he was “an aloof, remote person, intent on being Cary Grant playing Cary Grant.” Despite being an integral figure in putting Grant on the map with appearances in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, Mae West was the recipient of many disparaging remarks from her former leading man, who considered her his worst costar. “I don’t like artifice on a woman,” he said during one of his “A Conversation with Cary Grant” appearances in the 1970s. It’s an especially rich statement considering how much Grant’s life and on-screen persona utilized the artificial.
 
His treatment of his wives and other romantic partners is even more uncomfortable to read about. His narcissism, temper, and possessiveness were reported by many, including his first wife, Virginia Cherrill, who “preferred to talk about the Cary she loved, not the Cary that occasionally frightened her,” Eyman writes. Grant’s ambivalence coupled with his need for intimacy but distrust of it from women is undeniably born from the horrifying circumstances of his childhood home and the ordeal his mother went through. But even after his years of therapy and LSD treatments, which he credited with giving him the tools necessary to integrate his warring selves, Grant still seemed unable to see women as full people. “I am not proud of my marriage career. It was not the fault of Hollywood, but my own inadequacies. [. . .] My wives have divorced me. I await a woman with the best qualities of each. I will endow her with those qualities because they will be in my own point of view,” he says. Eyman blessedly doesn’t glide away from addressing the problem with this mindset, “The idea that women have no intrinsic qualities other than those imposed on them by a man is hard to surpass.” I bring up Grant’s complex and complicated relations with women not to disparage him but to paint a fuller picture of just how well-crafted his star persona and acting performances are. That gap between the man Archie Leach became and the persona of Cary Grant may in fact be a chasm.
 
Lost in that chasm is the truth about Grant’s sexuality, particularly his relationship with Randolph Scott. I’m not interested in parsing out rumors or delving into conspiratorial gossip. But it’s hard to ignore the problems with Eyman’s biography on matters such as this and the women in Grant’s life. Like so many of the other biographies rooted in the personalities of classic Hollywood, it has a blinkered perspective. While Eyman is aware of Grant’s own misogyny, he can’t see his own. He often doesn’t take Grant’s issues to task enough or contextualize them historically. Eyman is not alone in these faults. In researching Grant I kept butting against a horrifying amount of homophobia and misogyny. Trying to make sense of Grant as a star persona and an actual human being grows complicated when you study the terrain of his published biographies, which undoubtedly comes to bear on how his legend has been shaped.
 
This isn’t a problem contained only by Cary Grant biographies and critical explorations but a larger one about who gets to shape our understanding of the history of Hollywood. Travel through classic Hollywood biographies and critical appraisals, especially from the 1980s, and you’ll find a trove of bigotry. How different would our understanding of Grant’s life and career be if not dimmed by the horrid perspective of those who have contextualized it? What could have been unearthed or explored if people from marginalized backgrounds were allowed the space and support to write about him in-depth?
 
Cary Grant, the man, will likely always be partially steeped in mystery. But as a comedic force—with his sparkling romantic sensibilities and platinum poise—his prowess will always remain legible and unmatched.
 
The Acrobatic Grace of Cary Grant. By Angelica Jade Bastién. The Criterion Collection, February 11, 2021. 

Few celebrities from Hollywood’s Golden Age are as recognizable as Cary Grant. For a lot of movie fans, the actor can be summed up by a line from Charade (1963), when Audrey Hepburn asks, “Do you know what’s wrong with you?” — then, leaning in closer, answers her own question, “Nothing.” The pairing of these two screen legends was perfect. Grant, like Hepburn, represented a kind of elegance, class, charisma, and charm that seems impossible until you see it on the screen. In fact, Grant was such a pro at illusion that he was on the Board of Directors at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles. Yet, for all the viewers who know Grant’s films, very few know much about the man.
 
Grant reached a level of fame rarely achieved, let alone sustained over decades, with so many great films bearing his name. The actor often joked that he wished he was Cary Grant. He was always torn between his origins as a poor kid from Bristol and the Hollywood legend he became. A friend once wrote of Grant, “when we were out together in Beverly Hills, people usually didn’t approach him, or interfere. He was an object of awe. Being famous, visibly famous, is a terrible fate.” The truth is that Grant had a brilliantly constructed persona, better than anything a studio marketing team could have developed.
 

 
The question always looms: who was Cary Grant? Seasoned Hollywood biographer Scott Eyman is the latest to take a stab at cracking the case in his new book, Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise. “This is the story,” Eyman writes, “of the man born Archibald Alexander Leach, whose greatest performance was unquestionably as the matchless specimen of masculine charm known as Cary Grant.” Constantly avoiding self-exposure, Grant “was always the conspicuous object of desire; his character preferred to be left alone — passion was to be ignored, love was to be endured.” Eyman is a master at unveiling the person behind the iconic disguise, as he did in books such as Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille (2010) and John Wayne: The Life and Legend (2015).
 
Archie Leach grew up in a consistently tense family in Bristol. His parents didn’t get along, and the boy quickly learned conflict avoidance as a means of survival. It wasn’t until he found himself on the stage that he felt a true sense of family with his peers. After getting himself kicked out of school so he could join a traveling vaudeville troupe, Leach found himself on the SS Olympic on its way to New York City. Also on board were Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who were returning from their honeymoon. Leach remembered playing shuffleboard with Fairbanks and snapping a photo with his idol.
 
Leach worked in New York from 1920 to 1922 before creating a ruse about going home as a way to back out of his contract with the troupe. After accepting money to be sent back to Bristol, Leach stayed in New York, where he met costume designer Orry George Kelly, a.k.a. Orry-Kelly. The two would be roommates in the mid-1920s, rubbing elbows with many rising stars of the day. His vaudeville work allowed Leach to develop his acrobatic talents and hone his comedic timing, features that would help to later define him as a movie star. As it turned out, it was Cary Grant who eventually came to Hollywood, while Archie Leach was left behind in New York.
 
The name “Cary” was taken from a recent character he had performed on stage, while “Grant” was chosen as a suitably generic surname. Under this moniker, he became one of the most likable actors ever to grace the screen. He was also terribly insecure, a lingering result of his tumultuous childhood. Most audiences know Grant as an impeccably dressed aristocrat, but Eyman explores how his working-class childhood followed him forever. Grant didn’t blame his long list of broken marriages on the pressures of Hollywood; he always admitted to his own shortcomings. The star would also spend many years hung up on Sophia Loren, perhaps the one woman he couldn’t get to fall for him.
 
 

 
Grant’s Hollywood years are familiar to fans of movie history. What Eyman’s book does is situate Grant as both the icon we know and the person we wish we knew more about. Grant’s life offered fodder for gossip rags, such as his friendship with Randolph Scott, which fueled rumors for decades of a homosexual relationship. The biography does not dwell on Grant’s sexuality because, after all, it doesn’t matter. Some friendships were far more important, such as his connection with Harold Lloyd, a relationship that would have a major impact on Grant’s comedy. Grant also enjoyed a long friendship with the elusive Howard Hughes.
 
Eyman’s coverage of Grant’s career both unravels and upholds his iconic legacy. Grant’s insecurities certainly ruined some of his early relationships, including his first marriages, but this is the story of a man who lived and learned (or at least tried to). “What you saw in Cary Grant depended on which team you were rooting for,” Eyman writes. Grant rarely paid attention to the rumor mills because he was too self-centered to worry about what others thought. His battles were not with the press, audiences, directors, or studio heads; his conflict was internal. When Greta Garbo visited the Grant/Randolph residence, Grant showed his true colors when he told her, “Oh, I’m so happy that you met me.”
 
During World War II, Grant tried to join the British Navy. Time and again, he was told he would better serve his country by promoting England’s war effort on the big screen. Like many European immigrants in Hollywood, Grant had family back home who were living in increasingly dangerous circumstances. Several of Grant’s family members, including an aunt and uncle, were killed in an air raid in January 1941, and his mother narrowly escaped death during another raid.
 
“There was an edginess about him,” Eyman observes, “the fretful tone in his voice, the strange accent, and the abiding sense that beneath his calm surface well-oiled gears were whirling faster and faster.” In fact, Grant may have been involved with MI6, the British intelligence service that was running an operation in New York City in the 1930s. The main connection was through British filmmaker Alexander Korda, who was charged to investigate the isolationist movement in the United States. The Brits wanted to know what was going on in the movie studios, and Grant was Korda’s connection. Once America entered the war, Grant joined the Hollywood Victory Committee, an organization of stage, screen, and radio performers that championed bond drives and worked to raise morale among servicemen.
 

 

Korda’s influence can be found in one of Grant’s films of the war era, the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Notorious (1946), which features an espionage plot about a woman who marries a prominent Nazi in order to extract valuable secrets. (Hitchcock knew two people — screenwriter Charles Bennett and actor Reginald Gardiner — who were encouraged by MI6 to seduce female fascist sympathizers.) Eyman explores the deep connection between Grant and Hitchcock: the pair “had a lot in common: working-class English upbringing, ambivalence about women, an outwardly cheerful personality concealing a bleakness that could, in Hitchcock’s case, ascend toward malice, and in Grant’s case, downward towards depression.” As in so much of his excellent work on Hollywood history, Eyman gives readers a real sense of who Cary Grant was. Few celebrities were as successful at avoiding disclosure of personal details; indeed, Grant gave the “no-information” interview better than anyone. Yet Eyman continually finds ways to locate the person behind the self-styled mask.
 
While often seen as an amiable soul, Grant also had the ability to speak stern words to the public when necessary. For example, he staunchly defended Ingrid Bergman after she was denounced by many as immoral for having an affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini and giving birth to twins out of wedlock. Grant’s public response to her castigation could not have been more direct: “Ingrid Bergman is a fascinating, full-blooded yet temperate woman who has the courage to live in accord with her needs, and strength enough to accept and benefit by the consequences of her beliefs in an inhibited, critical and frightened society.” Eyman rightly notes that it would be tough to find a “public pronouncement of equal weight from [anyone] as eminent as Grant.” When Bergman won an Oscar for Anastasia (1956), Grant accepted on her behalf.
 
As Eyman shows, when people saw Cary Grant, on screen and off, what they were actually seeing was Archie Leach trying very hard to be Cary Grant. The man and his persona were in a constant tug-of-war, creating a persistent internal conflict. Toward the latter part of his life, Grant began to successfully confront his past with the help of a professional therapist. Beginning in 1958, Grant used LSD under a doctor’s supervision in order to explore and confront his deepest insecurities. His interest in new approaches to psychotherapy stemmed from his third wife, Betsy Drake. Eyman covers these years with a frank tenderness, as Grant desperately sought a means to fully accept himself, including his failed relationships.
 
Aided by extensive research into Grant’s interviews and correspondence, Eyman has constructed a definitive biography of the Hollywood legend. As Grant himself admitted:
 
”I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant; unsure of either, suspecting each. Only recently have I begun to unify them into one person: the man and the boy in me, the mother and the father and all people in me, the hate and love, and all the degrees of each in me, and the power of God in me.”
 
Eyman gives us insight into aspects of Grant’s world that were previously inaccessible. Of course, we get glimpses into the production of great films like His Girl Friday (1940) and North by Northwest (1959), but those are secondary to Eyman’s purpose of exposing the man behind the mask. He tells Grant’s story with the scholarly precision evident in his previous work and the kind of care only possessed by a dedicated fan.
 
Grant died in 1986, in the midst of a cross-country tour called “A Conversation with Cary Grant.” He had been hosting a series of Q-and-A sessions with fans in smaller cities, places that would not usually see visits from such a Hollywood legend. At the time, Grant was finally opening up and accepting himself, little by little. The journey of self-discovery took his entire life. Whether he ultimately found solace, we will never truly know, but this fine biography gets us as close as we have ever been to seeing Grant whole.
 
A Man and His Persona: On “Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise” By Chris Yogerst. Los Angeles Review of Books , January 3, 2021.