Of All the Gin Joints

CARY GRANT

1904–1986
ACTOR

“A shot of brandy can save your life, but a bottle of brandy can kill you.”

Known for his debonair, sophisticated manner, transatlantic accent, and formidable comedic talents, Cary Grant was born in England as Archibald Leach, and ran away from home as a teenager to join a troupe of acrobats. His first big break came when Mae West chose him as her leading man in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel (both 1933). Grant’s career skyrocketed after signing with Columbia in 1936 and starring in such films as The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and His Girl Friday (1940). Later he was known for his seminal work with Alfred Hitchcock (Suspicion, 1941; Notorious, 1946; To Catch a Thief, 1955; and North by Northwest, 1959). A savvy businessman, he was the first major star to break away from the studio system and hire himself out as an independent contractor. Grant founded his own production company in the mid-fifties, through which he made a number of his later hits, including Operation Petticoat (1959). Although he received two Academy Award nominations during the first half of his career—Penny Serenade (1941) and None but the Lonely Heart (1944)—he didn’t take home an Oscar until 1970, when he was presented with a lifetime achievement award. Grant was married five times but hounded by rumors of homosexuality throughout his life, largely due to his close relationship with actor Randolph Scott. He was also an outspoken proponent of LSD.

FOR FIVE DECADES, CARY GRANT played Hollywood’s consummate gentleman. His dashing looks, combined with his grace and humility, became the standard by which debonair leading men have since been judged. Add to that the slightly continental accent, the final coat to Grant’s patina of real-life aristocracy.

But as we know, there’s most always a gap between the person and the persona. And for Grant that gap was a yawning chasm—the pedigree behind that upper-crust accent being far less than blue blood. Grant was born Archibald Leach and raised in Bristol, where his clinically depressed mother was committed to an institution when he was ten. At the time, Grant was simply told she had gone on a long holiday. Already his father had abandoned the family for a new wife and a new baby. So adrift was young Grant that for the next twenty years he believed his mother was dead, until he found her living in an institution in the late 1930s. By then, Archibald Leach had changed his name from the one his parents had given him to his stage name, Cary Grant, and his transformation—from the goofy, insecure orphan into the avatar of worldly confidence—was nearly complete.

As he once confessed, “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.”

But what few would ever know, perhaps even Grant himself, was exactly who the real Cary Grant was. As he once confessed, “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.” Still, it’s remarkable that Grant managed to overcome such childhood trauma, to stitch himself up and live the rest of his life as a movie star. Though he didn’t do it alone. Rather, the threading Grant used was an unusual blend of psychotherapy, psychedelics, and good old-fashioned booze.

Having arrived in the United States at only sixteen, Grant took to drink early. In New York City, while juggling and performing acrobatics in vaudeville, he bartended at a speakeasy with his roommate, the future costume designer Orry-Kelly. Some say they owned and operated the speakeasy out of their little apartment—and that they were lovers, too (there was similar speculation regarding Grant’s later “roommate” actor Randolph Scott). But Grant’s sexuality is just another part of the mystery, even in those early days, when he would walk on stilts in the morning and get legless at night, drinking bootleg beer across not much more than an ironing board. He would later claim, “a man would be a fool to take something that didn’t make him happy.” And perhaps for him, it was a happy time.

Jump-cut thirty years later to Grant as the elegant advertising executive Roger O. Thornill in North by Northwest. Sitting across the table from Eva Marie Saint in that famously impeccable gray glen check Savile Row suit, sipping a Gibson martini. He was still a mystery—one of the few consistencies being his thirst. Though now, even in the throes of celebrity, he would say, “You know what whiskey does when you drink it all by yourself—it makes you very, very sad.” Had Grant become a fool? On set, he would hide his liquor in his coffee cups. On the streets, he had already been extricated from two drunken-driving incidents. Soon he would wake up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, having been discovered unconscious in the bedroom of his home. Acknowledging that he had “spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant, unsure of each, suspecting each,” he started seeing a psychiatrist in search of answers.

Unexpectedly, it would be through therapy that Grant was first exposed to LSD. This as far back as 1957—LSD something not then or since to be found in a gentleman’s handbook. Grant was striving to better understand himself and, through the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills, was let into early experimental trials. Some of the other patients supposedly included Aldous Huxley, Jack Nicholson, Rita Moreno, and musician André Previn. He would go on more than a hundred acid trips, lauding the drug for its therapeutic benefits. “I was an utter fake … until one day, after weeks of treatment, I did see the light.”

But what did that light reveal to our consummate gentleman star? In an interview nearing the end of his life, Cary Grant would point out, “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant.” To which he added, “So do I.” And so the question still remains—just who was he?