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complete. No one else was quite like him. There was something odd, something peculiar even, about his perfection.

      ‘Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,’ said Cary Grant. ‘Even I want to be Cary Grant.’¹⁸ It was not meant as a boast, but rather as an admission of vulnerability. Cary Grant appreciated – more so than anyone else – how difficult it was to be ‘Cary Grant’, because he knew that he was far from perfect. ‘How can anyone’, asked David Thomson, ‘be “Cary Grant”? But how can anyone, ever after, not consider the attempt?’¹⁹ It is really not so strange that even Cary Grant could not always succeed in being ‘Cary Grant’. It is not as if Archie Leach had always found it easy to be Archie Leach. The difference is that everyone knows who ‘Cary Grant’ is supposed to be, everyone knows the rules, while not even Archie Leach was ever very sure of who Archie Leach was supposed to be.

      Everybody knows Cary Grant. What everybody knows about Cary Grant, however, is largely what he wanted us to know. Leslie Caron, one of his last co-stars, recalled: ‘He would say, “Let the public and the press know nothing but your public self. A star is best left mysterious. Just show your work on film and let the publicity people do the rest.”’²⁰ He lived much of his life on the screen, in the movies, making us believe in Cary Grant, showing his image at each stage in its slow and subtle evolution. When he retired, he withdrew from view. There were no opportunities for disenchantment: no kiss-and-tell memoirs, no television specials, no embarrassing scenes, no political pronouncements, no diet books or diaries, no talk-show appearances, no authorised biographies, no comebacks, no second thoughts. He never told us how he had managed to be Cary Grant so well for so long. He cared too much, or too little, to let on; he liked to keep us guessing. To accept definition was to invite disqualification. He was content, it seemed, just to live with – or behind – the mystery. The mystery had, after all, served him very well. Why let in daylight upon magic?²¹ ‘Besides,’ he said, with a playful insouciance, ‘I don’t think anybody else really gives a damn.’²²

      Cary Grant was an excellent idea. The last person who wanted to deconstruct that idea was Cary Grant:

      Who tells the truth about themselves anyway? A memoir implies selectiveness, writing about just what you want to write about, and nothing else. To write an autobiography, you’ve got to expose other people. I hope to get out of this world as gracefully as possible without embarrassing anyone.²³

      It was typically Cary Grant: polite, urbane, decent and discreet – and very much in control. He looked on with wry amusement as the old tales were retold and the new myths manufactured: he ignored all the parodies and pretenders, all the old quotations and well-worn misconceptions, all the ‘Judy, Judy, Judys’ and the ‘How old Cary Grants’. He did not rise to the bait. He refused to involve himself in the investigations. He kept his self for himself. ‘Go ahead, I give you permission to misquote me,’ he told his uninvited chroniclers. ‘I improve in misquotation.’²⁴

      Cary Grant, in more than one sense, was a class apart. Socially, he was a glorious enigma, eluding every pat classification. Artistically, he was, in his own particular field, without peers. In a leading article in the Washington Post shortly after his death, it was said that the name ‘Cary Grant’, ‘in the absence of anyone remotely like him on the screen, continued to be a synonym for a set of qualities his friends and admirers inevitably summed up as “class”’.²⁵ Cary Grant did indeed have class. He was a master of the ‘high definition performance’, a term defined by Kenneth Tynan as ‘the hypnotic saving grace of high and low art alike’, characterised by ‘supreme professional polish, hard-edged technical skill, the effortless precision without which no artistic enterprise – however strongly we may sympathise with its aims or ideas – can inscribe itself on our memory’.²⁶

      Everybody wanted to be Cary Grant. Everyone else, before and since, failed. It took someone special to succeed. It took Archie Leach.

       BEGINNINGS

      It is not dreams of liberated grandchildren which stir men andwomen to revolt, but memories of enslaved ancestors.

      WALTER BENJAMIN

      Peace. That’s what I’m looking for. I want peace. Withhappy hearts and straight bones without dirt and distress.

      Surprises you, don’t it? Peace – that’s what us millions want,without having to snatch it from the smaller dogs. Peace – tobe not a hound and not a hare. But peace – with pride tohave a decent human life, with all the trimmings.

      NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART

       CHAPTER I Archie Leach

       Don’t I sound a bounder!

      CARY GRANT

      Take it from me: it don’t do to step out of your class.

      JIMMY MONKLEY

      Cary Grant was a working-class invention. His romantic elegance, as Pauline Kael remarked, was ‘wrapped around the resilient, tough core of a mutt’.¹ It is one of the greatest and most mischievous cultural ironies of the twentieth century that the man who taught the privileged élite how a modern gentleman should look and behave was himself of working-class origin. It took Archie Leach – poor Archie Leach – to show the great and the good how to live with style. It was Archie Leach, born into such inauspicious circumstances, who became the man others liked to be seen with, a role model for the socially ambitious, the well bred and even the royal. ‘When you look at him’, said Kael, ‘you take for granted expensive tailors, international travel, and the best that life has to offer.’² Cary Grant exuded urbane good taste and inoffensive prosperity: ‘There were no Cary Grants in the sticks’; Grant represented the most distinguished example of ‘the man of the big city, triumphantly suntanned’.³

      The transformation of Archie Leach into Cary Grant was contemporaneous with, but different from, that of James Gatz into Jay Gatsby. The mysterious and glamorous figure in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby ‘sprang from his Platonic conception of himself’,⁴ suddenly, out of sight, without explanation. Cary Grant, on the other hand, took time to take over Archie Leach. Both Leach and Gatz came from poor backgrounds, their parents ‘shiftless and unsuccessful’;⁵ both longed to grow, to change, to escape (Leach from Bristol, Gatz from West Egg, Long Island) and reinvent themselves as the kind of attractive, successful, stylish young man of wealth and taste ‘that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent’;⁶ and both possessed an extraordinary ‘gift for hope’,⁷ a quality commented on by another character in the novel:

      If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.⁸

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