“I never associated him with being a working-class kid. I must say, I don't want to sound snobbish about it, but he never had any sort of Bristol accent. From the first time I met him, he always impressed me as the model gentleman. I thought he was Cary Grant offscreen, in real life. But that's what made him such a good actor.”
—PETER CADBURY
Archie's dreams of the future stretched across the ocean like expanding tubes of a telescope until, on July 28, the tip of lower Manhattan finally came into view. As the Olympic slowly pulled into New York's harbor and the Hudson River, Archie stood on deck with the hundreds of other passengers, the salt spray cooling his face in the hot sun as they sailed past the silent, welcoming gaze of the Statue of Liberty. When he turned his head in the other direction, while the great ship was carefully tugged into West Forty- sixth Street's White Star pier, he could see for the first time the magnificent tall buildings of Manhattan.
Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks and the other first-class passengers disembarked to fireworks and a live brass band, while hundreds of photographers and newsreel cameramen and hordes of well-wishers celebrated the return of the larger-than-life screen legends. By the time Pender's troupe deboarded, much of the pomp, press, and people had gone. Archie and the others had missed all the excitement because of getting bogged down in the extra-long tedium of customs reserved for steerage passengers. His first steps onto American soil were taken over dead streamers and punctured balloons strewn along the wooden pier, as he and the others made their way to the waiting taxis that Lomas had arranged to take them to their hotel. The entire troupe had been booked into a Fifty-eighth Street “We Cater to the Theatrical Trade” residential hotel, just west of Eighth Avenue, about three-quarters of a mile from where they had docked.
After lugging his own bags up four flights to his small room, Archie barely had time to unpack when a slip of paper under his door informed him that the company was to attend a reception that evening personally arranged and supervised by Charles Dillingham, to be held on the stage of his famed Broadway Globe Theater. Archie was ready to go an hour before departure time.
Dillingham intended the welcome party as a way to formally introduce the Penders to Fred Stone, the star for whom they had been booked to open. The evening went well enough, with relations between Stone and the troupe cordial, if not warm. They cooled even more the next day when Stone caught a glimpse of the troupe rehearsals. He didn't like what he saw—not because they were so bad, but because they were too good. Stone feared that the Penders' spectacular physical feats, far better than he had heard, particularly the stilt-walking routine, would be impossible for him to follow, and he insisted they be taken off the bill.
It was a blow for the Penders and for Dillingham, as well. He had invested a lot of money in this booking, personally financing the trip over from England, and needed to find a way to recoup. The next day Dillingham released a statement to the press saying that because of the physical limitations of the Globe, Pender's stilt-walking “Giants,” as his players were advertised in the American trades, would not be appearing after all, and he had arranged to book them instead into another of his contracted venues, the cavernous New York Hippodrome, billed by the showman as “The World's Largest Theater” (its front curtain was a full city block long). The Hippodrome was the permanent home of his Good Times revue, meant to compete with the Ziegfeld Follies, the talk of the town at the New Amsterdam Theater.
Good Times was a world-class extravaganza, complete with elephants, zebras, monkeys, horses, acrobats, fireworks, dazzling light shows, solo singers, cyclists, dancers, chorales, musicians, magicians, and a self-contained water show that featured dozens of female swimmers and male divers in a stage tank containing 960,000 gallons of water. Dillingham hoped the Penders' stilt act would now give the show a dash of old-world music hall. In a sequence squeezed in between the elephants and the zebras the producer billed as “The Toy Store,” the stilt-walkers were all made up to look like toys that came alive at night after all the people went home.
On August 9, barely a week and a half from the day he arrived in America, Archie made his Stateside debut as one of the stilt-walkers in Dillingham's Good Times revue. The act received great notices in the press, and the group settled in for a long run. Between performances Archie and the others quickly developed a regular routine of performing, laundering their own clothes, and cooking their own meals on hot plates in their rooms. To avoid homesickness, several of the boys paired off and roomed together.
At one point Archie developed a strong crush on a gorgeous, leggy blonde in the Good Times chorus by the name of Gladys Kincaid, his first case of show-business-related unrequited love. As Grant would later recall, “Here I was, seventeen, and incapable of sufficient progression toward testing that birds-and-bees theory.” The self-confessed still virginal Archie never even got to hold Gladys's hand. He spent one afternoon shopping for a present for her at Macy's, but rather than buy her a lover's lure—some fancy lingerie or imported perfume—he chose a multicolored woolen coat-sweater-scarf combination, which got him nothing more from Gladys than a puzzled look followed by a motherly pat on his handsome cheek. (The only physical comfort Archie managed in these days was back at the hotel, engaging in the kind of adolescent games of sexual exploration and experimentation typical of British all-boys boarding school residents.)
The revue ran on Broadway for another nine months, then embarked on a year-long tour on the famous B. F. Keith vaudeville circuit, which took them to the major cities east of the Mississippi. As it happened, the Keith circuit traveled the same route as the New York Giants baseball team, and because all the games were played in daylight, Archie was able to see a good number of them. Having never heard of baseball before coming to America, he became endlessly fascinated by the intricacies of the game and developed a love for it that would last a lifetime.
He also met quite a few successful actors on the circuit (and a few unknowns, mostly understudies and last-minute fill-ins, among them a young New York hoofer by the name of James Cagney), but none amused him or impressed him more than the Marx Brothers, whose vaudeville routines later became the basis for many of their zany movies. While the rest of the country preferred Groucho, Zeppo, the good-looking straight man and romantic lead, was Archie's favorite, the one whose foil timing he believed was the real key to the act's success. Not long after, Archie began to augment his already well-practiced “suave” Fairbanks look and dress with a Zeppo-like fancy bowtie (called a jazz-bow, or jazzbo, during the Roaring Twenties) and copied his brilliantine hairstyle, adding Dixie Peach, the favorite pomade of American black performers and show business leads, by the palmful to his thick dark mop, to give it a molded, comb-streaked blue-black Zeppo sheen.
THE KEITH CIRCUIT TOUR ended in January 1922, just days shy of Archie's eighteenth birthday, which roughly coincided with the expiration of his original contract. After four years in America, Lomas was exhausted by all the traveling, especially by the long distances between stops that made touring much more difficult in the States than back in England. He was ready to bring the boys home and assumed that Archie and the others would be eager to depart as well. To his surprise, not only Archie but most of the others chose to stay in America. Lomas agreed, gave them all the equivalent of their passage money and some additional funds to help settle in, and bade them all a warm farewell. He then sailed with his family back to England and obscurity, never again to achieve the level of popularity there he had enjoyed prior to his voyage west. In his absence the world of British music hall had all but vanished, its theaters converted to accommodate the working public's newest favorite form of entertainment, feature-length motion pictures.
BACK IN AMERICA, Archie, who quickly split from the others, was, for the first time, now on his own in New York City and loving it. Freed from the never-ending regimentation and grind of traveling and performing, he now intended to relax and enjoy the city. He loved traveling around in open-air buses down Fifth Avenue to Greenwich Village, then back uptown in the enclosed ones that went up Broadway all the way to Harlem. He marveled at the tall residential apartment buildings all along the West Side that were so unlike the one- and two-family dwellings that dotted Bristol. He also enjoyed riding the IRT subway all the way to the Bronx and then back to the Battery. On sunny days he liked walking through Central Park, or visiting Grant's Tomb, or taking the ferry to see the Statue of Liberty up close.
All too soon, however, the little money he had left ran out, and in the fall of 1922 he found himself broke and out of a job. He reluctantly moved out of his single room at the hotel and into the apartment of another struggling artist, George (Jack) Orry-Kelly, who had a small loft on Barrow Street in the Village, situated behind a legitimate theater.
Orry-Kelly, originally from South Wales and named by his mother after her favorite garden flower, was one of the few new friends Archie had made in America, although exactly when and how remains unknown (Grant makes no mention of Orry-Kelly in his “autobiography”). When Archie told him of his current situation, the set designer offered to let him share his living space, and the out-of-work actor quickly and gratefully accepted. It is not difficult to understand why Archie liked him. At twenty-four, Orry-Kelly was seven years Archie's senior, smart, sophisticated, city-seasoned, tall, and good-looking. He dressed impeccably, presented himself with confidence, and benefited from a quick and verbal wit. Like Archie, Orry-Kelly was the son of a tailor (Archie's father, primarily a presser, had done some tailoring for the military while he lived in Southampton). Like Archie, he had migrated at an early age to America to find work in the theater. But unlike Archie, he was extremely effeminate and openly and unashamedly gay. During all the time they lived together, Archie would try to cherry-pick those qualities he most admired in Orry-Kelly, even as he struggled to deal with an undeniable physical attraction to his new and charismatic roommate.
With time on his hands, Archie began to frequent the National Vaudeville Artists (NVA) Club on West Forty-sixth Street, a gathering place for performers like himself in search of a lead on a new job, or word of a traveling company that was passing through and needed a pickup performer. Most often all he found was a soft chair and a courtesy cup of tea.
Archie auditioned for several Broadway shows, but the advantages of his handsome face and tall, athletic body were offset by the still noticeable traces of his working-class British accent, which made casting directors reluctant to hire him. He became increasingly intimidated by the act of auditioning—a fear (he later recalled) that manifested itself in the form of a recurring dream. Standing in the center of a lighted stage, Archie is surrounded by a large cast of actors and unable to remember his lines. The result is always the same: public humiliation for not being able to perform and deliver. The dream, with all its socio-sexual implications, appears by all accounts (including Grant's) to have begun approximately the same time period Archie moved in with Orry-Kelly.
Also around this time, Archie managed to earn some money by serving as a male escort to several of the most socially acceptable women in the city. He fell into this type of work after he befriended a fellow he would later identify only as “Marks,” an easy-time hustler of the type that operated on the fringes of the New York theater community. One night Marks set him up to accom- pany Lucrezia Bori, the world-famous Metropolitan Opera lyric soprano, to a swank Park Avenue affair.
The idea of “acting” the role of a black-tie escort appealed to Archie, and Marks easily convinced him that his good looks made him well equipped to play the part. The evening with Bori proved to be the successful debut of a character who would one day be recognizable to all the world—a handsome, charming rake, dressed in the finest tux, with an appealing manner, cleft chin, and devastating smile.
That night, mingling with the upscale crowd, Archie met a fellow by the name of George Tilyou Jr. Over cognac and small talk, a relaxed Archie revealed his “secret” to Tilyou, that he was, in fact, less than he appeared to be. Beneath all his gloss, tails, and sheen, he told his new friend, he was just one more out-of-work actor picking up a few dollars playing Bori's “date.” Tilyou got a great kick out of it, and when Archie told him his best talent was walking on stilts rather than carrying on airs, Tilyou burst out laughing and told him he might be able to help him out with a real job. His late father, he said, had created—and his family still owned and operated—Coney Island's famous Steeplechase Park amusement attraction.
They exchanged phone numbers, and when Archie called the next day, Tilyou proved as good as his word. He had managed to secure a park job for Archie as, of all things, a stilt-walker. A few hours later Archie found himself dressed in a bright green coat, jockey's cap, and long black pants. Tilyou directed him to walk around the boardwalk on stilts, wearing a wooden sand- wich board advertising that the steeplechase was open. It was undeniably a step down, and Archie knew it, but escort work was far from steady, and he desperately needed the money to extend his stay in America. The forty dol- lars a week he received from Tilyou, in a job that earned him the nickname “Rubber Legs,” was almost enough to make ends meet.
To get the rest, besides occasional escorting gigs, he sold hand-painted ties that Orry-Kelly made in their Greenwich Village apartment, which had lately become a bit more cramped when Orry-Kelly took in another roommate, an Australian fellow by the name of Charlie Phelps, whose financial contribution was badly needed. How and when Phelps first appeared in Orry-Kelly's life remains unknown, although it may actually have been Archie who met him first, aboard the Olympic on his voyage across the Atlantic, for which Phelps, a bit of a vagabond, had hired on as a steward in order to gain his pas- sage to America.
Archie sold Orry-Kelly's ties on street corners during the day and at night served as the household cook, specializing in the fried and breaded Dover sole and crisp chips all three were so fond of from their youth. Fresh sole was available daily at the nearby docks, and after spending several hours selling his wares, Archie always enjoyed walking over and picking out a couple of freshly caught fish, then buying his other ingredients from the many small ethnic shops that flourished on the streets of the West Village, in preparation of that evening's “family dinner.”
A FEW MONTHS LATER, Dillingham announced auditions for Better Times, his sequel to Good Times scheduled to play that summer at the Hippodrome. Archie quickly contacted the other members of the Penders still in America and suggested they reunite, train, and try out as a unified act for the show. When they felt ready, they auditioned for Dillingham, who immediately hired their stilt act as a featured spot for his new extravaganza.
Better Times opened on Labor Day weekend (August 31) of 1922, and after seven months that had felt like a lifetime of unemployment, Archie was back working on Broadway. The show ran for six months, and when it closed, Archie was able to convince the others to stay together and form their own company, the Lomas Troupe, named after the man who had first brought them together. Archie proved a diligent manager and soon had the group booked onto the Pantages circuit, a national vaudeville trail that traveled across the country, including a few stops in Canada, before arriving in Los Angeles to play the cir- cuit's namesake theater on Hollywood Boulevard, the West Coast equivalent of New York's famed Palace.
On his first day off in L.A., Archie explored Hollywood just as he had New York City—alone, unplanned, and unhurried. He traveled once more by bus and by the many trolleys that crisscrossed the city and mostly, as everyone else seemed to in those days, on foot. He strolled up and down the sparkling pave- ment of Hollywood Boulevard, marveling at the palm trees along the side- walks, the first real ones he had ever seen, and tried to keep his head tilted toward the sky to catch some of the glorious sunshine that quickly and beau- tifully bronzed his face.
During one of his evening performances at the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, Archie was visited backstage by Douglas Fairbanks, who'd read about the show in the trades and remembered the youngster's name from their voyage to America aboard the Olympic. Archie was de- lighted both by the visit and by Fairbanks's invitation for him to visit the set of his latest production, The Thief of Bagdad. The next afternoon Archie did just that. As if he were in the eye of a hurricane, he stood motionless off to the side of the massive film stage while dozens of behind-the-scenes workers scurried all around him. Then suddenly he heard his name being called, and he spotted Fairbanks, a wide smile on his face, waving him over for a quick but friendly chat before he shot his next scene. It was a day young Archie Leach would never forget.
When the troupe's engagement at the Pantages ended, Archie reluctantly returned to New York, dreaming of the day he would be able to return to Hollywood and make movies of his own.
Back in Manhattan, Archie fell into his familiar routines of escorting, selling ties on the street, keeping house with Orry-Kelly and Charlie, and spending many an afternoon at the NVA Club. Acting work was, as always, hard to find, and Archie took whatever morsels came his way. Because he could move well, he'd get an occasional booking as half of a song and dance “duo,” his partner being whatever young out-of-work actress was available. For the union scale of $62.50 a night, he and his assigned partner would trot out into one of the many new and cavernous movie houses that had sprung up in the suburbs across the river in New Jersey and dance to scratchy recordings played between features while indifferent audiences filed in and took their seats.
Among the younger theatrical casting directors he regularly stopped by to see was Jean Dalrymple, who eventually put him in a vaudeville skit called The Woman Pays, which played several months on the junior Orpheum cir- cuit. The gig is notable because it marks his first speaking role. The skit, writ- ten by Dalrymple, centered on Archie, “the handsomest man in town,” being the unwitting object of two overzealous women vying for his affections.
By the time the tour ended, Archie and Dalrymple had become good friends, and slowly, with her guidance, he developed a strong reputation as a willing and reliable “straight man” for whatever vaudeville stars came to town for one-offs (one night of performances). Straight-man work was unpopular among the more established actors, who disliked playing the fool, the foil, or the mark, setting up jokes for comedians who made them, and only them, look good. Archie, however, was more than willing to do that kind of work, but soon ran into new problems no one, including Dalrymple, had antici- pated. Comics like Milton Berle were reluctant to use him because his good looks made it too difficult for audiences to accept him as “the dummy.” Berle was a particularly physical pie-in-the-face type who, like so many jokesters, considered himself also something of a ladies' man and did not appreciate being upstaged by someone as attractive to women as Archie.
At the opening night party of one of these gigs Archie found himself among many of the glitterati of New York vaudeville, including comedians George Burns and Gracie Allen. Burns had heard about Archie and wanted to meet him.
Archie invited Orry-Kelly to accompany him to the party. Things had not been going well between the three roommates, and Archie saw this as a chance for just the two of them to get out of the apartment and have a good time. While Archie was away on tour, Orry-Kelly had begun to get steady work on Broadway as a costume designer for such theatrical luminaries as the great Ethel Barrymore. Archie had wanted him to stay home and leave the wage-earning to him. But for Orry-Kelly, career was not just the first but the only priority.
Unfortunately, things came to a head at the party, when Archie and Orry- Kelly got into a loud shouting match that horrified the other guests. Burns, in particular, was disgusted by the public display and asked friends why every- one had to be a witness to all this “homosexuality.”
Believing he and Orry-Kelly had come to an impasse in their relationship, Archie began seeing more of Lester Sweyd, a vaudevillian star ten years his senior whom he had first met when both were appearing at the Hippodrome. Sweyd had made a name for himself playing Fonzo, the Boy Wonder in Skirts, before retiring from the stage to become a full-time agent. Shortly after the argument with Orry-Kelly at the party, Archie began spending nights at Sweyd's apartment.
He also began to accept more of the constant offers from Marks to do escort work. His good looks had made him quite popular among the wealthy women around town, and it was an open secret among them that the “social services” of this handsome young actor could be acquired for an entire evening at a quite reasonable cost.
Socializing with the tuxedo allowed Archie to observe, up close, the phys- ical mannerisms of the wealthy and helped him iron out many of the lin- gering cultural wrinkles from his own limited upbringing. He listened carefully to the way these people spoke and worked incessantly on modulating his lingering British singsong lilt into a more descending American rhythm. He practiced his walk to eliminate his street roll, the result of his slightly bowed, naturally acrobatic “Rubber Legs.”
All this physical fine-tuning resulted in his becoming even more attractive to the women who hired him. And while his increasing presence among the upper strata of the New York social scene may have been mostly deco- rous, it bothered Orry-Kelly that Archie was rapidly gaining a name as the number one gigolo in town, and that such a reputation could hurt both of their careers. One night over dinner Orry-Kelly made it official. Their rela- tionship was over, and Archie would leave the apartment for good.
With his love life in shambles, a tainted reputation, and not a penny to his name, Archie moved out. For the next year and a half he rented a room in an SRO at the NVA Club in Times Square. Fearful that escorting was ruining any chance he might have at making a living on Broadway, he took a series of dead-end jobs waiting on tables or wearing a billboard for a Chinese restaurant across the street from Macy's department store.
Years later, to cover up the failure and humiliation of these times, Grant insisted that in 1925, at the age of twenty-one, he returned to England to appear in repertory with the Nightingale Players. In fact, he never left America at all. Instead, he remained in New York City, lost, lonely, and knocking around, until 1927, the same year he later claimed to have returned from British rep to the United States and New York City.
One thing is certain: the year 1927 would signal the creative rebirth of Archie Leach.