“Cary Grant,” film critic Pauline Kael once wrote, was “the sky that women aspire to.”

In over 70 movies over four decades—including classics like The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Notorious, To Catch A Thief, An Affair to Remember and Charade—Grant was, as Kale put it, everyone’s “dream date — not sexless but sex with civilized grace, sex with mystery.”

His fourth wife, Dyan Cannon, agreed. “Cary Grant was glamour. Cary Grant was charm. Cary Grant was class, intelligence, refinement… Cary Grant made manners, civility, and style as thrilling as Humphrey Bogart made a good pistol - whipping.”

Yet these big superlatives were achieved at a heavy cost for the man born Archie Leach, who worked tirelessly to live up to the image he had painstakingly created. “Enthusiasm was a most important ingredient in Cary's make-up, and it shone out of that side of his character which he presented to his friends,” his good friend David Niven once wrote. “The other side was as mysterious as the dark side of the moon.”

A trio of books—2020’s Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise, by Scott Eyman, 2011’s Dear Cary: My Life With Cary Grant by Dyan Cannon, and 2011’s Good Stuff: A Reminiscence of My Father, Cary Grant by Jennifer Grant—help unravel the mystery of the complex figure behind mid-century America’s perfect man. “He’s a completely made-up character and I’m playing a part,” Grant once said. “It’s a part I’ve been playing a long time, but no way am I really Cary Grant. A friend told me once, ‘I always wanted to be Cary Grant.’ And I said, ‘So did I.’”

Bristol Boy 

It sounds like something out of Dickens. 

Archibald Alexander Leach was born on January 18, 1904, in gray, freezing Bristol, England. His father, Elias, was a nattily dressed alcoholic suit presser; his mother, Elsie, a pretty, nervous, controlling woman who smothered her only child.  “I never spent a happy moment with them under the same roof. And that’s a fact. That’s the truth,” Grant recalled, per Eyman. 

In 1915, Elias had an allegedly mentally unstable Elsie committed to Fishponds, a grim state-run mental asylum. Elias never told his 11-year-old son what had happened to his mother, leaving little Archie to assume she had abandoned him or was dead. Unsurprisingly, Elsie’s disappearance had a profound effect on the little boy. “I washed myself constantly,” he remembered, “a habit I carried far into adulthood in a subconscious belief that if I scrubbed hard enough outside I might cleanse myself inside.”

The emotionally starved Archie soon found the warmth he was lacking at a local theater, where he became an errand boy, and found a playful surrogate family to cling to. In 1918, young Archie signed up as an apprentice with the Bob Pender Troupe, and soon left Bristol far behind, touring the vaudeville circuit as a tumbler.

But his sordid past came back to haunt him in 1936, when the rising Hollywood star now known as Cary Grant was summoned to Bristol by his dying father—who told him that not only was his mother still alive but she was still languishing in a mental institution. Elsie was finally discharged that year. Grant supported her until her death in 1973, always desperate for his distant mother’s approval.  “Do you believe she loves you?” Cannon recalled asking Grant. After a long pause, Grant replied: “I think she loved Archie.”

The Ideal Man 

While sometimes a little heavy on the psychobabble that Grant himself was so fond of, Scott Eyman’s Brilliant Disguise is an excellent, unbiased account of Grant’s life—particularly his early years as a hardscrabble acrobat, stilt- walker and light comedian during vaudeville’s last glory days. 

In 1920, Leach made his way to New York City, to tour with Bob Pender and his tumblers. Eyman paints a portrait of a watchful, inquisitive young man, who soaked up lessons from brilliant buddies like designer Orry Kelly, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, and Faye Wray. “I was very conscious of my lack of education when I started,” he recalled, per Eyman. “I didn’t want it to show, so I invented an accent…The rest I stole from Noel Coward.”

By the late 1920s, Leach’s incredible looks and graceful charm won him roles in a handful of Broadway shows. In 1931, he made his way to Hollywood and changed his name to Cary Grant. But as self-possessed and effortless as Grant appeared onscreen, he was often a nervous wreck before the camera rolled. “A more nervous, fidgety actor I never saw,” his The Philadelphia Story co-star Jimmy Stewart recalled, per Eyman. 

When he wasn’t working, the financially tightfisted Grant was always searching—trying out the latest health fad, reading self-help books, and amusing friends with his endless advice and worry. 

His relationships with his first three wives (including the tragic heiress Barbara Hutton) and affairs with Ginger Rogers and Sophia Loren were often complicated by his abandonment issues and obsession with perfection and control. As for his rumored affair with roommate Randolph Scott and other men, his third wife Betsy Drake had a succinct response. “Why would I believe that Cary was homosexual,” she asked, “when we were busy fucking?”

The Odd Couple 

When Dyan Cannon, an effervescent, free-spirited starlet, met Grant in late 1961, he was a long-standing suntanned superstar—and three years older than her father. “I hadn’t, and still haven’t, seen anyone who radiated such godlike masculine beauty,” she writes. “He stepped forward and extended his hand. I could barely breathe.”

If Brilliant Disguise is a straightforward and analytical biography, then Dear Cary is an intimate, freewheeling, emotional memoir—a kind of coming-of-age novel written by the kooky, spiritual Cannon, star of films like Heaven Can Wait, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and The Last of Shelia. 

The two quickly bonded over their goofy sense of humor and spiritual curiosity, and Cannon was the recipient of Grant’s full-force charm offensive. In an open letter to Grant at the end of the book, Cannon recalls a scene early in their courtship that sounds like a Cary Grant movie:

“Do you know how I feel about you, Dyan?” “I’m not sure I do,” I replied. Right then, you went into a free fall, toppling like a redwood and landing facedown on the cold pavement. Then you turned your head ever so slowly, looked up at me, and said, “Head over heels! That’s how I feel about you, Dyan! Head over heels!”

But as Cannon pushed a reluctant Grant to marry her, his nervous temperament increasingly began to show. On the night he finally proposed, a terrified Grant crashed his Rolls Royce into a pillar, before fleeing her apartment and then returning to take her for licorice ice cream. On the way home, he finally popped the question: 

He slammed on the brakes, came to a screeching halt in the middle of the street, and smacked the steering wheel with his hands. “Damn it, Dyan, do you want to get married?” Now I really did gasp. Even with the nagging chorus of beeping horns flying past us, I couldn’t take my licoriced lips off his.

Tripping Out 

But for Cannon, her screwball May/December romance soon became a tragedy. After their marriage in 1965 (she was 28, he was 61), and the birth of their daughter, Jennifer, in 1966, Grant retired to become a family man. His increased presence became a nightmare—with her husband constantly criticizing her looks, her parenting, even the way she “treated” doorknobs. She began to dread the self-help clippings from magazines and newspapers he left constantly on her nightstand, knowing she would be quizzed on them later. 

Though ultimately generous and forgiving, Cannon unflinchingly reveals the brutal “dark side” of Grant that Niven referred to. Cold, manipulative and distant, everything Grant had loved about the quirky Cannon, whom he referred to as a “silly child,” now seemed to disgust him. His obsession with the healing psychiatric benefits of LSD, which Cannon reluctantly participated in, further widened their rift. She also began to purge her meals, in an attempt to control something in her life. 

Things came to head during a weekend in Las Vegas, where the couple were attending the star-studded anniversary party of Rosalind Russell and her husband, Frederick Brisson. Grant became incensed when he found Cannon innocently playing craps with his good friend Frank Sinatra. When a furious Grant told her to “remember who you’re with,” Cannon told him she felt like she was about to have a breakdown. Grant cruelly replied, “Then why don’t you have one and get it over with? It might be a good thing.”

Cannon eventually left Grant, and their bitter divorce was finalized in 1968. A traumatized Cannon drowned her sorrows in pills and booze and found herself in a psychiatric hospital telling her fellow patients: “My husband said maybe a breakdown would be good for me. But I think I’d rather have gone to Disneyland.”

Dear, Dear Jennifer 

“From the start, reliable as daybreak, Dad was there for me,” Jennifer Grant writes in her own memoir of life with Grant. “He bared his all in love and held nothing back. From the day-to-day detail to life’s blockbuster moments, my father was there. This didn’t mean he was always pleased with me, but happy or not, if he could help it, he wasn’t ever going away.”

It is interesting that both Cannon and her daughter Jennifer’s memoirs were published in the same year, because they present such radically different versions of Grant (though Cannon readily admits Grant was a loving father). Good Stuff: A Reminiscence of My Father, Cary Grant is a beautiful, sweet nugget of a book that presents a doting father with a “happy way of life,” who worshipped his Jennifer almost to the point of obsession.  

As Eyman notes, Grant had long had a soft spot for children, and in his retirement, he was able to fully immerse himself in his only child’s life. He took Jennifer everywhere—to his beloved Dodger Games, The Magic Castle, the horse races at Hollywood Park (where he was an overly enthusiastic board member) and to the annual circus festival in Monaco, presided over by his favorite co-star Princess Grace. There, she writes“his adolescent septuagenarian face lit up watching men fly through the air.”

Cherishing every moment he spent with her (he and a flourishing Cannon cordially shared custody), Grant was a playful and present father, who loved shopping with Jennifer at the Gap and pigging out in bed while watching Benny Hill and Carol Burnett. He kept a literal vault at his home in Beverly Hills, where he saved every memento from her life. Jennifer reprints many of the photos, letters and transcripts of tapes her father saved, which show a man finally truly at ease, knowing someone loved him unconditionally no matter what his name was.  

The Grunts 

The puzzle became complete in 1976, when Grant met the elegant, charming and polished Englishwoman Barbara Harris, 47 years his junior. They married in 1981 and formed a tight family unit with Jennifer that they lightheartedly called “the Grunts.”

“The Grunts generally combusted into play,” Jennifer writes, “Play was a cornerstone in our lives. We were dynamic goofballs. We went the way of card games, board games, guesstimating distance games, hangman, word scrambles, memory games, magic tricks, television game shows, and the ever popular ‘roll around in a ball in the backseat while Dad swerved the Cadillac like a madman’ game.”

In his old age, Grant—whose harshest admonishment to his daughter was usually “how unkind”—finally seemed to find peace within himself and became a mentor to luminaries like Peter Bogdanovich. He loosened up, at times trading his perfectly cut menswear for roomy caftans Barbara made him and seemed to finally give everyone around him—including himself—a break. 

“Between Grant’s delight in Barbara and Jennifer’s blossoming, he seemed to emotionally enlarge, become more buoyant,” Eyman writes. “He wasn’t acting anymore, which in turn meant that he could complete the integration of Cary with Archie. For the first time in his adult life, he was free from the burden of performance; he no longer had to worry about being revealed as an impostor.”

Cary Grant died of a stroke on November 29, 1986. For his daughter, he left behind the legacy of a fully realized, loving man. “In my father’s last years, he asked several times that I remember him the way I knew him,” Jennifer writes. “He said that after his death, people would talk. They would say ‘things’ about him and he wouldn’t be there to defend himself. He beseechingly requested that I stick to what I knew to be true, because I truly knew him. I promised him I would. I’ve easily kept that oath.”