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THERE'S CHAMPAGNE cooling in a silver bucket and
C.K. Dexter Haven in a shocking-pink silk bathrobe. "Howdya
like it?" he croons, smoothing the lapels. "It's my aging
actor's outfit."
He looks like Cary Grant. He sounds like Cary
Grant. He is Cary Grant.
And so splendidly Cary Grantish, with his thick, snow-white hair,
lilting, affected accent, twinkling brown eyes, dimpled chin and tan
face that should be carved on Mount Rushmore.
He is wearing beige pajamas under the pink
bathrobe because it's 11 a.m. and he just got out of bed because
he's sick. An unspecified infection.
"I'm not going to tell you. I'll tell you
what if you don't print it. It's so bloody silly."
He tells what it is.
"I'm riddled with antibiotics."
He'll go back to his hotel room bed right after
breakfast and a 90-minute chat with a reporter who is being
scrutinized by a certain Mrs. Cary Grant who is packing up their
clothes to fly to Monte Carlo to see "Rainier."
"May I steal one of your English
muffins?" he says, leaning over the small table set up in the
sitting room of the suite. Room service has arrived with two
soft-boiled eggs for him, cold cereal for his fifth wife,
33-year-old Barbara Harris, and tea and muffins for their guest.
He is terminally debonair, utterly witty, and
smoother than a Brandy Alexander. But this morning, he seems a bit
grumpy. He will not allow a photographer, and he shrinks from the
sight of a tape recorder. "Don't tell me you're going to use
one of those things," he says, horrified. "Take notes.
You're a good enough reporter."
He's here to tape the Kennedy Center Honors
gala, which will air later this month. He hates to make speeches,
can't read the cue cards and this morning has tried to strap a
second watch on his left wrist.
"Oh, look at me, I'm half awake, putting on
two watches."
He is 79 and looks 20 years younger, due to a
life-long obsession with keeping fit and tan, and the awesome
responsibility of preserving the Cary Grant persona.
He smiles. "I sit with my back to the
light."
On Jan. 18, Grant will turn 80. That's right.
Eight O.
"Everyone grows older," Grace Kelly is
said to have once remarked, "except Cary Grant."
She was right. The man born as Archibald Leach
may be turning 80, but Cary Grant? Impossible. Pauline Kael, in her definitive
essay on Grant ("The Man From Dream City"), called him
"immortal--an ideal of sophistication forever."
Still, the thought of immortality is nagging at
him. Especially on the eve of his birthday, when everyone wants to
know how it feels to be Cary Grant at 80.
"I don't know how I consider death,"
he says, crossing his long legs and dipping a toast point into the
tiny pot of strawberry jam. "So many of my friends have been
doing it recently."
He ticks off the familiar names on his long,
slender fingers: Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, David Niven.
"My only fear is that I don't embarrass
others. That I don't die an ugly death."
He crosses his legs. "I hope," he
says, brown eyes twinkling, "I do it well."
As if Cary Grant is capable of doing anything
unwell.
"My mother did it rather well. She just
went to sleep. That's what I'd like to do."
He smiles. "Who knows? I may go outside and
get knocked down by a cab."
He made 72 movies, never won an Oscar, never
said, "Judy, Judy, Judy," married five women, experimented
with LSD, fathered one child, never had an agent, made millions of
dollars, doesn't have any hobbies, reads history and biographies but
never novels.
He wears a Size 43-Long suit, weighs 186 pounds,
and is 6 feet 1 1/2 inches "and shrinking."
He'd like to have more children.
"I'm capable, sperm-wise," he
confides.
"Oh, darling, she'll print that," his
wife says.
Cary Grant's haunting good looks and impeccable
timing have made him arguably the greatest, most enduring presence
of the American cinema, and directors like Alfred Hitchcock, George
Cukor and Howard Hawks tapped his talent for screwball comedy and
romantic intrigue to produce the best that Hollywood had to offer.
He was the man Mae West asked to come up
"sometime and see me" (not "C'mon up and see me
sometime," according to Richard Schickel's new biography,
"Cary Grant, A Celebration").
He was the man Grace Kelly coolly offered the
choice of "breast or leg," the man John F. Kennedy wanted
to play him in his life story. He was chased by Katharine Hepburn,
Rosalind Russell, Mae West, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Eva Marie
Saint, Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day and
Sophia Loren, who almost became wife number four had it not been for
a certain Carlo Ponti.
He was always the reluctant suitor. But as Mae
West observed, he "could be had." It was precisely this
blase' attitude toward the opposite sex that made him such an
obscure object of desire.
His movies number on most everyone's list of
all-time favorites: "Sylvia Scarlett," "Topper,"
"The Awful Truth," "Bringing Up Baby,"
"Holiday," "Gunga Din," "His Girl
Friday," "My Favorite Wife," "The Philadelphia
Story," "Suspicion," "Notorious," "Mr.
Blandings Builds His Dream House," "To Catch a
Thief," "An Affair to Remember," "North by
Northwest."
Cary Grant is an original. Which is why every
woman wants him. And every man wants to be like him. Some mimic
Bogie's sneer. Or Gable's squint. But nobody does Cary Grant as well
as Cary Grant.
He made his last movie in 1966, a limp comedy
called "Walk, Don't Run."
"Now you know why I left films," he
grumps.
It wasn't one of his best.
"It isn't good either."
His favorite film?
"It depends on what you mean," he
says, characteristically dodging the question. "Which did I
have the happiest time? Which made the most revenue? There are many
ways of looking at them. I suppose they all have sentimental
value."
He sounds weary. As if the question might have
been asked before. Like maybe a million times before.
"I enjoyed working mostly with Hitchcock.
And Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, George Stevens. Those I remember
most. I remember the camaraderie. The company."
Was Hepburn hurt when he, as the inimitable C.K.
Dexter Haven, shoved her to the floor in the opening sequence of
"The Philadelphia Story"?
"I had a vague idea she rather liked
it," he says, warming to a question that may have been asked
only a quarter of a million times. "She hit me rather too hard
in the previous picture, 'Sylvia Scarlett,' an ill-fated film which
has now become a cult film. She hit me a resounding slap and I said,
" 'Oh, Kate, the day will come,' and the day came."
He flashes a grin.
"I think I did it rather well."
The phone rings. Barbara Grant answers it in the
bedroom, then walks to her husband. "It's the doctor. He wants
to talk to you."
Grant points to his chest. "Me? Oh,
dear."
He takes the phone. "Hullo. I'm feeling
much better. I slept well . . . only once . . . Thank you very much.
I feel exactly the same way knowing you . . . I shall . . ."
He hangs up the phone.
"Shoot. Where were we?"
He says "shoot" when he's ready for
another question which he never really answers and divides most
things in life into two categories; "Mahvelous" and "Chahming."
Did he want to become such an enormous success?
"I don't know what one wants. One must aim
for something. A congressman must aim to become president. Of
course, one wants to become a success. I think what one aims for is
a degree of admiration, adulation, respect. We all do in life.
"One must select which is most important to
them. You can't do everything.
"You don't have to go after things
aggressively. I don't think I ever did, as far as I can remember. I
think one must steer, select to one's best advantage but not
necessarily to the disadvantage of others. Which is what I think
aggression is."
The price of fame has been high.
"Yes. There's a certain harassment that
goes with it constantly. There's a certain balance to it. There's an
advantage and disadvantage.
"I'm talking now aside from the work. Oh,
the work is always interesting. I'm talking about the other. The
people one would most like to know are the people less apt to bring
themselves to your attention. On the street, at the theater, on a
cruise, anywhere."
The people who are most apt to stop him on the
street are rabid fans of the female persuasion.
"My wife gets rather annoyed."
"I do not," Barbara Grant says hotly.
"Yes, she does," Grant says. "She
gets absolutely furious."
He studies the bacon. It's burnt.
"Next you'll ask me who my favorite actress
is."
As if we didn't know.
"You know who my favorite actress is? Who?
You believe what you read in a clip? That's interesting."
He has been quoted as naming Grace Kelly. His
face softens at the mention of her name.
"Grace is still my . . . also the best
actress. I'm a great admirer of Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, many
actresses, Sophia."
As in Sophia Loren. They made two movies
together, "The Pride and the Passion" and
"Houseboat," and the romance blossomed off screen.
What about Sophia?
"What about Sophia?" he says, eyes
twinkling. "We were friends and hoped to further that, but we
didn't."
There's a knock at the door.
"My love, you'll have to see who's at the
door."
Barbara Grant, her brown hair pulled in a bun,
is wearing a silk dress with a floppy tie at the neck. She goes to
the door and Cary Grant hides in the bedroom doorway, hands clasped
in front of the pink silk robe. He stands there, smiling rakishly,
mimicking his wife who is talking to a porter. It's Grant's
prescription medicine. Cary Grant, it seems, doesn't like to answer
the door.
"See, that's why," he says as his wife
returns to the room with the prescription, after a lengthy dialogue
about him with the porter.
"Yeah," she says.
"Yeah," he mocks.
It's a scene from a Cary Grant movie.
"Shoot shoot shoot," he commands,
going over to the small desk in the corner.
"What are these things?" he says,
examining four pony bottles of brandy neatly aligned near the
blotter, compliments of the hotel. "Can't they see we didn't
drink the ones from last night?"
Is Cary crabby?
"Am I? Am I?" He laughs. "The
things I've been called recently."
He was born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England,
on Jan. 18, 1904, the only child of Elias and Elsie Leach. His
father worked as a presser in a garment factory, and the family,
Grant says, was lower middle class. His mother deserted the family
when Archie was a boy. She went to a mental institution. Grant says
now he doesn't know why. Years later, they were reunited and
remained fairly close until she died at the age of 93.
When she was 89, Grant says, his mother and he
were driving in a car. She told him she thought he should start
dyeing his hair. He asked why. She said, "You should. It makes
me look so old."
Grant guffaws. "Can you imagine?"
He left home at the age of 15 to join an
acrobatic troupe, wound up in New York in 1920 as part of the Bob
Pender troupe, did vaudeville, then Broadway, then took off for a
screen test in Hollywood. He was signed by Paramount in 1932.
He married actress Virginia Cherill in 1934.
They separated after one year and divorced. He then married dime
store heiress and "poor little rich girl" Barbara Hutton
in 1942, and became an American citizen the same year. They were
divorced three years later. His third wife was actress Betsy Drake.
They were wed in 1949 (with Howard Hughes as best man) and divorced
in 1962.
He married actress Dyan Cannon in 1965. A year
later, she gave birth to their daughter, Jennifer, and left him. Two
years later, they went to divorce court and Cannon claimed that
Grant spanked her, had an uncontrollable temper and took LSD every
day for 10 years.
Grant never publicly refuted her claims.
"I did take LSD," he says.
"I told my lawyer to let her say whatever
she likes. You see, a divorce is a very peculiar thing. It's a very
odd game lawyers play. It's psychological."
At the time of the divorce, Grant was reported
to be worth $10 million, with an annual income of $300,000. By that
time, he had become a globe-trotting executive with Faberge', the
cosmetics firm.
Other rumors began to surface about him. A
persistent one said he was gay, which Grant found amusing until
comedian Chevy Chase appeared on a television show and quipped,
"I understand he's a homo" and "What a gal."
Grant filed a $10 million slander suit against
Chase, which has since been settled out of court. "He Chase
felt foolish and stupid," says Grant, frowning. "A
psychologist told me that it would be very interesting to analyze
why he did it, especially because of the similarities in our
careers, that he wanted to be . . ."
Cary Grant?
"Well . . ."
Grant says he has seen one or two of Chase's
films. "He's not bad."
Grant's daughter, Jennifer, is now 17, a
freshman at Stanford University, and the light of his life. He
sorely regrets waiting so long to experience fatherhood.
"I wish I'd had more children," he
says quietly. "At the time, I did not have children because I
did not feel that I could bring them up the way that I would have
wished to. Because of the paucity of my own youth. It lacked many
advantages."
He stares out the window. "So I kept on
taking care of me and mine. My own security. I was selfish,
perhaps."
And egocentric?
"I don't know."
That paucity propelled him to a career in show
business, a career of love and adulation. To make up, perhaps, for
all those lonely years in Bristol.
"I think we all do anything to get respect
and a degree of respect. We all need love. It should be, and
unfortunately isn't, the motivation of all life."
As a child, he says, "I was loved to a
moderate degree. My hard-working father and my mother . . . One must
love our parents for what they gave us. To wash ourselves, to be
polite."
Cary Grant never uttered a catty word about any
of his wives. He gallantly claims they all left him. Stories abound
about his fear of women. Betsy Drake, it is said, was the love of
his life.
"They were all the great loves of my
lives," he says. "Of course they were or I wouldn't have
married them nor would they have married me. The best love of my
life is my present wife."
How did he meet Barbara?
"Luckily," he smiles.
Did they meet at a party?
"Well, why does everyone from Hollywood
have to meet at a party?"
Well, they didn't meet at the laundromat.
"How do you know we didn't?" he
guffaws.
Actually, they met in 1976 at the Royal
Lancaster Hotel in London. Barbara Grant was working there doing
public relations. They were friends first, they both insist, then
became lovers, marrying two years ago.
Says Barbara Grant, "I was impressed by the
person, not so impressed by the legend."
"You said I was a legend?" her husband
asks, mockingly.
He leans forward. "I've never understood
the legend."
You believe him. Cary Grant was an invention, a
fantasy. For that reason, perhaps, the real Cary Grant says it was
never a burden.
"It hasn't been difficult at all," he
says, smoothing the pink bathrobe. "I've just been me."
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