Becoming Cary Grant

This year, the Academy, in order to

express its appreciation for one of its members

for a unique screen career, has voted an Oscar to Mr. Cary Grant

for sheer brilliance in the acting business.

No one's brought more pleasure to more people for as many

years as Cary has, and no one has done more things well,

from light comedy to strong drama, and made it look easier.

No one has been more admired and loved by his fellow actors,

for skill, for finesse, for subtlety, charm,

and for being Cary Grant.

Hello there!

Hello.

Hmm...

Tell me, why are you so good to me?

Shall I climb up and tell you why?

Cary Grant was a very private man.

He only rarely spoke to the media.

This film draws on his unpublished autobiography

and extracts from interviews, as well as little-known footage

he shot with his own camera.

He had a filmmaker's eye, and his often very personal images

offer a window into his inner world.

In the late 1950s, at the height of his career

and hitting mid-life, he faced an existential crisis.

"For many years, I have cautiously peered from behind

the face of a man known as Cary Grant.

The protection of that facade was both an advantage

and a disadvantage.

If I couldn't see out, how could anybody see in?

All my life, I've been going around in a fog.

You're just a bunch of molecules until you know who you are.

You spend your time getting to be a big Hollywood actor,

but then what?

All my life, I've been searching for peace of mind.

I wanted to rid myself of all my hypocrisies."

Now, Esther, don't you like the way I'm doing this?

"It was a time when people were attempting to find something

inside of themselves that they felt they lacked.

I was so confused when I first started seeing Dr. Hartman.

I'd explored yoga, hypnotism, and mysticism.

Nothing really seemed to give me what I wanted

until this LSD treatment.

One of the first things you did when you got there

is you selected your music.

And the music would play, whatever your music was,

and then you would gradually begin going with it,

if you would.

This reality started disappearing in another kind of

unconscious mind, or whatever.

We used to call it fusion.

Apparently, the idea was that you would fuse with the sort of

universal concept of the world and yourself in the world.

Some people found that very difficult and didn't do it

at all and were quite resistant or alarmed by it.

Cary was not.

Cary took to it instantly.

I don't recall ever being at the pool with him,

or at a beach or anything, I don't recall any of that.

The thing I think it's important to remember about Cary, always,

is contained in that wonderful thing he said about himself.

He said, "Everybody wants to be Cary Grant.

Even I want to be Cary Grant."

And everybody laughed and thought that was really funny.

But, for me, that's the crux of Cary.

Cary invented himself.

I wonder if I could have just a little bit more of your smile.

Oh, no, not at this hour of the morning.

Cary did a masterful job of it, and, of course, it worked

superbly on screen and in life, socially.

But he got to that place at 52, without looking back

at what he had experienced as a child, you know, and a teenager,

which must have had terrible scars on him emotionally.

And the fact that the LSD allowed him to open that

universe up and examine it and put that into context with

the Cary Grant he had become, was an extraordinary experience,

which is, I think, why he was so -- you know, always spoke with

such respect about his experience with LSD.

The sessions were scheduled for five hours each,

and they were scheduled once a week.

And then there were some after-effects of the chemicals

that would stay with you for a few hours afterwards.

So it was virtually a day that you'd have to

give up for that.

"The action of the chemical releases the subconscious so

that you can see what transpires in the depths of your mind."

"During therapy, I passed through seas of horrifying and

happy sights, through a montage of intense love and hate,

a mosaic of past impressions assembling and reassembling."

"I don't know what I learned about love.

It took a long time for me to even try to understand love.

I learned manners from my parents.

They taught me to be neat and organized,

which I am to this day.

I was born in Bristol in a suburban house,

which, lacking modern heating conveniences,

kept only one step ahead of freezing.

My mother was a delicate black-haired beauty

with olive skin, frail and feminine.

What isn't apparent in the photograph is the extent

of her strength and her will to control.

My parents had another boy, born before I was.

My mother accidentally closed the door on his thumb.

He developed gangrene and died,

and she blamed herself for the rest of her life.

She wasn't a happy woman.

I wasn't a happy child...

because my mother tried to smother me with care.

She kept me far too long in baby dresses and curls,

and perhaps, for a while, I wasn't sure whether

I was a boy or a girl."

Think it matches?

Ask the gentleman to come in.

Clearly, his mother was very aspirational.

She made sure that he had piano lessons,

that he learned good table manners,

that he said please and thank you.

She punished him when he did anything wrong at the table.

She was trying to make him into the perfect gentleman

that he became in later life.

What do you think?

Fits rather well.

But are you sure it's what you want, Dr. Fulton?

Well, tell me, do they ever wear trousers to match?

Oh, very seldom.

Usually gray flannels.

Oh, these socks ought to go well with it.

My father was an incredibly smart dresser.

He apparently gave Cary -- I should say he gave Archie --

one piece of advice about dressing that Archie and Cary

always remembered, which was, if you're only going to have

one suit, make it a good suit.

My father was a handsome tallish man with a fancy mustache.

He earned his money pressing suits for a clothing

manufacturer, but progressed in that firm too slowly

to satisfy my mother's dreams.

The relationship between my mother and father

seemed to grow unhappier.

I came home from school one day, and mother was gone.

My cousins told me that she had gone to

a local seaside resort.

It seemed rather unusual, but I accepted it as one of those

unaccountable things that grownups do.

However, the weeks went by and there was no further

explanation of mother's absence, and it gradually dawned on me

that perhaps she wasn't coming back at all.

There was a void in my life,

a sadness of spirit that affected everything I did.

I always felt my mother rejected me.

In some of the very early interviews,

when he's still Archie Leach on Broadway,

he makes reference to his mother being dead.

When she's gone, he moved to a more working class

neighborhood of Bristol to live with his

paternal grandmother.

This is the point at which the father went to South Hampton

to start his new family, and so he's left there on his own.

He remembers being left to fend for himself in an unheated

house, being hungry, so this had a terrible impact on him.

You can imagine an 11-year-old boy not knowing

why his mother had left, where she'd gone,

why she hadn't said goodbye, it would be devastating.

And so he would have trust issues with women

for many, many years.

Ha, ha, ha.