Troubles of Biographers: G is for Gossip and Cary Grant

Trouble: Gossip makes for lousy biographies but everybody wants to hear it anyway.

My enjoyment of gossip has a shelf life. I read, for instance, very few Hollywood biographies.

Too many of them are lists of all the people that the subject knew. Or all the rumors about the subject. Lists and lists and lists of "so-and-so went to this party and met this person and then starred in this film and it got these ratings." 

The ones where the biographer knew the subject are much the same except the biographer creeps in there: "So-and-so went to this party to which I was invited so I met so-and-so, who said the funniest thing to me and then starred in this film and I practically sort of gave so-and-so the idea because of something I said once..." 

If the biographer has a bad attitude about the subject, the emphasis on nasty rumors is greater but even a good attitude can be off-putting.   

Biographies:

Eliot, Marc. Cary Grant: A Biography.  Harmony, 2004.

Eyman, Scott. Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise. Simon & Schuster, 2020.

Both Eliot and Eyman emphasize Grant's vaudeville training. Eyman, even more than Eliot, emphasizes how utterly ambitious Grant was, not only in rising to the top of his profession but in teaching himself to be a good actor. Although having a very different personality type than Mr. Rogers, Grant was not dissimilar. A commonality emerges. People who make it in show-biz have a kind of single-minded ruthlessness. They know what they want. 

Both Grant biographies spend a great deal of time dishing out gossip. 

Regarding Grant's relationship with Randolph Scott, Eliot assumes--without ever explaining why--that Scott and Grant were lovers. Eyman entirely rejects this interpretation, calling on context, the time period, and pages and pages of notes from a visitor's diary. Where exactly was Grant at 10 a.m. on February 10th?!

I don't much care which of them is right. I did find Eliot easier to read. He presents the beginning and end of the Grant-Scott relationship as story. Eryman comes off as more defensive (though probably more accurate) and nastier. I gave up on his biography. 

Here are both biographers discussing Grant's behavior toward Scott and others--

Eliot: Like Scott, Grant's physical needs and desires were not particularly overheated. Sex was almost an afterthought, a natural extension of the buddy-buddy, British-schoolboy-type friendship they shared...Grant's attraction to Scott's physical attributes and southern-bred ways was nicely burnished with one quality Grant envied most in his partner and that he considered requisite for anyone he would ever be involved with--financial security. (79-81)

Eryman: [Grant] was extremely smart, almost cunning, or, perhaps, just profoundly indifferent. There is plausible evidence to place him inside any sexual box you want--gay, bi, straight, or any combination that might be expected from a solitary street kid with a street kid's sense of expedience. What you saw in Cary Grant depended on which team you were rooting for. What all this overlooks is that neither Archie Leach nor Cary Grant ever played on any team but his own. (94)

Note that Eliot and Eyrman agree about the basics. For all his refined later persona, Grant was rather like Charles Dickens: a man who had experienced poverty (emotionally and financially) and didn't find it particularly attractive. Leach/Grant never forgot that he didn't want to go "home." 

Yet although Eryman's analysis seems roughly more accurate, the tone is extremely off-putting. Grant comes across as sociopathic. Eliot, on the other hand, allows that other people around Grant were just as strong and demanding in their personalities. They wanted stuff too. They weren't a bunch of innocents being taken advantage of by the cunning Mr. Grant.

Still--what if you care more about Cary Grant's biography in terms of his movies than in terms of gossip? 

Read a book about movies, not a biography. 

Burr, Ty. Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame. Pantheon, 2012. 

Grant naturally comes up several times throughout the book. Burr focuses on Grant in the chapter "The Stars Who Talked." He argues--as Eyman and Eliot do--that Grant was not a particularly good actor when he started out. Then he starred in a film that went nowhere, Sylvia Scarlett. Burr writes, 

[M]aybe because it's a character part instead of a romantic lead, Grant seems freed for the first time onscreen. Virile, cruelly funny, acrobatically poised, naturally superior, he's at last the Cary Grant who would dominate the 1940s and 1950s--his own man, insofar as even Cary Grant was uncertain who that man was. (113)

Despite the last line, Burr doesn't single out Grant for attack as if members of Hollywood weren't all trying to remake themselves. He writes, "So many of the stars are unconscious creations consciously arrived at, paintings where each brushstroke is a product of instinct and calculation and luck" (113). 

Sure, Ty Burr addresses Grant's sexuality. Like Eyman, he claims it doesn't matter. Unlike Eyman, he doesn't make that claim after pages and pages and pages of gossiping "proof."  Burr states:

Grant was also an ambitious man with ambivalent feelings about fame and privacy. Decide for yourself whether he was gay, straight, bisexual, or omnisexual (there's at least one biographer for every theory) and note, too, that a sense of hidden depths, of multiple levels to the persona (and we're just seeing the top two or three) ground his mature performances and keep him from seeming like an empty tuxedo. Far from it; Hepburn once described Grant as "personality, functioning" and in his best performances...he is just that: a Whole Man, balancing shades of darkness and light in a way no other classic-era actor achieved. (113-114)

Burr's analysis is insightful, illuminating. So--the lesson here? Maybe, in the end, a biography can't do a subject justice.