BY ROGER EBERT / December 1, 1986
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Cary Grant is dead, and with him dies an era in motion picture history. The man who combined debonair charm, classic grace and a subtle sense of the sinister in some 72 movies died late Saturday of a stroke in Davenport, Iowa. He was 82.
For Grant, the end came as his adult life had been lived, in the style of a gentleman. He was in Davenport to make a personal appearance; he planned to show clips from some of his films and then answer questions. At rehearsal Saturday afternoon, "he was chipper," said Lois Jecklin, chairman of the event. "He made several changes of the microphone, shifted the stool where he would be sitting and rearranged some of his film clips."
But as he left the stage, he faltered and asked for help from publicist Barbara Harris, his wife since 1981. She took him back to their hotel room, where he insisted that he would recover and be all right for the evening appearance. But it was canceled, and at 8 p.m. Mrs. Grant asked for blankets to be sent to the room, because her husband was feeling chilled.
Grant apparently resisted suggestions that he be taken to the hospital, until his Los Angeles physician ordered the move. He was comatose when he arrived at St. Luke's Hospital in Davenport, where he died at 11:22 p.m.
"There was nothing that could be done," said Dr. James Gilson, who treated Grant in his last hours. "There's no intervention when something like that happens."
Grant's widow and two friends returned with his body to Los Angeles yesterday. Funeral arrangements were incomplete.
"Cary Grant must be the most publicly seduced male the world has known," critic Pauline Kael wrote in a 1975 appreciation of him, acknowledging that Grant usually was the pursued, not the pursuer, in his romantic teamings with such great stars as Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Eva Marie Saint, Mae West, Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn.
Along the way, he became Hollywood's ideal leading man, a generous actor whose superb timing made others look better when they acted opposite him.
His death was mourned yesterday not only by countless fans but by President and Mrs. Reagan, who said "his elegance, wit and charm will endure forever on film and in our hearts"; veteran actress Helen Hayes, who called him "one of the charms and joys of my life"; Doris Day, his co-star in "That Touch of Mink," who said, "He was the classiest man I ever met," and Charlton Heston, who said, "He was as important as anyone since Charles Chaplin."
But Grant was the first to acknowledge that he was not born with class and that his sophistication was something he learned. He sometimes referred to "Cary Grant" as a role he first played onscreen, then began to play offscreen, until he merged with the role and became a person much like the characters he often played.
Grant was born as Archibald Leach in Bristol, England, on Jan. 18, 1904. His father was a presser in a garment factory, his mother a shipwright's daughter.
His mother was confined in a mental institution when he was 9, but he did not learn the reason for her disappearance until he was 29 and world-famous. That traumatic childhood event may have accounted for the dark underside, the brooding gloominess, that many viewers found even in his comic roles. "There is a light and dark side to him," wrote critic David Thomson, "but, whichever is dominant, the other creeps into view."
The young boy was not a good student and ran away at 13 to join a troupe of acrobats. He was returned to school but left for good at 14 and toured in vaudeville from 1918 to 1922, when he moved to New York.
In 1927, still a handsome man-about-town who picked up small jobs in vaudeville and at Coney Island, Grant was taken to meet Oscar Hammerstein II and won a role in the operetta "Golden Dawn." He had moderate success on the New York stage, but his real success began after he moved to Hollywood in 1931.
Sound had revolutionized the movie industry, and directors sought British leading men for light romantic roles; in one year, Grant was in seven films, including "Blonde Venus" with Marlene Dietrich, and with Mae West, who gave him starring roles in "She Done Him Wrong" and "I'm No Angel."
Legend has it that West, seeing Grant at a screen test, said, "If he can move, I'll take him." It was to Grant that she uttered the immortal line, "Why don't you come up sometime and see me?"
Grant's most memorable films in the prewar years were screwball comedies, such as "Topper," "The Awful Truth" and "His Girl Friday." One of his biggest hits was in "Gunga Din," where he provided a hilarious satire of British unflappability. His favorite leading lady of the time was Katharine Hepburn. He appeared with her in "Holiday," "Sylvia Scarlett," "Bringing Up Baby" and "The Philadelphia Story."
In 1946, his career faltering because of a dearth of screwball and romantic comedies, Grant turned to suspense and began a long association with Alfred Hitchcock. They made some of the highlights of both their careers: "Suspicion," "Notorious," "To Catch a Thief" and "North by Northwest."
Grant described the "formula" of the Hitchcock pictures: "You take a fellow who looks fairly well and behaves fairly well and put him in a series of untenable situations."
In the 1960s, he continued to work in movies that were somewhat pale imitations of his earlier successes, and then announced his retirement in 1967. He devoted the last 20 years of his life to business, social and charitable events and personal appearances. Married 5 times
Grant's personal life was, by all accounts, not always happy. He was married five times, first in 1934 to actress Virginia Cherrill, who divorced him 13 months later; then to heiress Barbara Hutton, from 1942 to 1945; then to actress Betsy Drake, from 1949 to 1962, and to actress Dyan Cannon, with whom he lived for four years before marrying for 17 months in 1965 and 1966; and finally to Barbara Harris, 47 years his junior, whom he wed in 1981.
He had one child, Jennifer, now 19, by Cannon, and doted on her. He said one reason he stopped making movies was to be close to her as she grew up.
Grant was the subject of much publicity after the revelation that he experimented with LSD in the late 1950s; he used hypnosis to give up cigarettes and hard liquor, and later claimed that people addicted to such vices became distracted "from what they should be doing, which is making love."
In later years, Grant became a favorite subject of celebrity photographers who snapped him outside restaurants and theaters, where his white hair, wide smile and tanned face seemed to outwit the passage of time.
"Everyone grows older," the late Grace Kelly once said, "except Cary Grant." He had seemingly boundless energy even for such routine assignments as his most recent visit here, in October, to attend the opening of a Walgreens store on behalf of Faberge.
By refusing to appear in movies for the last 20 years, Grant preserved a more youthful image of himself in the memories of filmgoers. Unlike James Stewart, John Wayne or Jimmy Cagney, he refused to grow old on the screen. And, indeed, for a long time he always seemed about the same age, somewhere around 40, smiling, charming, polished and enigmatic. "It is impossible to think about the movies," the critic Thomson wrote, "without thinking of Cary Grant."