Cary Grant: A Class Apart by Graham McCann
Columbia University Press, 1997 (1st US edition)
Category: Biography
I don’t remember how I found out about this book. I know Jacob and I saw something on TV about Cary Grant’s life, and thought it would be fun to read a biography of him; I read somewhere that this was the best one; I found it listed on ABE for a piddling sum and bought it immediately. Then it sat around for a while, shamefully unread until now. I should not have needed such a perverse incentive to finally read it.
It’s not so much the subject matter as McCann’s style that makes this book brilliant. McCann not only provides an exhaustive look at Grant’s life, he also refers extensively to the other major biographies (and Grant’s own autobiographical essays) to put the material in context. Where dates or events are in doubt, he explains the discrepancies and the merit of each source. Throughout he attempts not to reconcile, but to bring all sources into a single narrative that is extremely readable and endlessly fascinating. All biographies should be this good.
Of course, without the subject matter there would be no point, no matter how good a writer McCann is. His primary goal is to examine the influence Cary Grant had not just on moviemaking, but on audiences around the world. Like other biographers, he refers to how Archie Leach (Grant’s birth name), a low-class working man’s son from Bristol, coexisted with Cary Grant, the smooth, elegant, sexy leading man from nowhere, but rather than resort to the simplistic explanations of others (that Leach was Grant’s secret and uncomfortable true identity) McCann explores how Leach set out deliberately to become Cary Grant, and how Leach’s upbringing and experiences helped build a leading man who was both suave and humorously awkward, distant and approachable, seducer and seduced.
Yes, it’s a two-bookmark book, and I wished so many times that the endnotes were color-coded for my convenience, with black indicating a reference and red, or something, meaning that there was something substantive back there. The endnote material had some of the most interesting tidbits, like how Billy Wilder wrote Humphrey Bogart’s role in Sabrina for Grant, who never was able to make his schedule fit Wilder’s. Can you imagine the difference in that movie? Okay, besides the fact that no one in her right mind could believe Audrey Hepburn choosing whats-his-name over Cary Grant. (I could have looked that up on IMDB, but it would have been pretentious.) Or how worried Grant was, later, about the age difference between himself and Audrey in Charade–so much so that he insisted the writers insert lines here and there to defuse the "dirty old man" vibe.
I read biographies of actors because I’m intrigued by what drives such people and how the difference between their private and public lives affects their work. McCann tells the story of a man who was in many ways exactly the same in private as he was in public. Almost everyone he ever worked with was impressed with him–his work ethic, his generosity with his costars, the unrelenting demand for excellence in every aspect of movie making. What startled me was that, after he retired from films, he was genuinely surprised that people still remembered him and his movies. Try to imagine that. For me, Cary Grant may be the one actor whose work I remember for the rest of my life.
