TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/86/86capmil.8

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 6.3 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                December 15, 1986

The Acrobat of the Drawing Room

Cary Grant: 1904-1986


She is tired. She has the sniffles. She has never been less
interested in a blind date. But then: up-angle, backlight,
and there he stands in her doorway, impeccably tailored,
elegantly casual in manner--a perfectly beautiful man with, as
she soon discovers, a singular style of speech. He is confident
without being overbearing, confidential without being intrusive,
quite inimitable despite the fact that the actor playing her
visitor had one of the most imitated voices of this century.
Never in the history of movies has a leading lady more quickly
overcome her languors in order to get ready for romance. The
year was 1958. The film was a comedy called Indiscreet. And by
this comparatively late date, neither Ingrid Bergman nor anyone
else encountering Cary Grant, onscreen or off, had any
alternative to bedazzlement as a response to him.

Better than anyone else, Grant understood that his public
persona was a fiction, and a highly stylized one at that.
"Everyone wants to be Cary Grant," he liked to say. "I want to
be Cary Grant." Indeed, in a strange way, it had been his
lifelong ambition, though at first he could not have given a
name to his goal or, as he also admitted, define it with any
accuracy. "I don't know that I've any style at all," he once
told an interviewer. "I just patterned myself on a combination
of Jack Buchanan [a debonair English musical-comedy star of the
'20s and '30s], Noel Coward and Rex Harrison. I pretended to be
somebody I wanted to be, and I finally became that person. Or
he became me. Or we met at some point." In any event, Grant
apparently felt that the process of self-invention on which he
worked with so little visible strain but with such devotion
reached apotheosis in Indiscreet, for he would later name it his
favorite among the 72 feature films he made.

It is an agreeable enough film, of course. But did he really
believe he was better as the urbane diplomat than he was as the
playboy in comically desperate pursuit of marital reconciliation
in The Awful Truth?  Or as the absentminded paleontologist in
Bring Up Baby?  And what about scheming Walter Burns in His Girl
Friday, one of the funniest misanthropes ever recorded by the
camera?  For that matter, what about Gunga Din, The Philadelphia
Story and Only Angels Have Wings?  Or the unforgettable work for
Hitchcock--Suspicion, Notorious and, possibly best of all, North
by Northwest.

These films, and several almost as good (mostly dating from
Grant's golden era, from the mid-'30s to the mid-'40s), relied
on his mercurial essence for their effectiveness. In a farce,
there was often a bit of malice about him; playing romance,
something wary, even near misogynistic in his relationship with
a woman; and in every genre he imparted a sense of the fragility
and impermanence of human arrangements. Not that such
subtleties ever prevented him from taking a pratfall, or
dressing up in drag, if necessary.

In later years, he decreed much of this work "tinny" and claimed
a certain estrangement from the daring young actor who had
accomplished it. What he seemed to be saying was that he had
not yet purified those performances of autobiography, had not
yet completed the process of total reinvention that was the
largest promise acting held out to him as a young man. Born
Archibald Leach in bleak Bristol, England, son of a drinking,
defeated father and a mother who was placed in a madhouse when
he was ten, he was a lonely, latchkey child, who decided on a
life in show biz the first time he visited backstage. "A
dazzling land of smiling, jostling people...classless, cheerful
and carefree," is how he later described what he saw.

His first job, at age 14, confirmed his hunch, for he caught on
with Bob Pender, who managed a troupe of boy acrobats as if it
were a kindly, disciplined, extended family. Young Archie
learned acrobatics, mime and, above all, the joys of camaraderie
and the need for collegial generosity. At the height of his
career, he would remain the least narcissistic of actors, always
willing to share scenes and to take a chance with some
undignified business if someone thought it would work.

He came to the U.S. with Pender's company and decided to stay
on. He failed his first screen test, then got a contract, his
"nom de screen" and not much more from Paramount, where he made
nearly a quarter of his films and no strong impression. He was
noticed opposite Mae West and Marlene Dietrich, but it was in
1936, on a loan-out for an RKO flop, Sylvia Scarlett, that he
finally "felt the ground under his feet," as George Cukor, the
film's director, would put it. He played a type he had known
in his past, a Cockney con man with a chipper way of expressing
a gloomy view of human nature. here, for the first time, he
achieved that quicksilver quality that was the basis of his
stardom and, ultimately, his legend.

This last is what people came to know best in recent years. It
was the logical extension of his screen character as he had
finally refined it, a healthy spirit who kept his troubles and
even his memories to himself, Grant quit films in 1966 after
Walk, Don't Run, a relative failure. After that, the public saw
only the odd, tastefully tantalizing glimpse of a man minding
his own cheerful- seeming business, playing a graceful front man
for Faberge cosmetics, doting on his fifth wife, Barbara, and
his daughter Jennifer, 20, by his marriage to Actress Dyan
Cannon. It was more than usually shocking in his sudden death
of a stroke last week as he prepared for a charity appearance
in Davenport, Iowa. One thought he might even elude mortality.

But, of course, he had--long since. The hasty media images by
which we fed our curiosity about his years as a celebrity will
fade. But the films of his younger manhood, in which his
subject was not charm but its fragile and illusionary nature in
a world where brutality often masquerades as farce--these will
abide to delight and possibly even haunt the future. Some
distant day, audiences may even come to agree with a minority
of Grant's contemporaries that he was not merely the greatest
movie star of his era but the medium's subtlest and slyest actor
as well.

--By Richard Schickel