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Toronto Star (01/Dec/1986) - Cary Grant's star never lost its glow

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Cary Grant's star never lost its glow

"Hello, I'm Cary Grant," said the genial, white-haired gentleman with the black rimmed glasses. And indeed he was. For more than an hour Archibald Leach, also known as Cary Grant, talked about his career and his life while nervous assistants kept peeking into the boardroom of Faberge.

Grant was in Toronto to open a new Faberge plant, but said he first had to repay an old debt.

"Your newspaper once gave me a fine review. That was in 1923, when I was in vaudeville and doing a tumbling routine. I've wanted to thank you ever since."

I was then at the Hamilton Spectator and a look back on microfilm at the date Grant insisted he had performed at the old Lyric Theatre did indeed yield the review that "Archie Leach was ever so funny and fast."

Grant's death Saturday night at 82 from a stroke firmly closes one door to Hollywood's past. 'Delicious personality'

Among the greatest stars, Grant had few peers when it came to light comedy (only William Powell and Robert Montgomery could touch him). Yet his staying power was awesome. He made his first movie in 1932 and voluntarily retired in 1966 to go into business.

His appeal was easy to understand. Katharine Hepburn summed it up best when she described him as a "personality functioning. He is a delicious personality who has learned to do certain things marvellously well. The public isn't interested in him in serious parts. But he has a lovely sense of timing, an amusing face, and a lovely voice."

Critic Tom Wolfe said it was his casual elegance that kept him a big star: Grant on the screen forever remained "consummately romantic and consummately genteel." Indeed, he never seemed to age the way such contemporaries as Spencer Tracy and Gary Cooper did. When they were playing old men Grant was still romancing his leading ladies. Grant simply was changeless.

Yet when I asked him what it meant to be Cary Grant, he quickly answered, "I really have no idea. I'm not at all like that person up there on the screen. When people say I'm playing myself, I take it as the greatest compliment." Struggling family

In real life he described himself as chronically insecure. He would frequently sign for parts, then convince himself he should not be playing them and withdraw. Thus, he left The Third Man, The Bridge On The River Kwai, The Music Man and My Fair Lady after being the first choice.

"I was nominated twice for dramas," he told me. "But never for comedies."

He was not to the manor born at all. The only child of a struggling family in Bristol, England, he came home from school at the age of 9 to find his mother was gone. He never learned until years later that she had suffered a nervous breakdown and had been taken to a sanitarium. The little boy felt deserted. He would not see his mother again for more than 20 years.

Young Archie ran away at age 14 to join a juvenile acrobatic company, the Bob Pender troupe, which endlessly toured England and North America. He later was a stilt walker at Coney Island. Eventually he got to Broadway to sing in light musical comedies like Boom-Boom opposite Jeanette MacDonald.

He went to Hollywood in 1932 and Paramount Pictures, impressed with his dark good looks, signed him for $150 a week. Bosses insisted he change his name.

"I'd just been in a play called Nikki, where my name was Cary. Paramont was on a kick about short names like George Brent so I chose Grant. I was not discovered by Mae West. By the time I made my two movies with her I'd done six pictures."West helped career

In his first movie, This Is The Night, he played a javelin thrower. He was a rich playboy in Sinners In The Sun and a stage actor in Merrily We Go To Hell.

West was looking out her studio dressing room window when she spied Grant walking by on the backlot. "Where has he been all my life?" she purred, and immediately had him cast as her new leading man.

West used him in She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel, which helped his career, and he supported such Paramount women stars as Marlene Dietrich (Blonde Venus) and Talullah Bankhead (The Devil And The Deep, where his screen character's name also is Cary).

It was to Grant that West uttered the now immortal line, "Why don't you come up and see me some time."

"But I never said 'Judy, Judy, Judy', " Grant told me.

"No, but you did say 'Julie, Julie, Julie' in the movie In Name Only with Carole Lombard," I reminded him. He was so amazed he took my notebook and copied down other lines I told him he had said. Robust adventures

At Paramount he was playing male mannequin parts. He was stiff and wooden. "I didn't know who I was so I pretended to be Noel Coward. It didn't work." Director George Cukor borrowed him for 1936's Sylvia Scarlett and encouraged young Cary to be more natural, to get over his fear of the camera. Grant told me it was the first time he felt at ease because he was playing a character whose raffish life he understood.

In 1936 he refused to renew his Paramount contract, deciding to freelance from studio to studio. He was getting better all the time: As a ghost in Topper, as the philandering husband in The Awful Truth, as the inhibited paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby. But Grant also was successful in such robust adventures as Gunga Din and Only Angels Have Wings.

By 1940 he was one of Hollywood's most accomplished stars and his string of hits continued.

Probably his best performance comes in His Girl Friday as tough talking city editor Walter Burns (to Roz Russell's ace newspaperwoman Hildy Johnson). "He comes by it naturally. His grandfather was a snake," explains Russell to her fiance, Ralph Bellamy.

Grant was top billed in The Philadelphia Story as Kate Hepburn's ex-husband, socialite wastrel C. Dexter Haven, quipping at one point, "It offends my vanity to have anyone who was even remotely my wife remarry so obviously beneath her."

In 1941 he won his first Oscar nomination for Penny Serenade, as a small-town journalist who almost loses wife Irene Dunne.

In 1941 Grant began a long association with Alfred Hitchcock. In Suspicion, Joan Fontaine suspects his character is trying to kill her: the studio imposed a happy ending because it was felt Grant could not play a villain. In Hitch's Notorious, Grant and Ingrid Bergman were caught in a spy ring in South America.

To Catch A Thief with Grace Kelly is the weakest of the thrillers but the last one with Hitchcock, North By Northwest, sums up the star's appeal. The best remembered scene has Grant out in a cornfield as a crop dusting plane suddenly tries to mow him down.

Grant was turned down for World War II service because he was too old. His hits continued: The Talk Of The Town, Mr. Lucky, Once Upon A Honeymoon, Destination Tokyo.

"The film I most cared about was a flop," he told me. "None But The Lonely Heart was the only time I played a character very near myself, a man unsure of himself, a drifter, a rake." Ethel Barrymore won a supporting Oscar as Grant's mother and Grant was again nominated, but the movie lost money. Audiences wanted Grant in comedy.

So he obliged them: The Bachelor And The Bobby Soxer (1947), Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House (1948), Every Girl Should Be Married (1948), and the hysterically funny I Was A Male War Bride (1949), which had Grant disguised as a particularly ugly woman for much of its running time. In Monkey Business (1952) he is a scientist discovering a youth elixir and reverting complete with crew cut to teenaged antics. Used LSD

He retired in 1953, turned down leads in A Star Is Born and Sabrina and remained away for two years. He began experimenting through a psychiatrist with LSD to try to find himself.

His last movies were among his weakest: The Pride And The Passion, Kiss Them For Me, Operation Petticoat, A Touch Of Mink. But the films were widely popular if a trifle old-fashioned.

Charade, his last romantic lead, summed up his appeal in a Hitchcock-type romantic thriller. Leading lady Audrey Hepburn was 25 years his junior. He tried two more times but in character parts: Father Goose and Walk, Don't Run. Then he simply walked away from it all.

Grant told me, "I'm a bit of a worrier. Very shy actually. Acting was always agonzing." Unfulfilled dreams

Like many of us, Grant said he had regrets, unfulfilled dreams, contradictions.

A ladies' man on screen, he was married five times and his ex-wives said he was stingy, moody and aloof. He adored daughter Jennifer by fourth wife Dyan Cannon. His first three wives were actress Virginia Cherill, socialite Barbara Hutton and actress Betsy Drake. Last wife, Barbara Harris, who was with him when he died, was 30 years younger.

Last night he could be glimpsed on TV, at a taped salute to Clint Eastwood, his usual pink cheeked, smiling self. He was still charismatic, slightly mysterious, and despite his silver hair seemed forever young.

That was the Cary Grant the public wanted, not the real man. As Audrey Hepburn said to him in Charade, "That's what's wrong with you. You're perfect."