Cary Grant: A Biography by Marc Eliot 3 stars (and) The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood by Jane Leavy. 2.8 stars
Everybody wants to be Cary Grant and at some point everybody is...
Jane Leavy met Mickey Mantle when she was a young reporter and he was working at a casino after his retirement from baseball. Leavy grew up idolizing Mantle. The Yankees were baseball when baseball was the only game that mattered. Mantle, their biggest star, was the American Dream come to life. Everyone worshipped Mickey Mantle.
On the day she interviewed him, Mantle spent an hour drunkenly propositioning Leavy, before passing out on top of her in a restaurant booth. When a waitress walked by, she just sighed and said, “Oh Jesus, not again,” before helping Leavy get out from under her childhood hero.
“Oh Jesus, not again” isn’t the worst epitaph ever, but it’s in the running.
Cary Grant was insanely elegant. He retired as an actor when he was 62 and became a full time father. One night, Grant’s daughter got sick, so he threw on whatever clothes he could find and rushed out to get his kid medicine. A fan saw him standing on line and shook her head at his appearance. Grant apologized, then never wore jeans in public again. He knew what he represented.
Mantle got so drunk one night, he literally fell into a gutter. He looked up at his drinking buddies and said, “fine place for an American hero.” He was often less self-aware and even less endearing. A young boy standing next to his mom asked for an autograph. Mantle wrote ‘Dear Billy, You’re lucky. Your mother has great tits”.
Grant was born Archibald Leach. His distinctive English accent was entirely his own; not wanting to sound poor, he just made it up. Early in his career he learned not to trust any suggestions his female co-stars gave him. Actresses were inevitably jealous of his looks; their ‘tips’ were meant to make him look bad. Good luck with that, no one ever made Grant look bad. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,” Grant once said. “Even me.” Every part of Cary Grant was made up; he could easily have won an Oscar for every role he played before filming even started.
Some people are better at being icons than others.
Years ago, one of my son’s friends met Tom Cruise on a film set.
At first it was awkward in all the ways you might expect, as the kid, then about 15, waited to say hi. But when Cruise saw him, he jumped up, shook his hand like meeting him was the highlight of his day. Then Cruise said, ‘hey…do you want a picture?’ as if he’d just invented the idea of a selfie. The kid started to reach for his phone, but Cruise’s own photographer jumped up to take the photo. Cruise did the movie star grin, and that was that.
But also this:
A few days later, the family got the photos delivered to their house. Cruise looked great, because of course he did. But my son’s friend looked great too, because Cruise’s people had airbrushed all of his pimples out of the shot. Of a selfie. Of someone Tom Cruise will never see again. There’s lots about Tom Cruise that isn’t appealing, but the man knows his job and what he means to others.
At some point, we are all iconic to someone. If you casually, or even jokingly, are mean to your child, they will remember it long after you’re gone, because parents are iconic, if only to their kids. If you own the company, you’re The Boss. You can’t order at a restaurant without being The Customer. Those things matter and people who pretend they don’t, inevitably wind up acting like assholes. You have to know what you mean to people. If you don’t, you wind up meaning all the wrong things.
You can’t blame Mantle or anyone else for falling short of other people’s ideals. We’re all only human. On our best days though, we remember that sometimes the world or even just a small handful of people in it, needs slightly more than only human from us. And with any luck at all, we rise to the challenge. Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. When you get the chance to be, you really should take it.