Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise by Scott Eyman
They say never meet your heroes, and folks...I'm just not a fan of Cary Grant the person.
But this biography, Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise by Scott Eyman is probably one of the best I've ever read.
To be fair, my thoughts on Cary Grant first started tanking after I'd read the autobiography of Dyan Cannon, his fourth wife.
In that review I wrote:
"His coldness, his controlling nature, the way he kept pushing LSD usage on Dyan (despite multiple people in her life telling her how dangerous it was), the way he chipped at her psyche until she became a husk of a person. To go from what seemed like a beautiful romance into this empty shell of wrecked love...it was devastating to read. Devastating to see how loving Cary Grant transformed Dyan into someone totally broken down and beaten."
But I had no idea it was a pattern and that he'd already done it to his previous three wives.
Eyman's central premise seems to be that Cary Grant was a construct created by Archie Leach, and he played the character so brilliantly that he mostly had to stick with it for the rest of his life. That sounds like an awful time, to be honest. Especially since, off-screen...Cary Grant didn't really match the suave, charming leading man on-screen.
The stories of him being cold, calculating, controlling, cheap...it wasn't fun to read how he'd charge his friends for incidentals if they were staying over as guests; or how, as a result of his friend set, he became snobby and critical of others. There's a story in here about him offering Rosalind Russell use of his limo in the UK and her thinking it was a gift, but then he tells her to call his UK agents to arrange to pay for it.
She's quoted as saying, "It strikes me that Cary never has had any social poise. He dares not be around people more than twelve minutes. He flits around, hiding from his own shadow, hoping nobody will notice, or that his shadow may expose the image he has created for himself. Yet, there's no one really life him...and at times I'm glad there aren't."
And there's Ingrid Bergman, who liked him, but also had no problem giving him shit when she felt like it (she called Audrey Hepburn 'too old for him' in Charade and referenced that their combined age was 100 in 1958).
Though I didn't particularly care for the man himself, I have to say that Scott Eyman is a fantastic writer and critic. I'm looking forward to reading more of his books (my library has his book on the friendship between Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda, so as soon as lockdown's over, that's where I'm headed!). He handles Cary's long, detailed life with a deft hand and weaves a great portrait of Hollywood when Cary was trying to break in, when he ruled it, and after he retired.
To me, it's always fascinating to read about the matinee idols and the stars of the studio system navigating their careers as the system collapsed in the '60s and '70s and how they adapted. Cary adapted by giving up moviemaking altogether in the mid-'60s, but learning how the studios paid (male) stars and the deals that went on behind the scenes was also fascinating.
To be fair, I'm a fan of Cary Grant's films and there are a few that I'll always stop to watch when I see them on TCM, but after reading this...I'm just not a fan of the man behind Cary Grant. But you should definitely read this book; it'll paint the portrait of who he was, disguised and undisguised.
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