It was an extraordinary time for him.
‘The first thing I loved about America’, he said, ‘was how fast it all seemed.’11 He found New York itself endlessly fascinating. It was a place that breathed possibility. With the Hippodrome dark on Sundays, he was free to explore the city: ‘I spent hours on the open-air tops of Fifth Avenue buses … I contentedly rode from Washington Square, up the Avenue and across 72nd Street, to the beauty of Riverside Drive, with its quiet mansions and impeccably kept apartment buildings.’12 He wanted to feel at home in New York, and, in time, he would do so, but, to begin with, he found it simply exhilarating: the size, the sights, the sounds, the scope, the pace, the opportunities (real and imagined) – the initial exoticism of it all was thrilling.
Good Times ran for nine months, giving 455 performances before closing at the end of April 1921. Exploiting the success of the show, Bob Pender was able to book the troupe on a tour of the B. F. Keith vaudeville circuit (the major vaudeville power at that time in the eastern United States), visiting most of the major cities east of the Mississippi River. In mid-1922, the tour closed with an appearance at the prestigious New York Palace, and then, without definite prospects, Pender – ever the pragmatic professional entertainer – decided to return to England. Not all of his troupe, however, agreed with the decision; some of the members, including Archie Leach, were keen to stay on in New York.
Although Pender clearly had a great deal of respect and affection for Leach, as, indeed, it was evident that Leach had for him, it seems that their relationship had, by the end of the tour, grown tense. Pender by now was tired, middle aged and increasingly cautious; Archie Leach was eighteen years of age, good looking, tall (6′ 2″), fit, energetic, with an increasingly forceful personality, and relishing life away from home. The manner in which they parted reflected the change in the relationship, with Leach, along with some of his fellow members of the troupe, deceiving Pender about their plans for the immediate future. Pender’s letter to Elias Leach not only marks – with regret and exasperation – the end of his association with Archie, but it also suggests that he had been knowingly misinformed as to Archie’s real intentions:
244 West Thayer Street,
Philadelphia, PA
May 21, 1922
DEAR MR. LEACH:
I am writing this to inform you that Archie is coming home. He leaves New York by the Cunard Liner Berengaria on May 29th and should arrive Southampton June 2 or 3. He has made up his mind to come home. I offered him 35 dollars a week which is about G8 [eight guineas] in English money, and he will not accept it, as he says he cannot do on it so I offered him £3/10 a week clear and all his expenses paid but he says he wishes to come home. The wage I have offered him is the same as my daughter and also another of my boys have been getting so I know he could do very nicely on it but I must tell you he is most extravagant and wants to stay at the best hotels and live altogether beyond his means.
I promised him if he improved in his work and was worth it, I will give him more money, but he is like all young people of his age. He thinks he only has to ask and have. I must tell you he has very big ideas for a boy of his age, and he seems to have made up his mind to come home.
He has been a good boy since he has been with me and I think he is throwing away a good chance but he does not think so. Mrs. Pender has talked to him but it is no use. He will not listen. So I should like to hear if he arrives home safely … I shall be glad to do anything for him when I return to England.
I remain,
Yours truly, BOB PENDER13
Recollecting the event forty years later, Cary Grant commented, ‘It must have been very disappointing and difficult for [Pender] to leave so many of his boys behind in America, our land of opportunity: but youth, in its eagerness to drive ahead, seldom recognises the troubles caused or the debts accrued while passing.’14 He was a young adult who, as he put it ruefully, ‘knew that I knew everything’.15 The only problem, it seemed to him at the time, ‘was just that I hadn’t seen everything’.16
Archie Leach, committing his immediate future to the US, spent most of the summer of 1922 searching for ways of making himself employable. Pender had contacts, Leach, thus far, had none; he was a young Englishman in America, with little experience and limited resources in a highly competitive business. ‘Before I made my way to some measure of success,’ he would recall, ‘I had many tough times, but I was always lucky.’17 He began from the outside in, acquiring ‘the corniest habits in my attempts to become quickly Americanised’.18 The obvious influences, for him, were from the theatre:
I’d been to the Palace to see the Marx Brothers, billed as the ‘Greatest Comedy Act in Show Business; Barring None’. I noticed that Zeppo, the young handsome one, the ‘straight’ man, the fellow I copied (who else?) wore a miniature, neatly tied bow tie. It was called – hold onto your chair – a jazz bow. Well, if that was the fashion, it was at least inexpensive enough for me to follow.19
The over-eager series of restylings did little to help him find regular work. After a few barren weeks, he was forced to start using up the ‘emergency money’ given to him by Pender for a return passage to England.20 He had, however, during his search for the right kind of shows, managed at least to meet the right kind of people; Pauline Kael has suggested that he must have been ‘an incredible charmer’,21 because he was just eighteen, admittedly tall and good looking, yet found himself invited to a number of exclusive dinner parties in the company of the wealthy and famous. On one such occasion, as the escort of the opera singer Lucrezia Bori,22 he met George C. Tilyou,23 whose family owned and operated the Steeplechase Park on Coney Island. The meeting resulted in a job: Tilyou hired him to walk around Coney Island on six-foot-high stilts while wearing a bright-green coat and jockey cap, long tube-like black trousers and a sandwich board advertising the race-track. If, in retrospect, the image of Cary Grant on stilts seems somewhat incongruous, one should also note that the image of, say, Ronald Colman, Rex Harrison or David Niven on stilts seems simply incomprehensible; Archie Leach, with his working-class background and his music-hall training, was, among all of the future Hollywood British, uniquely suited to the potential harshness of life in New York in the twenties. ‘If I hadn’t been badgered, cajoled, dared, bullied and helped into walking those high stilts when I was a boy in the Pender troupe, I might have starved that summer – or gone back to Bristol.’24 The pay was forty dollars per week, which provided him with some steady cash while he searched for further vaudeville bookings. Another short-term scheme to earn money involved selling neckties hand-painted by his friend John Kelly (who later achieved fame as the Hollywood designer, Orry-Kelly).
He was experiencing other anxieties during this period. There seems – judging from the (incomplete) correspondence which has been preserved between Archie Leach and his father, Elias – to have been an ongoing series of increasingly acrimonious exchanges between Archie and Bob Pender. Elias Leach, in a letter to his son, refers to ‘the rumour of Mr. B. Pender action towards you’; he advises his son to ‘try and get in touch with the national vaudeville artists institute and ask them if they take up such cases as yours [if Pender] tries his game on’.25 Judging from this letter, it seems that Pender may have attempted to force Archie to return the money he was given for his return fare back to England.