Mark Glancy - Cary Grant, the Making of a Hollywood Legend

OXFORD CULTURAL BIOGRAPHIES

Gary Giddins, Series Editor

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Cary Grant, the Making of a Hollywood Legend

Mark Glancy

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Mark Glancy 2020

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943043

ISBN 9780190053130

eISBN 9780190053154

For

Roger Law

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: authors own collection

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: authors own collection

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: authors screen capture

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors own collection

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: authors screen capture

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Source: authors screen capture

Source: authors screen capture

Source: The Cary Grant Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library

Since Plutarch, cultural biography has too often lent itself to the extremes of hagiography and demonization: biography not as fact-based narrative with a critical point of view, but as testimony of slavish devotion or blunt disdain. A particularly toxic mode of disdain, fueled by gossip and amplified by outrage, focuses on artists once regarded with veneration and later found to be imperfect. Cary Grant was among those who got it in the neck. Some of the early accounts of his life were so intent on portraying a bitterly disturbed and miserly closet-case that readers unfamiliar with his uniquely creative luminosity on screen (if any such readers exist) might wonder why he merited a full-dress biography at all. Mark Glancy puts artist and art in perspective, and finds much to admire in both.

Grant was born for the screen. One suspects he would have been amusing but diminished on stage. Of course, he came from the stage, but, significantly, not the stage of Shakespeare and Shaw. Rather, like Keaton and Chaplin, he served his apprenticeship in varietythe theater of pratfalls, sketches, blackouts, beer drinking songs, and stilt-walking, the last his specialty when he toured under his birth name, Archie Leach. He remade himself onscreen, mastering the tools of the more intimate medium, including the close-up; the mutable mise en scne on which to impose his graceful angularity; and the microphone, which caught the nuances of his much-imitated but finally inimitable voice. Nobody talks like that! the Jack Lemmon character challenges the Tony Curtis character, who does a spot-on Grant impression in Some Like It Hot, invariably getting a raucous laugh because no one did speak like that during Prohibition, when that film takes place, or after, except for Cary Grant.

In Cary Grant, the Making of a Hollywood Legend, Glancy examines his accent as a fusion of Bristol, where he was born, and Brixton, where he worked, with his methodical attempt to sound American, resulting in an agile mid-Atlantic concoction entirely sui generis. Glancy, a British film historian who has focused on the cinematic connections between two countries separated by a common language, gives us a thorough and knowing account of his life and career, not least the difficult years of his childhood. (Even Freud might have blanched at the Oedipal snags arising from his father telling young Archie that his mother was dead when, in fact, he committed her to a mental asylum three miles away so that he could live with another woman.) One primary research source was the thirty-nine linear feet of boxes, filled with papers that Grant had amassed and preserved for posteritys sake. They were available to previous biographers who evidently perused them superficially or not at all.