Cary Grant and the Discomfort with Ambiguity

A new Britbox docudrama sidesteps the star's sexuality, but how should we talk about historical figures' hidden feelings?

This week, Britbox, a streaming service for Anglophiles, launches a four-part miniseries called Archie dramatizing the life of Cary Grant, the Old Hollywood actor born Archibald Leach in Edwardian Britain, whose debonair on-screen persona papered over a Dickensian childhood and a series of failed marriages. I’m not really sure how one spins that into a compelling, multi-hour drama that producers preposterously compared to a thriller, but, then, neither did critics, who gave the rather low-budget series (shot at a discount in Spain) mixed to negative reviews.

Jason Isaacs as Cary Grant in “Archie" (Britbox)

I was, however, interested in the unusual approach the miniseries took to Grant’s alleged bisexuality—basically sidestepping it altogether. The series addresses the issue in a single scene where one of Grant’s wives asks him if he were gay, to which Jason Isaacs as Grant offers an ambiguous response. “We didn’t want to say definitely no, nor did we want to say definitely yes,” said screenwriter Jeff Pope, apparently having difficulty with the concept of bisexuality and instead referring to sexual orientation as binary. (The miniseries is “inspired” by the memoir of Grant’s last wife, whom gay writers criticized at the time for soft-pedaling.)

Like Rock Hudson and other big stars of the middle 20^th century, Grant himself never said one way or the other, though he was not quite as reticent about it as some other stars of his era. He told one of his ex-wives about his teenage sexual experimentation with other boys, though he dismissed it as normal British schoolboy behavior. (That’s not wrong, but that’s a whole other, and very weird, story.) He lived with gay men as a young man and spent his early Hollywood years sharing homes with Randolph Scott, a fellow actor, sparking rumors of a secret romance. He also openly admitted that each of his ex-wives had accused him of being a homosexual, though Chevy Chase found himself on the wrong end of a 1980 lawsuit for saying the same thing before Grant died. As far back as the 1940s, columnists like Edith Gwynn were making sidelong references to Grant’s sexuality. Photoplay even ran a headline—with pun fully intended—over an innocuous 1939 story proclaiming “The Gay Romance of Cary Grant.”

Cary Grant (left) and Randolph Scott in their shared home, in a staged 1930s publicity photo.

An infamous 1989 biography of Grant, Charles Higham’s and Roy Moseley’s Cary Grant: The Lonely Heart, attempted to shock AIDS-era audiences with a collection of rumors and falsehoods dressed up in unconscionably homophobic rhetoric casting Grant’s sexuality as a shameful secret only the two biographers had the fortitude to exhume. (Higham also made the claim that Errol Flynn had been a Nazi spy, a false allegation that inspired part of the plot of the 1991 movie The Rocketeer.) As will be instantly familiar to those who have read my various articles about the sensationalist biographies of James Dean, it is no surprise that Higham and Moseley used Freudian fantasies to “explain” Grant as the product of bad parenting, particularly in blaming his mother for causing his bisexuality and his cruelty to women.

The most recent biography of Grant, by Scott Eyman, hilariously casts the question of Grant’s sexuality as a matter of competing factions: “Gays have been eager to claim Grant as one of their own, while straights have been every bit as insistent about his presumed heterosexuality. Caught in the middle are skeptics, who ask why a supposedly gay man would marry five times.” That is not the “middle” position, but whatever; the idea that there are celebrity sex “skeptics” is somehow deeply amusing to me. I remain dumbfounded, however, that even as late as 2021, a biographer (let alone the “skeptics”) could have difficulty with the concept of bisexuality.

Eyman reports on an account given to him by Bill Royce, which is … Well, let’s say Royce describes himself as Grant’s house-sitter and errand-boy, who had what Eyman calls “an involuntary pelvic response” to seeing Grant shirtless. Royce told Eyman that Grant confessed his true sexual feelings to him, saying he had been homosexual as a teenager, bisexual as a young adult, and heterosexual after middle age. Eyman then summarizes the remainder of their conversation: “Grant explained sexuality in terms of performance, of acting. He told Royce that to not completely explore one’s sexuality would be like an actor playing only one character for life. Everybody, he said, had more than one character inside them. He didn’t think homosexual acts were anything to be ashamed of, or, for that matter, proud of. They simply were—part of the journey, not necessarily the final destination.”

I have never thought much about Cary Grant, and nothing in the biographies I skimmed through this week has convinced me his life was interesting enough to cast as a drama. I also have no strong feelings either way about Grant’s sexuality, or much interest in plunging more deeply into the evidence. But I was impressed by the degree to which Grant biographies share with James Dean biographies a fascination with trying to impose and defend labels rather than simply describe what someone said and did. Several biographies present him as a closeted homosexual, others as an unfairly maligned heterosexual. Few seem to truly believe bisexuality really exists.

It simply is not possible to inhabit another person’s heart and to know what they felt and how they processed those feelings internally. It’s doubly difficult to translate what we do know about people from the middle twentieth century into a twenty-first century idiom. Cary Grant, for example, might well have performed “homosexual acts” without thinking of himself as “a homosexual” because he was also attracted to women. The compartmentalized minds of previous generations, which too often could not conceive of same-sex romance or of bisexuality, often divorced physical acts and emotions, or even, as was typical among British men according to extant literature, made a distinction that only anal-receptive “passive” sex was truly a homosexual act. In other words, it’s a lot more complicated that simply assigning a historical personage to one of the dozens of contemporary LGBTQ+ sexualities.

Similarly, I can’t help but notice the degree to which the authors, on each side, frame their arguments—well, maybe that’s too strong a word; let’s call them “implications” since authors prefer to avoid conclusions, lest they be wrong—around old homophobic stereotypes. The writers, and especially their aging sources, discuss homosexuality in terms of effeminacy and whether someone could really be gay (or bisexual, or whatever) if they weren’t sashaying about in women’s clothing or lisping through a showtune. Worse, the “evidence” for Grant’s bisexuality was, in one book, a claim that Grant was sashaying about in some silky outfit one night at a party.

All-in-all, the biographies of Cary Grant share a remarkable similarity to those of James Dean, in terms of their uncritical use of rumor and innuendo, their irreconcilable testimonies from associates with limited knowledge and imagination, and the degree to which they exist as arguments about sexual labels rather than simply discussing how their subjects acted and behaved and allowing the facts to speak for themselves. (I could also mention the lack of clear source notes or critical methodology, but that’s another story!) There seems to be a discomfort with ambiguity and the inability to box individuals neatly into modern categories, particularly insofar as it would require a deep understanding of the historical context and social pressures of different times and places, an understanding that would undermine the very concept of celebrity biography—to universalize the fantasy of Hollywood.

James Dean, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, and many others lived in the ambiguous space between public and private, and they had teams that ensured little that is solid remained behind to tell the tale. It is fortunate, I suppose, that in writing about James Dean I was able to acquire the settlement agreement for the lawsuit the gay man he lived with for years filed against him for repayment of gifts, support, and living expenses. That, at least, is tangible evidence of a relationship that had long been dismissed as allegation and rumor.

For what it’s worth, Higham wrote that Herald-Tribune gossip columnist Joe Hyams claimed around the time that Grant sued him for slander to have seen no evidence of Cary Grant’s bisexuality, which I suppose gives more weight to the implications and evidence for James Dean’s sexuality that Hyams both presented and tried to explain away from the 1950s to the 1990s.