Читать книгу Cary Grant: A Class Apart - Graham McCann - Страница 10

Death merely acts in the same way as absence.

MARCEL PROUST

[I made] the mistake of thinking that each of my wives was my mother,that there would never be a replacement once she left.

CARY GRANT

Archie Leach was just nine years of age when it happened.¹ He had just arrived home, shortly after five o’clock, after an ordinary, quiet, uneventful day at school. He was shocked to discover that his mother had disappeared. She had said nothing to him on the previous day to prepare him for her absence. No one, in fact, had said anything to suggest to him that his mother might not be waiting for him, as usual, at this particular time on this particular afternoon. It was, quite simply, a mystery.

His mother had, it was true, grown stranger, more unpredictable in temperament and behaviour, over the past few months, and he had been aware, to some extent, of the change. She had become increasingly – perhaps even obsessively – fastidious: Archie had noticed that she would sometimes wash her hands again and again, scrubbing them with a hard bristle brush; she would also lock every door in the house, regardless of the time of day, and she had taken to hoarding food; there had even been odd occasions when, inexplicably, she would ask no one in particular, ‘Where are my dancing shoes?’;² and on some evenings she would sit motionless in front of the fire, saying nothing, gazing at the coals, the small room draped in darkness. Archie had also grown accustomed – but by no means immune – to the noisy quarrelling between his parents, as well as to the equally common periods of icy silence which usually followed these arguments.³ Nothing, however, prepared him for such a sudden and dramatic disappearance as this.

Two of his cousins were lodging in part of the house at the time, and, when he realised that his mother had gone, he sought them out to see if they knew of her whereabouts. According to one source, they told Archie that his mother ‘had died suddenly of a heart attack and had had to be buried immediately’.⁴ The more common version, however, first put forward by Grant himself, has Archie being told that his mother had gone to the local seaside town of Weston-super-Mare for a short holiday.⁵ ‘It seemed rather unusual,’ he recalled much later, with a bizarre attempt at English understatement which perhaps had come to serve, in public, as a relatively painless way of obscuring a painfully disturbing memory, ‘but I accepted it as one of those peculiarly unaccountable things that grown-ups are apt to do.’⁶

If his father attempted to reassure him that his mother would soon come home – and it seems that he did so – then it was not long before Archie realised that she was never going to return:

There was a void in my life, a sadness of spirit that affected each daily activity with which I occupied myself in order to overcome it. But there was no further explanation of Mother’s absence, and I gradually got accustomed to the fact that she was not home each time I came home – nor, it transpired, was she expected to come home.⁷

Towards the end of his life he admitted that, once some of the shock had worn off, ‘I thought my parents had split.’⁸

What had really happened to Elsie Leach was that her husband had committed her to the local lunatic asylum, the Country Home for Mental Defectives in Fishponds, a rustic district at the end of one of Bristol’s main tramlines.⁹ Elias had arranged for the hospital’s staff to collect her from their home earlier in the day, and then, after settling her in, he went back to work. He never told his son the truth about the matter.

The asylum at Fishponds was, by quite some way, the worst of the two institutions for the mentally ill in Bristol at that time. Conditions were filthy, and supervision negligible. It cost Elias just one pound per year to keep Elsie inside as a patient. She stayed there for more than twenty years, until, in fact, her husband’s death in the mid-1930s. Was he her gaoler? British law prohibits the unsealing of psychiatric case records until a hundred years after the patient’s death, and, as Elsie lived on until 1973, the actual reasons for her incarceration may remain ambiguous until well into the next century. Dr Francis Page, a Bristol physician, has said that it was ‘always presumed she was a chronic paranoid schizophrenic’, but he also acknowledged that he ‘never did know the official psychiatric diagnosis’ that had been used to keep her institutionalised.¹⁰ She was, it is clear, prone to periods of acute depression, and it is conceivable that she could have suffered a nervous breakdown at this time. It is not so obvious, however, why this in itself should have convinced Elias that the only possible solution would be to abandon her inside the most wretched institution he could find. Ernest Kingdon, a cousin, visited Elsie regularly in Fishponds, and he has insisted that he found her to be resilient and intelligent: ‘She used to write beautiful letters asking why she could not be released.’¹¹

Although the precise state of Elsie Leach’s mental health remains a matter for speculation, it is much easier to establish the reasons why Elias Leach was prepared – or perhaps determined – to have her committed and out of his life. It was a fact – a fact that Cary Grant never acknowledged or commented on in public – that Elias Leach had a mistress, Mabel Alice Johnson. It might have been the shock of her husband’s indiscretion which precipitated Elsie’s breakdown, although, by that time, their marriage was probably not much more than a sham, and Elsie was unlikely to have been entirely unaware of her husband’s numerous earlier affairs. Divorce was both socially unacceptable and financially impracticable. Once Elsie was shut away, however, Elias was at liberty to establish a common-law marriage with his lover and, eventually, have a child with her.¹²

Archie Leach was kept ignorant of his father’s other family. He and his father moved in with Elias’s elderly mother, Elizabeth, in Picton Street, Montpelier, nearer to the centre of Bristol. Elias and Archie occupied the front downstairs living-room and a back upstairs bedroom, while Archie’s grandmother (whom he later remembered as ‘a cold, cold woman’¹³) kept to herself in a larger upstairs bedroom at the front of the house. This arrangement provided, at least in theory, someone to look after Archie while his father was spending time with his new family, and it saved Elias the expense of renting two separate houses for his double life.

Archie Leach never knew the full extent of the extraordinary deception perpetrated by his father.¹⁴ Cary Grant discovered the truth (or at least a part of it) two decades later, in Hollywood, after the death on 1 December 1935¹⁵ of his father from the effects of alcoholism – or, as the official account put it, ‘extreme toxicity’¹⁶ – when a lawyer wrote to him from England to inform him that his mother was in fact still alive.¹⁷ Through the London solicitors Davies, Kirby & Karath, Grant arranged for the provision of an allowance and moved her to a house in Bristol. Elsie Leach was fifty-seven years old, her son thirty-two. She barely recognised the tall, well-dressed sun-tanned star who arrived back in England to be reunited with her. ‘She seemed perfectly normal,’ Grant would recall, ‘maybe extra shy. But she wasn’t a raving lunatic.’¹⁸ As Ernest Kingdon put it, ‘Cary Grant knew very little of his mother. She was a stranger. Late in life, they had to come together and learn to know each other. It was a tragedy, really – a great tragedy.’¹⁹

Suddenly to re-acquire a mother in one’s early thirties must have been, to say the least, a strange experience, just as the sudden reappearance of an adult son one last saw leaving for school at the age of nine must have been profoundly unsettling. ‘I was known to most people of the world by sight and by name, yet not to my mother,’²⁰ Grant would say. He, in turn, would never know how ill she had been. Their subsequent relationship, unsurprisingly, might best be described as ‘difficult’.

Opinions differ as to how difficult the relationship actually was. Any references to mothers in his movies – no matter how slight or frivolously comic – have been pounced upon by some writers for their supposedly deeper ‘significance’: in one, for example, his character – a paediatrician – has written a book entitled What’s Wrong With Mothers.²¹ According to his biographers Charles Higham and Roy Moseley, there was never any real warmth or affection shared by mother and son; Elsie, it is claimed, was a ‘hard, unyielding woman’ who never showed much gratitude for her famous son’s regular flights to Bristol, nor did she allow him ‘to make her rich’, and she ‘remained stubbornly independent and uninterested in his film career till the end’.²² She was not, according to some accounts, a physically demonstrative person, and she could sometimes appear aloof and brusque in the presence of strangers.²³ Dyan Cannon, Grant’s fourth wife, after spending some time with her new mother-in-law, described her as an ‘incredible’ woman with a ‘psyche that has the strength of a twenty-mule team’.²⁴ Grant himself, after her death in 1973, two weeks short of her ninety-sixth birthday, admitted that he had often been exasperated and sometimes hurt by Elsie’s stubborn and misplaced sense of independence:

Even in her later years, she refused to acknowledge that I was supporting her … One time – it was before it became ecologically improper to do so – I took her some fur coats. I remember she said, ‘What do you want from me now?’ and I said, ‘It’s just because I love you,’ and she said something like, ‘Oh, you …’ She wouldn’t accept it.²⁵

According to Maureen Donaldson, who lived with Grant for a brief period in the mid-seventies, he said that his mother ‘did not know how to give affection and she did not know how to receive it either’.²⁶ He is said to have told one interviewer that his mother – in part because of her prolonged absence – had been, until quite late on, ‘a serious negative influence’ on his life.²⁷ Bea Shaw, a friend of Grant’s, recalls him as being ‘devoted to his mother, but she made him nervous. He said, “When I go to see her, the minute I get to Bristol, I start clearing my throat.”’²⁸

It seems, however, that the relationship was not as grim as some have suggested. Speaking in the early 1960s, when his mother was in her eighties, Grant described her as ‘very active, wiry and witty, and extremely good company’.²⁹ According to some interviewers, Grant remembered visits to his mother when the two would talk and laugh together ‘until tears came into our eyes’.³⁰ In a letter to the Bristol Evening Post, Leonard V. Blake recalled first seeing Elsie – ‘a rather plainly dressed woman’ – in a department store in the city, telling someone, ‘I have heard from Archie.’ Blake went on to observe that she ‘would visibly glow as his name was mentioned … I believe she would wander around Bristol just waiting to talk about Archie. He was the Sun to her.’³¹ Clarice Earl, who was a matron at Chesterfield Nursing Home in Bristol, where Elsie lived during her last few years, describes how when Elsie knew that her son was due to visit she would dress herself up and become excited: ‘She would sit by my office and look along the corridor toward the front door. When she saw him, she’d give a little skip and throw up her arms to greet him.’³² Years earlier, when the strangeness of her son’s celebrity was far fresher in her mind, she still showed much more interest in him and his career than has usually been suggested. Writing to him at the end of 1938, for example, she confessed: ‘I felt ever so confused after so many years you have grown such a man. I am more than delighted you have done so well. I trust in God you will keep well and strong.’³³ After the end of the Second World War, when Elsie was almost seventy years old, she was interviewed by a Bristol newspaper about her son: ‘It’s been a long time since I have seen him,’ she said, ‘but he writes regularly and I see all his films. But I wish he would settle down and raise a family. That would be a great relief for me.’³⁴

Elsie Leach, it is true, did not accept her son’s offer – which was put to her on more than one occasion – to move to California, but her refusal was prompted by reasons other than any alleged ill-feelings towards her son. At the end of his life, Grant explained:

She wouldn’t join me in America. She told me: ‘Never lived anywhere but Bristol. Don’t want to [leave], only place I know.’ At her own request she lived in a nursing home but we kept her house although we knew she would never return there. I didn’t want to get rid of it. It would have seemed like I was packing her off.³⁵

Elsie was, it seems, as concerned about her son as he was about her. In 1942, when war prevented him from flying over to see her, she wrote to him: ‘Darling, if you don’t come over as soon as the war ends, I shall come over to you … We are so many thousands of miles from each other.’³⁶ A friend of Elsie’s recalled seeing two large chests of food which had been gifts from Grant. When she was asked why they remained unopened, Elsie is said to have replied, ‘I want to have them until they’re really needed … You never know … Cary might be hard up one day.’³⁷ When Grant tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade her to let him hire someone to do her housework for her, he was amused and impressed rather than upset by her negative response: ‘she avers that she can do it better herself, dear, that she doesn’t want anyone around telling her what to do or getting in her way, dear, and that the very fact of the occupation keeps her going, you see, dear’.³⁸

The earliest letter from Elsie in Cary Grant’s papers is dated 30 September 1937, sent from Bristol to Hollywood, and it gives one the impression of a much warmer, caring and humorous person than many biographers have described:

MY DEAR SON,

Just a line enclosing a few snaps taken with my own camera. Do you think they are anything like me Archie? I am still a young old mother. My dear son, I have not fixed up home waiting to see you. No man shall take the place of your father. You quite understand. I am desperately longing waiting anxiously every day to hear from you. Do try and come over soon …

Fondest love, your affectionate MOTHER.³⁹

In her letters and postcards – and Grant saved hundreds in his personal archive – she was usually rather garrulous and good-natured, addressing her son as ‘Archie’ or ‘My Darling Son’ and closing with ‘Kisses’, ‘Fondest Love’ or ‘Your Affectionate Mother’.⁴⁰ Grant, in turn, cabled or wrote to her regularly,⁴¹ usually addressing her as ‘Darling’, ending with ‘Love Always’ and ‘God Bless’, and signing his name as ‘Archie’. In one letter, sent in 1966 shortly before the birth of his (and Dyan Cannon’s) daughter, Grant wrote:

Watching, and being with, my wife as she bears her pregnancy and goes towards the miraculous experience of giving birth to our first child, I’m moved to tell you how much I appreciate, and now better understand, all you must have endured to have me. All the fears you probably knew and the joy and, although I didn’t ask you to go through all that, I’m so pleased you did; because in so doing, you gave me life. Thank you, dear mother, I may have written similar words before but, recently, because of Dyan, the thoughts became more poignant and clear. I send you love and gratitude.⁴²

Phyllis Brooks, who was once engaged to Grant in the late 1930s and who remained a close friend, remembered him being reunited with Elsie: ‘Cary called his mother a dear little woman. But he didn’t talk much about her. I didn’t probe. It was such a traumatic thing to have happen to anybody.’⁴³ If the reunion had been an act, prompted by fears of adverse publicity, he seems to have invested an unnecessary amount of time, energy and emotion in maintaining the union during the next thirty-five years. It seems likely that Grant and his mother did, slowly, develop a relationship that was, in the circumstances, relatively stable and mature.

It is probably true that he had found it much easier to feel affection for his father.⁴⁴ He had, after all, enjoyed an uninterrupted relationship with him, and, after his mother’s disappearance, he may have come to regard his father, like himself, as a victim of that traumatic episode.⁴⁵ His mother, it seemed at the time, had, without any explanation, deserted him, whereas his father had stayed and raised him. When Elias died, his son expressed the belief that his death had been ‘the inevitable result of a slow-breaking heart, brought about by an inability to alter the circumstances of his life’.⁴⁶ It would be wrong, however, to accept uncritically the common perception today of Elias as the deferential working-class man and Elsie as the somewhat snobbish woman with grand ambitions, just as it would be wrong to believe that Grant sided consistently and completely with one or the other of his parents. He once said that, when he looked back on the family arguments that dominated his childhood, he felt unable to ‘say who was wrong and right’.⁴⁷ Both Elsie and Elias Leach possessed a strong sense of working-class pride: in Elsie, this showed itself in her determination to avoid giving anyone an opportunity to regard her family as ‘common’, as well as in her dreams of financial security and her hopes for her son’s social advancement; in Elias, this pride evidenced itself in more prosaic and pragmatic ways, such as in his advice to his son to buy ‘one good superior suit rather than a number of inferior ones’, so that ‘even when it is threadbare people will know at once it was good’.⁴⁸ Elsie craved prosperity whilst Elias would have settled for the appearance of prosperity; Archie respected his mother’s boundless determination, as well as sharing some of her aspirations, and he also sympathised with his father’s gentle stoicism.

Eventually, Cary Grant came to look back on his childhood, and both of his parents, with a generous spirit: ‘I learned that my dear parents, products of their parents, could know no better than they knew, and began to remember them only for the most useful, the best, the nicest of their teachings.’⁴⁹ According to one of his friends – Henry Gris – it was only relatively late in his life that Grant ‘realised the depth of his guilt complex about his mother’s disappearance. He believed he was the subject of his parents’ many bitter quarrels.’⁵⁰ Archie Leach, however, during those traumatic months following the mysterious disappearance of his mother, was unable to come to terms with what had really happened to his family; he could only attempt to adjust to what he thought had happened, and he thought that his mother had deserted him. ‘I thought the moral was – if you depend on love and if you give love you’re stupid, because love will turn around and kick you in the heart.’⁵¹