Authors: Marc Eliot
Victorian society believed that no crime went unpunished. If the authorities of the state did not arrest and prosecute those who broke the legal code, a higher authority surely would avenge those who broke the moral one. Such was the only explanation Elsie could fathom to explain the unexpected death of her firstborn, John William Elias Leach.
She had given birth at home on February 9, 1899, and from the moment baby John took his first breath, Elsie devoted herself to his every need. She showered him with all the love and affection she withheld from her husband, who, she believed, had not remained true. He was surely the cause of God's retribution on their home when, in his eighth month of life, the child developed a cough, followed by violent convulsions and the onset of a fever that would not break. John died of tubercular meningitis on February 6, 1900, two days before his first birthday and one day before Elsie's twenty-third.
She would not allow herself to cry at baby John's funeral. Throughout the solemn service she sat tearless, cloaked in black, and stared straight ahead into the private world of her overwhelming grief. God had indeed punished
Elias for his sins and in so doing had brought His wrath down upon her as well, taking back the fruit of their corrupted marriage. After his burial, baby John's name was never spoken again by either Elsie or Elias.
In the spring of 1903 Elsie became pregnant once more, a sign, she believed, of a merciful God. She had Elias redecorate the room that had been her firstborn's and add more insulation to the walls and ceiling to prevent any deathly drafts from blowing onto her new baby.
Archibald Leach was born on January 18, 1904. Early on, to ensure his good health and moral righteousness, Elsie imposed her obsessive orderliness upon the lad, a prudent upbringing that would stay with him the rest of his days. “As a little boy,” he would remember nearly eighty years later, “I was fined for spilling things on the tablecloth. Thruppence a blib. But that wasn't so bad. I had a shilling a week for allowance, so I had four blibs—and we only put the tablecloth on the table on Sundays.”
Elsie enjoyed keeping little Archie's hair long and curly and dressed him in frilly clothes that resembled nothing so much as a little girl's dresses. Much has been made elsewhere of this early treatment as the speculative root of Cary Grant's later bisexuality, and while it may indeed have been a factor, this was the common style of Victorian childrearing in pre-Freudian England. A toddler's sexuality was presumed to be nonexistent, and the so- called cross-dressing of boys was nothing more provocative than a mother's innocent “dolling up” of her baby, without regard to gender. Nevertheless links are links, and Freud did establish that sexual feelings are present in children, and that preadolescent emotional connections are often retained, in one form or another, for a lifetime. In his thirties Cary Grant and his house- mate and lover Randolph Scott often showed up at costume parties dressed as women, and in his mid-fifties Grant surprised reporter Joe Hyams by admitting that he still often preferred wearing women's nylon panties under his regular clothes when he traveled because they were easier to pack than men's underwear and he could wash them out himself, which saved on hotel laundry bills.
As likely to have influenced the young Grant's psyche as his too-close physical attachment to his mother was Elias's frequent absences, which deprived him of a father's normalizing presence. In truth, her husband's nights away from home no longer worried Elsie. Instead, she saw them as an
opportunity for additional uninterrupted playtime with her perfect little Archie.
And yet even as the boy grew more attached to his mother and her possessive ways, he still strongly identified on some level with his father. If Archie had become the surrogate husband to his mother, receiver of her smothering affection and perhaps a bit of her misplaced rage, on some primitive or instinctive level he probably knew why Daddy wasn't always around. The few nights Elias did stay home, he and Elsie had loud arguments over money (or the lack of it), which only deepened the emotional split in the boy's loyalties between the two and secured the groundwork for his well-known lifelong thriftiness and later conflicted views of adult love—his uneasy acceptance of the public's at-times-wild adulation, the chaste pursuit of women he believed he unconditionally loved, his failure at marriage, his preference for the company of men over women, or the choice of no company at all. “My parents tried so hard and did their best,” Grant said later on. “The trouble was that they weren't happy themselves. The lack of money for my mother's dreams became an excuse for regular sessions of reproach, against which my father learned the futility of trying to defend himself. But that isn't really to say that either one of them was ‘wrong’ or ‘right.’ They were probably both right.”
Elias (Jim to his friends) was, if anything, relieved by his exclusion from his fatherly responsibilities to his son. He preferred the aroma of cigar smoke and ale spilled on wood at a local pub to the hot cabbage and cold wife waiting for him at home. Whenever Elias did get to spend time alone with his son, it was that much more fun for the both of them. When Archie was just five, his father began taking him to the pressing factory on Saturdays, where the boy loved to stand amid the loud machinery until closing time, then walk through town holding his hand above his head to reach his father's big one as Elias made the rounds of the local pubs and the traveling cribbage games. Archie always received two rewards for “assisting” his father at work. The first was a wrapped candy he was encouraged to fish for with his fingers in the well-pressed pants Elias wore for after-work activities. The second was the advice of a man who admired fine clothing, who believed that visual presentation, despite one's social standing, was the best way to self-promote. One afternoon Elias, after noticing the inferior quality of Archie's shoes, gave him a stern but loving lecture about the importance of proper footwear. Elsie,
ever thrifty and practical, had bought Archie four pairs of inexpensive shoes. It was the kind of thrift Elias did not approve of. To him, the dress-up shoes his son wore looked “cheap” and “wouldn't last.” Better to have just one good pair, he advised the young boy, than several that were worthless. “Buy less at higher quality” was a lesson Archie would remember the rest of his life.
*
One of Elias and Archie's favorite Saturday-night pastimes was to go to a Bristol music hall or vaudeville theater to see pantomime—a particularly raucous and quite popular entertainment where men played both male and female parts, and the male lead was always played by a young and usually attractive woman—and the song-and-dance routines of the newest performers.
In 1909, at just five years of age, young Archie caught his first glimpse of the performer he would be obsessed with for much of of his life. Charlie Chaplin was a member of the Karno Players, a traveling vaudeville group that regularly toured the music hall circuit that included Bristol. A year later, Karno took Chaplin and others to America, a journey from which Chaplin would not return. He became a solo sensation first in the New York City vaudeville houses along Forty-second Street, then in short film comedies, and triumphed in Hollywood when he gave the world, and Archie, the gift of “the Little Tramp.”
Elias was a bit of a piano-roller himself, and soon enough young Archie could plunk out some pretty fancy rhythms on the pub's beer-stained clanky uprights. When Elsie learned of her son's musical talent, in a gesture of kindness perhaps tinged with parental competitiveness, she had her father buy a fancy brand-new upright for the family living room. The arrival of the piano angered Elias, not because he didn't enjoy the boy's playing but because he
hadn't paid for it himself, and his loud but hollow complaints about not wanting to live off her father's charity set off yet another squabble over money that was anything but music to young Archie's ears.
At Elsie's insistence, Archie began studying classical piano, while at his father's urging he continued to develop his music hall style. The conflicted direction of his percussive abilities confused the boy, even as it became yet one more focal point of his parents' polarization, to the point where, while he loved to play, he rarely did for either of them.
Soon enough Elsie, ever the practical puritan, decided that her young boy's God-given talents (aided by the strong left hand, which he naturally favored) qualified him for early admission to one of the best schools in the area, the Bishop Road Junior School in Bishopston. She was rightly proud when Archie's musical abilities convinced the board he was fit to take one of the few available vacancies. The only thing that concerned her was Archie's left-handedness, something she feared might keep the school from allowing him to enroll.
Once enrolled, five-year-old Archie played the piano far less often than he kicked a football, and his unusually deft playground skills won him the friendship and admiration of the other boys his age and older. With all the good food and exercise he got, he spurted upward like a bean weed, stretching to a full six foot one before his thirteenth birthday. What then became apparent to everyone at school, students and teachers alike, was how unusually handsome young Archie was, tall, strong, and blessed with a face that was embossed with his mother's dimpled chin and rich brown eyes and his father's thick black wavy hair and ready smile.
If life seemed better for him at Bishop Road, his absence from home only made things worse between Elsie and Elias. Without Archie as the restraining buffer, their bickering became more frequent, and always centered on either Elias's philandering or his lack of sufficient income. More than once their fights turned physical. For Elias, as he saw it, at times the only way to deal with his stubborn wife was to beat her into proper submission.
Whenever things became too intense between them, Elsie simply left until thing cooled down. It eventually became clear to Elias that the situation between them was hopeless and that he had to leave for good. Unable to pay for a divorce, he figured out a route to freedom by taking a factory job
in Southampton, eighty miles southeast of Bristol near the southern shore, to make uniforms for both militaries in the ongoing Italian-Turkish conflict.
Years later Grant would recall in this revealing description the traumatizing incident of what he took as his father's abandonment and his own culpability in helping to drive him away: “Odd, but I don't remember my father's departure from Bristol.
Perhaps I felt guilty at secretly being pleased, but now I had my mother to myself … anyway, I don't remember my father's going, but I missed him very much despite all his, and therefore my, faults”
(emphasis mine).
In Southampton, Elias quickly took a young mistress by the name of Mabel Alice Johnson and set up a second household. They soon had a baby, born out of wedlock, while back home, Elsie and Archie were forced to move to even smaller quarters.
Whenever Archie made the occasional visit to Southampton to visit his father, Elias made no secret of his new live-in relationship, and rewarded the boy's arrival with a trip to the local cinema to see the latest Chaplin–Mack Sennett two-reeler. Archie always laughed out loud at Charlie's put-upon character and exasperated glances through the camera—straight at him!— that brought a special brightness and joy to his otherwise lonely life.
IT WAS A JOY THAT
would not last. One day in 1914 when he was ten years old, Archie came home from school and could not find his mother. With the war imminent, relatives had begun to live together to share ration books. Despite their smaller house, Elsie had taken in two of her brother's children, both of them older than Archie; now they silently watched as he ran from room to room looking for his mum. When he finally asked where she was, they said she had gone to a seaside resort for a little while. Why, Archie wondered, would she do that without taking him along? Without even telling him? And who was going to take care of him while she was away?
Elsie's sudden disappearance deepened Archie's increasingly tortured feelings of abandonment, guilt, and despair that would, in one form or another, stay with him for the rest of his life. Years later, Grant had this to say about his many failed marriages: “I [made] the mistake of thinking that each of my wives was my mother, that there would never be a replacement once she left. I found myself being attracted to [women] who looked like my
mother—she had olive skin, for instance. Of course, at the same time I [often chose] a person with her emotional makeup, too, and I didn't need that.”
What did happen to Elsie? Where had she gone? Not to a seaside resort, and not for a little while, as his relatives first told him. That story was quickly replaced by another; his mother had died of a heart attack.
The news devastated the young boy, who soon began to act out both his rage at being abandoned again, this time by his mother, and his guilt for somehow having caused both his parents to leave him. He soon turned to petty thievery and kept at it, even when, mostly out of pity, the community awarded him a scholarship to the prestigious Fairfield Secondary School. It was there he met his first girlfriend, someone he would still remember decades later as “plump, pretty, and frankly flirtatious” but utterly beyond his reach. The daughter of a local butcher, the girl so turned Archie's head that one day while staring at her, he walked straight into a lamppost and very nearly knocked his own teeth out.
That summer, Archie relocated himself to Southampton. He longed to move in with his father, but Elias said no, claiming that the woman he lived with and their baby, Archie's half-brother, took up all the room in the house. Archie then volunteered for summer work as a messenger and gofer on the military docks, often sleeping in alleys at night if he didn't make enough money to rent a cot in the local flophouse. This was wartime, and one of his daily chores was to hand each soldier a life belt before he set out from the English Channel in a transport ship, many of which were sunk by German submarines only a few miles offshore. Out of his sense of patriotism, Archie refused to accept any tip money from the soldiers for whom he ran these errands. Instead, he would take a military button or a regimental badge. He coveted these as if they were the true reflection of his self-worth and proudly wore as many of them as he could fit on his own belt.