In ‘Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise,’ working-class Archie Leach becomes a Hollywood legend | Book review

Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise

By Scott Eyman

Simon & Schuster. 304 pp. $35

Reviewed by Louis Bayard

The accent might be the strangest part of all, for it bears no relation to his native Bristol dialect. To the American ear, it registers as London, and to the English ear, it registers as nowhere at all. “Mid-Atlantic” is the usual catchall. But one of the lessons of Scott Eyman’s empathetic biography, Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise, is that the accent was built in the same way as the speaker: from bits and pieces collected here and there.

The childhood was working-class Hobbesian. Multiple addresses. Days and nights without food or clothing. A roving, alcoholic father and a mother unsettled enough, according to prevailing Edwardian standards, to be committed to an asylum. Young Archie Leach was told that she was dead (and wouldn't learn otherwise until he was already a movie star).

He escaped by joining a traveling acrobats' troupe and following it to America. Desperate for money, he sold neckties on the streets of New York, walked on stilts at Coney Island for five bucks, and five hot dogs a day. By dint of persistence and handsomeness, he found work as a 1920s Broadway male ingenue, but even when Hollywood came calling, he showed no signs of exorbitant talent. He might have gone down in movie history as Mae West’s rather stiff and distracted love interest had he not been mysteriously unleashed by a string of late-1930s screwball comedies.

With Topper, The Awful Truth, and Bringing Up Baby, the renamed Cary Grant found his truest expression as farceur: virile and subtle, intelligent and flummoxed and — crucially — not quite believing in his own attractiveness. Actresses chased him from one end of the screen to the other, and for the next three decades, working with directors as divergent as George Cukor, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock, he adapted his tightly honed, self-invented persona to the demands of every genre that would have him.

His reward was to become, until his retirement in 1966, the rare star whose star never wavered.

Even today, it can be extraordinary to revisit a movie like Notorious or The Philadelphia Story or North by Northwest and find an actor whose work has not aged a second — only deepened.

Grant’s costars testified to his hard work. Eyman rightly homes in on his never-resolving oscillation between dark and light — between Archie Leach and the man he became.

Grant was a man of confliction: One side was Hollywood’s most notorious tightwad, staving off the terror of poverty by stiffing servants and handing houseguests itemized bills. The other subsidized his good friend, playwright-director Clifford Odets, until the end of Odets' days. One was an anxiety-ridden basket case who drove four wives to distraction and became no more manageable after a hundred-plus LSD sessions. The other doted on children and rained down decades' worth of deferred love on his late-in-life daughter.

The duality was perhaps most pronounced when it came to Grant’s sex life. For today’s LGBT community, it has become an article of faith that he was “one of us.” Yet the many women in his life testified to an ardent lover. Eyman, treading as carefully as a bomb-disposal team, declares, “There is plausible evidence to place him inside any sexual box you want — gay, bi, straight, or any combination that might be expected from a solitary street kid with a street kid’s sense of expedience.”

Mealymouthed? Or just the resigned sigh of a biographer who can no more get a handle on his subject than his subject could? “You don’t look like Cary Grant,” someone once told him. “I know,” he said. “Nobody does.”

Bayard is a novelist and reviewer whose most recent book is “Courting Mr. Lincoln.” He wrote this review for the Washington Post.