Cary Grant (7 page)

Better Times
opened on Labor Day weekend (August 31) of 1922, and after seven months that had felt like a lifetime of unemployment, Archie was back working on Broadway. The show ran for six months, and when it closed, Archie was able to convince the others to stay together and form their own company, the Lomas Troupe, named after the man who had first brought them together. Archie proved a diligent manager and soon had the group booked onto the Pantages circuit, a national vaudeville trail that traveled across the country, including a few stops in Canada, before arriving in Los Angeles to play the cir- cuit's namesake theater on Hollywood Boulevard, the West Coast equivalent of New York's famed Palace.

On his first day off in L.A., Archie explored Hollywood just as he had New York City—alone, unplanned, and unhurried. He traveled once more by bus and by the many trolleys that crisscrossed the city and mostly, as everyone else seemed to in those days, on foot. He strolled up and down the sparkling pave- ment of Hollywood Boulevard, marveling at the palm trees along the side- walks, the first real ones he had ever seen, and tried to keep his head tilted toward the sky to catch some of the glorious sunshine that quickly and beau- tifully bronzed his face.

During one of his evening performances at the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, Archie was visited backstage by Douglas Fairbanks, who'd read about the show in the trades and remembered the youngster's name from their voyage to America aboard the
Olympic.
Archie was de- lighted both by the visit and by Fairbanks's invitation for him to visit the set of his latest production,
The Thief of Bagdad.
The next afternoon Archie did just that. As if he were in the eye of a hurricane, he stood motionless off to the side of the massive film stage while dozens of behind-the-scenes workers scurried all around him. Then suddenly he heard his name being called, and he spotted Fairbanks, a wide smile on his face, waving him over for a quick but friendly chat before he shot his next scene. It was a day young Archie Leach would never forget.

When the troupe's engagement at the Pantages ended, Archie reluctantly
returned to New York, dreaming of the day he would be able to return to Hollywood and make movies of his own.

Back in Manhattan, Archie fell into his familiar routines of escorting, selling ties on the street, keeping house with Orry-Kelly and Charlie, and spending many an afternoon at the NVA Club. Acting work was, as always, hard to find, and Archie took whatever morsels came his way. Because he could move well, he'd get an occasional booking as half of a song and dance “duo,” his partner being whatever young out-of-work actress was available. For the union scale of $62.50 a night, he and his assigned partner would trot out into one of the many new and cavernous movie houses that had sprung up in the suburbs across the river in New Jersey and dance to scratchy recordings played between features while indifferent audiences filed in and took their seats.

Among the younger theatrical casting directors he regularly stopped by to see was Jean Dalrymple, who eventually put him in a vaudeville skit called
The Woman Pays,
which played several months on the junior Orpheum cir- cuit. The gig is notable because it marks his first speaking role. The skit, writ- ten by Dalrymple, centered on Archie, “the handsomest man in town,” being the unwitting object of two overzealous women vying for his affections.

By the time the tour ended, Archie and Dalrymple had become good friends, and slowly, with her guidance, he developed a strong reputation as a willing and reliable “straight man” for whatever vaudeville stars came to town for one-offs (one night of performances). Straight-man work was unpopular among the more established actors, who disliked playing the fool, the foil, or the mark, setting up jokes for comedians who made them, and only them, look good. Archie, however, was more than willing to do that kind of work, but soon ran into new problems no one, including Dalrymple, had antici- pated. Comics like Milton Berle were reluctant to use him because his good looks made it too difficult for audiences to accept him as “the dummy.” Berle was a particularly physical pie-in-the-face type who, like so many jokesters, considered himself also something of a ladies' man and did not appreciate being upstaged by someone as attractive to women as Archie.

At the opening night party of one of these gigs Archie found himself among many of the glitterati of New York vaudeville, including comedians
George Burns and Gracie Allen. Burns had heard about Archie and wanted to meet him.

Archie invited Orry-Kelly to accompany him to the party. Things had not been going well between the three roommates, and Archie saw this as a chance for just the two of them to get out of the apartment and have a good time. While Archie was away on tour, Orry-Kelly had begun to get steady work on Broadway as a costume designer for such theatrical luminaries as the great Ethel Barrymore. Archie had wanted him to stay home and leave the wage-earning to him. But for Orry-Kelly, career was not just the first but the only priority.

Unfortunately, things came to a head at the party, when Archie and Orry- Kelly got into a loud shouting match that horrified the other guests. Burns, in particular, was disgusted by the public display and asked friends why every- one had to be a witness to all this “homosexuality.”

Believing he and Orry-Kelly had come to an impasse in their relationship, Archie began seeing more of Lester Sweyd, a vaudevillian star ten years his senior whom he had first met when both were appearing at the Hippodrome. Sweyd had made a name for himself playing Fonzo, the Boy Wonder in Skirts, before retiring from the stage to become a full-time agent. Shortly after the argument with Orry-Kelly at the party, Archie began spending nights at Sweyd's apartment.

He also began to accept more of the constant offers from Marks to do escort work. His good looks had made him quite popular among the wealthy women around town, and it was an open secret among them that the “social services” of this handsome young actor could be acquired for an entire evening at a quite reasonable cost.

Socializing with the tuxedo allowed Archie to observe, up close, the phys- ical mannerisms of the wealthy and helped him iron out many of the lin- gering cultural wrinkles from his own limited upbringing. He listened carefully to the way these people spoke and worked incessantly on modulating his lingering British singsong lilt into a more descending American rhythm. He practiced his walk to eliminate his street roll, the result of his slightly bowed, naturally acrobatic “Rubber Legs.”

All this physical fine-tuning resulted in his becoming even more attractive to the women who hired him. And while his increasing presence among
the upper strata of the New York social scene may have been mostly deco- rous, it bothered Orry-Kelly that Archie was rapidly gaining a name as the number one gigolo in town, and that such a reputation could hurt both of their careers. One night over dinner Orry-Kelly made it official. Their rela- tionship was over, and Archie would leave the apartment for good.

With his love life in shambles, a tainted reputation, and not a penny to his name, Archie moved out. For the next year and a half he rented a room in an SRO at the NVA Club in Times Square. Fearful that escorting was ruining any chance he might have at making a living on Broadway, he took a series of dead-end jobs waiting on tables or wearing a billboard for a Chinese restaurant across the street from Macy's department store.

Years later, to cover up the failure and humiliation of these times, Grant insisted that in 1925, at the age of twenty-one, he returned to England to appear in repertory with the Nightingale Players. In fact, he never left America at all. Instead, he remained in New York City, lost, lonely, and knocking around, until 1927, the same year he later claimed to have returned from British rep to the United States and New York City.

One thing is certain: the year 1927 would signal the creative rebirth of Archie Leach.

4

T
hat spring, desperate for money, Archie swallowed his pride and called upon Orry-Kelly, to whom he had not spoken for two years, and who had during that time become a highly sought-after Broadway set and costume designer. Orry-Kelly was happy to hear from him, but was still not willing to take him back. Instead, he agreed to pay for a small studio apartment for Archie on East 80th Street, in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. This new neigh- borhood felt strange to Archie. It seemed light-years from Times Square, with a huge influx of German immigrants and many crowded restaurants that spe- cialized in that country's heavy cuisine. He much preferred the more familiar show business surroundings of Rudley's, the theatrical bar and grill on 41st and Broadway where he now was a familiar face, nicknamed “Kangaroo” by fellow drinking buddies because of his accent and funny walk. Among them were some of the biggest up-and-coming names in show business, including screen- writer Preston Sturges, playwrights Moss Hart and Edward Chodorov, Broadway song-and-dance man George Murphy, and a stage actor with the
unusual name of Humphrey Bogart. Although Archie became extremely pop- ular among this heady crowd and was granted the privilege of sitting at their large, Algonquinesque table, he felt a bit intimidated and tended to say little. According to Chodorov, “He was never a very open fellow, but he was earnest and we liked him.”

Orry-Kelly was also part of the elite gay Broadway social scene, and at a party one night producer Reginald Hammerstein, the younger brother of Oscar Hammerstein II (grandson of the legendary Broadway impresario), told him he was casting his big new fall musical,
Golden Dawn.
Orry-Kelly replied that he ought to check out Archie Leach, an actor he thought would be perfect for it.

The next day Reggie set up an appointment for Archie and during the audition developed an immediate and intense crush on him. Archie, who would later on recall Reggie only as a “happy acquaintance,” nevertheless began a romantic relationship with the young producer. They were seen together at many of the best nightclubs in town, and before long Reggie told Archie the role in
Golden Dawn
was his. He also convinced his uncle, Arthur Hammerstein, now in charge of the theatrical dynasty's business end, to sign Archie to a one-year personal management contract to run through the 1927–28 theatrical season. The agreement gave the Hammerstein organization exclusive rights to Archie's services at a starting salary of $75 a week, renewable through 1933 at pre-set increases to $800 a week. Archie eagerly signed on the dotted line, and that fall the show opened on Broadway.

Golden Dawn
is the story of a white goddess who rules an African tribe, a flimsy premise that allowed for extravagant sets and numerous musical numbers with touches of minstrelsy, lots of jazzy pop, and a finale notable for featuring mainstream Broadway's first topless chorus line. Its main attraction (besides the naked bodices of its beautiful chorines) was the appearance of Metropolitan Opera star Louise Hunter.

The show opened on November 30, 1927, to largely negative reviews (the most memorable coming from the
New York Daily Mirror
's Walter Winchell, who dubbed it
The Golden Yawn
) and quickly closed.

Archie, who was cast in a secondary role of a youthful Australian POW with one song and a single line of dialogue, was, ironically, the only person who benefited from
Golden Dawn.
His appearance, brief as it was, proved
good enough to get him signed by Billy “Square Deal” Grady, a young hus- tling William Morris agent. Grady was convinced that Archie could be a star, and he worked closely with the Hammersteins, who still held exclusive rights to Archie's services on Broadway, to get him into
Polly,
slated for Broadway later that year.

Polly,
a musical adaptation of a 1917 stage comedy,
Polly with a Past,
starred British music hall sensation June Howard-Tripp, vaudevillian Fred Allen, and comedienne Inez Courtney. Archie was cast as a society playboy opposite Howard-Tripp, a poor girl masquerading as a rich one.

Unfortunately, June took an instant dislike to Archie, and despite (or per- haps because of) his strong out-of-town reviews, she complained to the pro- ducers that he was unsuited to play opposite her. His British working-class accent, she said, made a mockery of his rich playboy character, and besides not being able to act, in her opinion, he also could neither dance nor sing.

To appease their star, the producers reluctantly fired Archie, although he was still in the show when it had its out-of-town tryout in Philadelphia, where the great Florenz Ziegfeld happened to see him in it and decided he wanted him to star in the national tour of his Broadway hit
Rosalie.
^*

Ziegfeld's world-famous Follies had by now taken up permanent residence in the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street, built shortly after the turn of the century, the Klaw and Erlanger Booking Agency. By 1910, Marc Klaw and Abraham Erlanger's professional differences with the Hammersteins had escalated into a personal feud (which would eventually help bring down the Hammerstein empire). The Hammersteins hated Ziegfeld, who was firmly in the Klaw and Erlanger camp, believing he had stolen much of the original Hammerstein concept of style, flash, and glitter for his Follies.