Cary Grant

Cary Grant: The Lonely Heart is a biography of Cary Grant by Charles Higham and Roy Moseley, dated 1989 in the catalog listing. The publisher’s description on Google Books says the book covers both the movie star’s personal life and his work, and Google Books gives its length as 408 pages. That one sentence is the only description of the contents carried by the Google Books and Open Library records.

Next to the other Grant biographies in the catalog listing, it falls near the middle of the run. Seven are dated earlier, from Lionel Godfrey’s of 1981 to the 1987 books by Warren G. Harris and Pamela Trescott, and six are dated later, from Nancy Nelson’s Evenings with Cary Grant of 1991 to Scott Eyman’s of 2020. It is also the one title in that listing credited to two authors.

For fans

The library records

The records disagree on the imprint and the date. The catalog listing names Avon Books (Mm) with a date of 1989, the Open Library record names Avon Books (Mm) with an edition of February 1990, and Google Books names Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P with a date of 1989. Open Library files the work under four subjects: Biography, motion picture actors and actresses, Grant himself with the dates 1904-1986, and “New York Times reviewed.” The Open Library record gives neither the date nor the text of that New York Times review.

Beside the other Grant books

The title closest in date is Maureen Donaldson’s An affair to remember, also dated 1989 and issued by Putnam. The listing classes both as biography, as it does every other book about Grant it names. Geoffrey Wansell appears on both sides of the Higham and Moseley book, with titles of 1983 and 1984 before it and Cary Grant, dark angel of 1996 after it. Wikipedia’s article on Cary Grant names McCann, Wansell, Schickel, Eliot and Nelson as biographers in its running text, and that text does not name Higham or Moseley. Neither the Open Library record nor the Google Books record lists the chapters or quotes a reviewer.