Cary Grant just wasn’t getting it. He’d signed on to be the star of the film, was being paid handsomely for his efforts, and he was working with the legendary director Alfred Hitchcock, no less. What could possibly go wrong?
North by Northwest seemed destined to be a box-office smash when it debuted in 1959.
Indeed, prior to the start of shooting, screenwriter Ernest Lehman was quoted as saying he wanted to write “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” He held nothing back, and created a melange of suspense, lighthearted fun, intrigue, and nonstop action. There’s even a fight-to-the-death sequence that takes place on the face of Mt. Rushmore, not to mention arguably the most famous scene in Hitchcock’s long, storied career–the crop-duster attack!
And, of course, and above all else, the film features Cary Grant.
During filming, though, Grant wasn’t thrilled with the direction North by Northwest was taking. One day, he pulled Hitchcock aside, and said, “It’s a terrible script. We’ve already done a third of the picture and I still can’t make head or tail of it!” Hitchcock assured his leading man that things were going well. The film is designed to be confusing, with myriad twists and turns, so if his lead actor was finding the story line hard to follow, all the better!
All Hitchcock said to Grant was to be himself. Don’t even worry about the acting. Don’t worry about the script. Just be Cary Grant. The rest would take care of itself.
And it did.
Hitchcock understood a fundamental truth, and used it to his advantage–people just liked Cary Grant. He’d been Hollywood’s most luminous star for decades, the epitome of charisma, debonair charm, and cool. Indeed, Grant himself once famously said, “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”
Grant’s on-screen persona was larger-than-life. If you wanted to see raw emotion, vulnerability, weakness, you weren’t going to find that here. His roles were designed to match his never-let-them-see-you-sweat mystique. He was made out to be more icon than actor, more romantic ideal than flesh-and-blood person. Grant’s public image surely wouldn’t have been so spotless if he were acting today, but in Old Hollywood, he was lifted up to stratospheric heights, and for the duration of his career, he never came down from his perch. Well on into his fifties and early sixties, Grant played the lead opposite actresses such as Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Audrey Hepburn, and Sophia Loren–all two or three decades his junior.
Then, abruptly, in the mid-1960s, at the age of sixty-two, Grant retired from the cinema. Hollywood’s quintessential leading man would not go on to play the sage, grandfatherly roles that would surely have come his way if he’d pressed forward with his career. He would simply walk away and preserve the image, the concept, the legend that was Cary Grant.
It hadn’t always been that way. During his growing-up years in the suburbs of Bristol, in southwest England, Cary Grant wasn’t known as Cary Grant. He was born Archibald Leach, and his hardscrabble childhood bore little resemblance to the fame and prestige that would materialize decades later. His father struggled with alcoholism and his mother was clinically depressed, sent to a mental institution when Grant was just nine years old. His father simply told him that his mother had gone on a “long holiday,” and later, when she failed to come home, said she had died. Grant didn’t learn of the lie for over two decades, and at that time, arranged to meet his mother just as his movie career was taking off. But in his childhood, Archibald Leach, the future hero of the Silver Screen, was antsy, on edge, uncomfortable around others, nervous and awkward in his interactions with girls. Described by a classmate as a “scruffy little boy” and by his teacher as “the naughty little boy who was always making a noise in the back row and would never do his homework,” Leach was expelled from school when he was fourteen.
Over a decade later, after honing his craft onstage and in vaudeville, and on the doorstep of Hollywood superstardom, Archibald Leach was advised to change his name to Cary Grant.
If you were to choose between “scruffy” Archie Leach and his later, more celebrated alter ego, and select the winner to serve as the main character for a novel you wanted to write, the choice would seem to be obvious.
And it is.
*******************
The four primary protagonists in The Eye-Dancers each struggle with their own personal hang-ups, outlooks, inner demons, and shaky self-esteem. None of them are what anyone would call popular in school. They don’t hang out with the “in” crowd, they’re not the trendsetters or movers-and-shakers of their peer group. Mitchell Brant feels the need to fabricate and invent stories about himself, as he’s not confident that he’s “good enough” as he is. Joe Marma lives in the shadow of his high-achieving older brother, and as the shortest boy in his grade, he has a king-sized chip on his shoulder. Ryan Swinton doesn’t want to rock the boat; he likes to go along with the crowd and tell jokes to make people laugh. Marc Kuslanski never met an equation he didn’t like; he closes his mind to the mysterious, the unexplained, the supernatural. In his logical, rational worldview, everything, no matter how extraordinary, has a commonsense explanation.
As the novel progresses, each character is confronted with circumstances that challenge his perspective, threaten to erode his already fragile sense of self, and even sabotage his ability to survive. The boys can either be swept away and swallowed up by their own insecurities and weaknesses, or they can rise to the occasion to learn, grow, and adapt.
It strikes me that any character, really, needs to have the motivation, ability, and impetus to change over the course of a story. If Character X begins a novel one way and ends the novel exactly the same way, we as readers might pause and ask ourselves, “What was the point of it all?” Then again, maybe “character” isn’t the best word to use.
“When writing a novel, a writer should create living people,” Ernest Hemingway once said. “People, not characters. A character is a caricature.”
Real people are flawed. They have moles and in-grown toenails, regrets and long-held secrets, wistful memories and would-be dreams that, through lost opportunity and the inexorable march of time, are now irretrievably lost. The Cary Grant that the world saw, and thought they knew, was, in the words of Hemingway, a caricature–a glittering creation of Hollywood and the movies. Archibald Leach was in there somewhere. We just couldn’t see him.
If a literary character is Cary Grant-perfect right from the first page, there is no room for growth, no way for readers to relate. The plot may wind through hills and valleys, wander through wooded ravines and turn sharply around sudden hairpin curves, but the protagonist will remain static. The story will not engage.
If I were a producer or a director in Hollywood sixty years ago, the choice would be a no-brainer. I’d take Cary Grant in the proverbial heartbeat. But as an author, looking for a character to build a novel around?
Give me Archibald Leach.
Thanks so much for reading!
–Mike
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