His rise, which was far from immediate, included stints in vaudeville and on the legitimate stage before he finally landed in the movies. He found salvation, and a way out, in show business, first in England and then in the United States. Grant, born a Cockney named Archie Leach, managed to escape his oppressive, working-class origins in England after a difficult childhood that involved the loss of one parent and abandonment by the other. Which is unfortunate, because Grant's story, otherwise well-told here, is a compelling one, filled with personal drama. Eliot's reverence for his subject doesn't stop him from assiduously documenting Grant's real-life flaws in such detail that they begin to overwhelm everything else.
The problem is that Eliot's book, while full of praise for Grant's achievements onscreen, seems to have an excessive interest in dwelling on the troubled aspects of his private life, sometimes to the point of reveling in them. No doubt, a complete and unvarnished portrait of Grant is a legitimate aim for any biographer. Having concluded that previous writings on Grant were "hopelessly inaccurate," Eliot means to set the record straight. Eliot's carefully footnoted biography appears to be the result of meticulous research, which he says he spent five years doing. The question is particularly puzzling since Eliot's book is the product of a self-admitted fan who says in an afterward that he became "hooked" on Grant after he first saw Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest as a boy. Still, when a new Grant biography is as warts-and-all as Marc Eliot's Cary Grant (Harmony Books, $25.95), you have to wonder about the author's intent. "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant," he famously said. And since that image was one of idealized male perfection, the real man has to suffer by comparison. But since his death in 1986 he has become fair game for any author willing to dig up the most intimate and unflattering details about the man behind the celebrated screen image. Throughout his lifetime, Grant tried, if not always successfully, to keep his private life closely guarded, especially by today's standards of celebrity overexposure. It's probably inevitable that a biography of Cary Grant is going to produce at least some small degree of disillusionment.
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