Broadway. According to Hart, Archie Leach had appeared to be ‘a disconsolate young actor’ whose ‘gloom was forever dissipated when he changed his name to Cary Grant’.16
Archie Leach saw his reincarnation as ‘Cary Grant’ not as the end of his self-reinvention but rather as the start of it. The writer Sidney Sheldon, who came to know and work with Grant in the forties, used him as the prototype for Rhys Williams, a character in the novel Bloodline; Williams is described as ‘an uneducated, ignorant boy with no background, no breeding, no past, no future’, but, with ‘imagination, intelligence and a fiery ambition’, he transforms himself from ‘the clumsy, grubby little boy with a funny accent’ into a ‘polished and suave and successful’ man.17 Archie Leach was eager to learn, to absorb as much as he could from the places and people he encountered. His lack of formal education remained one of his lifelong regrets.18 Since his arrival in the US, he had made a point of making the acquaintance of people who were gifted and highly educated. Rather like the character in Bloodline, he ‘was like a sponge, erasing the past, soaking up the future’.19 He was not ashamed of his working-class background, but he did want to take every opportunity to pursue the project of self-improvement; he was, in part, eager to educate himself, but also he was reacting, with bitterness, to the memory of the routine humiliations suffered by himself, his family and his friends back in England. He studied other people’s dress sense, table manners, gestures and accents. He was not going to be ‘caught out’. The composer Quincy Jones, who formed a friendship with him in later years, remarked that when he was growing up, ‘the upper-class English viewed the lower classes like black people. Cary and I both had an identification with the underdog. My perception is that we could be really open with each other because there was a serious parallel in our experience.’20 John Forsythe, who acted alongside him in the forties, made a similar point: Archie Leach had been ‘a poor kid. He did scrape his way to the top. That meticulous quality he had – knowing how to best use himself – was one of the key things to his nature.’21
The idea of America – its promise of liberty and equality – inspired Archie Leach, as it had inspired many other English people from similar backgrounds. Betsy Drake, who became Cary Grant’s third wife, recalled that ‘in Cary’s day you got nowhere – nowhere – with a lower-class accent. The fact that he survived all that speaks very well for him.’22 Though America had its own casual snobberies, it was, none the less, considerably more democratic in outlook and disposition than the England that Archie Leach had grown up in. Categories in England were particularly rigid then, and social distinctions emphatically made and scrupulously preserved. In America, on the other hand, Archie Leach could, to some extent, avoid such potential disadvantages. Only an expert in contemporary English class distinctions could have contemplated slotting him firmly into a particular niche; to most people he was just a good-looking and personable young man.
Archie Leach had some sense of what kind of person he wanted Cary Grant to be. Glamorous, for instance. Archie Leach wanted Cary Grant to be the epitome of masculine glamour. To this end his first chosen role-model was Douglas Fairbanks. He had met Fairbanks before he even set foot in America. Fairbanks and his wife, Mary Pickford, had been passengers on the RMS Olympic on the same voyage to the US as Archie Leach and the rest of the Pender troupe. The couple were returning to America after their much-publicised six-week honeymoon in Europe. Fairbanks fascinated Archie Leach. Tall, dark and handsome, an international screen idol, a ‘self-made man’ (with just a little help from Harvard), a fine athlete and, as his young admirer noted, ‘a gentleman in the true sense of the word. A gentle man. Only a strong man can be gentle.’23 Archie Leach was thoroughly impressed by Fairbanks, off screen as well as on; Fairbanks symbolised the kind of man – and star – that the then still somewhat gauche teenage Archie Leach wanted one day to become. What is more, Archie knew enough of Fairbanks’s biography, gleaned from movie magazines and newsreels, to see that they had much in common: disrupted and largely unhappy childhoods, alcoholic fathers, acrobatic training, apparently limitless high spirits and a capacity to enjoy their own good luck. Fairbanks had triumphed; he had achieved fame, wealth and power, as well as marrying ‘America’s sweetheart’.24 ‘For a man coming out of darkness into light,’ commented the critic Richard Schickel, ‘there was, possibly, a promise in Fairbanks.’25
At one point, late on during the crossing, Archie Leach found himself (probably less fortuitously than he later liked to suggest) being photographed alongside his hero during a game of shuffleboard: ‘As I stood beside him, I tried with shy, inadequate words to tell him of my adulation. He was a splendidly trained athlete and acrobat, affable and warmed by success and well-being.’26 Archie’s glimpses of Fairbanks on that first Atlantic crossing provided him with his initial, and possibly most enduring, image of modern elegance and style. Cary Grant always attributed his almost obsessive maintenance of a perpetual suntan to that first sighting of Fairbanks’s deeply bronzed complexion,27 and he was also equally impressed by the relatively thoughtful and understated elegance of Fairbanks’s dress sense (he was not the only one: many of the studio bosses had started out in the clothing trade, and there were few sights more likely to have them purring with delight than that of a well-tailored suit28). An Anglophile, Fairbanks had his suits made in Savile Row by Anderson & Sheppard, his evening clothes by Hawes & Curtis, his shirts by Beale & Inman and his monogrammed velvet slippers by Peel. Grant never forgot the subtle precision of that celebrated sartorial flair. Ralph Lauren has said that, years later, Grant described, in minute detail, how Fairbanks looked, and he urged Lauren to make a double-breasted tuxedo ‘like the one worn by Fairbanks, same lapel and all’.29
Archie Leach was aware, however, that he could not, and should not, simply replicate the Fairbanks look. Cary Grant could not be another Fairbanks. Fairbanks was, at least on the screen, an all-American hero and Cary Grant, whatever, whoever, he might become, was never going to pass for an all-American hero. Gary Cooper would be able to grow into the role of the westerner, his voluptuous, gentle-looking face changing gradually – as though it had long been left thoughtlessly outside at the mercy of the elements – into a harder, rougher complexion, but Cary Grant could not go far in that particular direction. If Cary Grant’s future was American, his lineage was English. He could change the way he looked rather more effectively, and speedily, than he could change the way he sounded. His accent, when he arrived in Hollywood, was the oddest thing about him. Nobody talked like that, not even Archie Leach in earlier years.
There is no reason to believe that Archie Leach, during his childhood and early adolescence, sounded in any way different from other working-class Bristolians. There are, indeed, some who claim to be able to discern the distinctive ‘burr’ of his old Bristol accent beneath the assumed American tones.30 It seems likely that Archie Leach’s accent first began to change during the period he spent in London with the Pender troupe. It was not just that he was, at the impressionable age of fourteen, exposed to the distinctive dialects associated with South London, but also, more specifically, that he was drawn into the London music-hall community, which had developed its own semiprivate patois, something described by one performer as ‘a mixture of Cockney, Romany and Hindustani’.31 Archie Leach, in time, would speak in his own odd hybrid of West Country and mock-cockney, with an increasingly distinctive staccato enunciation. Ernest Kingdon, his cousin, believed that this peculiar accent was to some extent the result of