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A little good news. This week we--not to mention
he--celebrate the 80th birthday of one Archie Leach, born in
Britain, raised on the stage, matured in film and now enshrined in
our memory as the essence of style and grace. Ladies and gentlemen,
I give you Cary Grant.
For almost 50 years now, Cary Grant has been a
major, if not the dominant, film star. He's retired now, living (I
hope) on yachts, changing his clothes several times a day, never
losing his crease, dressing for dinner, opening the door for women,
saying just the right thing, impressing headwaiters, knowing just
how much to tip, being humorous without ever being ridiculous
and--most important--doing it all effortlessly.
An admission. I always wanted to be Cary Grant.
I know, of course, that Cary Grant is Cary Grant and the part is
taken, but I wanted to be something like him. Other kids wanted to
be ballplayers or firemen, but not me. I wanted to be Cary Grant.
The funny thing is that Cary Grant wanted the
same thing. As Richard Schickel tells us in his book, "Cary
Grant--A Celebration," there was nothing about Grant's early
life to foreshadow the man he eventually became. He was born into
the lower middle class, the child of Elias and Elsie Leach, he a
garment presser with a weakness for the grape, she a housewife with
an equally serious problem, insanity. When Grant was 9, his mother
was institutionalized, and he did not see her for 25 years. By then,
he was a movie star: "I was known to most of the world by sight
and by name, yet not to my mother," he once said.
So Cary Grant was his own creation. He simply
invented himself, modifying a pronounced British accent, learning
how to dress, turning himself into the epitome of the mid-century
man. He was a gentleman without virtue of money, without virtue of a
gentleman's education, with no clubs and no social connections. He
took the name Cary from a character in a play ("Nikki")
and Grant from a list of short last names. Cary Grant was born--born
again, we might now say.
His is the ultimate democratic story. Grant,
like the equally humbly born Fred Astaire, became the essence of
urban sophistication by simply wanting to be that. Of course, he was
born with his looks and his remarkably ageless body, but the
rest--the clothes, the manner, the strangely unplaceable accent--was
all his own invention. He decided what he would be and then went out
and became it.
And yet Grant can be seen as something else
entirely: undemocratic. The movies in which Cary Grant really played
Cary Grant--movies about charm and culture, movies where people
dressed for dinner, always had something clever to say and never
sweated--seem elitist. And so Hollywood has been turning out movies
in which the male stars wear T-shirts, drive pickups and drink beer.
This is realism, no doubt, but it is also a celebration of the
obvious. Richard Gere, for instance, is Richard Gere, good-looking,
sexy. There is no art to him, no packaging. There is no sense
aspiring to be Richard Gere because he aspires to be nothing else.
He is what he is--what I could never be.
I could never be Grant, either, of course. But I
could try. I could learn how to dress well. I could watch my speech.
I could master etiquette and manners. I could, you see, rise above
my origins, my education, my (limited) looks. I could never do that
in a T-shirt. In a T-shirt the world would always kick sand in my
face. In a tux and camel's hair coat, though, I can be something
else--something better.
I suppose the same thing applies to women.
Clothes, makeup--all these can be rungs on the ladder of
self-improvement. But a bikini, a Flashdance sweatshirt--these are
assertions of the explicit. They keep you in your place, which is,
for lots of people, the last place they want to be.
So here's to Cary Grant on his 80th birthday. In
his clothes, with his manner, he remains the ultimate democrat.
Let's drink to him--he with champagne, we with beer. Grant is proof
that maybe someday the champagne can be ours. Archie Leach is dead.
But Cary Grant lives.
A little good news.
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