Odd this day
Well, if it’s the 120th anniversary of the birth of Cary Grant, it must be time to tell the story of the time he went to an Alice Cooper concert and likened the experience to shitting himself.
This was in the 1970s, when he was in a relationship with Maureen Donaldson, who later wrote an autobiography entitled An Affair to Remember — my life with Cary Grant. She had, apparently, been on at Grant for ages to meet Alice Cooper, because she was friends with Alice and thought they’d get on. Grant’s daughter, Jennifer, thought it was exciting that her dad’s girlfriend knew someone so exotic, so she was keen, too.
Finally, Grant agreed to attend a concert…
(The trilby, incidentally, had been a gift from Spencer Tracy.)
Alice’s manager, Shep Gordon, had provided tickets in the press section, so on the way in they swapped with
two kids who had tickets much farther away from the stage.
No one wanted Cary Grant being seen wearing all that. Then the concert started.
He had not enjoyed it — but, then, Archie Leach didn’t even like The Beatles.
“I’m sorry dear,” he said. “I know they’re popular. It’s just not music in my book.”
So, on the long drive home, Maureen broke the silence.
Before the concert, apparently, Grant had said:
Maureen … I know you like him very, very much and he seems quite thoughtful and all that. But once you scratch off all that hideous makeup, what you’ve got is just a homely man.
Which may have been an amusingly fuddy-duddy thing for cinema’s most debonair, urbane leading man to have said, but… he had a point.
