58. Magician: Cary Grant biography and movies, reviewed by Cheryl S.
Between binge-watching old movies and new insurrections, Sandy and I have been reading the new biography of Cary Grant (Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise by Scott Eyman, Simon and Schuster, 2020). We’ve been distracting ourselves from Louise Ebersdorf’s mood swings during the political unrest. Our boss is obviously disappointed at President Trump’s failed authoritarian efforts, not because of Trump himself (whom she can take and leave) but because the power shift may make Ivanka’s presidential plans for 2024 more difficult to actualize. Louise still wants to help manage the First Daughter’s inevitable coming campaign, starting now. Louise has consulted her private psychic, Mme Sesostris, who says that the entire Trump clan and its governmental enablers, including 147 serving Republicans in Congress, may have to decamp to Russia in the very near future, and that means Ivanka might not be available to star in Louise’s planned film epic, D.C.: Demon Cat.
As you may recall, Louise ever hoped to have a cameo appearance in the film from The Donald himself, but that may now be difficult to arrange, what with the loser’s mental quirks and looming threats of various types of litigation. Louise did enjoy the video shots during the recent Capitol fracas which allowed interior views of the building, where our leader says she would feel on location and right at home behind a camera. But that’s all in the future. Perhaps Louise can introduce a Kremlin subplot in her D.C. Ivanka could look fetching in a fur Cossack hat and matching ermine muff: a chic, albeit ersatz, czarina.
Sandy agrees with me that the best thing about the new Cary Grant biography is its insider’s view of an actor-entrepreneur who was a dedicated winner at managing his own career across decades. And how gratifying that so many of his films are available gratis on the internet these days. You’ll be surprised how many you can catch via Deep Digital and often in good prints! That’s just as well because Eyman is not very interested in critical analysis or even detailed description of the movies that Grant graced in the old studio system. The author sticks pretty much to the day-to-day, year-to-year, epoch-to-epoch struggle for autonomy that Grant maintained with dignity, humor, and smarts. Following that chronicle is like watching a master magician pulling rabbits out of hats against all the many odds. One of his tricks was to make a transition from comedy to more serious roles, for example from Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby to Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. What is fascinating to me are the many parallels between the actor’s private life and the themes raised in certain of his movies. (For my comments on Cary Grant’s various film comedies, see my report in Blog 48, “Lucidity”.)
Grant worked to liberate himself from the usual studio grind and to keep ownership of the negatives of many of his films. He was eventually able to choose properties and even inspire or commission work from first-rate screenwriters and directors, while also remaining dedicated to situating his name before the title. Of course, the demise of the studio system and the autonomy of leading actors are not without their drawbacks if a Tom Cruise can command many millions for one film and a very large cut of the profits. Grant helped set that ball in motion.
Since many readers are inevitably going to be interested in Grant’s sexual preferences, Eyman has managed a balancing act that I believe is unique among star biographies. At the end of the volume, a gentleman who was close to Grant in the actor’s later years (although they were not lovers) reports on the confidences traded by Grant with his young friend. Grant reported that when he was young he had been gay; when he was mature he was bisexual; and when he was ready for eldercare, he was heterosexual and in serious pursuit of progeny. When you look back across the book’s chronicles, you can see this pattern that Eyman has detailed in Grant’s choices and actions. Eyman has not pushed for certainty at any point along the way, and he does not employ underlining, but the cumulative evidence traces an arc like the one confessed. I do not believe I have seen an author use this particular retrospective technique so successfully, so subtly, in any other biography. It’s something of a triumph here since it allows the reader to arrive at his or her own conclusions. Grant was with Randolph Scott when both were young.
Now that is out of the way, we can turn to the movies and the career armature that the biography outlines across four decades. Grant claimed that various anxieties kept him from personal joy and contentment throughout his film years; only when he retired did he find the happiness that four unions (Grant was married five times) had been unable to provide. Finally, a series of controlled therapeutic experiences with LSD came to his rescue. The day arrived when he was no longer plagued with the contrast between the perfect gentleman that “Cary Grant” could represent on screen and the vulnerable inner man whom Archie Leach (his natal identity) had to confront off. In watching certain of Grant’s performances on the internet while reading Eyman’s biography, one can further fantasize what Leach’s “failings” might have been in comparison or contrast with the characters played by the actor.
I was pleased to locate a second pairing of the actress Nancy Carroll with Grant in The Woman Accused (1933), directed by Paul Sloane. (Don’t miss their earlier Hot Saturday.) In it, Carroll gives another luminous performance as a society girl who accidentally kills a brutish lover and then goes on a three-day cruise with her new boyfriend, played by an attractive young Grant. Both Carroll and Grant are restricted by the fast pace of the film melodrama. There is no way for them to stretch or breathe within its narrative tensions. But Grant gets to administer a brutal horsewhip lashing to a young hood. It is a good example of the way vigilante punishment is a recurring theme in American films. (See the ending of the 2017 award-winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.) Grant’s avenger quashes incriminating testimony against his girlfriend and saves her from trial. The actor was usually a gentleman on the silver screen. But the private man saw himself as capable of inflicting real pain on those closest to him. The Grant self-accusations include a great deal of personal pain.
In the early 1940s there were three “dark” films in which Grant was stretching his acting range and the willingness of his fans to see him in serious melodramas. Suspicion is the 1941 Hitchcock mystery-thriller in which Joan Fontaine begins to doubt the motives of her new spouse, played by Grant. Perhaps he even wants to kill her for her insurance? No matter how eerily blank the actor’s expression (or how hooded his eyes in Hitchcock’s lighting plot), Grant can ingratiate himself with masculine charm. The film’s compromised happy ending merely extends the director’s alternation between taut suspense and romantic cliché into infinity: Joan Fontaine melts repeatedly into Grant’s arms, only to arch an exquisite eyebrow. After four marriages, the actor must have wondered what his own faults might be to fail time after time.
George Stevens’ Penny Serenade (also 1941) pairs Grant with Irene Dunne as they suffer the loss of a child through miscarriage, lose an adopted little girl to childhood illness, and almost separate until a godmotherly adoption agent, Beulah Bondi, finds a replacement orphan boy. Stevens invents beautiful comic variations on marital rituals (for example, learning to bathe a new baby), and Grant has a scene pleading to keep the girlchild despite his character’s lack of sufficient income. Grant is characterized as a child-man himself, and his learning to love children is part of his maturation process under Dunne’s guidance. Grant is impressive squeezing emotions out of inarticulate anger toward authorities who would separate parents from their child. What is interesting is the emphasis Grant later placed in his own life upon the importance of becoming a parent, especially with the coming of middle age.
He is very charming under Stevens’ direction, and the movie is highly seductive in its controlled rhythms and broad emotions. Dunne glows throughout. Her scenes remind me of a passage in a poem by John Ashbery:
But it is certain that
What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific
Life, experienced or not, channeled into some form
Steeped in the nostalgia of a collective past.
We have all had actor-friends here in New York City, and we all know how every actor has a repertory of performance schtick with which to delight his friends and intimates offstage. (This is undoubtedly the source of the maxim, “Never fall in love with an actor!” Such charm can prove illusory.) Stevens creates situations in which Grant can entertain us with actions as simple as closing a recalcitrant door with a backward hook of his lower leg. (He does this more than once. It’s a motif that draws upon Grant’s physical skills from his days as a gymnastic trouper in music halls.) And Stevens makes the apartment Dunne and Grant keep above a newspaper office a perfect example of cinematic Affective Topography. You come to know every nook and corner, day and night, of the restricted space. The painful sentiments of Penny Serenade show Grant’s character at his most winning and at his most feckless before adult emotional challenge. In the 1942 The Talk of the Town Stevens presented Grant as an escaped prisoner accused of arson and murder. His charm is kept under strict control in that movie, which eventually resorts to preachments about the U.S. judicial system. Jean Arthur makes romantic bewilderment very charming on her own.
The 1944 None but the Lonely Heart (with a screenplay and direction by Clifford Odets) was a passion project for Grant because it deals with a lower-class Cockney milieu out of his childhood and a mother-son relationship that echoes the love-hate that Grant endured with both of his parents. (Grant’s father consigned his wife to an insane asylum’s care for years, with the result that the young Grant could feel abandoned: he was not told where his mother had disappeared to until decades later.) The Odets film is more complex than it appears at first. The mother-son relationship here appears to be based on the son’s adult irresponsibility. It is only near the end that the ambivalent motivations of the mother (played by a restrained Ethel Barrymore) are revealed to include her attempt to separate her child from the criminal world that her pawn shop uses to fence merchandise. Her antagonisms toward him have their salvific aspect. That the young man finds his way to mob violence on his own is part of the heavy irony of the work. Grant is a little too old for his character, but the movie’s ensemble is very strong, made up of a series of attractive females who are initially captivated by his wilder charms, only to resist eventually his unmoored social status. Odets makes it clear that this version of Archie Leach will end up soldiering in the Second World War and probably not survive its devastations. Eyman suggests that Grant, on the other hand, may have served as underground informer for the U.S government during World War II under the sponsorship of Alexander Korda. Who knew?
The ongoing attempt to turn the comedian Grant into a serious actor led to Hitchcock’s great 1946 Notorious, where Grant falls in love with a ravishing Ingrid Bergman, whose expiatory act as the daughter of a captured Nazi involves turning spy herself and to that end marrying a fascist (played by Claude Raines) in South America. She is thereafter in secret service to U.S. government agents. Grant follows her to Rio and endures bitter bouts of jealousy and anger against the beloved on a level of romantic neurosis to be found nowhere else in his work. There is a scene on a park bench toward the end in which Grant becomes one of the greatest “serious” actors in sound movies through his character’s endurance of pain from lost love. And the early sequence of serial kisses as Grant leaves Bergman to pick up their chicken dinner is one of the truly erotic sequences on film. (Hitchcock and Stevens were geniuses at amorous byplay.) Romantic devotion is tested in its many agonies by the Ben Hecht screenplay. Perhaps the decades of psychological disquiet that Grant claimed as his own private hell made this performance possible. Or perhaps the actor drew on his creative imagination. I suspect the latter. Grant makes that scene in the park hard to watch.
Bergman and Grant were reunited in 1958’s romantic comedy Indiscreet, directed by Stanley Donen. The film is based on a boulevard entertainment by Frederick Lonsdale and is “opened up” throughout its first half to feature London sights and sounds. This is the movie where B&G arrive late at a ballet performance and give their tickets to two youngsters. At a later hour, the infatuated older couple (she is a famous actress, he a presumably married diplomat) walk silently through nocturnal London before making an unspoken decision to spend their first night together. Under Donen’s expert guidance, the emotion here is a lightly serious one. The comedy doesn’t really take off until Grant’s character reveals he’s not married. (In the past, such prevarication has allowed him to find partners willing to accept an eventual end to relationships on a short-term basis.) But this time he proposes marriage. Bergman is so angry at his dupery that she responds, “How dare you ask me to marry you when you are not married?”
In the first half of the movie, you marvel at Grant’s ability to give scene after scene to Bergman and her character’s rediscovery of love. From the movie’s witty snooker table revelations forward, the film becomes truly entertaining, and both stars are high comedy experts at a peak. Bergman once again shows how moving she can be before her love object (“The woman always kisses me,” Grant advised a late-career student of his oeuvre). Grant regularly claimed that his creation of “Cary Grant” was a carefully achieved disguise, much to the artificer’s private chagrin. And here in Indiscreet’s final half hour, we have the cream of that impersonation. Along with To Catch A Thief and North by Northwest under Hitchcock’s direction.
Ultimately, it is the sparkling and moving Grant personae that we see on the silver screen that matter to us. A genius like Grant is able to suggest multifaceted areas of character weakness and strength beyond clichés of Freudian analysis or Method subtext. Although his psychic pain may have been very real, Grant’s self-reported struggles with his anxieties can have the same tinny ring as the folk wisdoms in his movies. (In Suspicion, Fontaine is first glimpsed reading a book on child psychology.) But then we remember that Grant worked in a mass medium that wanted the largest public forum for the exposition of its general themes. The new biography reveals that Cary Grant belonged to various stage magicians’ societies in Los Angeles, another reminder of his music hall days and his serious study of theatrical illusionism. I suspect he saw himself as a sorcerer before the camera, right down to the smallest detail.
So do we.
C.S.
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