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"You know what
wrong with you?" a frustrated Audrey Hepburn demands of Cary
Grant in Charade. She leans into him, her anger suddenly
swooning into adoration, and murmurs.
"Nothing." As far as Hollywood's honors society
was concerned, nothing was precisely what was wrong with Cary
Grant. His resume boasted no Shakespeare, his nose wore no
putty, his performances betrayed no sweat, his directors had no
complaints, his films stoked no controversies. And so he won
no competitive Oscar. That most men wanted to be Cary Grant,
and most women wanted to have him, mattered not to the solons of
the Motion Picture Academy. Their insulting assumption was
that Grant didn't achieve this character, he was born with
it. He was always just - and just magnificently - Cary
Grant. Well,
pooh on them. He deserves to be cited along with the
medium's top pioneers. Edison developed the movie camera,
D.W. Griffith discovered the closeup, the Brothers Warner brought
sound to feature films, and Cary Grant - not his directors, not
Paramount or RKO, not his fans - invented "Cary
Grant." Surely it was a creative triumph to have
fashioned the movies' most enduring symbol of masculine grace,
wit, and edge. At the very least, he deserved a patent for
producing a heart-throb machine that a couple of generations of
audiences fell in love with. Grant
did his sculpting from some pretty raw elements. At 13 he
ran away from his factious working class home and hooked up with a
troupe of acrobats. By 16 he was in New York, where he
carried advertising signs on stilts and worked as a Coney Island
lifeguard. Sure, he was always plenty gorgeous, but so were
Fredric March and John Locke and Robert Taylor and Nils Asther and
a hundred more glamour-studs. Grand had other handicaps: a
cutting tenor voice that refused to sake its Liverpool origins,
some indifferent early scripts, and swirling rumors about his
sexual preferences. (Which was the true charade? The
poofter regalia he and Randolph Scott would don for a costume
party, or the manly brio of his screen image?) None
of this mattered - and none of the later failed marriages or
charges of wife beating or reported experiments with LSD - so
comforting was our notion of "Cary Grant." This
creature took 27 films to be realized in shadowy form (the
insouciant ghost in Topper) and two more to perfect (the
jaunty divorcer in The Awful Truth). But by then he
was on a roll that hardly let up for a quarter century. Some
of us prefer the Grant who swam the straits of deboair roguery, in
Holiday, His Girl Friday, Penny Serenade,
and The Talk of the Town, to the more daring
performer testing his audience with a gallery of nerds (Bringing
Up Baby), macho aerobats (Only Angels Have Wings), and
pratfalling farceurs (Arsenic and Old Lace). But his
celebrity soon made it tough for him to wriggle out of his suave
sanctity and into a good scowl. By 1941, he literally could
do no wrong. When cast in Suspicion, he forced the
jettisoning of plot and logic because no one would believe that
Cary Grant could scheme to poison his wife. Hitchcock
misused him again in Notorious (where Grant must go all stiff and
envious as Ingrid Bergman vamps Claude Rains) but found the key
for his star with To Catch a Thief. There, Grant has to
prove he is not stripping the bejeweled necks of the Riviera
glitterati, and Grace Kelly has to pretend she cares whether this
silky hunk is a common thief. Exuding her unique
aristocratic sexual musk, Kelly allows Grant to see her to the
door of her hotel room, then plants lips to lips in the most
economical and forthright display of lust seen in public to that
day. Grant was,
of course, only amused by the Princess' tactics. He had
darker work to do for Hitchcock, in North by Northwest. He
and Eva Marie Saint are slinking toward a mutually mistrustful
tryst. In a sleeping car on the Twentieth Century Limited
they circle each other in a mating dance that is also a war
dance. As he goes to caress her, his hands suddenly seem
huge - King Kong mitts - and we realize that every tool of
seduction he possesses is also a lethal weapon. For all
these years, all these films, he has been holding his sexual power
in check. He knows it can wound, kill. And his
audience realizes that the secret of Cary Grant's popularity was
not energy but Olympian restraint. Oh
yes, he could act too - do the big Oscar-nomination-grabbing
scene, as in the long take of his plea for custody of his and
Irene Dunne's adopted child in Penny Serenade. Did fine,
partly because the character's anxiety twinned nicely with Grant's
discomfort at pulling out all the thespic stops. But this
was not the most valuable lesson he would teach. The true
subtleties of acting and character, of revelation and concealment,
took place in the arc of admiration that bound Grant to his
audience, and set him apart. The definitive movie idol,
"Cary Grant" was a two-dimensional fiction that could be
seen but not touched. To see him was to love him. To
love him was never to know him.
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