It’s been a minute since I’ve shared a guest post here on Travalanche, and I don’t do it very frequently, but I am excited to be presenting one today. My most frequent guest poster has been my wife, of course, but second runner up is Lauren Milberger. Lauren’s wonderful 2012 tribute to Gracie Allen is one of Travalanche’s most popular posts, and I’m pretty sure her most recent one was her three-parter on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-18). Today, just under the wire for Pride Month, and on Pride Day in NYC, she gives us her take on what’s missing from the miniseries Archie, about the life of Cary Grant….
In the recent Britbox miniseries Archie, based on the life of Cary Grant, a young Archie Leach (Cary Grant’s real name), only a stilt-walker in vaudeville at the time, attends an audition withh a young vaudevillian named George Burns. It isn’t much of an encounter. In fact, they barely speak as they each audition in a long line of hopefuls. But George, one half of the famous comedy double-act of Burns and Allen, the former Nathan Birnbaum of the Lower East Side, remembers the young Brit after a run-in at a restaurant, with enough good faith to give the lad a tip on a job in a Broadway show. A job that would change the trajectory of Leach’s future
toward becoming who we know today as movie star Cary Grant. After that, we never see George again in the story, the assumption being that he helped a struggling actor and moved on like a lonely drifter in the night. What might shock you is that this never happened… in more ways than one.
Overall, Archie is a story of a man whose issues with his mother affected every
female relationship in his life – yet missing from Archie are the crucial men in Cary Grant’s story – starting with George Burns. One of the few of important men who stayed with Cary Grant for the rest of his life, literally and figurately. In the series, when George runs into Grant in that restaurant in 1931, giving him a tip for an audition that will lead to him playing opposite movie star Fay Wray (Today’s audience may know her as the star of the original King Kong), Burns’ is depicted as having an agent and a lawyer, suggesting that he is a successful performer, as contrasted with a strugglingly Grant. This part was true in real life; by 1931, Burns and Allen were a well-known Big-Time act, having performed at the famed Palace Theater (the most prestigious theater on the Big Time vaudeville circuit) and had appeared in a handful of movie shorts.
The first glaring stray from reality in Archie, however, and, one of two interesting facts about Burns, is that it would be highly implausible for George to audition for anything, at the time, without his wife and comedy partner Gracie Allen. A woman who, even in their early days, would have been considered the “talent” of the two, with George almost never being asked to appear by himself (as opposed to the solo act he became known for after her death). More than this, George had previously struggled consistently in show business until he met his future bride and muse. The second, lesser known fact is that George was highly dyslexic, and attending an event where he might have to be asked to read from a script would have scared George half to death. In fact, in their successful Burns and Allen radio shows, George would memorize his script, holding it for broadcast like all of his fellow castmates, but only pretending to read from it on air. Burns even famously showed up for a first read-through for his Oscar-winning role in The Sunshine Boys (1975) with the entire script fully memorized, something unheard of in film, let alone for a book-in-hand table read.
Still, this isn’t George’s story, and dramatizations of famous people’s lives are just that: dramatizations. They therefore stray from the truth for many reasons, from moving the story forward to combining characters to help the audience focus on certain plot elements or themes. There may not be time to show the countless theater performances that steered Grant toward his stage role in Nikki (1931) opposite Fay Wray, which then led to Grant meeting Irene Mayer Selznick, the wife of famous film producer David O. Selznick, also the daughter of Hollywood studio mogul Louis B Mayer, at the closing night party. A meeting that would catalyze Grant’s move to LA to pursue film work.
The miniseries Archie reimagines George Burns as a benevolent stranger and deus ex machina (“God from a machine”), a character who arrives to fix an unsolvable problem (here giving Grant his “big break”) and then leaving. Yet, Grant and Burns had a well-documented mentorship relationship well into their old age. Grant attributed his comic timing to Burns, literally learning at Burns’s feet by watching him perform on multiple occasions, both on stage and in social situations. So, the question remains: Why turn a meaningful relationship into an encounter between two strangers? Thematically, his impact remains the same, but why invent the lack of personal relationship and connection? Perhaps the reason lies in the story of how Burns and Grant met.
When George Burns first met the future Cary Grant, he did, in fact, know him as Archie, long before he changed his name. That part of their meet-cute is true. However, instead of randomly meeting Burns once or twice, and although still just a kid, Cary Grant was, in fact, part of the Burns’ New York circle of friends in the mid-late 1920s. A group that included the likes of other comedy giants such as George’s best friend, Jack Benny. All older and successful in a way the young Archie could only dream about. Grant was first introduced to the group through Australian-born Orry-Kelly, the future legendary Hollywood costume designer, who had previously been a neighbor and good friend of Gracie Allen before she married George.
The best way to explain just how close Orry-Kelly and Gracie were is to recount a story in George’s book, Gracie: A Love Story, where Burns left for the office in the morning observing Gracie and Orry-Kelly talking on the phone, only to return that night with them still gabbing away. Scott Eyman’s book A Brilliant Disguise quotes George as saying Gracie and Orry-Kelly “stayed close friends all their lives.” Thus Grant wasn’t just introduced to Burns through just any old friend but by a trusted confidante of the love of his life and on-stage partner. George often told stories of this group of friends at this time, going out drinking and dancing and putting on shows for each other n their apartments. In George’s eyes, it was a golden age, and Grant was a part of it.
“He was the best-looking guy I’d ever seen,“ George said about Grant. “We used to have dinner together once in a while. At the automat, everything was cheap.” The young Archie easily integrated himself into their friend group, and Cary idolized George and, by his own account, took notes. “George was an absolute genius. Timing his laughs with the cigars… “ Grant credits Burns with teaching him comic timing and “the importance of integrating yourself with the audience but masking the effort – making it effortless and flawless”. All traits one would now associate with movie star Cary Grant. Grant also admired George’s confidence (little did he know that the comedian’s confidence level had been zero before his success with Gracie Allen) and, although attributed to Benny Fields, in George’s biography of Gracie, other biographies attributed the following encounter to Grant – who, after asking where he and their friends could send Burns and Allen flowers after their first night playing The Palace Theater, George remarked: “After the third encore.” It was the type of confidence Archie Leach could only dream of, but it would be just another layer of the on-screen character known as Cary Grant, which Archie created for himself. Like Orry-Kelly and Gracie, Burns and Grant’s friendship lasted until the end of his life.
Orry-Kelly and Grant would also see each other on and off in La-La-Land. And although he was a pallbearer at Orry-Kelly’s 1964 funeral, Grant and Orry-Kelly did not maintain the same close relationship as he had with Gracie, nor talk about their time together as he did about Burns. Orry-Kelly is entirely absent from Archie, the only remaining fiber of connection between the two men in the series seems to be the presence of George Burns— the only link to their friend group. Orry-Kelly and Grant had met first, and although different from Gracie and Orry-Kelly, they did meet under similar thematic circumstances: housing. Orry-Kelly says he met Grant after Grant was locked out of his lodging. Orry-Kelly took the young man in as a roommate in a small flat in Greenwich Village. Together, the two worked on Orry-Kelly’s tie-painting business. Orry-Kelly would paint/design the ties, and Grant would sell them with his good looks and charm.
Gillian Armstong, who directed a documentary on Orry-Kelly, Women He’s Undressed, says that Grant and Orry-Kelly even ran a speakeasy and, at one point, were on the run from the mob. Grant went from being a young kid in a new country to having a core group of friends and supporters. Are Burns and Orry-Kelly in Archie meant to be a composite character in terms of representing support? Still, even if he was, the question arises again: Why change such lasting and meaningful relationships in Grant’s life to that of a glancing acquaintance? Does the answer lie in Grant himself? Grant asked his costume designer friend not to speak of their time together in their Commerce Street apartment, even though when Orry-Kelly arrived broke in LA, Cary Grant took in his old friend, helped him with his finances, and never acted as if they never knew each other. And Although there is no proof of where Grant slept in their New York City apartment (bed, floor, or couch), Armstrong confirmed in print that the apartment only had one bed.
I’ve buried the lede here for those not familiar with Orry-Kelly, which was that he was an openly gay man whom Cary lived with on and off for over a decade. Perhaps Grant himself is responsible for the omission of Orry-Kelly in Archie. The series was based on the memories of Grant’s third wife, Dyan Cannon, who may have not been familiar with the story of Grant’s early years due to Grant’s reluctance to talk about it and Orry-Kelly’s death prior to the time they married. Not to mention the homophonic nature of the time period he lived in and his job in the public eye. Orry-Kelly even denied their relationship as romantic in his unpublished biography, although other periodicals and books would say they have proof of otherwise.
The speculation about Cary Grant’s sexuality has been debated for decades, across two centuries, and remains a question that could only be answered by Grant himself. In the series, Cannon (played by Laura Aikman) point-blank asks Grant if rumors about him being gay are true, which he flatly denies, as per Grant’s real-life refutation. However, one could point out that while the script reflects that Grant was not part of the LBGTQ+ community, the filmmakers would appear to think otherwise. This can be seen on display in Grant’s relationship in the series (and in reality) with the man who started the gay rumors in Hollywood in the first place, the second of his known flatmates, fellow actor, Randolph Scott.
According to Eyman’s book, it was Orry-Kelly’s idea that he and Grant part ways as LA roommates and that Cary move in with fellow actor Randolph Scott. During their time of cohabitation, Scott and Grant were presented in the press as two single men sharing a “bachelor pad”, with photos of them eating together, in their pool together, working out together, and by all accounts by a modern context, looking as if they are in domestic bliss. They look happy and content together.
Rumors were so rampant at the time, that they were an item that famed gossip columnist Hedda Hopper is said to have remarked of Grant, “Whom does he think he is fooling?” Eyman points out that similar allegations were made about several actors at the time that were not true. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the public discourse over Scott and Grant’s relationship became the public discussions we know today. In the Scott section of the Archie miniseries, older Grant, played by Jason Isaacs, narrates in voice-over how Grant and Scott found the speculation about their relationship funny, i.e., not true. However, the series’ visuals tell another story. That is manifested in one scene where a gorgeous woman walks past Grant and Scott, and is ignored by the two men as the camera follows her, focusing on the lack of attention she garners from the two men, who appear enraptured with each other.
Isaacs, who plays the older Grant, seems to have come to the same conclusion as the
filmmakers about Grant: “Today you might call him ‘fluid’.” Still, the honest answer is only known to Grant himself, who died in 1986. But perhaps we have something close. In David Canfield’s Vanity Fair article, “Cary Grant and Randolph Scott’s Hollywood Story: Our Souls Did Touch,” in their January 2024 issue. Canfield paints a lovely portrait of two humans who shared a deep love for each other, always seeming to come together again after another of Grant’s marriages to women flickered out. The article quotes the noted fashion writer Richard Blackwell, who referred to Randy (as Scott he was called by intimates) and Cary as a “couple” after spending months with Scott and Grant, saying they were “deeply, madly in love.”
Quoting the 2006 biography of British journalist Maureen Donaldson, a former flame of Grant’s in the late ’70s, co- written by Bill Royce, a close friend of the couple, Royce recounts Grant’s reaction to Royce informing Grant of a recent encounter with Scott, and Grant’s “melancholy wistfulness” in his confession of love for Scott: “Have you ever heard of gravity collapse?… “some people call it love at firstsight,” he said. “This was the first time I’d felt it for anyone.” Grant reportedly told Royce that he and Scott weren’t gay or straight but somewhere in between, that women as well as men slept over at their beach house, and that Scott never wanted Grant in the same way that Grant wanted Scott. They explored this attraction imbalance. Grant said that they did have sex, often awkwardly, and that they connected romantically. “There was no way Randy would have experimented with me…if he didn’t truly love me on some profound level.” And how painful it was to say goodbye: “It was dreadful having to let go of him in my heart….our souls did touch.”
This is admittedly secondhand, and it is not anyone’s place to label or out a person, before or after death. However, the glaring absence of these three men from the story of Cary Grant’s life in Archie seems suspect in the framework of a format where the goal is to leave us knowing a subject better by the finale than we did in the premiere episode. To relate to our heroes on a human level – to understand what made them “tick.” Because in explaining Grant’s connection to Burns, one has to explain Orry-Kelly’s connection to Grant, which then, in turn, would lead to explaining Cary’s connection to Scott. Significantly absent in a series whose running narrative is that of a man who failed to connect with women due to his own maternal absence until he was a parent of a daughter. Which leaves as the only explored male relationship in the series, the one between Grant and his monstrous estranged father. For a series about connection, it feels lopsided and confounding.
Either way, romantic or otherwise, the exclusion of the men who touched Cary Grant’s soul from the narrative leaves his story half-told. The important people in our lives make us who we are – leaving them out entirely is something less than truth. Ultimately, when we leave this earth, all that is left is our connection to each other’s souls. They are our stories.