Volume 51, Number 20 · December 16, 2004
The Man in the Smoking Jacket
By Geoffrey O'Brien
Cary Grant: A Biography
by Marc Eliot
Harmony, 448 pp., $25.95
Cary Grant: In Name Only
by Gary Morecambe and Martin Sterling
Robson, 358 pp., $11.00 (paper)
In 1920 Cary Grant—or properly speaking, Archie Leach—was a sixteen-year-old Bristol-born music hall acrobat, specialized in stilt-walking and pratfalls, who was on his way to America for the first time as a member of the Bob Pender troupe. In 1927, after various show-business ups and downs, he was a largely out-of-work actor living in a single-room occupancy hotel in New York, working sometimes as a male escort, sometimes as a tie salesman, sometimes as a sandwich board man for a Chinese restaurant. In 1935 he was a movie actor who, despite having appeared (over a period of only three years) in twenty films opposite such co-stars as Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Carole Lombard, Loretta Young, and Myrna Loy, had failed to live up to the high expectations of his bosses at Paramount, who had signed him in the hope that he would prove a star of the magnitude of Rudolph Valentino or Gary Cooper.
Review, 4397 words
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