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Philadelphia Inquirer (01/Dec/1986) - His name spelled charm: Cary Grant

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His name spelled charm: Cary Grant

Here was a figure grandfathers, pops and their sons wanted to pal around with. Why? Because hardy Grant was grace and daring incarnate. Like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Victor McLaglen in Gunga Din, every man recognized that the muscular Grant was, at heart, a roisterer.

Cary Grant was a ladies' man and a man's man. And despite challenges from stalwarts like James Stewart and Robert Mitchum, no other actor had a longer reign — 34 years — as romantic king of the screen, beloved by both sexes. Although he has been most often written about as Hollywood's most debonair charmer, the occasion of his death Saturday night at age 82 should jolt the jaded into admitting that Grant was the most gifted actor in movie history.

It was not merely his dancing eyes, cleft chin and cashmere voice that won Grant legions of female admirers, although those features didn't exactly hurt his cause. Nor was it just his light stride, tart irony and rakish aplomb that earned Grant his wide appeal among men, although those characteristics were fundamental to his heroic screen stature. And it wasn't simply his rare ability to make his art (and his beauty) look unstudied, to make age look easy, that made him Hollywood's most enduring and endearing star.

Cary Grant's profusion of physical and behavioral assets obscure his two almost-mythic qualities:

  • Like Jimmy Stewart, Grant was eminently capable of being likable and unlikably sinister simultaneously (perhaps the emotional feature that attracted Alfred Hitchcock to both actors).
  • Unlike Jimmy Stewart, a rugged native son, Grant didn't embody inherently American values. Nevertheless, the bloke born Archie Leach in Bristol, England, almost 83 years ago, realized the American dream. Grant personified the American ideal of populist aristocrat, the indefatigable guy who worked hard — and made good.

As Grant's appeal crossed gender lines, so it crossed class lines. Unbound by social conventions, Cary Grant invented the clipped, mid-Atlantic accent now cultivated by so many network anchors. (Grant claimed that he developed his unique way of speaking to hide his lack of education.) Furthermore, he made male physical grace manly in a way the Ariel-like Fred Astaire never could, and that Errol Flynn was able to do only in costume dramas.

It's not just a fact of Grant's biography that the son of a Cockney garment-presser father and emotionally unstable mother became wealthy beyond dreams of avarice in his adoptive country. It's also a fact of his impressive filmography that, with exceptions like Blonde Venus and The Philadelphia Story, Grant almost always played a hard-working professional or hard chiseling confidence trickster, socially rewarded with money and love.

When Cary Grant was cast in parts that allowed him to be likable and unlikable, hard-working and hard-chiseling, he created his own myth — as well as his most memorable roles. He was urbane — but streetwise. As audiences recall to their merriment, Alfred Hitchcock used that urbanity to hilarious effect in North by Northwest when he stranded Grant in an open cornfield and had him strafed by a crop-duster.

Though too few have seen it, George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett (1935) was Grant's breakthrough movie. He was not cast as a debonair pretty boy with the patent-leather part in his hair, as he was in his earlier efforts opposite Marlene Dietrich (Blonde Venus, 1932) and Mae West (She Done Him Wrong, 1932 and I'm No Angel, 1933). In his wisdom, Cukor cast Grant as a Cockney con man and acrobat who befriends and blackmails Katharine Hepburn, disguised as a young boy.

Cukor encouraged Grant, who had hidden his Cockney roots and athletic abilities from the camera, to reveal the kind of boisterous energy for which he would become celebrated. (And a seedy self-interest that few care to recall, but that was one of Grant's memorable traits.) It was Cukor, likewise, who exploited Grant's self-invented classlessness and physical prowess in two more Hepburn vehicles, Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940), in which Grant plays the hero who loves, but refuses to worship, the patrician beauty.

The Hepburn/Grant combination put the spin on screwball comedy, as anyone who has ever seen Bringing Up Baby (1938) can attest to between giggles. In this Howard Hawks classic, Grant first demonstrated what would be his unique contribution to movie comedy: the personification of the single-minded professional man henpecked to distraction and not noticing that he has fallen into the arms of the woman pursuing him.

In 1939, Grant starred in the two adventure movies that endeared him to generations of boys and men who would be boys. Howard Hawks cast him in Only Angels Have Wings, a remarkable action/adventure about cargo aviators working in Barranca, an outpost in the Andes. And George Stevens chose him for one of his roughneck trio in Gunga Din. In both movies Grant was able to reveal his dark, selfish side, a part of his nature brought out in relief by scripts that demanded him to yield to the collective interest.

Once was not enough for a first-rank director to work with Cary Grant. And with each great director, Grant was able to mine a particular aspect of his rich humanity. With Howard Hawks (for whom Grant made five films, Bringing Up Baby, Only Angels and three sidesplitting slapsticks, His Girl Friday, I Was a Male War Bride, and Monkey Business), Grant developed adroit comic timing while projecting a profoundly funny sense of tunnel-vision professionalism. The lightning-paced His Girl Friday (1940), in which he starred opposite Rosalind Russell, and the harebrained Monkey Business (1952), with him as the research chemist married to Ginger Rogers, are two of the funniest movies ever made and seem particularly modern in an era of workaholism.

After Gunga Din, Stevens directed Grant in Penny Serenade (1941) and Talk of the Town (1942), two terrific dramas in which Stevens and the actor explored Grant's moral dimensions. In Serenade, Grant earned his first Oscar nomination, playing an unsuccessful newspaper editor who persuades a court to let him keep his adoptive daughter. In Talk, Grant is a trade unionist, suspected of violence, who gets Ronald Colman to argue his case.

Grant's most successful collaboration with any director was that with Alfred Hitchcock, who probed the inhumanity and selfishness lurking beneath his character's moralism and selflessness. In Suspicion (1941), Grant plays an apparent chiseler preying on rich girl Joan Fontaine, though he claims to love her. Notorious (1946) finds him as a intelligence agent playing opposite Ingrid Bergman, manipulating her into marrying a known fascist so that he can get information. Notorious is Grant's fiercest and most savagely brilliant portrayal. He makes vivid the mind of the democrat who fascistically controls the woman he loves — as opposed to his rival, Claude Rains, playing a Nazi who treats his wife, Ingrid Bergman, with the utmost love and regard.

During the '50s, Hitchcock showcased Grant's virile good looks. In To Catch a Thief (1955), Grant plays a falsely accused jewel thief opposite Grace Kelly, who offers him a leg or a breast — of chicken. He's enticed by another Hitchcock blonde, Eva Marie Saint, in the delightful North by Northwest (1959), which casts him as an ad executive mistaken for a CIA agent.

One question lingers. Was it because he excelled in light comedy that Hollywood never took Cary Grant too seriously as an actor? He was twice nominated for Oscars, for Penny Serenade and None but the Lonely Heart, two excellent performances in, it should be noted, dramas. Only after Grant formally retired from acting (he continued to be active on the boards of directors of Loew's and Faberge, and a passionate breeder of ponies and poodles) did he receive an honorary Oscar. In 1969, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences belatedly bestowed a statuette on Grant for "sheer brilliance."

That brilliance, often mistaken for sophisticated glitter, blinded many to Grant's achievement. To many, like actor Charlton Heston, who eulogized Grant yesterday, "there was never an actor who could wear beautiful clothes, stand in beautiful rooms and say such beautiful lines as Grant. And there never will be."

But Grant was far more than a fine figure of a man in elegant tweeds and natty argyles who could speak like — and even play — an angel. He was a heel, a gigolo (countless times), a chiseler, an editor (twice), a doctor (four times), a jewel thief, an ad executive (twice) and a CIA agent. He was an actor of many moods, and he wasn't afraid to share them with his audience. When he accepted his Oscar at the ceremonies in April 1970, a misty-eyed Grant thanked the audience for "forgiving me for what I didn't know."

It's churlish to say so, but his audience can forgive Cary Grant anything — except dying.

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