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The way the story goes, someone sent a wire to
Cary Grant -- a guy writing a profile for Time, or a producer on
location, this part isn't clear -- and the guy wanted to know Cary
Grant's age, and so the wire read: "How old Cary Grant?"
And so back came the answer from Cary Grant:
"Old Cary Grant fine. How you?"
Great old Hollywood story, vintage stuff from
the More Innocent times, and -- like virtually all such Hollywood
stories -- not true.
"No," says old Cary Grant himself,
"I never said that. But I have always wished that I had."
These days, of course, Cary Grant actually is
old. He will be 80 on Jan. 18. That's not so bad, considering that
the wirephotos continue to suggest a nearly ageless man. But Grant
has stayed out of sight as well, having been one of Hollywood's more
retiring retirees since his last film, Walk Don't Run, in 1966.
Grant doesn't do interviews and he doesn't do television --
regardless of how many times Johnny Carson puts him in his wistful
Top 10 of guests-to-get. He does do tributes. "Jimmy Stewart
and I do -- at our age there's a tribute every five seconds."
And what Grant has recently begun to do are
personal appearances, with conditions: He shows up at a college
auditorium, coming out after a short film in which he is seen being
kissed and slapped by an imposing series of leading ladies, and
answers questions from the audience. No lectures -- "I have no
speech to make, and I can't imagine that anyone would want to listen
to me" -- and easy on the adulation. Cary Grant is a modest
man.
In one of the more remarkable booking coups of
the cultural season, Grant will appear in two of his q-and-a's this
week at Broward Community College (Tuesday evening and Wednesday
afternoon). The program is sponsored by BCC's Office of Cultural
Affairs, and affords anyone with the $14 admission ($12 for the
Wednesday matinee) a rare opportunity to confront the man whom at
least one well-regarded critic has called the most important actor
in the history of the cinema.
So how is old Cary Grant? It is hard to say on
the basis of a 20-minute telephone call, though even a short call is
something of a special treat. Grant, one of the most physically
adept and economical of
screen actors, able to cram the slimmest of
scenes with subtle bits of business and able to use a handsome face
better than anyone the movies have seen, should be dealt with in
person. There is still the voice, of course -- along with Cagney's
and Jimmy Stewart's and the Duke's, the kind of voice with which
impressionists launch their life-of-the-party routines. But the
voice over the line carries its own, eerie quality, being somewhat
larger than life. There is the haunting possibility that one is
talking not to Cary Grant at all, but to Rich Little.
So we begin with the voice. It is actually the
least important of Grant's several performing attributes, but it is
unique. It is suggested that this is the voice that charmed a
million women, quite beyond the procession of leading ladies, and
this makes Cary Grant laugh. "I don't think that's true at
all," he says, but it's easy for him to say. He has been out of
circulation. "I grew up with a Cockney accent, and then I
joined a troupe of acrobats" -- this was when Cary Grant was
still Archibald Leach -- "and then I was with the vaudeville
people. So there was that, and then I came to the United States. And
at first, my voice was something of an affectation, in the early
movies...Now, I have it."
Yes, he does. Cary Grant's voice, with its
deceptive rhythm and the way it turned up at the end of a line, like
a winning smile, enabled him to be petulant and yet never annoying,
a bad little boy, perhaps, but with a grownup's hidden menace; he
could whine without ever seeming to whine at all.
And so Cary Grant could be urbane, suave and
put-upon at the same time, usually in full flight from a gaggle of
female characters and yet, as Pauline Kael has pointed out, usually
able to convey to the most suitable of his pursuers that he really
wasn't all that dedicated to getting away. He could be had (and the
first to observe this was Mae West, in 1933), so long as one
pretended not to notice this was true until the final confrontation.
Hence the kisses and the slaps: How else to deal with the world's
most charming boy?
Grant today professes to know little about this
remarkable chemistry. Like much of the best of his generation of
actors and directors, he treats all movies as simple entertainments
in which he was glad, if not exactly overwhelmed, to have had a
part. Told that a South Florida television station has been running
Cary Grant classics for weeks, he answers quickly, and with a laugh:
"Oh, you poor people."
Well, no. There is a body of critical thought
that holds that Cary Grant never made a bad film, and that includes
his big break, in Mae West's She Done Him Wrong ("Why don't you
come up sometime, and see me?" she said). And it is certainly
true that Cary Grant was the star or costar of more acknowledged
classics than any actor of the sound era.
He virtually invented the screwball comedy, and
with Topper, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday
set a peculiar standard for what comedy could be. It could be funny,
sophisticated and, by the standards of the day, sexy. Grant was
directed by Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, two of the greats who
worked in very different ways on very different themes, and
illuminated the films of both. And he worked with almost all the
stars with whom a male lead should work -- West and Jean Harlow,
Grace Kelly and Katharine Hepburn.
And the first question he is asked, he says, at
these question-and-answer sessions, concerns his favorite leading
lady (the second, presumably, is favorite director). Of course, he
will not say. "They were all my favorites," he says,
sounding suspiciously like Jimmy Stewart -- perhaps the legends get
together and rehearse their dodge-'em lines -- "and it wouldn't
be fair to pick one out, anyway."
But then, Grant says, "the questions get
juicier...There was a woman at one college whose question was, 'Will
you have a baby with me?' I told her she'd have to check with my
wife, who was sitting in the third row...' "
Cary Grant does not go to movies much anymore,
though he is excited by Barbra Streisand's Yentl (to open in South
Florida Dec. 9), while admitting that he is on the board of the
film's distribution company, and hence immutably biased. But he
sounds like a man who wishes there were more Cary Grant movies.
"Movies have changed. They are not so innocent, they're more
violent." And then, perhaps aware that he has begun to sound
like Katharine Hepburn, battling to keep Connecticut safe for
hearts- and-flowers, he says, "But we have all changed, haven't
we?"
Yes, there's a populist strain to what Cary
Grant -- star of The Philadelphia Story, more socially intimidating
than William F. Buckley -- has to say these days. Challenged to
confront his own image, the persona he created and is still in some
ways trapped by, he shrugs it off. "We all make ourselves up,
don't we? We all want to impress people..." Just a job.
And so it is that Cary Grant declines to explore
some areas of inquiry on the grounds that their publication before
his appearance might spoil things for the audience, and for Dr.
Ellen Chandler-Manning of BCC, who has arranged the appearances, and
who Grant says is a perfectly splendid person. One is of two minds
about this: It doesn't make for such a great story, but it does seem
the kind of thing that Cary Grant would do. Perhaps Cary Grant
really is Cary Grant.
And this in turn leads to the line in Pauline
Kael's otherwise definitive essay on Grant, The Man From Dream City:
"Cary Grant has said that even he wanted to be Cary
Grant." It's the perfect line, the observation one hopes for
from a man who made himself up, concerning his fully charming
creation. And by now you will have guessed what Cary Grant says
about it: "No, I never said that. I'm not even sure what it
means..."
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