Cary Grant: A Class Apart. Graham McCann

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       CHAPTER III A Place to Be

      Regardless of a professed rationalisation that I became an actor in orderto travel, I probably chose my profession because I was seeking approval,adulation, admiration and affection: each a degree of love. Perhaps nochild ever feels the recipient of enough love to satisfy him or her. Oh,how we secretly yearn for it, yet openly defend against it.

      CARY GRANT

      Our dreams are our real life.

      FEDERICO FELLINI

      Archie Leach’s adolescence was marked by absence: the absence of his mother, the absence of a stable home life, the absence of money, the absence, it seemed, of a promising future. Not long after his mother’s disappearance, his world was disrupted again: Britain was at war, and material conditions grew even worse for working-class families. His father, it seems, simply withdrew himself from his son’s life. There was no open breach; there was just a vague and gentle separation. They left the house at different times – Elias for work, Archie for school – and they returned at different times. They seldom saw each other. Archie became, in effect, a latch-key child.

      In September 1915, at the age of eleven, he won a scholarship to the local Fairfield Grammar School¹ – a gabled, red-brick establishment about ten minutes’ walk from Picton Street. The Liberal government of the time offered ‘free places’ to a limited number of children whose parents could not afford to contribute financially to their education.² Archie still had to pay for his books, school uniform and other necessities, however, and, in the absence of his mother, he soon came to suspect that he would probably not be able to get through Fairfield on the little money that his father gave him. As a result, his ‘aspirations for a college education slowly faded’.³

      Elsie Leach’s smart young son was now, according to one of his former classmates, ‘a scruffy little boy’⁴ who was a promising scholar and a good athlete, but who also had a mischievous streak and was often a disruptive influence. ‘It depressed me to be good, according to what I judged was an adult’s conception of good’, Grant recalled, ‘and matters around me were not going well.’⁵ When Cary Grant made his triumphant return to Bristol on a visit in 1933, Archie Leach’s old teachers told reporters of their memories of ‘the naughty little boy who was always making a noise in the back row and would never do his homework’.⁶ The irascible piano teacher whom Archie was obliged to visit had taken to rapping the knuckles of his left hand with a ruler (he was naturally left-handed,⁷ which caused him to struggle sometimes to play as she instructed). ‘My head seemed stubbornly set against the penetration of academic knowledge,’⁸ although he admitted, grudgingly, that he quite enjoyed studying geography, history, art and chemistry. What he did become was an avid reader of comics, such as The Magnet and The Gem, as well as a popular and eye-catching footballer (playing in goal and experiencing the ‘deep satisfaction’ of being cheered when making a good save – ‘one of those fancy ballet-like flying jobs’⁹). It was, in fact, as a result of his increasingly uninhibited sporting exploits that he suffered an accident that would alter his appearance in a subtle way: he snapped off part of a front tooth when he fell over in the school playground; the gap closed up in time, but he was left with only one front-centre tooth.¹⁰ Similar – if less dramatic – mishaps followed. His teachers began to give up on him: ‘I was not turning out to be a model boy.’¹¹

      He found an additional outlet for his energies in the 1st Bristol Scout troop. At the end of his first year at Fairfield he volunteered for summer work wherever his Boy Scout training could be used for the war effort: ‘I was so often alone and unhappy at home that I welcomed any occupation that promised activity.’¹² He was assigned to working as a messenger and guide on the military docks at Southampton. For two months he watched thousands of boys not much older than himself sail off towards France; some had already lost an arm or a leg in combat but were being sent back for a second time. It was a poignant experience for him, but it was also, in an odd way, an exhilarating period in his life. When he returned to Bristol, he began to spend time at the docks, where schooners and steamships sailed right up the Avon into the centre of the city. ‘You always had a sense that Bristol was a port, a gateway to somewhere else,’ he said, and, seeing the ships ‘that could take you all over the world’, he came to see the city as ‘a place you could leave, if you wanted to, and, at that age, I did.’¹³ He was restless and lonely, and it appears that he contemplated signing on as a cabin-boy until he discovered that he was too young.¹⁴ Although, years later, he described Bristol as ‘one of my favorite places in the world’,¹⁵ he admitted that, at the time, ‘I didn’t like it where I was, and I wanted to travel’.¹⁶

      Back at the dark, quiet, cramped house in Picton Street, he was aware that his father, on those irregular occasions when he saw him, was growing increasingly withdrawn and melancholic. ‘He was a dear sweet man, and I learned a lot from him,’¹⁷ but as a father he no longer exerted much influence on Archie’s life. The shadow of Elsie hung over them both. Years later, Cary Grant wrote of a long-held desire to ‘cleanse’ himself ‘perhaps of an imagined guilt that I was in some way responsible for my parents’ separation’.¹⁸

      An opportunity to escape from the emptiness of his home life opened up unexpectedly when he encountered an electrician who was helping out in the school laboratory as a part-time assistant. Grant remembered him as a ‘jovial, friendly man’¹⁹ whose attitude towards his own family was considerably more responsible and positive than that of Elias Leach. This unnamed benefactor took a kindly interest in the bright but rather pathetic young boy who was clearly eager for companionship. He was also working at that time at the Hippodrome, Bristol’s newest variety theatre, which had opened in 1912; a fully electrified theatre was still something of a novelty in those days, and he offered Archie the chance to explore the house that he had helped to wire. Archie, without any hesitation, accepted:

      The Saturday matinee was in full swing when I arrived backstage; and there I suddenly found my inarticulate self in a dazzling land of smiling, СКАЧАТЬ