target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">32 This very individualistic way of speaking was probably made even more noticeable during the years Leach spent touring the music-halls in Britain and America with the Penders. Peter Honri, a member of one of Britain’s most famous music-hall families, has noted that the so-called ‘music-hall voice’ relied not so much on volume as on ‘pitch and resonance’ – it was ‘a voice with a cutting edge’.33
Archie Leach, as he struggled to survive in New York, realised that being – or, more pointedly, sounding – English limited the number of stage roles he could, with any seriousness, audition for.34 ‘I still spoke English English, and I knew that to get jobs here, I’d have to learn American English.’35 He was not trying consciously to erase the sounds that associated him with a certain geographic and class background; he was simply trying to make himself more employable in his new environment. As Richard Schickel has argued, he was probably aiming not for affectation but rather for ‘something unplaceable, even perhaps untraceable’, a malleable accent that could lend a ‘democratic touch of common humanity’ to an aristocratic role and a ‘touch of good breeding’ to the more raffish parts.36
He did his best, and, of course, his accent had already begun to change during those first formative years he had spent in the United States,37 but the transformation process was both slow and incomplete. Some New Yorkers during this time mistook him for an Australian,38 and a number of his colleagues, for a brief period, took to calling him ‘Boomerang’, ‘Digger’ or ‘Kangaroo’ Leach (years later, in Mr Lucky, he referred back to this strange misconception, having his character explain his use of cockney rhyming slang by saying, ‘Oh, it’s a language I picked up in Australia’). Although his accent, once he had settled in Hollywood, grew gradually into its now-familiar transatlantic timbre, it continued to strike some American admirers as beguilingly exotic. The critic Richard Corliss, for example, writing on the occasion of Cary Grant’s death, recalled the ‘cutting tenor voice that refused to shake its Liverpool origins’39 (which is rather like suggesting that James Stewart never quite managed to lose his Texan twang). Grant himself remained appealingly unpretentious and self-effacing when referring to his accent: when Jack Warner offered him Rex Harrison’s role in the movie version of My Fair Lady, he exclaimed, ‘I cannot play a dialectician – a perfect English teacher. It wouldn’t be believable … I sound the way ’Liza does at the beginning of the film.’40
If the accent was, and would continue to be, unique, it was distinctive in the ‘right’ kind of way as far as Hollywood producers were concerned. There was a demand at the time for British (or at least British-sounding) actors, because the diction of so many American performers was, it was thought, ill-suited to the technical limitations of the early ‘talkies’. Although Archie Leach had arrived in Hollywood with his accent a volatile mixture of West Country, South London and New York, Cary Grant was able to attract attention by the way he sounded as well as by the way he looked. That accent, as a critic, Alexander Walker, has pointed out, gave the new personality an ‘edge’; it impressed on the voice ‘the sharpness that comedy needs if it’s to be slightly menacing’.41 It would, in time, become the kind of accent that could underline the humour in well-written dialogue and disguise the absence of it in the most mediocre of lines. Writers, as a consequence, were among Cary Grant’s most genuine admirers. Listen to the way, in The Awful Truth (1937), that Grant, serving a rival with a glass of egg-nog, manages to make the innocent question, ‘A little nutmeg?’ sound like a threat, or how, in The Grass is Greener (1960), he places such an artfully sardonic emphasis on the question, ‘Do you like Dundee cake?’, that it succeeds in mocking both the place-name and the antiquated mannerisms of his upper-class character. Cary Grant would become the kind of person who, as David Thomson put it, ‘could handle quick, complex, witty dialogue in the way of someone who enjoyed language as much as Cole Porter or Dorothy Parker’, with a memorably serviceable accent, caught between English and American, working-class and upper-class, that produced a tone that could be made to sound ‘uncertain whether to stay cool or let nerviness show’.42
If Cary Grant was going to be someone who sounded unorthodox, he was also, in rather less obvious but equally significant ways, going to be someone who looked unorthodox. Whereas most other actors in Hollywood at that time were known either for their physical or verbal skills, Archie Leach, unusually, possessed both. Silent screen comedy had demanded performers who could be as funny as possible physically, noted the critic James Agee, ‘without the help or hindrance of words’. The screen comedian, before sound took hold of Hollywood, ‘combined several of the more difficult accomplishments of the acrobat, the dancer, the clown and the mime’.43 The advent of the ‘talkies’ marked a change in direction. Archie Leach, with his vocal mannerisms and his acrobatic training, had the rare opportunity to make Cary Grant an appealing hybrid: a talented physical performer with a rare gift for speaking dialogue, someone who could, whilst remaining in character, utter a string of sophisticated witticisms before slipping suddenly on a solitary stuffed olive and landing ignominiously on his backside. One movie historian commented on what it was like to grow up in the 1920s with but one wish: to be ‘as lithe as Fairbanks and as suavely persuasive as Ronald Colman’.44 Cary Grant had the rare chance to realise such a wish.
Archie Leach did not take long to see that the opportunity existed, and Cary Grant exploited it. He brought athleticism to elegance, physical humour to the drawing-room. It was the kind of unexpected versatility which undermined the rigid screen stereotypes, and it would help Cary Grant to become ‘an idol for all social classes’.45 As Kael explains, other leading men, such as Melvyn Douglas, Henry Fonda and Robert Young, could produce proficient performances in screwball comedies and farcical situations, ‘but the roles didn’t release anything in their own natures – didn’t liberate and complete them, the way farce completed Grant’.46 It was as though the grace of Fred Astaire had combined with the earthiness of Gene Kelly. David Thomson observed: ‘Only Fred Astaire ever moved as well as Cary Grant, but Grant moved with more dramatic eloquence while Astaire cherished the purity of movement. Grant could look as elegant as Astaire, but he could manage to look clumsy without actually sacrificing balance or style.’47
Cary Grant’s potential could not be realised, however, until Archie Leach found the confidence to start acting like Cary Grant, and to start he needed first to develop a reasonably sharp sense of who Cary Grant should act like. Cary Grant, Archie Leach decided, should act like those stars who, up until then, had most impressed him. By his own admission, Cary Grant was in part, at the beginning, patterned on a combination of elegant contemporary Englishmen:
In the late 1920s I’d wavered between imitating two older English actors, of the natural, relaxed school, Sir Gerald DuMaurier and A. E. Matthews, and was seriously considering being Jack Buchanan and Ronald Squire as well; but Noël Coward’s performance in Private Lives narrowed the field, and many a musical-comedy road company was afflicted with my breezy new gestures and puzzling accent.48
Coward’s unapologetically reinvented self – and accent – was of particular relevance. Alexander Walker comments how Coward’s example – above all others – probably encouraged Archie Leach ‘to abandon the stigmata of English class’.