Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, ‘The Two Hour Old Baby’
A mask tells us more than a face.
OSCAR WILDE
Some might say they don’t believe in heaven
Go and tell it to the man who lives in hell.
NOEL GALLAGHER
Cary Grant was an excellent idea. He did not exist, so someone had to invent him. Someone called Archie Leach invented him. Archie Leach did not know who he was, but he knew what he liked. What he liked was what he came to think of as ‘Cary Grant’. He discovered that it was an extraordinarily popular conception. Everyone really liked the idea of Cary Grant. Archie Leach liked it so much that he devoted the rest of his life to its refinement.
It is easy to see why. Cary Grant was the man that most men dreamed of being, an exceptional man, the ‘man from dream city’.1 He was that most unexpected but attractive of contradictions: a democratic symbol of gentlemanly grace. No other man seemed so classless and self-assured, as happy with the world of music-hall as with the haut monde, as adept at polite restraint as at acrobatic pratfalls. No other man was equally at ease with the romantic and with the comic. No other man seemed sufficiently secure in himself and his abilities to toy with his own dignity without ever losing it. No other man aged so well and with such fine style. No other man, in short, played the part so well: Cary Grant made men seem like a good idea. As one of the women in his movies said to him: ‘Do you know what’s wrong with you? Nothing!’2
There was nothing wrong with Cary Grant. His colleagues admired him. ‘Cary’s the only actor I ever loved in my whole life,’ said Alfred Hitchcock.3 ‘If there were a question in a test paper that required me to fill in the name of an actor who showed the same grace and perfect timing in his acting that Fred Astaire showed in his dancing,’ said James Mason, ‘I should put Cary Grant.’4 To Eva Marie Saint, Grant was ‘the most handsome, witty and stylish leading man both on and off the screen.’5 James Stewart described him as a ‘consummate actor’,6 and Frank Sinatra remarked that ‘Cary has so much skill he makes it all look so easy’.7 Stanley Donen, the director, regarded him as ‘absolutely the best in the world at his job’:8 ‘If you asked almost any man in those days who would he like to be, you’d often get the answer “Cary Grant” – much more often than you would get the answer “the President of the United States”.’9
There was nothing wrong with Cary Grant. Movie audiences loved to watch him. In the era when movies were made with and around stars, the initial attraction being the name above the title, no fewer than twenty-eight Cary Grant movies – more than a third of all those he made – played at New York’s Radio City Music Hall (the largest, most important and prestigious movie theatre at that time in the United States) for a total of 113 weeks – a long-standing record.10 Again and again he was acknowledged as that theatre’s leading box-office attraction. One of his movies was the very first to earn $100,000 in a single week; another was the first to earn $100,000 in a single week at a single theatre. In the pre-eminent popular cultural medium of the twentieth century, Cary Grant was one of its most successful stars. His pulling-power stayed with him until the end of a movie career which lasted for over three decades; even in the year of his retirement, the Motion Picture Association of America voted him the leading box-office attraction.11 There was no decline, no fall from fashion. He was an exceptionally and enduringly popular star.12
There was nothing wrong with Cary Grant. Critics warmed to him. ‘We smile when we see him,’ wrote Pauline Kael, ‘we laugh before he does anything; it makes us happy just to look at him.’13 Richard Schickel suggested that ‘the only permissible response to him is bedazzlement’.14 In 1995, Premiere magazine lauded him as, ‘quite simply, the funniest actor the cinema has ever produced’.15 David Thomson judged him to be nothing less than ‘the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema’, in part because of his singular disposition, his ‘rare willingness to commit himself to the camera without fraud, disguise, or exaggeration, to take part in a fantasy without being deceived by it’,16 and in part because of the extraordinary richness of the results of this commitment, an art mature and elaborate enough to embrace the ambiguities of a self shown in close-up.
There was nothing wrong with Cary Grant. There was much, however, that was extraordinary about him. That accent: neither West Country nor West Coast, neither English nor American, neither common nor cultured, strangely familiar yet intriguingly exotic (as someone in Some Like It Hot exclaims: ‘Nobody talks like that!’). That expression: capable of blending light and dark inside a single look, hinting at much more than it holds up for show. That walk: confident, athletic and slightly rubber-legged, fit for slapstick as well as for sophistication. He was, in an unshowy way, unusually versatile: he could play submissive, naive, child-like characters (such as in Bringing Up Baby) or worldly-wise charmers (as in Suspicion) or world-weary cynics (as in Notorious). John F. Kennedy thought that Grant would be his ideal screen alter ego, but then so did Lucky Luciano;17 Grant’s exceptionally broad appeal was in part to do with his bright roundedness, the promise of completion, showing the coarse how to have class and the over-refined