Two Cary Grant Biographies: A Class Apart (1998), Graham McCann and Cary Grant: A Biography (2005), Marc Eliot.

Without realizing that biographies of Cary Grant are many and vary greatly in quality, I spent much of March making my way through two beginning with Marc Eliot's book.  Struggling to complete it, I found Eliot hyperfocused on Grant's sexuality and mean-spirited to boot.  Eliot can't wait to describe Grant as "Sister Cary" or talk about how he and Randolph Scott, whom Eliot believed (without convincing evidence) was Grant's former lover "priss[ed] and preen[ed] at each other" throughout the film My Favourite Wife.  I have no objections to an author revealing a subject's sexuality but Eliot's tone is too close to homophobia for me and left me unimpressed.  

To cleanse my palate I tried again, this time with A Class Apart by Graham McCann. McCann's book is completely unlike Eliot's:  McCann studies Grant from all angles and considers his various sources carefully (he also draws extensively on Grant's own writings).  He brilliantly discredits previous sensational biographers and provides good dissections of Grant's films (something Eliot unforgivably skips)!  McCann writes about the mystery of Cary Grant, which is in the end the very thing that fascinates us about him: how does an individual adopt a persona, and as far as most of us can see become that persona?  Many come to Hollywood to shed old identities and ethnicities and names, but it was only Archie Leach who emerged as one of the most perfect of a flawless pantheon.  Yet we see through McCann's book that Grant made wise decisions throughout his career and worked carefully to cultivate his image, beginning in the 30s when he broke free of the studio system (one of the earliest actors to do so) and when he chose to work with directors he respected (Hawks, McCarey, Stevens, Cukor and Hitchcock) who he believed could bring out the best in his acting.  "Each of those directors permitted me the release of improvisation during the rehearsing of each scene - rather in the manner that Dave Brubeck's musical group improvises on the central theme, never losing sight of the original mood, key or rhythm, no matter how far they go," wrote Grant. 

I grew up watching Hitchcock flicks but as a kid had no idea what Grant was - English?  American?  It was as though he just dropped fully formed in the streamlined designs of a late-50s film set, wearing a ventless suit.  To the great unwashed audience, me included, how Leach/Grant pulled it off so successfully is a complete mystery.  The colossal gag, I think, is that Archie Leach was probably pretty close to Cary Grant in the first place and it was me watching North by Northwest in our TV room in the basement that was about a million parsecs from either of them.