Cary Grant Read Online Free PDF

house- mate and lover Randolph Scott often showed up at costume parties dressed as women, and in his mid-fifties Grant surprised reporter Joe Hyams by admitting that he still often preferred wearing women's nylon panties under his regular clothes when he traveled because they were easier to pack than men's underwear and he could wash them out himself, which saved on hotel laundry bills.
    As likely to have influenced the young Grant's psyche as his too-close physical attachment to his mother was Elias's frequent absences, which deprived him of a father's normalizing presence. In truth, her husband's nights away from home no longer worried Elsie. Instead, she saw them as anopportunity for additional uninterrupted playtime with her perfect little Archie.
    And yet even as the boy grew more attached to his mother and her possessive ways, he still strongly identified on some level with his father. If Archie had become the surrogate husband to his mother, receiver of her smothering affection and perhaps a bit of her misplaced rage, on some primitive or instinctive level he probably knew why Daddy wasn't always around. The few nights Elias did stay home, he and Elsie had loud arguments over money (or the lack of it), which only deepened the emotional split in the boy's loyalties between the two and secured the groundwork for his well-known lifelong thriftiness and later conflicted views of adult love—his uneasy acceptance of the public's at-times-wild adulation, the chaste pursuit of women he believed he unconditionally loved, his failure at marriage, his preference for the company of men over women, or the choice of no company at all. “My parents tried so hard and did their best,” Grant said later on. “The trouble was that they weren't happy themselves. The lack of money for my mother's dreams became an excuse for regular sessions of reproach, against which my father learned the futility of trying to defend himself. But that isn't really to say that either one of them was ‘wrong’ or ‘right.’ They were probably both right.”
    Elias (Jim to his friends) was, if anything, relieved by his exclusion from his fatherly responsibilities to his son. He preferred the aroma of cigar smoke and ale spilled on wood at a local pub to the hot cabbage and cold wife waiting for him at home. Whenever Elias did get to spend time alone with his son, it was that much more fun for the both of them. When Archie was just five, his father began taking him to the pressing factory on Saturdays, where the boy loved to stand amid the loud machinery until closing time, then walk through town holding his hand above his head to reach his father's big one as Elias made the rounds of the local pubs and the traveling cribbage games. Archie always received two rewards for “assisting” his father at work. The first was a wrapped candy he was encouraged to fish for with his fingers in the well-pressed pants Elias wore for after-work activities. The second was the advice of a man who admired fine clothing, who believed that visual presentation, despite one's social standing, was the best way to self-promote. One afternoon Elias, after noticing the inferior quality of Archie's shoes, gave him a stern but loving lecture about the importance of proper footwear. Elsie,ever thrifty and practical, had bought Archie four pairs of inexpensive shoes. It was the kind of thrift Elias did not approve of. To him, the dress-up shoes his son wore looked “cheap” and “wouldn't last.” Better to have just one good pair, he advised the young boy, than several that were worthless. “Buy less at higher quality” was a lesson Archie would remember the rest of his life. *
    One of Elias and Archie's favorite Saturday-night pastimes was to go to a Bristol music hall or vaudeville theater to see pantomime—a particularly raucous and quite popular entertainment where men played both male and female parts, and the male lead was always played by a young and usually