Cary Grant: A Class Apart. Graham McCann

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      He began taking lessons in ground tumbling and stilt-walking and acrobatic dances. He practised using stage make-up. He studied the best ways to make full use of a wide range of stage props. He was also coached in the ways of ‘working’ an audience, of conveying a mood or a meaning without having recourse to words, establishing silent contact with an audience – a skill that he later acknowledged as having helped prepare him for the special challenge of screen acting.

      Archie Leach had found a teacher he trusted. Bob Pender, a stocky, robust man in his early forties, was one of the most experienced and versatile physical comedians in England at that time. His real name was Lomas, the son and grandson of travelling players from Lancashire. His wife and co-director, Margaret, was former ballet mistress at the Folies Bergère in Paris. Archie, once he joined the troupe, lived with the Penders and the other young performers, either in their house in Brixton (the area long established, because of its close proximity to the forty-one London music-halls, as the home base of many professional entertainers⁴⁰) or in boarding-houses on the tour circuit. It was an intense, practical and rapid education. Three months after he had left Bristol, Archie returned with the troupe to appear at the Empire. After the final curtain, Elias Leach, who had been in the audience, walked with his son back to his home. ‘We hardly spoke, but I felt so proud of his pleasure and so much pleasure in his pride, and I remember we held hands for part of that walk.’⁴¹ It was the closest that he had ever felt to his father.

      The Pender troupe toured the English provinces and played the Gulliver chain of music-halls in London. The theatre became Archie Leach’s world, the source of his new identity; when he was not on stage, he was usually studying the other acts. ‘At each theatre I carefully watched the celebrated headline artists from the wings, and grew to respect the diligence it took to acquire such expert timing and unaffected confidence, the amount of effort that resulted in such effortlessness.’⁴² He became determined to learn how to achieve the illusion of effortless performance: ‘Perhaps by relaxing outwardly I thought I could eventually relax inwardly; sometimes I even began to enjoy myself on stage.’⁴³

      While on tour, the troupe was informed that it had been engaged for an appearance in New York. It was an extraordinary opportunity for all the young performers. There were twelve boys in the company, but provision for only eight in the contract that Pender had signed with Charles Dillingham, a New York theatrical impresario. Archie Leach – much to his relief – was one of the first of the troupe to be selected. On 21 July 1920, he joined the others on the RMS Olympic – sistership to the Titanic – and set sail for the United States of America.