He played many of the silver screen’s most suave, cultured men, but Cary Grant enjoyed poking fun at his image. “Sometimes I would come home from shopping, and he’d meet me in a top hat and his pajamas and he’d do a funny walk,” his widow, Barbara Jaynes, tells Closer. “He was even funnier than he was in films.”
With a movie career that spanned three decades and many genres, Cary became Hollywood’s definition of a leading man. His handsome looks, sophisticated aura and continental accent were even said to be a model for superspy James Bond. “Everyone would like to be Cary Grant,” an interviewer once told him. The famous actor cheekily replied: “So would I!” In fact, the road that would take him from his birth as Archibald Leach in Bristol, England, to Cary Grant, movie star, would be a long one. “I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant; unsure of either, suspecting each,” he admitted in his memoir.
Born in 1904 into a working-class family, Archie was an only child. An older brother, John, had died of tuberculosis a few years earlier. That terrible loss contributed to his mother Elsie’s depression and his parents’ unhappy marriage. “His mother focused all her energies on her second son,” says Geoffrey Wansell, author of Cary Grant: Haunted Idol and Cary Grant: Dark Angel. When his mother disappeared abruptly, Archie, then 9, became confused and anxious. “A long time later, I learned that she had experienced a nervous breakdown and been taken to an institution,” recalled the star, who would also eventually discover that his mother’s confinement had not been voluntary. “His father had actually put her into the institution,” says Jaynes.
As a teenager, Archie, a mediocre student and a rebel, ran away with the Pender Troupe, a vaudeville act. “He was part of a troupe of 16 boys who did tumbling, falls, walked on stilts and did little sketches,” Wansell says. “It was the first time he found what passed for a family.”
On a voyage to America to perform with the troupe, Archie met Golden Age actor Douglas Fairbanks, who was also a passenger. Archie was photographed with the star on the shuffleboard court and was impressed by Douglas’ patience with his many fans and his glamorous suntan. “A gentleman in the true sense of the word,” recalled Cary, who would later copy Douglas in cultivating grace and a year-round tan.
When the troupe returned to England, Archie stayed behind in New York. For several years, he managed to eke out a life as an acrobat, comedian and Broadway stage actor. He began to take on a little shine by mixing with New York society. “Good manners and a pleasant personality, even without a college education, will take you far,” he noted.
By the time he arrived at the gates of Paramount Studios in Los Angeles in the 1930s, Archie had begun his metamorphosis into Cary Grant. Along with a new name, he received a contract. “A lot of his image was self-taught,” Wansell says. “His training in knockabout comedy gave him impeccable timing. He also wanted to be a little mysterious, reserved and attractive.”
Those qualities, which would make him one of the world’s most celebrated movie stars, also made Cary catnip to women. His second marriage, to Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, placed him among the jet set, adding extra gloss to his persona. “I remain deeply obliged to her for a welcome education in the beauties of the arts and other evidences of man’s capability for gracious expression and graceful living,” he said after their divorce.
From 1932 until his retirement from films in 1966, the two-time Oscar nominee made 77 films. “He covered up his own frailties and insecurities by becoming this wonderfully attractive man with immaculate comedic timing,” Wansell says.
Stardom, the kind Cary dreamed about as a young boy, certainly made him proud, but the five-times married actor found his greatest personal joy in his later life. He stopped being “Cary Grant” in the mid-1960s to devote himself to fathering his only child, Jennifer, 56. His final marriage, to Barbara Jaynes, whom he remained with until his passing in 1986 at age 82, would also be his happiest. “He reached such a high position in the world, yet his feet were so securely on the ground,” she says. “His best quality was his humility.”
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