Bill Royce - Cary Grant: The Wizard of Beverly Grove

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Cover and book design by Lisa Wysocky,
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Applied For

Bill Royce
Cary Grant: The Wizard of Beverly Grove
p. cm
ISBN 10: 0-9673920-6-3
ISBN 13: 978-0-9673920-6-6
1. Memoir I. Title
2006

Copyright 2006 Bill Royce

All Rights Reserved
including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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For Archie

Theres no greater wealth than being remembered.
Cary Grant

IN HIS OWN UNIQUE way Cary Grant started this book and, in her own unique way, his ex wife, Dyan Cannon, convinced me to finish it.

As youll read, it was Cary, early in our friendship, who gave me a diary and urged me to put down everything I thought worth remembering. That was in 1973. Seventeen years later, in 1990, I was working as a segment producer and writer on the late night talk program, The Arsenio Hall Show. Dyan was a frequent guest and I always had the pleasure of doing her pre-interview, in which we went over what Arsenio could ask her that might be amusing or interesting.

By her third appearance, I still had not mentioned that I knew Cary, much less co-authored only the year before Maureen Donaldsons book about her relationship with him called An Affair to Remember: My Life with Cary Grant. I knew Dyans marriage to Cary had been tempestuous, but I didnt know if all her scars from that experience had fully healed.

Finally, I just blurted it out one afternoon in Dyans dressing room. I explained how I met him and the dramatic impact hed had on my life.

Yes, she laughed, you dont walk away from a man like that untouched or unchanged, do you? She acknowledged some of the rougher parts of their relationship, but was thankful they had managed to heal their differences before his death in 1986, mostly for the sake of their daughter, Jennifer.

After all these years, she said, Im now grateful to him. He could be a handful, but he was a great teacher, wasnt he?

I agreed that was the perfect description for Cary and mentioned some of the lessons Id learned from him.

You know, said Dyan as she got ready to join Arsenio on stage that night. You should do your own book about him someday. Youll know when the time is right.

I could say the same thing to you, I replied.

Dyan erupted with one of her signature, gut-deep laughs. Like I said, when the time is right for you, Bill!

It took me another fifteen years before I was ready to do this book. Why? The reason is as simple, and as complicated, as the fact that I wasnt ready psychologically to do it until now. When I walked into Carys life, he was sixty-nine years old and I was twenty-five. For most people Carys age it was a time of looking back, but for Cary it had become a time of giving back. I set foot on Beverly Grove, Carys retreat high above Beverly Hills, as a child-manno longer a child, but still far from an adult. I had been taught up until then not to trust, not to talk, and not to feel.

The person who came to Carys door was a keeper of secrets and a king of masks. I had buried my feelings so deeply they were impossible for anyone to tap into, including myself. But Cary was a master of not only finding the theater in the men he played on the screen, but of finding it in real people like me. Cary had his share of secrets and knew that in sharing his with me, I could begin the process of dredging up mine.

There were times when this process resembled a game of emotional chicken, with each of us challenging the other to dig deeper and to face our truths, however unpleasant. If Cary had the guts to face his, I was duty bound to reveal mine, too. In this way, Cary went far beyond lending a struggling young man a helping hand; he opened up his heartand his hometo me.

Difficult as these excursions into our pasts might have been, I knew they were necessary not only for me to grow as a human being, but for our friendship to grow as well. Cary said repeatedly that we couldnt be selectively honest with each other. Such evasions might be necessary, he felt, when he talked on occasion to the press, but never in the privacy of his own home.

In short, Carys talent for friendship was easily as great as his talent for acting. I wont pretend that what youre about to read is a comprehensive biography or an in depth look at his career in films, although there is much new information in this book about his on and off screen lives. I knew Cary too well to be objective. However, in these pages I do recognize what film critic David Thomson once wrote about Cary in his movies: There is a light and dark side to him but, whichever is dominant, the other creeps into view.

Off the screen, this combination of sunlight and shadow was always present. Cary always called Hollywood a sunny place for shady people and considered himself one of them. He said almost everyone who came to Hollywood was, in one way or another, an orphan trying to find a new family. We just call it an audience, he said.

Throughout his career, Cary became a screen on which his audience could project their own wishes and desires. The truth is he was a man of simple tastes, marked deeply by a Dickensian childhood back in England, who knew how complex the human heart could beespecially his own. For example, many of his fans to this day want Cary to be exclusively heterosexual; others want him to be exclusively homosexual. The truth is more complicated than that. Carys life shredded such categories; he was a human version of a Rubiks cube, continually and effortlessly slipping in and out of any attempts to box him in one place.

While some might find parts of what I share about Carys life upsettingespecially regarding the years before he came to HollywoodCary would have demanded nothing less than the truth. He also hated false sentimentality of any kind. At the same time, Cary was a deeply emotional man, particularly in the latter years of his life when I knew him. He could be brought to tears by something as simple as a sunset or a flower in his garden.

Cary was born in England and it is said that the British do not like open displays of affection, but I think more and more that description applies less to the English and more to us Americans. Anything overtly emotional or spiritual is increasingly ridiculed, particularly in the media, while only things that can be physically feltlike sex and drugsare trusted.

Much of this book is, frankly, emotional. That was the nature of my friendship with Cary. To portray it in any other way would be a disservice to his memory. Jennifer, and Carys last wife, Barbara, have, in their own loving ways in the twenty years since his death, made it clear what an extraordinary father and husband he was. This is my way of showing what a great friend he was.

Columnist Richard Cohen said this about Cary in a recent article contrasting the negligible impact of contemporary actors on the political scene, versus the influence of those from Carys generation: (Cary) set an example for boys and men younger than him: This is the way a man acts and the way he appears. Learn from me.

Now in e-book format, heres what I had the privilege of learning from Cary.