Book Review: "Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise"

Scott Eyman's new biography sheds a not always flattering light on one of old Hollywood's most famous yet enigmatic stars

When one thinks of classic Hollywood, certain stars spring to mind: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart and...Cary Grant. Perhaps more than any other actor working in old Hollywood, Grant personified a certain form of classy masculinity. As with so many other Hollywood stars, however, the confident persona that he so often showed in his films was sharply at odds with the real person beneath, as Scott Eyman documents in his recent biography, Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise. Like so many other stars, both then and now, Grant was a complicated and contradictory person, a man who often used his on-screen persona to compensate for what he lacked in his real life.

Born Archie Leach in Bristol, England, Grant had a troubled upbringing, not least because his father had his mother institutionalized but told his son that she had died. Though he eventually realized the truth of matters, he would have a strained relationship with his mother for the rest of his life. In fact, Eyman sees his lack of love as a child as key to his inability to have functioning relationships with women, and it is certainly true that Grant couldn’t seem to find a marriage that could work. He couldn’t resist the urge to try to force the women in his life to do as he wanted and thought best.

This obsessive need to have everything just so extended into his professional life. As his fame increased, so did Grant’s sense of entitlement and his desire to control as many aspects of a production as he possibly could, which often led to conflicts with directors with their own creative visions. That said, he did have strong working relationships with several directors, most notably Alfred Hitchcock, who brought out one of Grant’s best performances in North by Northwest. What’s more, Grant was a consummate gentleman to his female co-stars, for while he was very aware of his growing star power, he often went out of his way to help others ascend the ladder.

Eyman, who has written biographies of several other notable Hollywood figures--including MGM head Louis B. Mayer--has a good idea for what makes his subject tick, though there are times when he leans a bit into psychoanalysis. In Eyman’s analysis, the persona of Cary Grant was Archie Leach’s attempt to make up for the lack that he saw in his psyche. As a result, Eyman tends to read many of the films through that lens, which can be both a seductive and reductive interpretive strategy. 

That being said, the book does what every star biography should do, which is to give us a more nuanced and rich understanding of both the personality of the individual and of their on-screen performances. While I’ve always enjoyed watching Grant perform, I wouldn’t say that he’s one of my all-time favorite actors from the golden age of Hollywood. Eyman opened my eyes to the nuances of Grant’s performance, the way that he really did seem to have a firm grasp of his craft, honed from his time in vaudeville and perfected once he entered Hollywood. Reading the book, it’s clear that Eyman has a deep appreciation for Grant’s talents as an actor and, as a result, we gain one as well.

At the same time, there were several points in the book where Eyman tended to veer off into subjects only tangentially related to Grant and his career. While some of this is to be expected in any biography, it’s one of those instances where a firmer editor could have helped Eyman to keep focused on the subject of the book. Most notable in this regard is an extended digression on Alexander Korda (the famed director) and his role in World War II. It’s an anecdote in which Grant has only a bit part to play, and I found myself wondering exactly what it’s purpose was. 

Eyman also gives some attention to Grant’s alleged bisexuality. This subject, as so often with the case of the sexual lives of the stars of old, is muddled, precisely because so much about stars and their biographies was made up out of whole cloth by the studios themselves. What is clear, at least in Eyman’s account, is that Grant wasn’t uncomfortable with the rumors or with gay people and that there might have been at least a part of him that veered toward the bisexual. Near the end of the book, for example, Sue Lloyd peaks of a party where Grant was “swirling around in a caftan [...], swishing around the party.” And, regardless of whether or not Grant was bisexual in the way that we think of the term (a claim of which we should be at least somewhat cautious), he did express a remarkable degree of tolerance, even going so far as to say that he preferred homosexual male secretaries to female ones.

As he grew older, several developments helped Granta attain the peace of mind and spirit that had so long eluded him. The birth of his daughter Jennifer was a revelation, and he truly loved being a father. What’s more, his use of LSD (yes, that LSD), also allowed him to explore his psyche in ways that had been denied him before. In fact, he would become a proselytizer for the substance, though he was steadfast in his belief that it wasn’t a drug in the way that other controlled substances were. In Eyman’s telling, it was only after Grant retired from Hollywood that he at last became the man that he’d always wanted to be. 

For those whose only familiarity with Grant is through his on-screen performances, the revelation that he was a bit of a fuss-budget and that, at times, he could be a bit of a jerk will no doubt take a bit of the shine off of his screen image. However, there’s no denying that Grant was one of the brightest stars in the Hollywood firmament and, though the man himself has been gone for thirty years, we are still blessed to have had him as long as we did and that his legacy is preserved on our screens.