Between the Pages

Cary Grant was one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood in the mid-20th century.  He made 72 films in his career, and was – and is – loved by fans the world over.  However, there was another side to Cary Grant.  He married five times, experimented with LSD, and was constantly the subject of specualtion over his alleged homosexuality.

This book charts his life, and attempts to compare and contrast the persona of Cary Grant with whom audiences are so familiar, with the private Cary Grant behind the scenes.

I actually found the first half of this book intensely irritating.  It is the job of a biographer to give the details about their subject’s life, not to take speculation and discuss it as if it is fact.  After a good description of Grant’s troubled childhood, and his start in showbusiness with an acrobatic troupe, with whom he went to America and decided to carve out his future in the movie business, Eliot seemed to become preoccuppied with Grant’s alleged homosexuality (this being at a time when being homosexual could destroy an actor’s career).  Grant always denied any attraction to men, yet the author seems to ignore that fact, and give details of relationships with men that Grant apparently had (although he is unable to cite any sources for his information).  When discussing the friendship between Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, Eliot describes the domestic set-up in the bachelor pad which the two men shared, and muses that “sex was an afterthought.”  But where did he get this information?!  (There were also a few minor factual errors elsewhere in the book.  For example, when discussing Director George Cukor, Eliot states that Clark Gable had Cukor fired as Director of Gone With the Wind, because he didn’t like the fact that Cukor was gay.  Although this has been erronously stated elsewhere, it is simply not true.  Cukor actually lost the job because of he found Producer David O. Selznick hard to work with, or get along with.)

The book did improve the further along I got.  There was lots of information about many of Grant’s films, goings on behind the set, and the casting processes.  Most films also have a fairly detailed synopsis (some readers may want to skip these parts if they have not seen the films, because the synopses generally give away the endings to the films).

Grant’s marriages and the possible reasons for the breakdown of four of them are given.  Again, some of this is speculation, but much of it can be verified.  However, I did get the impression that the author spent too much time on the less savoury aspects of Grant’s life – for example, towards the end of the book, casual mention is made of the extensive charity work that Cary Grant did for numerous Jewish charities.  However, this is not mentioned elsewhere in the book at all – surely, such extensive charity work should warrant more than one throwaway line?  Instead, there are numerous references to Grant’s apparent meanness with money – I sometimes got the impression that Marc Eliot did not actually like Cary Grant very  much!

Eliot’s writing does flow well – he would probably make a great novelist – if at times, he does tend towards the cringeworthy – when describing the dimple on Cary Grant’s chin, he says, “…whose two smooth and curved bulges resembled nothing so much as a beautiful woman’s naked behind while she was on her knees in sexual supplication before the godlike monument of his face.”  I’m not making this up!  Fortunately however, there aren’t too many of these kinds of statements.

My overall feeling after reading this book was that it seemed somewhat mean-spirited towards its subject, but there were some interesting aspects – mostly about the movies which we love Cary Grant for giving us.  In fact, had Eliot written a book solely about Grant’s film career, it would have probably made for terrific reading.  This book isn’t awful, but such a major celebrity certainly deserves better.  Grant always tried to keep his personal life private, but he left his legacy of 72 films behind – and maybe those are how he should be remembered.

(Author’s website can be found here.)

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