I finished reading this book, which I read at the insistence of my friend Jetta, who said: “You’ve got to read this book! You’ve GOT to read this book!!”And she was right!
It's amazing, considering how pinched the circumstances most people faced during the Depression, just how expansive and interesting a life that Briton Archibald Leach (aka Cary Grant) was able to fashion for himself, based on his grace (he started life in the circus as a stiltwalker), his physical conditioning, his fine acting talent, and his extraordinary good looks. His father and family could be cruel to him too: told that his mother had unexpectedly died when he was ten, her continued existence was not revealed to him for twenty years. One strange life!
Amazing too are the number of film roles that Cary Grant rejected - the Reject Filmography. The history of cinema would have been much, much different had Grant changed his mind. "The Music Man" with Cary Grant instead of Robert Preston would have been - truly different!
Here are excerpts from another review, by Anthony D'Amato that does better justice to the subject (even as he pushes a theory of androgyny that doesn't necessarily work for me):
First and most obviously, Grant was your basic bisexual. He lived openly with Randolph Scott and had serial affairs with other men. He also married, for love, five women. “Every one of my wives left me”, he told The New York Times in 1971.
In addition to the five Mrs Grants, Cary became totally smitten with several of his leading ladies such as Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Eva Marie Saint, Sophia Loren, and Grace Kelly. It’s noteworthy that every one of these world-class beauties rejected his passionate advances. Was it because they detected a certain insincerity in Grant? An incapacity for true love? One cannot tell on the screen what Cary Grant is really thinking – a mysteriousness that’s indeed part of his magnetism. He could make screen love to a tarantula and do it just as convincingly as with Kate, Sophia, or Grace.
Prior to The Awful Truth ([Leo McCarey] 1937), a romantic male who was at once charming, intelligent, romantic, sensitive, witty, sexy, rascally, and as beautiful as a leading lady simply did not exist in American movies.
Hollywood’s first generation of leading men, Eliot continues, were the courtly European types with sculpted moustaches such as Ronald Colman, elderly lechers like Adolphe Menjou, or devilish hedonists like Rudolph Valentino. Then as the talkies took over in the early 1930s, the image shifted toward the humorless hunk – Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, and John Wayne.
Although these guy types may have represented the ideal male of the era, there was nothing remotely androgynous about any of them. Eliot quotes Andrew Britton, writing in Cine-Action, who nailed the Cary Grant difference:
Grant’s performance in The Awful Truth (co-starring Irene Dunne) was “remarkable for the extent to which gender characteristics assigned to women could be presented as being desirable and attractive in a man.”
This androgyny made for high-voltage comedy on the screen as Cary Grant and Irene Dunne continually tried to one-up each other. But the lasting impact of the film and those that were to follow was on world culture – it was OK for men to be like Cary Grant.
The third component of my androgyny theory is the consummate care that Grant took with his image, both on screen and off. He only wore custom-made suits and shirts. Eliot tells us: “He advised men who wanted to emulate him to never wear suspenders, belts, or garters but instead to go with hidden waist-tabs to keep their pants up and straight.” His most important obsession was keeping his waist slim. He also carried a toothbrush with him at all times, and after a smoke or after lunch or dinner with his friends, he would excuse himself and go to the men’s room to brush his teeth. He worked out every day. He paid as much attention to his face as Marilyn Monroe paid to hers. During the filming of Blonde Venus (1932), director Josef von Sternberg took a comb and parted Grant’s hair on the right side rather than the left, the way Grant had always combed it before. For the rest of his life Grant kept his hair that way. I had never noticed the right-sided parting until Eliot’s book brought it to my attention. However, I have always noticed subliminally that there was something magnetic about Grant’s hair, something that created a pleasant kind of tension. It’s like the well-placed beauty mole near Cindy Crawford’s lips – the mole that made her a model.
...There was no “method” in Grant’s acting of the kind we might associate with the early Marlon Brando. Grant was a “natural” actor, which means he had to work furiously hard in order to appear natural. In this respect he reminds me of the sublime natural actress Nicole Kidman. What made it especially hard for Grant, however, was that his naturalism was based on an androgynous model that he was inventing at the same time that he was trying to be true to it. He was his own work-in-progress.
...In addition to being a natural actor, Grant was an interactive actor. He worried over the scripts, taking notes and discussing lines with his directors. He came up with witty lines not only for himself but for his co-stars. Some directors are annoyed when the actor on the set “knows better”. But the best directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, positively welcome creative input from the actors. Indeed, Hitchcock cast his movies on the expectation that by choosing great actors, they would make important contributions to the production. It should come as no surprise that Hitchcock’s all-time favourite actor was Cary Grant.
As if to return the favour, Cary Grant gave the best performances of his career in films directed by Hitchcock: Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief (1955), and North by Northwest (1959). Marc Eliot’s favourite is North by Northwest; mine is Notorious.
When he was directing movies in London, Hitchcock watched Grant’s movies with great interest. On the other side of the pond, Grant was an avid student of Hitchcock’s films. When Hitchcock came over permanently to Hollywood in 1939, he lost no time in contacting Grant for a new project eventually called Suspicion. Hitchcock’s interest in Grant was not just because of marquee power. Rather, Hitchcock saw something in Grant’s screen performances that wasn’t there.
What Hitchcock saw, as Eliot so well describes, was the possibility of a hidden dark interior in Grant’s screen persona. Given the right role, Hitchcock thought, the dark interior could be brought out and pitted against the light comedic exterior, with the result that Grant would be a walking composite of precisely the good vs. evil tension that makes a screen thriller exciting. The audience would be torn between rooting for Grant as the good guy and hating him for being the bad guy. And Grant, with his precise facial control and body language, would be the person to pull off this feat.
...Maybe the hardest thing to do in criticising a movie is to imagine what it would be like with a different actor playing the lead. Would The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957) have been improved if Grant hadn’t turned down the William Holden role? I think so, to the following extent: that Grant would have been better playing off against Alec Guinness and making him more believable. Holden’s serviceable acting gave Guinness too much room to sail off into the domain of the comic book. Grant also rejected the lead in The Music Man (Morton DaCosta, 1962), which then was given to Robert Preston. Preston was splendid in the role he had originated on the Broadway stage, and his comedic timing was as good as Grant’s would have been. But the musical sags badly when Preston tries to romance the town librarian Shirley Jones. Preston is simply not believable; he looks too old and worn for her. Grant would have been completely believable and the movie at that point would have soared instead of sagged. But get this: Grant was in fact fourteen years older than Preston.
I could go on and on with the Reject Filmography of Cary Grant. Let me list just a few with the name of the actor who eventually got the lead role:
Around the World in Eighty Days (Michael Anderson, 1956) – David Niven
Can-Can (Walter Lang, 1960) – Frank Sinatra
Guys and Dolls (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1955) – Marlon Brando
Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962) – James Mason
My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964) – Rex Harrison
Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953) – Gregory Peck
Sabrina (Billy Wilder, 1954) – Humphrey Bogart
A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954) – James Mason
What’s Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich, 1972) – Ryan O’Neal
These films are all-time classics. Could they actually have been improved if Grant had accepted the lead role? Readers can answer this question for themselves. It is a question we perhaps would not even think of asking of any other movie star.
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