Sleeping with Strangers

Excerpted from Sleeping with Strangers

For much of his life, Cary Grant was under siege: he was forever imprisoned by the façade of “being Cary Grant.” How hard it would be to put himself on true trial with other, new people. He could not really find new people or anyone for whom he was new. They felt they knew him already. So he was barred from the secrecy or privacy so many of us treasure in sexual encounters. We long to believe in the special recess where sexual curiosity may find us. It’s one reason why sexual encounters are so often accompanied by immense, passionate talk between the selves unlocked. We are like Clyde Barrow: we want to hear our story told. That can make a precious feeling of something inviolably intimate being shared as it has never been before.

That may prove wishful thinking or a delusion later. But for people always on show, for show people, it can be a dream that is never satised. How could Cary Grant feel discovered, as opposed to being compared with “Cary Grant”? How could he or anyone else feel that some precious being had been arrived at? Isn’t there the creeping air of being a fake and a failure, as brilliant and bereft an entertainer as a whore playing yourself?

So movie people may give up the ghost on their secret identity as romantic beings. That is not so far from the self-loathing that some heroic actors feel when they are esteemed for rites of courage and physical prowess they cannot claim as their own. A kind of contempt can develop—that or an exaggerated and even cruel insistence on their own virtuous violence. Sex and bravery can be filled with paranoia—and in turn that leads some of our great romantic icons to feel a desperate unease with themselves. Cary Grant could never be satisfied with anyone’s belief in him. So a kind of mockery emerges: it could seem witty and sophisticated, but it might feel gay, too.

We’re only talking about Grant because that look of his is so particular and so enigmatic. We are watching the difficulty of deciding about him, and surely he knows this. Grant is not lazy or casual; the closer you look, the more there is to see.

If you want one example of that, go to Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), which involves a tortured love affair between Grant (as Devlin, a government agent) and Ingrid Bergman (as Alicia Huberman, whose family history places her on the edge of Nazi circles). The film is famous for a prolonged kissing scene between the stars as stealthy as it is erotic. That Grant had no difficulty playing straight. The actresses he worked with never seemed impeded or dismayed. But the narrative situation keeps Devlin suspicious of Alicia, and even cold toward her, as he sets her up for a perilous investigation of a Nazi conspiracy. Jealousy has seldom been done better. Thus Devlin gets her to marry a chief suspect, Alex Sebastian (very well played by Claude Rains). That jeopardizes their love and even threatens her life.

In the end, Devlin rescues Alicia, carrying her out of a house of evil and poison. Their love comes through, but uncertainty and a kind of cruelty linger in Notorious. These lovers may never forget the sense of falling in love and then of just falling. In a film about trust and vulnerability, Notorious depends on the anguished desire in its central faces. Once you’ve registered that, the unease does not easily leave you. The happy ending the film provides is for suckers.

This is acting; it is professional. In the riddle of performance, Devlin’s face has to be Grant’s. I cannot link Notorious to proven details of Grant’s private life, but another reference is available, and it is more cogent. Archie Leach the child lived with his mum and dad in an ordinary house in Bristol. There had been an older brother who died at the age of one. Then one day, when he was nine, the boy came home from school and his mum was not there with his tea. Archie waited. Dad came home and said the situation was a puzzler. The boy’s mother, Elsie Leach, did not come home. Archie was told she had gone away—and deserted them. She never went back to that home again.

Archie grew up. In time, his dad found another woman. The kid joined the music hall; he went to America; he became Cary Grant; he got into movies. It was a tough training, much of it in knockabout physical comedy—he was raised a goofball. But the lowly Bristol boy became an epitome of grace and charm for the wide world. One day in 1935 in Beverly Hills he got a letter from a solicitor in Bristol regretting to tell him his father had died. According to the solicitor, there were a few formalities to be tidied up. But one question was out of the ordinary or presented uncertainty: what was to be done with Elsie? Long ago she had been lodged in an asylum in Bristol, the Glenside Hospital, a place that Archie would have seen often without ever thinking about it.

Grant went back to Bristol as soon as he could. With surprising ease he was able to get his mother out of the asylum; it was plain that his father had placed her there, with some connivance from doctors, to suit his own situation. Elsie never returned to the asylum. She and the long-lost Archie did their best to repair their relationship. It would never be strong or relaxed. Elsie may not have been disabled, but that does not mean she was other than disturbed after nearly two decades being confined. She felt betrayed. Grant was horrified at what had happened, and he would admit later in life that he seldom found emotional comfort with his mother (she died in 1973, aged ninety-four). Had he let her down? Had he been deserted or deceived? Let’s just say that Grant’s trust and security were in ruins, and that can be a vital impulse for acting.

This is not a plea for sympathy—there’s no need to plead with these extraordinary circumstances—or a hope of explaining Cary Grant in any thorough or clinical way. I remain uncertain as to whether he was homosexual for a time in his life. And there is no reason to look down on that possibility or to argue that it might have been forgivable under his circumstances. Gayness does not need forgiveness—or explanation. There is ample reason to believe Grant was upset, disturbed, or damaged—whatever word you want to use—and thus all the more driven to seem smooth, urbane, and in control. Often enough in life, he would say, “I wish I could be Cary Grant.” That line got a laugh, especially in the Evening with Cary Grant stage shows he did in his last years and which were never filmed. But the wistfulness speaks to the way actors can feel overwhelmed by the popular image of themselves built up in a successful career. Isn’t that how Roy Fitzgerald felt dismayed or displaced by the looming figure of “Rock Hudson”?

My history of watching Grant suggests that every possible meaning (and then others not thought of) should be recognized in his smile and his bleaker stare. He is not simply heterosexual in the breathless His Girl Friday, where he treats his ex-wife and his wife-to-be (both of them Rosalind Russell) with a furious, competitive cunning that manages to be beguiling and alarming as well as comic. He only once came close to playing a gay character, but that Cole Porter was not allowed to be his homosexual self in the foolish and sanitized Night and Day. With magnificent aplomb he let a blue-chiffon Grace Kelly kiss him in To Catch a Thief, like a judge hired to award marks to a skater. His elegance was so underplayed it could seem introverted. He reached pathos in Penny Serenade and None but the Lonely Heart. He was acrobatic in Holiday, hilarious in Bringing Up Baby and The Awful Truth, and plain old perfect “Cary Grant” in North by Northwest, where he has giddy erotic scenes with Eva Marie Saint, if you recognize that talking can be as sensual as touching. He enlarged our sense of what a gentleman might be, and surely that involved an understanding of femininity.

Despite his ambiguity, most Grant plots settled on his good nature and happy-ever-after prospects. But in one film we are shaken by his unreliability. Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) was meant to be the story of Lina (Joan Fontaine), an heiress wooed and then murdered by a scoundrel con named Johnnie Aysgarth who will eventually ascend the staircase to her room bearing a glass of milk glowing with poison.

That great shot remains, but Hitch had to drop the ending for reasons of commercial reassurance, telling us instead that Lina’s suspicion had come from mere misunderstanding. (Hitch thought this escape clause was “deadly.”) Johnny and Lina are going to be “all right.” Fontaine won an Oscar, but Grant was far more deserving: fiendish, gleeful, mercilessly cold, perpetually dishonest—almost for its own sake—and curiously attached to an English idiot chum (played by Nigel Bruce). You don’t have to be too alert to see that Johnny is horrified by women. He’s not obviously gay, but Grant comes close to the devil. Hitchcock quietly exploited the fact that Grant did not like Joan Fontaine—we feel it. His Johnny cries out for a full film beyond Hitchcock’s cautious pact between box-office and bourgeois restraint. Still, Grant makes Aysgarth the most disturbing man Hitch ever put on film, and good old Cary understood the part.

There was more in Grant than Scotty Bowers noticed. Who knows where future biographies of the man will go or how much more evidence there can be? And who can deny but that, as a screen actor, he reassessed the entire possibility of what an attractive man might be. I knew an old lady once who assessed some men as “dead attractive”—that was Grant. There was something fatal in him.

I doubt he was ever simply happy—except perhaps when he saw Jennifer watching him. I talked to Grant a little near the end of his life and I was surprised to discover how uneasy or anxious he was. He was afraid of not getting the point, like a lot of eighty-year-olds. My guess is that a crucial part of his development was in his time with Betsy Drake, the least mentioned of his marriages, though it was the one that lasted longest.

Betsy Drake was born in Paris in 1923 to a wealthy family: her grandfather had founded the Drake Hotel in Chicago. She met Grant in 1947. They fell in love as fellow passengers on the Queen Mary and acted together in two modest films, Every Girl Should Be Married (1948) and Room for One More (1952). She was seldom relaxed on screen. They were married in 1949 and seem to have been happy for several years, until he had an affair with Sophia Loren during the making of The Pride and the Passion (a 1957 film that might have had no other purpose). But that came just as Drake had written a script for Grant’s next film, Houseboat, in which she thought she was set to play the lead. Grant then dropped Drake from the project, ordered a new script, and cast Loren instead—though she soon went on and married the producer Carlo Ponti, who would star her in Two Women, for which she won the Best Actress Oscar.

That bitter episode exposed some selfishness or spite in Grant. The couple were only divorced in 1962. She later laughed at the suggestion that he had been bisexual. They were having sex so much, she said, there was no time to consider whether he was gay. That remark may have been meant as wit and fun, and it meets both tests. But it can have a deeper meaning: that all across the nation there are mixed couples, married or not, who make love as a way of warding off awkward and insoluble questions about who they are, or might be.

Who are we, and who do we want to be? We have been raised to assume that straight sex is an urge and an instinct, a birthright and an identity. But it could be a safety net, a kind of Bunbury for those of us with uncertainties. Doing that, the thing, doing it, vigorously, happily, regularly, may be a way of denying critical thought or the capacity for other things, for anything.

After divorcing Grant, Drake studied at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and got a degree in education from Harvard, and she wrote a novel. She may have been the most valuable companion in his life, until his daughter arrived. Grant would say the LSD excursions she encouraged cleared up several of his emotional problems. People want to believe in such “healing”: they say they are cured or better or whole, while being on their way to disintegration and death. Equally, we have passed through the grotesque era in which sane and benevolent practitioners believed in aversion therapy, hypnosis, or simple castration as ways of “curing” homosexual tendencies. By now, we know that it’s that “benevolence” that needs to be treated.

When I talked to Cary Grant he was a slipstream of eighty-year-old ease and sophistication, on stage. He still looked like “Cary Grant.” But in person he was consumed in unease and anxiety. I suspect he had always acted to escape that panic and in the process he carried so many of us closer to imaginary comfort. We should thank him.

Betsy Drake died in 2015. I don’t know whether she left any writing about Grant, but who in his life had a better chance of clarifying his unease? Not that that would have settled every question in his gaze or his rueful, edgy presence. But those things amount to art and they are still there for anyone ready to enjoy his films and their uncertainty.

It doesn’t matter whether Grant was gay or not. That is the mixed signal or recommendation he left for history. The films are more valuable than the question; they are even an answer to surpass the question. The other day, Scott Eyman, who is setting out on a Grant biography, asked me, “Would a gay man really marry five times?” It’s a fair point: whatever else, Grant had great hopes for marriage—who can claim more than that? The historian in me admits “not proven,” but the film watcher feels the answer is transparent. That uncertainty over Grant’s nature may become a verdict on more and more of us.

Five marriages, or more? Is that being crazy for wives or a dread of loneliness? The longer I look at Grant, the more I realize that “good looking” requires our closest attention. It seems he was ready to be anyone, and that’s where the life of an actor educates our efforts to live up to the new roles change has made available for us. That sounds exciting, but it may be intimidating: a part of us still feels acting up is being dishonest or “not true to oneself.”