Cary Grant Read Online Free PDF Page B

attractive woman—and the song-and-dance routines of the newest performers.
    In 1909, at just five years of age, young Archie caught his first glimpse of the performer he would be obsessed with for much of of his life. Charlie Chaplin was a member of the Karno Players, a traveling vaudeville group that regularly toured the music hall circuit that included Bristol. A year later, Karno took Chaplin and others to America, a journey from which Chaplin would not return. He became a solo sensation first in the New York City vaudeville houses along Forty-second Street, then in short film comedies, and triumphed in Hollywood when he gave the world, and Archie, the gift of “the Little Tramp.”
    Elias was a bit of a piano-roller himself, and soon enough young Archie could plunk out some pretty fancy rhythms on the pub's beer-stained clanky uprights. When Elsie learned of her son's musical talent, in a gesture of kindness perhaps tinged with parental competitiveness, she had her father buy a fancy brand-new upright for the family living room. The arrival of the piano angered Elias, not because he didn't enjoy the boy's playing but because hehadn't paid for it himself, and his loud but hollow complaints about not wanting to live off her father's charity set off yet another squabble over money that was anything but music to young Archie's ears.
    At Elsie's insistence, Archie began studying classical piano, while at his father's urging he continued to develop his music hall style. The conflicted direction of his percussive abilities confused the boy, even as it became yet one more focal point of his parents' polarization, to the point where, while he loved to play, he rarely did for either of them.
    Soon enough Elsie, ever the practical puritan, decided that her young boy's God-given talents (aided by the strong left hand, which he naturally favored) qualified him for early admission to one of the best schools in the area, the Bishop Road Junior School in Bishopston. She was rightly proud when Archie's musical abilities convinced the board he was fit to take one of the few available vacancies. The only thing that concerned her was Archie's left-handedness, something she feared might keep the school from allowing him to enroll.
    Once enrolled, five-year-old Archie played the piano far less often than he kicked a football, and his unusually deft playground skills won him the friendship and admiration of the other boys his age and older. With all the good food and exercise he got, he spurted upward like a bean weed, stretching to a full six foot one before his thirteenth birthday. What then became apparent to everyone at school, students and teachers alike, was how unusually handsome young Archie was, tall, strong, and blessed with a face that was embossed with his mother's dimpled chin and rich brown eyes and his father's thick black wavy hair and ready smile.
    If life seemed better for him at Bishop Road, his absence from home only made things worse between Elsie and Elias. Without Archie as the restraining buffer, their bickering became more frequent, and always centered on either Elias's philandering or his lack of sufficient income. More than once their fights turned physical. For Elias, as he saw it, at times the only way to deal with his stubborn wife was to beat her into proper submission.
    Whenever things became too intense between them, Elsie simply left until thing cooled down. It eventually became clear to Elias that the situation between them was hopeless and that he had to leave for good. Unable to pay for a divorce, he figured out a route to freedom by taking a factory jobin Southampton, eighty miles southeast of Bristol near the southern shore, to make uniforms for both militaries in the ongoing Italian-Turkish conflict.
    Years later Grant would recall in this revealing description the traumatizing incident of what he took as his father's abandonment and his own culpability in helping to drive him away: “Odd, but I don't