This week, Britbox, a streaming service for Anglophiles, launches a four-part miniseries called Archie dramatizing the life of Cary Grant, the Old Hollywood actor born Archibald Leach in Edwardian Britain, whose debonair on-screen persona papered over a Dickensian childhood and a series of failed marriages. Like Rock Hudson and other big stars of the middle 20 th century, Grant himself never said one way or the other, though he was not quite as reticent about it as some other stars of his era.
He told one of his ex-wives about his teenage sexual experimentation with other boys, though he dismissed it as normal British schoolboy behavior. He lived with gay men as a young man and spent his early Hollywood years sharing homes with Randolph Scott, a fellow actor, sparking rumors of a secret romance.
He also openly admitted that each of his ex-wives had accused him of being a homosexual, though Chevy Chase found himself on the wrong end of a lawsuit for saying the same thing before Grant died. Higham also made the claim that Errol Flynn had been a Nazi spy, a false allegation that inspired part of the plot of the movie The Rocketeer.
Caught in the middle are skeptics, who ask why a supposedly gay man would marry five times. Royce told Eyman that Grant confessed his true sexual feelings to him, saying he had been homosexual as a teenager, bisexual as a young adult, and heterosexual after middle age. Everybody, he said, had more than one character inside them. They simply were—part of the journey, not necessarily the final destination.
I have never thought much about Cary Grant, and nothing in the biographies I skimmed through this week has convinced me his life was interesting enough to cast as a drama. But I was impressed by the degree to which Grant biographies share with James Dean biographies a fascination with trying to impose and defend labels rather than simply describe what someone said and did.
