Cary Grant..

In the 2022 biography 'Cary Grant A Brilliant Disguise By: Scott Eyman' towards the end a conversation was recorded. It was between CG and some other (the name escapes my elder-brain) during which CG said something along the lines of 'I started out sleeping with men, then men and women, then ended up only sleeping with women'. Also recorded were the words of the delightful Dyan Canon 'I don't know where the gay rumours started- we fucked all the time'! Make of these as you will.

All the modern biographers agree he was bi for real, but had issues in relationships with both men and women.

Probably Grant's happiest relationship was with Randolph Scott, when they were old they'd occasionally be seen out in Hollywood, holding hands under the table. But Grant kept trying to make it work with women, but it never worked, presumably his heart wasn't in it even if his dick was.

Which biographers, r2?

They were so handsome together. The perfect gay power couple.

OP, the latter

Both Carleton Carpenter and Dick Sargent said Grant hit on them when they were young actors starting out

Cary Grant was a "victim" of nothing except the insane side of his beautiful genes and his own peevish, self-obsessed, cheap-ass vacancy.

Well, someone has an ax to grind…..

I read some of that book R1. I didn't finish it because Grant was revealed to be increasingly unappealing. And I'm a fan! It was interesting to see, in the beginning of his movie career, how he invented "Cary Grant" by copying other men, Douglas Fairbanks JR., Leo McCarey, who directed an early hit The Awful Truth. He created a very successful persona, which didn't really change for the rest of his career.

As a young man, Archibald Leech chipped an upper central incisor and had it removed at a dental college. He had the upper teeth slowly squeezed together to fill the hole.

He was a mincing fairy and everyone knew it.

Jesus fucking Christ he was gorgeous—

Missing smashed in teeth and all.

^^ he really was. The very definition of a movie star.

Gay gay gay.

A fucking homo.

[quote] Cary Grant was a "victim" of nothing except the insane side of his beautiful genes and his own peevish, self-obsessed, cheap-ass vacancy.

What do you mean by 'vacancy'?

For some reason though no one gets me hornier than a young Marlon Brando. I am not sure if there was anyone hotter than him at his prime.

And this thread reminds me of the crazy homeless guy in NYC who used to go around shouting - "I Fucked Tony Curtis up the Ass!" He was so insistent it makes you half-wonder if he did.

Orlry-Kelly, the openly gay Hollywood movie clothing designer, was Cary Grant's roommate in NYC and sometimes lover. (This was in the late 1920s) . He wrote a tell-all autobiography not to be published until after his death. He names names and brings the receipts. I'm pretty sure you could take his anecdotes to the bank. I think Cary Grant was probably bisexual with a more pronounced feeling for men, but super ambitious and protective of his reputation, hence his marriages to women. He was a fine looking man who stayed good looking into old age. I think the biggest love of his life was Randolph Scott, and I'm sure that their relationship was broken up by their respective agents for the sakes of their careers. I think there's a deep sadness in the back of Cary Grant's expressions, even in all the zany comedies he made in the 40s and 50s, but even more so in his more serious films (see stills from Affair to Remember below) . If you can possibly get your hands on it, watch the documentary made about Orry-Kelly's life., called "Women he's undressed" , made in 2015.

I don’t know, honey. He never sucked my dick.

So OP had no ideas but had to post something, anything. So OP rehashes this dreadful beaten-to-death topic. So this is very DL.

He's very beautiful for an Englishman. Very swarthy.

I wouldn’t take Orry-Kelly’s word on anything.

Too right, R22, he was an Oirishman.

Cary Grant was beautiful and sexy, he had the best of both worlds, he lived a long life, left a legacy of wonderful films, he certainly had immense sex appeal into old age, he was still cute to the very end. .. :-)

He had a very dysfunction childhood from what I remember reading. Wasn't his mother committed to an asylum because of mental health problems?

An older friend of mine spoke to him in a gay sauna in London back in the late 70’s.

He's extraordinarily handsome, but for me, not at all sexy. There's no sexual heat from him. Compare him to his contemporaries; Clarke Gable, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, Spencer Tracy, men you can actually imagine getting sweaty in bed. Grant is sort of blank. No sexual heat with a lot of his co-stars, ok, maybe Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, but usually on screen Grant is sort of passive or neutral.

R27I6 Yes, you are right. What is the word - dispassionate?

Total fag.

Mel Brooks tells a funny story about him in a documentary. That he showed up at his bungalow at one of the studios wanting to have lunch, and Mel couldn’t believe THE Cary Grant wanted to spend time with him. Then he showed up again the next day, and Mel was pleased. By the 3rd day he was hiding so he didn’t have to go to lunch again. The implication was all Cary did was talk about himself, and he wasn’t that interesting.

Interesting comment, r27, i find him very attractive but completely get what you mean, and maybe that was the secret of his success, a cerise aloofness, an inability to let himself go. To me he is at his sexiness as the repressed professor in Bringing Up Baby.

^certain, not cerise, or maybe both

I am going to be at the hotel he stayed at before he died, and is rumored to haunt. I will ask him then.

I’d grant Cary anything he wished.

R25, the story I remember from a biography I read is that he was born out of wedlock to a dirt-poor married man and a mentally unstable woman. When he was a baby, his father brought him home to his wife, and basically told her that she had to bring up his bastard from an affair, and Cary/Archie didn't find out that his "mother" wasn't his biological mother until he was an adult, until then he'd never understood why she was utterly cold to him. He reportedly found out in the late 1939s, and there was tension on the set of "Gunga Din" because Victor McLaglen was anti-semitic and pro-Nazi, and Grant now knew his biological mother had been Jewish.

Grant kept his family secrets, and took care of the adoptive mother who'd treated him badly for as long as she lived, and continued to visit her like a dutiful son. Ajnd nobody will ever know if that was because he was motivated by a sense of duty or family feeling, or because it would have been bad for his image if he hadn't.

All I know is... he did an awful lot of acid

Stop this hate. He ate cunt. Not boy ass.

[quote] he certainly had immense sex appeal into old age

No, it ended in 1956.

Very handsome and charismatic. And obviously gay.

Yes, R39, as 'obviously gay' as Rock Hudson and George Nader and George Maharis.

Barbara Hutton said he was her only husband that loved her, and the only one who didn't ask for money in a settlement.

Cary Grant wore women's underwear to avoid a visible panty line, no straight man would do that

R27, I feel the same way. Impossibly handsome, especially in the late '30s and '40s, but utterly lacking in sex appeal. He may have been the horniest man in Hollywood in real life, but on screen he came across to me as someone who could take or leave sex,. There's no smolder.

In a totally different class, but as a similar example: I had the same reaction to Tom Selleck as Magnum PI. I should have thought he was hot. He was everything I like physically, but somehow he seemed almost sexless. The funny thing is I've seen Selleck in a couple of pre-Magnum roles (The Washington Affair, Daughters of Satan), and he's pretty sexy. I guess it was the Magnum role that didn't turn me on ...? That and his lightweight voice. Couldn't stand his voice.

Agree R43. He was charming but if you want a screen man of sex there's no one more masculine sexy than Sean Connery.

He was a mess playing a throughly obnoxious pseudo-intellectual in this throughly pretentious movie.

The trailer suggests it's to be a comedy but he's playing an egomaniacal whacko-guru like Frank Lloyd Wright or John Harvey Kellogg.

The movie is as painful as Mankiewicz at his worst.

[quote]his own peevish, self-obsessed, cheap-ass vacancy.

R7 nails it. Beyond his terrific acting skills and Hollywood persona, he was a nightmare of a classic, self-obsessed, selfish luvvie.

[quote]He wrote a tell-all autobiography not to be published until after his death. He names names and brings the receipts.

R18 clearly hasn't read Orry-Kelly's book at all. It's the very opposite of a tell-all. Very discreet.

In his autobiography Richard Blackwell, the fashion figure who was actor at RKO as 'Dick Ellis', said he'd slept with both Grant and Scott, preferring the latter. Jerome Zerbe, who took the now famous publicity photos of Grant and Scott in their house, also said he'd had them both. Zerbe's photo archive was purchased by the gay Koch brother and donated to Yale.

[quote] Richard Blackwell … said he'd slept with both Grant and Scott.

OK, I can top that. I slept with Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington!

Gay or Just British?

The solid Scotty Bowers also said he'd fucked them both. So lots of people in Hollywood knew the score, but the bullshit overrides everything. A lot of later biographers rely on the generally solid Charles Higham without acknowledgement.

As for Darwin Porter and Boze Hadleigh – I wouldn't trust a word written by either. The latter's Wikipedia entry is constantly rewritten to hide mention of disputable aspects of his work.

Below is the link to Blackwell's biography with the entry on Grant and Scott.

Def bi at the very least.

Effortlessly charismatic. Hollywood is utterly charmless today.

Here is a bit of the documentary, with many excerpts of Orry-Kelly's writing mixed in with analysis, interviews, and discussions with others.

He and Gene Kelly would sing in the rain

I read somewhere years back that Grant could have been a great executive at the studios had he chosen to pursue that at any time. He was an incredibly sharp operator and knew what he was doing with complex contracts. He got the better of some of the toughest negotiators in the business in his time.

R10. Cary Grant chipped a front tooth so he had it REMOVED and had the rest of his teeth squeezed together so you couldn't tell?!! Wasn't there anything easier to do?

Jennifer Grant apparently knows of all her fathers' love affairs before she was born when he was 62!

He was handsome but had zero sex appeal.

"with many excerpts of Orry-Kelly's writing"

Nope. Not at all. If you check the memoir you'll see they made a shitload up to suggest that a very discreet memoir was anything but. I don't doubt Grant and Kelly were sometime fuck buddies, but I hate it when original non-fiction material is 'nudged' for dramatic purposes.