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CHAPTER IV New York
It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess,and it was an age of satire. A stuffed shirt, squirming to blackmail in alifelike way, sat upon the throne of the United States; a stylish youngman hurried over to represent to us the throne of England.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Good manners and a pleasant personality, even without a collegeeducation, will take you far.
CARY GRANT
Archie Leach wanted to become a self-made man. The idea of being a self-made man appealed to him. It made sense. He had a fair idea of what he wanted to make of himself. As Pauline Kael observed, he ‘became a performer in an era in which learning to entertain the public was a trade he worked at his trade; progressed, and rose to the top’.1 Archie Leach craved realism, not magic: he did not want to be dazzled, he wanted to learn: ‘Commerce is a bind for actors now in a way it never was for Archie Leach; art for him was always a trade.’2 Not for Archie Leach the debilitating struggles with one’s conscience about the artistic merit of what one was doing; what he was doing was, it seemed to him, eminently preferable to what he would otherwise have been forced to do back home in Bristol. His initial struggles were, primarily, materialistic rather than intellectual; the practical experience he acquired furnished him with a certain toughness of spirit that subsequent generations of performers, from more privileged, middle-class backgrounds, lacked. In Bristol, he had seen the future, and it was work – work of the soul-destroying, demeaning kind which his father had come to accept as the bald and bleak sum of his life and identity. It was not a fate that Archie Leach was prepared to face: ‘I cannot remember consciously daring to hope I would be successful at anything, yet, at the same time, I knew I would be.’3
Archie Leach was there, at the ship’s rail, as the RMS Olympic steamed into New York harbour in the early morning sunshine of 28 July, and he thought he knew precisely where he was going; he had seen the famous sights of New York many times before, back in Bristol, on the movie screen. He had spent much of his free time, as a child, gazing at visions of American life in the dark. Archie Leach had imagined America long before he set foot on Manhattan Island.
The Pender troupe was met by a Dillingham representative, who took them directly to the Globe Theater. It was explained, as soon as they arrived, that the plans had been changed; instead of appearing in the comic Fred Stone’s show, the Pender troupe would now open in a new revue, Good Times, at the Hippodrome. Although there was little time for them to rehearse, the troupe was not disappointed about the unexpected change. The Hippodrome, then on 6th Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets, was the world’s largest theatre:4 it could accommodate several hundred performers at once on a huge revolving stage; it had a ballet corps of eighty, a chorus of one hundred, and it required around eight hundred backstage employees to mount a show that included over ninety of the most celebrated and spectacular acts from around the world; the auditorium seated 5,697 people.
Archie Leach and his companions had arrived at a fortuitous time. New York, in 1920, was the centre of the world’s blossoming entertainment business. Not only was it a period in which vaudeville theatres were attracting huge audiences, but it was also a period in which a new popular cultural medium – the movies – was in the process of transforming, and expanding, the realm of commercial entertainment in America.5 At the turn of the century, vaudeville exploited movies as a new attraction; a pattern of movie presentations as single acts in commercial vaudeville had soon been established, and, indeed, vaudeville provided the forum in which many urban Americans were introduced to the movies. By the 1920s, however, the relationship had changed, and one of the ways in which the heightened sense of competition between the two showed itself was the determined pursuit by vaudeville producers of increasingly grand and elaborate stage shows and a greater range of unusual and eye-catching acts.6 The Hippodrome housed many of the most spectacular of these.
When they arrived the Pender troupe, with its modest if expert knockabout routines, must have felt rather intimidated (or possibly even, as Cary Grant put it, ‘petrified’7). The other acts were certainly diverse: Joe Jackson, the tramp cyclist; Marceline the clown; the Long Tack Sam Company of Illusionists; ‘Poodles’ Hanneford and the Riding Hanneford Family; and, perhaps most memorable of all, Powers Elephants, described by Cary Grant as ‘an amazing water spectacle in which expert girl swimmers and high divers appeared in an understage tank containing 960,000 gallons of water’.8 Looking back, he reflected: ‘Today you cannot imagine the size of it … It really was show business.’9 The Hippodrome was not a place for the disorganised or the undisciplined: all performers were obliged to check in for work at a time clock – a necessary measure, as far as the management was concerned, in order to keep track of the extraordinary number of acts.
Archie Leach, along with the other boys in the troupe, lived under the authoritarian eyes of Bob and Margaret Pender in a cramped apartment just off Eighth Avenue. The Penders were severe taskmasters. After each evening’s performance at the theatre, the troupe would return to the apartment and line up at the kitchen sink to wash their socks, handkerchiefs, towels and shirts, and then on to the ironing-board – a ritual that usually lasted until well into the night. Leach was also given his own special duties, such as keeping accounts and cooking many of the meals. He grew up quickly.
Good Times was a considerable success, and the Pender troupe, although appearing in just one sequence in the show, attracted praise from several critics. Archie Leach found himself part of a ‘remarkable international family’, an ‘astonishing assemblage’10 of talented performers from diverse backgrounds, and he made the most of the opportunities open to him to learn everything that he could from all of the acts – including special acrobatic tricks, drunken walks, dance steps and illusions. It was an extraordinary time for him.
‘The first thing I loved about America’, he said, ‘was how fast it all seemed.’11 He found New York itself endlessly fascinating. It was a place that breathed possibility. With the Hippodrome dark on Sundays, he was free to explore the city: ‘I spent hours on the open-air tops of Fifth Avenue buses … I contentedly rode from Washington Square, up the Avenue and across 72nd Street, to the beauty of Riverside Drive, with its quiet mansions and impeccably kept apartment buildings.’12 He wanted to feel at home in New York, and, in time, he would do so, but, to begin with, he found it simply exhilarating: the size, the sights, the sounds, the scope, the pace, the opportunities (real and imagined) – the initial exoticism of it all was thrilling.
Good Times ran for nine months, giving 455 performances before closing at the end of April 1921. Exploiting the success of the show, Bob Pender was able to book the troupe on a tour of the B. F. Keith vaudeville circuit (the major vaudeville power at that time in the eastern United States), visiting most of the major cities east of the Mississippi River. In mid-1922, the tour closed with an appearance at the prestigious New York Palace, and then, without definite prospects, Pender – ever the pragmatic professional entertainer – decided to return to England. Not all of his troupe, however, agreed with the decision; some of the members, including Archie Leach, were keen to stay on in New York.
Although Pender clearly had a great deal of respect and affection for Leach, as, indeed, it was evident that Leach had for him, it seems that their relationship had, by the end of the tour, grown tense. Pender by now was tired, middle aged and increasingly cautious; Archie Leach was eighteen years of age, good looking, tall (6′ 2″), fit, energetic, with an increasingly forceful personality, and relishing life away from home. The manner in which they parted reflected the change in the relationship, with Leach, along with some of his fellow members of the troupe, deceiving Pender about their plans for the immediate future. Pender’s letter to Elias Leach not only marks – with regret and exasperation – the end of his association with Archie, but it also suggests that he had been knowingly misinformed as to Archie’s real intentions:
244 West Thayer Street,
Philadelphia, PA
May 21, 1922
DEAR MR. LEACH:
I am writing this to inform you that Archie is coming home. He leaves New York by the Cunard Liner Berengaria on May 29th and should arrive Southampton June 2 or 3. He has made up his mind to come home. I offered him 35 dollars a week which is about G8 [eight guineas] in English money, and he will not accept it, as he says he cannot do on it so I offered him £3/10 a week clear and all his expenses paid but he says he wishes to come home. The wage I have offered him is the same as my daughter and also another of my boys have been getting so I know he could do very nicely on it but I must tell you he is most extravagant and wants to stay at the best hotels and live altogether beyond his means.
I promised him if he improved in his work and was worth it, I will give him more money, but he is like all young people of his age. He thinks he only has to ask and have. I must tell you he has very big ideas for a boy of his age, and he seems to have made up his mind to come home.
He has been a good boy since he has been with me and I think he is throwing away a good chance but he does not think so. Mrs. Pender has talked to him but it is no use. He will not listen. So I should like to hear if he arrives home safely … I shall be glad to do anything for him when I return to England.
I remain,
Yours truly, BOB PENDER13
Recollecting the event forty years later, Cary Grant commented, ‘It must have been very disappointing and difficult for [Pender] to leave so many of his boys behind in America, our land of opportunity: but youth, in its eagerness to drive ahead, seldom recognises the troubles caused or the debts accrued while passing.’14 He was a young adult who, as he put it ruefully, ‘knew that I knew everything’.15 The only problem, it seemed to him at the time, ‘was just that I hadn’t seen everything’.16
Archie Leach, committing his immediate future to the US, spent most of the summer of 1922 searching for ways of making himself employable. Pender had contacts, Leach, thus far, had none; he was a young Englishman in America, with little experience and limited resources in a highly competitive business. ‘Before I made my way to some measure of success,’ he would recall, ‘I had many tough times, but I was always lucky.’17 He began from the outside in, acquiring ‘the corniest habits in my attempts to become quickly Americanised’.18 The obvious influences, for him, were from the theatre:
I’d been to the Palace to see the Marx Brothers, billed as the ‘Greatest Comedy Act in Show Business; Barring None’. I noticed that Zeppo, the young handsome one, the ‘straight’ man, the fellow I copied (who else?) wore a miniature, neatly tied bow tie. It was called – hold onto your chair – a jazz bow. Well, if that was the fashion, it was at least inexpensive enough for me to follow.19
The over-eager series of restylings did little to help him find regular work. After a few barren weeks, he was forced to start using up the ‘emergency money’ given to him by Pender for a return passage to England.20 He had, however, during his search for the right kind of shows, managed at least to meet the right kind of people; Pauline Kael has suggested that he must have been ‘an incredible charmer’,21 because he was just eighteen, admittedly tall and good looking, yet found himself invited to a number of exclusive dinner parties in the company of the wealthy and famous. On one such occasion, as the escort of the opera singer Lucrezia Bori,22 he met George C. Tilyou,23 whose family owned and operated the Steeplechase Park on Coney Island. The meeting resulted in a job: Tilyou hired him to walk around Coney Island on six-foot-high stilts while wearing a bright-green coat and jockey cap, long tube-like black trousers and a sandwich board advertising the race-track. If, in retrospect, the image of Cary Grant on stilts seems somewhat incongruous, one should also note that the image of, say, Ronald Colman, Rex Harrison or David Niven on stilts seems simply incomprehensible; Archie Leach, with his working-class background and his music-hall training, was, among all of the future Hollywood British, uniquely suited to the potential harshness of life in New York in the twenties. ‘If I hadn’t been badgered, cajoled, dared, bullied and helped into walking those high stilts when I was a boy in the Pender troupe, I might have starved that summer – or gone back to Bristol.’24 The pay was forty dollars per week, which provided him with some steady cash while he searched for further vaudeville bookings. Another short-term scheme to earn money involved selling neckties hand-painted by his friend John Kelly (who later achieved fame as the Hollywood designer, Orry-Kelly).
He was experiencing other anxieties during this period. There seems – judging from the (incomplete) correspondence which has been preserved between Archie Leach and his father, Elias – to have been an ongoing series of increasingly acrimonious exchanges between Archie and Bob Pender. Elias Leach, in a letter to his son, refers to ‘the rumour of Mr. B. Pender action towards you’; he advises his son to ‘try and get in touch with the national vaudeville artists institute and ask them if they take up such cases as yours [if Pender] tries his game on’.25 Judging from this letter, it seems that Pender may have attempted to force Archie to return the money he was given for his return fare back to England. It is not inconceivable, however, that Archie Leach, having spent at least part of this sum, was more concerned about the possibility that his father might discover that his account of his dealings with Pender had not been entirely truthful. Elias, rightly or wrongly, accepted his son’s version of events, and reassured him that ‘if I get any letters from B. Pender or anybody else from New York I will do as you have asked me to do and not take any notice of them’.26 Elias (who had just become a father again and was struggling to support his new family) also thanked Archie for ‘another ten shillings note’,27 which suggests that the pressure on Archie Leach to find more lucrative forms of employment was particularly great at this time.
At the end of the summer, Leach and other former members of the Pender troupe heard that the director of the New York Hippodrome, R. H. Burnside, was planning another extravagant variety show, Better Times, which would accommodate an act similar to that of the Penders. They began to practise together, and, in September, they returned to the Hippodrome for the new season, calling themselves ‘The Walking Stanleys’.28 When Better Times closed, the troupe prepared a new vaudeville act which toured the Pantages circuit of theatres during 1924, travelling through Canada to the West Coast (giving Leach his first, brief, tantalising glimpse of Southern California) and back across the United States.
Upon returning to New York, the troupe disbanded. A few more went back to England, disenchanted after another exhausting and relatively poorly paid tour.29 Archie Leach, however, once again, stayed on, living at the National Vaudeville Artists Club on West 46th Street ‘where I was again permitted to run up bills while trying to run down jobs’.30 The Club was a good place for making contact with other – often much better-known – performers, and, sometimes, substitute for them on stage. Leach had to improvise with little or no time for rehearsal or reflection. He worked in juggling and acrobatic acts; he had a short spell as a unicycle rider; in the guise of ‘Rubber Legs’ (a self-explanatory pseudonym that owed much to his years as a stilt-walker) he played in several comic sketches; he also appeared as ‘Professor Knowall Leach’ in a mind-reading act; and he was a straight man for a number of comics. The most memorable engagement that he secured at this time, he told people, was a spot as a straight man with Milton Berle in a variety show at Proctor’s Newark theatre. Also on the bill was one Detzo Ritter, a man who wrestled with himself on stage, spinning himself through the air, locking himself into an agonising half-nelson before pinning himself, exhausted, to the mat for a spectacular finale.31 Archie Leach’s sense of the absurd – which was already fairly pronounced – could not have remained unaffected by such sights: ‘The experiences were of incalculable benefit because it was during these one – and two-day engagements that I began learning the fundamentals of my craft.’32 It was the kind of work that demanded a considerable degree of self-discipline; there was no room for egotism. Archie Leach was learning how best to husband his own energy; it was, indeed, probably from this period that he started to acquire the lasting reputation as a man who took direction well and did not exert himself to assert himself needlessly at the expense of others.
He learned a great deal from studying the best acts, such as George Burns and Gracie Allen, night after night, when they performed in New York:
George was a straight man, the one who would make the act work. The straight man says the plant line … and the comic answers it … The laugh goes up and up in volume and cascades down. As soon as it’s getting a little quiet, the straight man talks into it, and the comic answers it. And up goes the laugh again.33
Archie Leach had stage experience, but only as a silent performer of physical comedy routines; he had not yet had cause to speak, but he was now, gradually, learning the techniques essential for verbal humour. As a straight man, he learned, in front of an audience, the importance of timing: ‘When to talk into an audience’s laughter. When not to talk into the laughter. When to wait for the laugh. When not to wait for the laugh. When to move on a laugh, when not to move on a laugh.’34 As his performances improved, and he became more experienced and self-assured, he received more bookings; he once said that he felt at this time that he had played ‘practically every small town in America’.35 The sheer variety, in terms of venue and composition and mood of audience, gave him further invaluable education in the art of comic technique:
Doing stand-up comedy is extremely difficult. Your timing has to change from show to show and from town to town. You’re always adjusting to the size of the audience and the size of the theater. We used to do matinees, supper shows, and late shows … the response would change from night to night and from town to town. The people in Wilkes-Barre and the folks in Wilmington don’t necessarily laugh at the same things.36
While he was playing some short engagements in and around New York, he met Reginald Hammerstein, a stage director and the younger brother of Oscar Hammerstein II, who suggested, somewhat impetuously, that his true talent might lie in musical comedy. Receptive to the idea, Leach took voice lessons and was engaged on a ‘run-of-the-play’ basis by Arthur Hammerstein, Reginald’s uncle, for Golden Dawn, the opening production of the impressive new Hammerstein Theater.37 Leach had a minor role as an Australian prisoner of war, and doubled as understudy of the juvenile lead. The production opened on 30 November 1927, and ran for 184 performances over a six-month period. Afterwards, Arthur Hammerstein re-engaged him for another musical, Polly, in the role that Noël Coward had taken in the London production.
Polly opened to largely negative reviews in Wilmington, Delaware, where one critic remarked that ‘Archie Leach has a strong masculine manner, but unfortunately fails to bring out the beauty of the score’.38 Leach was replaced before the show reached Broadway. He was not, however, out of work for too long. Marilyn Miller, the popular musical comedy star, chose him to replace her current leading man in Rosalie. The show’s producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, agreed with the choice and asked Arthur Hammerstein – his arch-rival – to release Leach from his contract. Hammerstein was not at all pleased, and, over Leach’s ‘complaining voice’,39 sold the contract to J. J. Shubert instead.
Shubert, along with his brother Lee, was Broadway’s biggest theatrical producer at the time.40 Ironically, although Leach, impetuously, had tried to resist the move, the change could hardly have done his career more good. Within a few weeks, the Shuberts had cast him in a new musical, Boom Boom, with Jeanette MacDonald, and agreed to pay him $350 per week. For a young performer who had been in only two previous productions, one of which he had been fired from, this was a stroke of remarkably good fortune. Leach, to his credit, appreciated this fact, and worked hard to make a success of the role. The show opened in New York at the Casino Theater in January 1929. After a mere seventy-two performances it closed (Charles Brackett, The New Yorker’s critic, remarked acidly that Boom Boom could ‘teach one more about despair than the most expert philosopher’41), but both MacDonald and Leach were screen-tested at Paramount’s Astoria Studio,42 though no contracts were offered. Leach’s test was not positive; he was, according to the talent scout’s report, ‘bowlegged and his neck is too thick’.43 This curt dismissal was not quite as injudicious as the now notorious verdict on Fred Astaire’s first screen test: ‘Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.’44 There was, after all, no shortage of young, tall, good-looking would-be matinee idols seeking employment in Hollywood; the competition was great, and any blemish, any sign of a suspect temperament, could count against one. Archie Leach, at that time, was far from Hollywood’s – or, indeed, his own – idea of perfect, and he had not yet learned how to make a virtue out of his distinctive features and mannerisms. The talent scout was not guilty of any gross exaggeration. Leach’s collar-size was 17½ inches,45 and, because he had a gymnast’s narrow, sloping shoulders, the thickish neck could sometimes seem even thicker than it actually was. He did indeed have a slightly bow-legged gait, which was not uncommon among those trained in his kind of specialised acrobatic work. The depressing verdict, therefore, was probably not entirely unexpected.
It was some consolation to Archie Leach that he was kept, in his words, ‘happily, gainfully and steadily employed’ by the Shuberts for almost three years.46 He was, in fact, doing about as well in the theatre at that time as he would have done with comparable work in Hollywood. The Shuberts were paying him $450 per week, which allowed him to purchase his first car, a Packard sport phaeton, then considered one of the finest of American-made automobiles. He was a young man who was sharply aware of the value of appearances. ‘That was my trouble,’ he recalled, ‘always trying to impress someone.’47
His next stage role was as Max Gunewald, a vain, superficial young man, in A Wonderful Night, Fannt Mitchell’s rather loose re-working of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. It opened at the Majestic Theater on 31 October 1929, two days after the blackest day of the Wall Street Crash, and closed, promptly, in February 1930. It had received mixed reviews, as had Archie Leach. One critic wrote, somewhat gnomically, that ‘Mr Archie Leach, as the soprano’s straying baritone, brings a breath of elfin Broadway to his role’, but another disagreed, claiming that Leach, ‘who feels that acting in something by Johann Strauss calls for distinction, is somewhat at a loss as to how to achieve it. The result is a mixture of John Barrymore and cockney.’48
After a few weeks back working in vaudeville, Leach received a new assignment from the Shuberts, but at a somewhat reduced salary. On the verge of bankruptcy, the Shuberts were packaging streamlined versions of some of their earlier successes to offer to the public at ‘pre-war prices’ from three dollars down to fifty cents. Leach went on tour in the musical The Street Singer,49 for the next nine months, he toured through the provincial towns where unemployment was starting to put many people out on the streets. The show had to gross two thousand dollars a night just to break even. It failed, and was one of the contributing factors that caused the Shubert Corporation to file for receivership in 1931.