Wife Barbara Hutton
Queer Places:
15 Hughenden Rd, Bristol BS8 2TT, Regno Unito
Bishop Road Primary School, Bishop Rd, Bristol BS7 8LS, Regno Unito
Fairfield Grammar School, Fairlawn Rd, Bristol BS6 5JL, Regno Unito
796 N Vía Miraleste, Palm Springs, CA 92262, Stati Uniti
9966 Beverly Grove Dr, Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Avenida Las Palmas, Rancho Mirage, CA 92270, Stati Uniti
Warwick Hotel, 65 W 54th St, New York, NY 10019, Stati Uniti
The Savoy, Strand, London WC2R 0EU, Regno Unito
Cary Grant (January 18, 1904 – November 29, 1986) (born Archibald Alexander Leach) was an English stage and
Hollywood film actor who became an American citizen in 1942.
Randolph Scott
was an American film actor whose career spanned from 1928 to 1962. They met in
1932 when they were cast together in Hot Saturday. They lived together for
many years in Los Angeles. Their home was featured in an issue of
Architectural Digest that showed legendary Hollywood stars at home. After
that, the house was dabbed “Bachelor Hall” (recently sold in 2006 for more or
less 4 million dollars.) They both married but remained close ever afterward.
Toward the end of their lives, Scott and Grant were often seen together, on
one occasion holding hands late at night in the Polo Lounge, alone except for
the waiters. Scott died little more than 3 months after Grant.
Grant was born Archibald Alec Leach[a]
on January 18, 1904 at 15 Hughenden Road in the northern
Bristol
suburb of
Horfield.[3]
He was the second child of Elias James Leach (1873–1935) and Elsie Maria Leach
(née Kingdon; 1877–1973).
Elias worked as a tailor's presser at a clothes factory while Elsie worked as
a seamstress.
Grant's elder brother, John William Elias Leach (1899–1900), died of
tuberculous meningitis.
Grant considered himself to have been partly Jewish.[b]
He had an unhappy upbringing; his father was an alcoholic,
and his mother suffered from
clinical depression.
Wanting the best for her son, Elsie taught Grant song and dance when he was
four, and was keen on him having piano lessons.
Grant entered education when he was four-and-a-half and was sent to the
Bishop Road Primary School, Bristol.
In 1915, Grant won a scholarship to attend
Fairfield Grammar School in Bristol, although his father could barely
afford to pay for the uniform.
With his good looks and acrobatic talents Grant became a popular figure among
both girls and boys.[32]
Able at most academic subjects,[d]
he excelled at sports, particularly
fives; he
developed a reputation for mischief, and frequently refused to do his
homework.
A former classmate referred to him as a "scruffy little boy", while an old
teacher remembered "the naughty little boy who was always making a noise in
the back row and would never do his homework".
His evenings were spent working backstage in Bristol theatres, and in 1917, at
the age of 13, he was responsible for the lighting for the magician
David Devant at the Bristol Empire.
Grant began hanging around backstage at the theatre at every opportunity.
In the summer he volunteered for work as a messenger boy and guide at the
military docks in
Southampton, to escape the unhappiness of his home life.
The time spent at Southampton strengthened his desire to travel; he was eager
to leave Bristol and tried to sign on as a ship's cabin boy, but learned he
was too young.
Hughenden Road, Bristol
Bishop Road Primary School, Bristol
Warwick Hotel, NYC, NY
.JPG)
The Savoy, London
On March 13, 1918,
Grant was expelled from Fairfield.
Several explanations were given, including being discovered in the girls'
lavatory,
and assisting two other classmates with theft in the nearby town of
Almondsbury.
Wansell claims that Grant had set out intentionally to get himself expelled
from school to pursue a career in entertainment with the troupe.
Grant rejoined Pender's troupe three days after being expelled from
Fairfield. Elias now had a better paying job in Southampton; Grant's expulsion
from the school brought local authorities to his door with questions about why
his son was living in Bristol and not with his father in Southampton. Upon
learning that his son was once again with the Pender troupe, Elias co-signed a
three-year contract between his son and Pender. The contract stipulated
Grant's weekly salary along with room and board, as well as dancing lessons
and other training for his profession until the age of 18. There was also a
provision in the contract for salary rises based on job performance.
By 1921 Orry-Kelly was working as a tailor's assistant in the garment district,
selling hand painted neckties as a sideline. It was about this time that he
met a 17 years old vaudeville acrobat by the name of Archie Leach (later Cary
Grant). Within a few months they were sharing a Greenwich Village loft,
just behind the present site of the Cherry Lane Theater. Their third roommate
was Charlie Phelps, who, as Charlie Spangles, played in drag at the Metropole
Club. Archie Leach and Orry-Kelly lived together, on and off, for the next nine
years, until Archie left for Hollywood in January 1932. Orry would tell
friends that they were lovers for some of that time. Orry's press of the 1930s
and 1940s rarely mentions his friendship with Grant, and never revealed that
they'd lived together in New York City. Only in the 1960s did Orry allow
himself to admit the connection. At a showing of his paintings in New York,
Orry included in his artist biography the fact that young Archie Leach once
helped him paint "lecherous frogs" on murals in Greenwich Village speakeasies.
One of the wealthiest stars in Hollywood, Grant owned houses in
Beverly Hills,
Malibu, and
Palm Springs.
He was immaculate in his personal grooming, and
Edith
Head, the renowned Hollywood costume designer, appreciated his
"meticulous" attention to detail and considered him to have had the greatest
fashion sense of any actor she had worked with.
McCann attributed his "almost obsessive maintenance" with tanning, which
deepened the older he got,
to Douglas Fairbanks, who also had a major influence on his refined sense of
dress.
McCann notes that because Grant came from a working-class background and was
not well educated, he made a particular effort over the course of his career
to mix with high society and absorb their knowledge, manners and etiquette to
compensate and cover it up.
His image was meticulously crafted from the early days in Hollywood, where he
would frequently sunbathe and avoid being photographed smoking, despite
smoking two packs a day at the time.
Grant quit smoking in the early 1950s through hypnotherapy.
He remained health conscious, staying very trim and athletic even into his
late career, though Grant admitted he "never crook[ed] a finger to keep fit".
He claimed that he did "everything in moderation. Except making love."
Grant's daughter
Jennifer stated that her father made hundreds of friends from all walks of
life, and that their house was frequently visited by the likes of Frank and
Barbara Sinatra,
Quincy Jones,
Gregory Peck and his wife Veronique,
Johnny Carson and his wife,
Kirk Kerkorian and
Merv
Griffin. She said that Grant and Sinatra were the closest of friends and
that both men were remarkably similar in that they both shared a similar
radiance and "indefinable incandescence of charm", and were eternally "high on
life".
While raising Jennifer, Grant archived artifacts of her childhood and
adolescence in a bank-quality, room-sized vault he had installed in the house.
Jennifer attributed this meticulous collection to the fact that artifacts of
his own childhood had been destroyed during the
Luftwaffe's bombing of Bristol in the Second World War (an event that also
claimed the lives of his uncle, aunt, cousin, and the cousin's husband and
grandson), and he may have wanted to prevent her from experiencing a similar
loss.
Grant lived with actor
Randolph Scott off and on for 12 years, which some claimed was a gay
relationship.
The two met early on in Grant's career in 1932 at the Paramount studio when
Scott was filming
Sky Bride
while Grant was shooting Sinners in the Sun, and moved in together soon
afterwards.
Scott's biographer Robert Nott states that there is no evidence that Grant and
Scott were homosexual, and blames rumors on material written about them in
other books.
Grant's daughter, Jennifer, also denied the claims.
When
Chevy Chase joked on television in 1980 that Grant was a "homo. What a
gal!", Grant sued him for slander, and Chase was forced to retract his words.
Grant was married five times.
In 1934, just as the Hays Code was put solidly into place and the campaign
against pansies both on- and off-screen had reached its peak, Grant left the
home he shared with Randolph Scott and married actress Virginia Cherrill. From
the start, their marriage was a disaster: the once-carefree Grant, as light
and bubbly aas his on-screen portrayals, attempted suicide after only a few
months.
She divorced him on March 26, 1935,
following charges that Grant had hit her.
The two were involved in a bitter divorce case which was widely reported in
the press, with Cherrill demanding $1000 a week from her husband in benefits
from his Paramount earnings.
Freed by his divorce, Grant'd go back to living with Scott.
The gay scene was documented in the 1930s by
Jerome Zerbe, who spent "three gay
months" (his words) in the movie colony. Fascinating are his many photos of
Cary Grant and
Randolph Scott, attesting to
their involvement in the gay scene: Scott arriving at a party at Zerbe's
apartment, several lovely poses of Grant in a bathing suit. Zerbe often stayed
with Grant and Scott, finding them both warm, charming, and happy. He'd later
confide to several friends that he had affairs with both of them. Zerbe's
photographs of the Countess
Dorothy di Frasso's party in the summer of 1935, however, remain the most
intriguing. The writer Brendan Gill would recount a tale as told to him by
Zerbe, in which the countess, known for her malicious sense of humor, secured
recording devices to the undersides of all her garden benches. On the day of
her party, the wily countess nailed some pretty incriminating tales from her
unsuspecting guests. Zerbe's photographs documented the party, and reveal the
guests to have all been part of the "sophisticated" clique. Although Cary
Grant arrived with perennial date Betty Furness, he posed jauntily with
William Haines,
George Cukor, and
Clifton Webb;
Claudette Colbert mugged
playfully next to Marlene Dietrich,
refuting for posterity charges that they barely knew each other. In one shot,
Zerbe captured Colbert taking home movie of Dietrich. A few weeks later, the
countess invited the same group back for another party. Gill reported: "She
played back for them the indiscreet conversations they had carried on in the
supposed privacy of the garden. The prank was not well received." Indeed
Photoplay's pseudonymous "Cal York" (perhaps at this point the gay writer
Jerry Asher) reported that di Frasso
received five urgent (York's emphasis) pleadings from unnamed persons to not
play the recordings at her next party, or ever again.
Mr. Blackwell, still as
Dick Ellis, spent a few months living with Grant and Scott, considering them
"deeply, madly in love, their devotion complete... Behind closed doors they
were warm, kind, loving and caring, and unembarrassed about showing it."
The Grant-Scott cohabitation would finally be severed permanently by new
marriages for both of them, although they remained friends for the rest of
their lives. Grant's biographer, Roy Moseley, interviewed the maitre d' at the
Beverly Hillcrest Hotel who recalled seeing the two of them in the 1970s, now
old and white-haired, sitting in the back of the restaurants, late at night,
after all the other diners had left. They were holding hands.
Filmed in the summer and fall of 1935, Sylvia Scarlett, by a novel
of Compton Mackenzie, was the
story of a girl (Katharine Hepburn)
disguised as a boy who teams up with a con man (Cary
Grant) and falls in love for an artist. It was Hepburn's idea. She
brought the story to George Cukor;
he liked its naughty challenge to traditional male-female relationships. For
screenwriter, they engaged John Collier, a British novelist recently brought
to Hollywood. It was a sympatico collaboration, despite the fact that
Collier was straight. "He was fascinated, just fascinated, by the
queer world," said Don Bachardy,
who, with his lover
Christopher Isherwood, often hosted Collier at their Santa Monica home.
"He wasn't the least bit gay, but he'd pump Chris for information about
parties or dates he'd gone on."
After the demise of his first marriage, Grant dated actress
Phyllis Brooks from 1937. They had considered marriage, and vacationed
together in Europe in mid-1939, visiting the Roman villa of
Dorothy di Frasso in Italy, before the relationship ended later that year.
In 1938 Rupert Barneby and
Dwight Ripley
rented a house at 330 North
Bristol, an imposing Spanish-style residence in the Brentwood setion of Los
Angeles. From their house at #330, Barneby discovered they could look down with binoculars on neighbour
Cary Grant.
Noël Coward’s staying with our Cary,
a ce qu’il parait, so that’s one question settled, he announced.
Grant became a naturalized United States citizen on June 26, 1942, at which
time he also legally changed his name to "Cary Grant".[308][309]
At the time of his naturalization, he listed his middle name as "Alexander"
rather than "Alec".[4]
That year he married
Barbara Hutton,
one of the wealthiest women in the world following a $50 million inheritance
from her grandfather,
Frank Winfield Woolworth.
The couple was derisively nicknamed "Cash and Cary",
although in an extensive
prenuptial agreement Grant refused any financial settlement in the event
of a divorce,
to avoid the accusation that he married for money.[z]
Towards the end of their marriage they lived in a white mansion at 10615
Bellagio Road in Bel Air.
While filming Arsenic and Old Lace in 1944, the only film of Cary
Grant's for which Orry did the costumes, costar Priscilla Lane observed the
two as decidedly unfriendly.
George James Hopkins, who new Orry well, recalled in his memoirs a
possible reason for that unfriendliness. "Although Orry hadn't seen Grant in
years," Hopkins wrote, "he still considered him his friend." But that first
day on the set, a radio game show had brought one of its winners for a tour.
On the show's limousine was painted the title: Queen for a day. Spotting it,
Grant turned to Orry and quipped: "Your limousine is waiting outside." Orry,
who could apparently dish out better than he could take it, was infuriated.
Hopkins wrote, "He resented the insinuation from a man many considered a
deadbeat."
After divorcing Barbara Hutton in 1945, they remained the "fondest of friends".[316]
After dating Betty Hensel for a period,
on December 25, 1949, Grant married
Betsy
Drake, the co-star of two of his films. This would prove to be his longest
marriage,
ending on August 14, 1962.
Leonard Spigelgass wrote I
Was a Male War Bride (1949) for Fox, light, crisp, and more than a little
campy. Cary Grant in drag, trying to accompany WAC wife Ann Sheridan back to
the US, is a hoot.
Grant married
Dyan
Cannon on July 22, 1965, at friend Howard Hughes'
Desert
Inn in Las Vegas.
Their daughter, Jennifer, was born on February 26, 1966. Jennifer is Grant's
only child.[321]
He frequently called Jennifer his "best production".[322]
He said of fatherhood: "My life changed the day Jennifer was born. I've come
to think that the reason we're put on this earth is to procreate. To leave
something behind. Not films, because you know that I don't think my films will
last very long once I'm gone. But another human being. That's what's
important."
Grant and Cannon divorced in March 1968.[324]
On March 12 that month he was involved in a car accident on
Long
Island when a truck struck the side of his limousine. Grant was
hospitalized for 17 days with three broken ribs and bruising.
Grant had a brief affair with self-proclaimed actress
Cynthia Bouron in the late 1960s.
Grant, who had been at odds with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences since 1958, was named as the recipient of an Academy Honorary Award
in 1970.
Grant announced that he would attend the awards ceremony to accept his award,
thus ending his twelve-year boycott of the ceremony. Two days after this
announcement, Bouron filed a paternity suit against Grant and publicly stated
he was the father of her seven-week-old daughter.[aa]
Bouron named Grant as the father on the child's birth certificate.[329]
Grant challenged her to a blood test and Bouron failed to provide one, and the
court ordered her to remove his name from the certificate.[329][330][ab]
Between 1973 and 1977 he dated British photojournalist
Maureen Donaldson,
followed by the much younger Victoria Morgan.
On April 11, 1981, Grant married Barbara Harris, a British hotel public
relations agent who was 47 years his junior.
The two had met at the
Royal Lancaster Hotel in London five years earlier where Harris was
working at the time and Grant attending a Fabergé conference. The two became
friends, but it was not until 1979 that she moved to live with him in
California. Friends of Grant considered her to have had an extremely positive
impact on him, and
Prince Rainier of Monaco remarked that Grant had "never been happier" than
he was in his last years with her.
Grant was at the Adler Theatre in
Davenport, Iowa, on the afternoon of November 29, 1986, preparing for his
performance in A Conversation with Cary Grant when he was taken ill.
Though his close friend Roderick Mann recalled that he had met up with Grant
at the
Hollywood Park Racetrack earlier that month and he had been in a jovial
state and in good health, Grant had been feeling unwell as he arrived at the
theatre. Basil Williams, who photographed him there, thought that though Grant
still looked his usual suave self, he noticed that he seemed very tired and
that he stumbled once in the auditorium. Williams recalls that Grant rehearsed
for half an hour before "something seemed wrong" all of a sudden, and he
disappeared backstage. Grant was taken back to the Blackhawk Hotel where he
and his wife Barbara had checked in, and a doctor was called and discovered
that Grant was having a massive stroke, with a blood pressure reading of 210
over 130. Grant refused to be taken to hospital. The doctor recalled that "The
stroke was getting worse. In only fifteen minutes he deteriorated rapidly. It
was terrible watching him die and not being able to help. But he wouldn't let
us." By 8:45 p.m. Grant had slipped into a coma and was taken to
St. Luke's Hospital.
He spent 45 minutes in emergency before being transferred to intensive care,
where he was pronounced dead at 11:22 p.m.[266]
He was 82.
An editorial in The New York Times stated: "Cary Grant was not
supposed to die. ... Cary Grant was supposed to stick around, our perpetual
touchstone of charm and elegance and romance and youth."[339]
Grant's body was taken back to California, where it was cremated and his ashes
scattered in the Pacific Ocean.
As per Grant's request, no funeral was conducted for him, which Roderick Mann
remarked was appropriate for "the private man who didn't want the nonsense of
a funeral".
The bulk of his estate, worth in the region of 60 to 80 million dollars,
went to Barbara Harris and Jennifer.[267]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Grant
- Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969,
William J. Mann, 2001