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

I've never steeped myself into the worlds of Cary Grant—the stage name of Bristolian Archie Leach—but now, I wish I had done so earlier.

Mark Glancy has done an outstanding job at researching and writing this, a making-of biography about Cary Grant.

It seems that many biographies about Grant include falsifications and bad research; one example of this is claim that Grant was secretly homosexual.

Glancy has interviewed Barbara Jaynes, Grant's widow, had access to The Cary Grant Papers—the archive left by Grant—was a consultant for the documentary named 'Becoming Cary Grant', and has been involved with people behind the Cary Grant Festival. So yeah, this is no Wikipedia half-assed job.

Grant himself was distrustful of biographies, so this is a fresh breath of air. Not to say that others haven't done a good job.

He saved not only the letters he received but carbon copies of the replies he sent, and when he clipped articles about his life and career from newspapers and magazines, he wrote corrective notes in the margins (“Nonsense!” was a frequent entry) or attached a typed sheet to them, listing their inaccuracies before filing the articles away. Even in retirement, he was a steadfast archivist, meticulously saving his press clippings and correspondence.

So, there is a lot of good stuff to delve through.

Fact finding doesn't make a book, but Glancy's writing does. He whisks the reader through Grant's life in chronological order, quickly building a case for a poor family where the father doesn't care and the mother suffers from bad mental health.

The fact that little Archie was told that his mother had died when she, in fact, had been committed to a mental hospital by his father, was even traumatic to read about.

Elsie Leach was not dead. Archie did not know it, but his mother was just three miles from home, a patient at the Bristol Lunatic Asylum in Fishponds (on the outskirts of Bristol). Jim Leach had taken her there and had her committed. Decades down the line, when Cary Grant recalled the terrible day that he came home from school to find her gone, he never remembered noticing that she was mentally unwell prior to her disappearance. He recalled that she had some peculiarities: when he was an infant, she kept him in baby clothes far too long, and when he was a young boy, she kept him in short pants far too long.1 He also spoke privately about an incident when, as a child, he got separated from her while shopping in a Marks and Spencer department store. He could not find her and as he grew increasingly anxious, his mother suddenly seized him. “You see how it is, Archie?” she asked angrily. “Who looks out for you? Who came to save you? Me, that’s who! I’m the only one in the whole world who cares about you, and you better not forget it.”2 It was an unpleasant memory but, like the reluctance to dress him in age-appropriate clothing, it points more toward maternal possessiveness than mental illness.

Little wonder, then, that Archie wanted to escape.

Backstage at the Saturday matinee, Archie found himself, as he put it, “in a dazzling land of smiling, jostling people wearing and not wearing all sorts of costumes and doing all sorts of clever things.” It was a mesmerizing epiphany for him. “And that’s when I knew! What other life could there be but that of an actor? They happily travelled and toured. They were classless, cheerful and carefree. They gaily laughed, lived and loved.”

There are quite a few shameful incidents recounted throughout young Archie's life.

Whatever offence he committed, his expulsion was carried out in the most humiliating way. The day after his offense, an unsuspecting Archie attended the school’s morning assembly, where the usually mild-mannered headmaster, Augustus “Gussie” Smith, called him to the podium to reprimand him. Archie was so dazed by the experience that he took in only a few scattered words, “inattentive. . . irresponsible . . .incorrigible . . . a discredit to the school” before he realized that he was being very publicly expelled. With his upper-lip quivering, and his head hanging in shame, he walked out of the hall and left the school – never to return as a pupil. The shame of it was enormous, and so too was his fear of telling his father about his disgrace.

He started working his way up soon thereafter.

There, at the Ipswich Hippodrome, he met the zany American comedian Don Barclay, who was playing on the headline act that week. Barclay was 12 years older than Archie, but he took an interest in Archie when he saw some of the Pender boys pretending to teach this inexperienced kid how to apply stage make-up, but actually making-up his face like a clown. Barclay intervened and offered to teach Archie properly. He was charmed to find that this runaway boy “was so polite, such a little gentleman.” When Archie addressed him as “Sir” or as “Mr Barclay”, he said, “Call me Don.” But Archie, who had been taught by his mother always to call older men “sir”, could only manage to call his new friend, “Don, sir.” In later years, after they met again many times, Cary Grant never forgot Barclay’s kindness to him, and occasionally when he called him, and Barclay answered the phone, he would ask, “Is that you, Don, sir?”

Glancy makes Archie's story come alive, from the streets of Bristol to performing acrobatic stunts for paying audiences across Great Britain, on to the USA.

As Cooper made his fortune in America, he continued to struggle, both in romantic relationships as well as that with his mother, whom he had found to be alive. The lives of Gary Cooper were legion, not withstanding how he found his footing as an actor in the USA.

Glancy makes fine use of his brief style of writing paragraphs, as with this one:

By the late 1950s, Cary himself had finally come to realize how troublesome his own reinvention of himself had been; how much he had buried and denied in order to live his new life. As a means of grappling with this revelation, and dealing with the breakdown of his third marriage, he had gone into a form of therapy based on the hallucinogenic drug LSD. He soon declared that LSD was a wonder drug, and told reporters that he was a new and saved man. Over time, however, he would find that personal transformations are not as swift and seamless as the movies suggest, and that inner demons are not so quickly or easily evaded as crop-dusting assassins.

To me, there was a bit of a lull in the book, about a third in, where I felt not much was happening. Sure, that's to be expected in anybody's life, but, rhythmically speaking, it could have been written in a snappier way to make the book flow in a steadier way.

To read of how Grant handled the media, gossip, becoming one of the most well-known movie actors in the world, while creating some of the most brilliant scenes ever recorded on celluloid (e.g. together with Alfred Hitchcock), and his old age, is enthralling.

Buy this book. It's worth it.

Cary Grant, the Making of a Hollywood Legend is published by Oxford University Press on 2020-10-15.