Cary Grant (3 page)

The potential for trouble, however, still loomed. Questions concerning Grant's long and bitter divorce from his fourth wife, actress Dyan Cannon, had recently flared up over the question of Grant's visitation rights to his four-yearold daughter, Jennifer. Bouron's paternity suit, he feared, might adversely upset the already delicate balance of the rights he had fought so long and hard to win.

And finally there was Princess Grace. The last thing Grant wanted was to have his dear friend associated in any way with scandal. That was the real reason why, the day after the Bouron story broke, Princess Grace sent, at Grant's insistence, her reluctant but irrevocable regrets to the Academy.

The last week in March, Grant authorized Fox to accept service of Bouron's subpoena and then quietly slipped back in to Los Angeles. The next day, under an agreement reached by his and Bouron's attorneys, he gave blood samples to the authorities. Bouron was also required to do so, but did not show at the appointed time, or at two subsequent occasions. Fox seized upon this to petition Judge Laurence J. Rittenband to dismiss Bouron's lawsuit. At a hastily convened hearing, Fox's request was granted, and just like that, her paternity case against Grant was over.

The scandal, however, refused to die. A new gust of rumors quickly blew through Hollywood that Grant had secretly met with Bouron and paid her off not to show up and give blood. While this made for good gossip, the reality of that having taken place was highly unlikely. Had the baby proved to be his, Grant, who had suffered a lifetime dealing with his own boyhood abandonment issues, and who desperately wanted a second child, would not likely have turned his back on it.

Nevertheless, the front-page persistence of the story convinced Grant that, despite Peck's continuing pleas, he should not show up at the Oscars. Then
on the first of April, at the behest of Howard Hughes, Grant flew to Hughes's Desert Inn hotel in Las Vegas to talk over the situation. The reclusive billionaire told him that the only way he could put an end to the whole sorry situation was to act as if he had done nothing wrong and had nothing to hide, and the only way to do that was to show up at the ceremonies and accept his Oscar. (It was ironic advice from the increasingly reclusive Hughes, who, having summoned Grant to Las Vegas, had conducted the meeting via telephone, suite to suite.)

On April 2, Grant called Peck and said he would show up after all but wanted his decision to be kept secret. Peck agreed. Nonetheless the story appeared the next day in an item by local columnist John Austin, who said he had been tipped to Grant's appearance by a “close friend.” (The only other person besides Peck who knew of Grant's decision was Hughes. Austin's column hinted it was indeed Hughes who had convinced Grant to show. It remains a matter of conjecture as to why Hughes would have told Austin, but the most likely reason is that he felt that once the story appeared in print, Grant would not be able to change his mind again.)

Peck then called Sinatra and asked him to be the presenter, and he said yes. As the night of the Awards approached, Grant spent several days and at least one evening at Cannon's home, both to give support to and seek comfort from his ex-wife. Cannon, as it happened, had been nominated that year as Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the wife-swapping comedy
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
^*

As the auditorium lights slowly dimmed, a six-minute montage of clips from Grant's best-loved movies played on a large screen behind the podium, punctuated by outbursts of spontaneous laughter from the audience and ripples of applause. When the film ended and the lights came back up, Sinatra finished his introduction by praising Cary Grant for the “sheer brilliance of his acting that makes it all look easy.”

And then at last the moment was upon him. With tears rolling down his cheeks, Grant emerged from the wings and walked slowly to the microphone
while the audience rose as one to stand and cheer for him. He nodded appreciatively several times, quickly wiped one eye with a finger, and waved gracefully to the crowd. As the crescendo of their applause began to wane, he slipped on his thick-rimmed black glasses, and in the familiar voice so beloved by his fans all around the world, humbly delivered his carefully prepared words of acceptance and appreciation.

“I'm very grateful to the Academy's Board of Directors for this happy tribute,” he began, “and to Frank, for coming here especially to give it to me, and to all the fellows who worked so hard in finding and assembling those film clips.”

He squinted into the audience, looking for those he was about to thank. He spotted Hitchcock, nodded slightly toward him, then once again spoke, departing from his notes and holding up his Oscar. “You know, I may never look at this without remembering the quiet patience of the directors who were so kind to me, who were kind enough to put up with me more than once—some of them even three or four times. There were Howard Hawks, Hitchcock, the late Leo McCarey, George Stevens, George Cukor, and Stanley Donen.

“And all the writers. There were Philip Barry, Dore Schary, Bob Sherwood, Ben Hecht, Clifford Odets, Sidney Sheldon, and more recently Stanley Shapiro and Peter Stone. Well, I trust they and all the other directors, writers, and producers, and leading women, have all forgiven me what I didn't know.”

At this point he paused, glanced at his notes, and then looked up again. “I realize it's conventional and usual to praise one's fellow workers on these occasions. But why not? Ours is a collaborative medium; we all need each other. And what better opportunity is there to publicly express one's appreciation and admiration and affection for all those who contribute so much to each of our welfare?”

A longer pause followed, during which he appeared to be trying to hold back his tears. He softly cleared his throat, then continued, coming closer than he ever would to explaining if not apologizing for his long and rancorous boycott of the Academy: “You know, I've never been a joiner or a member of any—oh, particular—social set, but I've been privileged to be a part of Hollywood's most glorious era. And yet tonight, thinking of all the
empty screens that are waiting to be filled with marvelous images, ideologies, points of view, and considering all the students who are studying film techniques in the universities throughout the world, and the astonishing young talents that are coming up in our midst, I think there's an even more glorious era right around the corner.

“So before I leave you, I want to thank you very much for signifying your approval of this. I shall cherish it until I die, because probably no greater honor can come to any man than the respect of his colleagues. Thank you.”

As the audience rose once more, he turned slowly and left, out of sight even before the ovation ended. For Cary Grant, these last few steps signaled the end of the long and wondrous journey that had started so long ago, when as little Archie Leach of Bristol, England, the first, sweet dreams of destiny had come to him in the night.

And the horrid nightmares as well.

Archibald Alec (Alexander) Leach, age 4, Bristol, England, 1908.
(Courtesy of the private collection of the Virginia Cherrill Estate)

2

B
ristol is the seventh-largest city and third-largest seaport in Great Britain. It is situated to the south of Cardiff, Wales, to the west of Bath, and to the southwest of Gloucestershire. In 1497, John Cabot, the discoverer of Newfoundland, first sailed to the New World from Bristol. Noted natives of Bristol include England's seventeenth-century poet laureate Robert Southey; William Penn, for whom Pennsylvania is named; and the celebrated Shakespearean actor Sir Henry Irving. During the first years of the twentieth century, Bristol was the designated port of departure for those who wished to
sail via luxury liner from England to the United States. It is adored by the rest of the world for its celebrated cream sherry.

Bristol is also one of England's many great theatrical districts, home to the famous Theatre Royal on King Street, which first opened in 1766 and remains in operation to this day. The other major stops on the British vaudeville circuit at the turn of the twentieth century were Bristol's Empire and Hippodrome. All three venues were the first signposts on the journey to dreamland for the boy whose destiny it was to become Bristol's most beloved progeny, young Archibald (Arch
-eee-
bald) Alec (Alexander) Leach.

Archie, as everyone called him, was the second child born to Elsie Maria Kingdon, the daughter of an Episcopalian shipwright, and Elias Leach, the son of an Episcopalian potter. Although Elias had big dreams of one day becoming a famous entertainer, he earned his living wage as a tailor's presser at Todd's clothing factory. The Kingdons generally presumed, in the waning days of the staunch Victorian epoch, that their prudent daughter had, unfortunately, married beneath her class. They did not consider Elias—at thirty- three, twelve years their daughter's senior—socially acceptable or sufficiently established in business for a man his age.

Nevertheless the slight, attractive, cleft-chinned, and prohibitively shy Elsie did not turn him down when he proposed. How could she? He was tall, slim, dashing, and a charmer, the mustachioed man of her dreams. She resolutely believed in Elias, even if her parents didn't, and was certain that he meant it when he promised her that the type of fancy coats and suits of the wealthy he pressed at the factory would one day belong to him as well, that the manual labor in the steamy, windowless shop in which he toiled six days out of seven was but a brief stepping-stone to a better life for the both of them.

Elias could dream with the best of them, and he also knew well how to make at least some of those dreams come true. By the time he walked his twenty-one-year-old wife down the aisle, he had already played through the field of Bristol's most (and least) eligible women, using his good looks to insinuate himself into their beds if not their lives. When he met Elsie, he sensed that her father might provide a rich dowry and, later on, a comfortable inheritance. It was enough to lure him to renounce his wild ways and seek Elsie's hand in marriage.

They settled in to one of the newly built working-class semidetached homes along Hughenden Road, just off Gloucester, a dwelling too chilly and damp in the winter, the air roughened by the smelly choke of poorly ventilated coal heating, and too sweaty in the clumping humidity of summer. In dire need of fresh stimulation, Elias soon returned to his carousing ways. At least part of his problem was sexual frustration. Less than a year into the marriage, he discovered he was no longer able to raise Elsie's temperature, no matter what the time of year. Her Victorian disposition toward romance dictated that procreation was the only justification for engaging in the act of sex. Doing it for pleasure was unproductive, a sacrilegious waste of time, at least as far as she was concerned.

Filled with many splendorous churches and lively music halls, Bristol provided ample opportunity for Elsie to worship God, at least as much as the numberless pubs and music halls accommodated her husband's more secular devotions. Indeed, Elias's relapse into roguishness found easy pickings in the traveling vaudeville companies that continually played the local theaters, where that sort of entertainment itself was seen by Elsie and the church folk as nothing more (or less) than the work of the devil himself.