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Some of Grant’s biographers have written that the photographs were leaked to the press or published just once by mistake. Being Archie Leach, however, was a rather more mixed blessing.
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Share or comment on this article: The 'truth' about Cary Grant's sexuality is finally revealed: He was the subject of rumours for decades, now a friend has told all about his male lover.
Others writers, commenting more widely on Hollywood’s oppressively closeted traditions, present the photographs as evidence of a hidden gay history.
While there is no doubt that Hollywood has a hidden gay history, it is very unlikely that these photographs figure in it in the way that contemporary commentators suppose.
Off-screen, Grant championed the hallucinogenic drug LSD, was deeply neurotic, shockingly stingy, and petulantly controlling towards his wives and colleagues.
Alfred Hitchcock, who cast Grant in some of his greatest films, said he was the only actor who could fake a charm he didn’t possess. Grant’s own home movies show these bustling, all-day parties, and the deep dark tan he developed spending the day in the sun with his friends.
Grant insisted the affair started after he and Hutton separated.
Grant married his fifth and final wife, Barbara Harris, 46 years younger than him, in 1981
There are many theories as to why Grant was such a great film star. The neurotic Hutton wanted him at home and suspected him of having an affair with Ginger Rogers.
Similarly, inside the house, they are pictured eating, playing backgammon, reading, and playing with the dog (a Sealyham terrier named Archie).
Today, these images look like portraits of a very happy gay marriage, and many contemporary commentators assume that they really are candid snapshots of the stars’ private lives.
Did he have affairs earlier in life? The bizarre house-share, which they insisted was primarily intended to save money and entirely platonic, lasted on and off for a dozen years.
According to former Fan magazine editor Bill Royce, he broached the sensitive subject of Scott with Grant in 1976 when he was 72 – no longer acting and so no longer nearly so worried about preserving his reputation.
The latest issue of Vanity Fair magazine reports that Grant ‘set aside several hours to admit to Royce that he’d been in love with Scott from his earliest days in Hollywood’.
Royce claims the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief and North By Northwest told him: ‘Have you ever heard of gravity collapse?
… We don’t have to walk on water to be wonderful human beings.”
Were Cary Grant and Randolph Scott Really Lovers?
Cary Grant and Randolph Scott are “Batching It” in the fan magazine Modern Screen (September 1937). He said she believed he was an ‘imposter’, adding: ‘And I suppose, in a way, she was right.’
In 1942, he married the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton – they were mockingly nicknamed ‘Cash and Cary’ – but they separated after three years.
At the same time, he was making some of his most famous films.
He hailed it as life-altering, describing how he once ‘imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from Earth like a spaceship’.
The marriage to Betsy ended after three years, when Grant broke his cardinal rule about not having on-set romances and fell heavily for Sophia Loren while they were filming in Spain.
His fourth wife Dyan Cannon claimed Grant tried to ‘force-feed’ her LSD and change her into the ‘shiny new wife who could effortlessly meld as one with her husband’.
Grant married his fifth and final wife, Barbara Harris, a British hotel PR 46 years younger than him, in 1981.
In an accompanying interview, they admitted that they earned high salaries by ordinary American standards but also insisted that stardom shackled them with unusual burdens. He was discovered in Hollywood when he was just 28 years old and became one of the most famous actors of all time, starring in films such as An Affair to Remember, To Catch a Thief, Charade, and North by Northwest.
Beck Starr/FilmMagic
Grant died in 1986 at the age of 82, when Jennifer was just 20 years old.
Scott, too, made a lot of films without much success, including the flop Hot Saturday, in which he and Grant vied for the affections of star Nancy Carroll. His childhood scars, said Eyman, also made Grant flinch from settling down and becoming the devoted family man – a life that, in his later years, he claimed he would have much preferred to stardom.
It also made him play it safe in his acting career, turning down serious films such as The Third Man, Lolita and The Man Who Would Be King.
Archibald Leach was born in 1904 in the working-class Bristol suburb of Horfield to a feckless, alcoholic father, who worked as a tailor’s presser, and a mentally unstable mother.
His first wife, the actress Virginia Cherrill, fell for the actor after waking one night to see Grant outside, repeatedly ramming his car into her boyfriend’s vehicle
Grant with fourth wife Dyan Cannon and their daughter Jennifer in 1966
His parents, Elias and Elsie, had little money and a fractious relationship which never really recovered from the death of Grant’s older brother – his only sibling – from meningitis as a baby.
Stricken by guilt, Elsie sought to impose a vice-like grip on Archie – once telling him after he got lost in Marks & Spencer that he had nobody else in the world but her.
Copyright © 2020 by Mark Glancy and published by Oxford University Press. This is one reason why modern commentators often assume that Grant and Scott were lovers rather than roommates. He had gay friends and there’s just absolutely nothing to be ashamed of there.