Cary Grant

Scott Eyman’s biography of Cary Grant carries the full title Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise in the Google Books record, which names Simon & Schuster as publisher, gives 20 Oct 2020 as the date and counts 576 pages. Open Library lists the book under Cengage Gale. Its catalog entry dates that issue 2020, while its edition record gives 2021 and 957 pages. Neither record explains the difference in length.

Among 15 cataloged biographies of Grant, dated from Lionel Godfrey’s Cary Grant (1981) onward, Eyman’s carries the latest date. The two nearest before it are Dyan Cannon’s Dear Cary (2011) and Marc Eliot’s Cary Grant: a biography (2004). Geoffrey Wansell has three titles in the same list, dated 1983, 1984 and 1996. Wikipedia’s further reading on Grant sets Eyman beside another 2020 book, Mark Glancy’s Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend, from Oxford University Press.

For a reader choosing among these, Kirkus Reviews, in a notice dated Oct. 20, 2020, wrote that Eyman’s version earns “top billing” among the several Grant biographies. The notice calls him a prolific film historian, and the publisher’s description also identifies him as a film historian. Open Library files the book under subjects including actors, Hollywood and the history of motion pictures.

For fans

What the publisher says

The Simon & Schuster description, as given by Google Books, says Eyman worked from Grant’s own papers, from archival research and from interviews with relatives and friends, and it calls the result “definitive.” It tells of a boy born Archibald Leach in 1904 who reached America as a teenage acrobat. It says his father drank and that his mother was put in an asylum when he was 11. He thought she was dead until he was told otherwise at 31. The description links that experience to Grant’s later trouble with close attachments, and it records five marriages and numerous affairs. It names Gunga Din, Notorious and North by Northwest among the films.

The Kirkus notice

Kirkus praises the book’s “meticulous research” and “sharp critiques,” and says the account “consistently engages and illuminates.” The reviewer reads Eyman’s subject as an actor running from a hard childhood, first into fantasy and then into fame and money. Kirkus quotes Eyman on “an astonishing run of films” and credits him with close descriptions of Grant’s technique in Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, Notorious and None but the Lonely Heart.

On the private life, Kirkus reports that only the fifth marriage succeeded, and that a child born during the fourth, to Dyan Cannon, gave Grant lasting happiness. The notice also cites his business dealings as a source of great financial reward. On the rumors that Grant was gay, Kirkus says Eyman examines the evidence and quotes his conclusion that it could place Grant “inside any sexual box you want.” The reviewer also singles out Eyman’s profiles of the designer Orry-Kelly, the director Leo McCarey and the writer Clifford Odets, which Kirkus calls “a colorful mural” of Hollywood in its golden age.

Where the accounts differ

The publisher and Kirkus both put Grant at 11 when his mother was committed, and Kirkus adds that she stayed in the asylum for 20 years. Wikipedia’s entry on Grant says he was 9 when his father placed her in Glenside Hospital, though it agrees that he learned she was alive at 31. On Grant’s sexuality, the same entry calls his relationship with Randolph Scott a matter of biographical dispute and reports that his daughter, Jennifer, has denied he was bisexual.