Cary Grant (5 page)

Archie reluctantly returned to Bristol that fall for school, still consumed with grief over the death of his mother. He often spent his nights alone in his room, staring at a photo of Elsie, weeping softly as he prayed for God to watch over her soul. On weekends he would take himself to the local docks to watch the schooners and steamships that, he would later recall, “came right up the Avon River into the center of town.” During these periods his notion of leaving Bristol forever intensified: “While most of my school friends were playing cricket, I'd sit alone for hours watching the ships come and go, sailing
with them to far places on the tide of my imagination, trying to release myself from the emotional tensions which disarranged my thoughts.”

In many ways, his longing to “release” himself was not all that different from, in many ways an emulation of, Elias's having found a way out of Bristol. Archie wished to escape as well, but no longer just to Southampton—his dreams now stretched much farther than that. Like his (and every Brit's) hero, Charlie Chaplin, he wanted to travel to the land of magic and dreams. America
—that
was where he longed to go.

THE NEXT SERIES OF EVENTS
have often been described as “a lucky happenstance,” the “fateful meeting of a boy and his mentor,” or as Grant himself would later recall, “a coincidence of destiny zeroing in on my future.” Thirteen-year-old Archie, although at best an average student with a bit of an aptitude for chemistry, was nonetheless befriended by his science professor's part-time assistant, brought in one day to help conduct a class experiment.

The assistant was actually a close friend of the teacher and an electrician who worked at the newly rebuilt Bristol Hippodrome (which then replaced the old Empire). Archie eagerly asked to be taken backstage to see the theater's modern switchboard and lighting system. It was a request his friend happily granted, and Archie quickly learned the technical aspects of putting on a show; he got to watch the performers from the privileged perspective of the wings, from where he could see the awestruck faces of the young boys in the first few rows lit by the spill of stage lighting as they bounced up and down with delight. According to Grant, “That's when I
knew.”
Like Charlie Chaplin, he too would join the theater and see the world!

Archie's electrician friend then introduced him to the house manager of the Hippodrome, who also took a liking to the boy. He often invited young Archie to sit with the backstage crews and occasionally help them pull curtain and lighting cables and change scenery between acts. Archie did so well he was eventually promoted to help the lighting men handle the special twin arc lamps, or limelights, as they were known (for their tendency to throw a pale green halo around performers). They hung from the ceiling at either side of the stage and had to be manually focused to keep the star performers in their special sharp, double-spot illumination.

Eventually Archie was allowed to operate one of the limelights on his own and was good enough with it to operate the all-important center “moving white” at the back of the house. All went well until one time during a performance he misfocused the center spot on a couple of back mirrors that gave away the secret to a headlining magician's best trick. At the magician's insistence, Archie was permanently barred from ever again working at the Bristol Hippodrome.

He was devastated and vowed to never set foot inside another theater, but soon found himself once again hanging around the fringes of Bristol's many playhouses, spending time with the actors he had gotten to know during his brief career as a lighting man. On the odd occasion he was even able to get some pickup work at the Hippodrome as a call boy after school for ten shillings a week, which is how he first heard about Bob Pender's troupe of young knockabout comedians.
^*
Pender's was a specialty act whose performers padded their skits with intricate slapstick numbers, stilt-walking choruses, and intricate mime routines complete with matching costumes and oversize masks. Pender, whose real name was Bob Lomas, had first made a name for himself as a performer in the tradition of the great Drury Lane clowns before forming his own company, intending to follow the path of the legendary Fred Karno traveling shows.

Lomas's entourage was a decidedly family affair. His wife, Margaret, a former Parisian Folies-Bergère ballet mistress, gave the Pender troupe the benefit of her specialized training in movement and balance. Among the lead performers were Lomas's daughter Doris, his brothers Tom and Bill, his widowed sister-in-law, and her son.

Like all companies made up of mostly young performers, Pender's was forever in need of trainable talent to replace those who grew too quickly, got bored and left, fell in love, married, or went into the military. After getting to know young Archie, Lomas invited him to try out as a member of the traveling company. Archie was beside himself! After hanging on the backstage fringes of the business for what seemed like forever, he was, at last, going to have a chance at performing.

He worked up a series of athletic moves he had learned from the older footballers in school, with a couple of flips he had always been able to do, and also showed that he could walk on his hands, a trick his father had taught him. Lomas liked what he saw and offered him a position with the company, provided that Elias give his written approval. Archie immediately accepted, went home, forged a letter of permission from his father, and brought it back to Lomas, who then sent him off to observe the troupe in Norwich.

Unfortunately, Archie's first tour ended abruptly ten days later, while the troupe was still in Norwich, by the sudden and unexpected arrival of Elias. He had been told by Archie's Bristol relatives that the boy had run away. He quickly tracked his son down, confronted Lomas, and informed him that Archie was not yet fourteen, the legal work age in England at the time. Elias demanded that he be returned to school at once and threatened to press criminal charges of abduction of a minor against Lomas. Reluctantly, Archie packed his few things, said good-bye to everyone, and returned to Bristol without ever having appeared on stage.

Back home, Archie longed to return to the theatrical life and came up with a clever plan to make it happen. Years later, according to Grant, he “investigated” the girls' lavatory at school, meaning that he drilled a small peephole through one of the walls to watch the girls go to the bathroom. Other sources claim he reverted to his old ways and was caught stealing. Whatever the reason, his official expulsion, for “inattentiveness, irresponsibility, and incorrigibility,” occurred in March 1918, just two months after his fourteenth birthday. The school's decision conveniently freed him to rejoin the Pender troupe.

That August Archie eagerly signed a three-year contract, this time actually cosigned by Elias, that officially granted him permission to join Pender's troupe, at a weekly salary of ten shillings with board and lodging included and technical training to be provided by Lomas. By now Elias was more than happy to give his son over to Lomas, for reasons that had less to do with Archie's budding talents than his own present needs. When the boy got in trouble at school, the local authorities had investigated why he was living with relatives in Bristol rather than with his father in Southampton. The last thing Elias wanted was the Bristol authorities sniffing into his personal life. Finally, when Elias discovered that Lomas was a fellow Mason
and a family man, he gave his full consent, believing his boy would be well cared for.

ARCHIE PROVED
an apt pupil when he wanted to be, especially in the more physical aspects of British music hall entertainment. His specialties became stilt-walking, tumbling, and pratfalls, to which he brought his natural athleticism and the same kind of natural rhythm and timing he had shown at the piano. At Lomas's urging, he also began to work on his speech to lose his pronounced West Country Bristol brogue. Unable to master “cultured English talk,” he developed a unique vocal mix of rhythms, raspy voice, and hesitant diction, the sound of which would one day be instantly identifiable to movie audiences all over the world.

For the next two years Archie and the troupe traveled the British music hall circuit, occasionally jumping over to the European mainland and the larger theatrical outposts of the Middle East.

By the age of sixteen, six-foot-one Archie Leach, with his handsome face, great smile, easy laugh, and natural athletic ability, had developed a charismatic stage presence that brought him to the front ranks of the Pender touring company. And then it happened. In 1920 Lomas's organization was invited by famed New York impresario Charles Dillingham, Oscar Hammerstein's chief competitor, to come to the United States, to perform at 42nd Street's Globe Theater as the opening act for Fred Stone, one of vaudeville's biggest stars. With room for only eight of the twelve resident young men in his company, Lomas was forced to eliminate one-third of his male leads. Archie could hardly contain himself when he saw his name posted on the bulletin board along with the other youngsters who had survived the cut.

He arose at dawn the morning of July 21, the day of the troupe's departure, and was the first to arrive at the Southampton docks, accompanied by Elias, who wanted to be there to say farewell. After kissing his father goodbye, he boarded the luxury liner RMS
Olympic
(the
Titanic
's sister ship), bound for America.

Also aboard were two of the most famous Hollywood film stars in the world. Douglas Fairbanks and his bride, Mary Pickford, whose marriage had caused an international newspaper and newsreel frenzy, were completing
their six-week European honeymoon with a first-class cruise back to the States. It was just before leaving for the Continent that Fairbanks and Pickford had signed their historic deal, along with Chaplin and D. W. Griffith, to create their own studio, United Artists, with the intention of gaining their artistic freedom and financial independence from the other studios.

When word got out that Fairbanks and Pickford were on the
Olympic
, it thrilled the other passengers, but none more than Archie. Every day he watched the people stream in and out of the dining room until he got his nerve up to approach the glamorous couple for their autographs. Fairbanks and Pickford proved remarkably gracious, and when Archie asked permission to have his picture taken with them, they happily complied. Archie told them how much he admired their movies, and how he hoped one day to be as great a physical actor as Fairbanks, famous for his astonishing acrobatic stunts often filmed in single, uncut sequences. Fairbanks thanked the boy, and then, to Archie's surprise, asked if he would like to join him in his daily on-deck morning calisthenics. Would he! Doing jumping jacks next to the well- tanned, immaculately dressed, and perfectly coiffed actor thrilled Archie and inspired him to “doggedly strive” to keep himself as fit and well groomed as his first famous Hollywood friend.

And so it was, late every afternoon, while the
Olympic
steamed westward and the other passengers took their daily naps, played cards, or stole away for a romantic interlude, Archie Leach stood by himself on deck, leaning over the rail trying to see the face of his future. Freed at last from the prison of British provincialism, he vowed that once in America, he would never again look back at the loneliness and sadness of all his yesterdays, left buried somewhere with Elsie in her Bristol grave.

3

A
rchie's dreams of the future stretched across the ocean like expanding tubes of a telescope until, on July 28, the tip of lower Manhattan finally came into view. As the
Olympic
slowly pulled into New York's harbor and the Hudson River, Archie stood on deck with the hundreds of other passengers, the salt spray cooling his face in the hot sun as they sailed past the silent, welcoming gaze of the Statue of Liberty. When he turned his head in the other direction, while the great ship was carefully tugged into West Forty- sixth Street's White Star pier, he could see for the first time the magnificent tall buildings of Manhattan.