“A combination of self-loathing and confusion was manifested in a punch-up or, on another occasion, Grant throwing Kelly out of a moving vehicle.’’īy 1931, both men were pursuing their destiny in Hollywood - the newly renamed Cary Grant had been signed to a $350-a-week contract by Paramount, while Kelly had begun a 12-year tenure as the head of the Warner Bros. “The physical violence between the men not uncommon between homosexual men of the period,’’ Katherine Thompson, the documentary’s writer, told The Post. He was clearly annoyed with Leach’s obsession with blond women, “though he always comes home to me.’’ And Kelly describes being knocked out cold by Archie “for three hours’’ when he criticized his roommate for ignoring his vaudeville guests (including Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen) at a party while trying to persuade Charlie Chaplin’s sister-in-law to help him arrange a screen test. While Kelly stops short of claiming that Leach was his boyfriend - something the documentary states outright - Kelly leaves a clear impression of someone whose heart was broken many times. Kelly’s memoirs, and the documentary, chronicle his volatile, on-and-off relationship with the actor over three decades. Kelly, who was painting murals for speakeasies and trying to break into show business as a set designer, had developed a lucrative sideline of hand-made ties - and Leach volunteered to stencil on designs and sell them backstage at vaudeville houses for a cut of the action.īranching out a couple of years later, the two men briefly ran their own speakeasy in Manhattan - and had an even more short-lived casino in Nevada before they were shut down by gangsters who demanded money to spare their lives.
The “devastatingly handsome” Leach, who had come to America from his native England as a teenager as part of a stilt-walking troupe, was barely scraping by, working occasionally as a carnival barker in Coney Island and donning a threadbare suit as a paid escort for women while seeking work in vaudeville. Kelly says in his book that Leach was suffering from an unspecified illness during their first few months of cohabitation, and he paid the younger man’s doctor bills. “You were surrounded by men who were openly living in ways you couldn’t imagine back home.’’ Mann says in the documentary, arguing that Kelly and Leach were definitely a couple. “It was a city of bachelors,’’ film historian William J. in the West Village with a tin box containing all his worldly possessions. Leach had been evicted from a boarding house for nonpayment, and had turned up at Kelly’s artist’s studio at 21 Commerce St.
Orry-Kelly and Marilyn Monroe Courtesy of Wolfe Video Kelly, who was seven years older, writes in his memoir that he met the struggling performer Archibald Leach - who would change his name to Cary Grant in 1931 - just before his 21st birthday in January 1925.
He had such a great sense of personal integrity, and we wanted to capture that sense of bravery in the film.’’ “Orry refused to hide his sexuality with a fake marriage. “There was such a pressure to conform to what was considered an ordinary, normal life,’’ the documentary’s noted Australian director, Gillian Armstrong, told Out Magazine last year, referring to Grant’s four failed marriages to women. 9 on DVD and video on demand) that adds a tantalizing new chapter to decades of speculation about Grant’s sexuality.īetween the film and Kelly’s recently published, long-suppressed memoir “Women I’ve Undressed,’’ a vivid portrait emerges of Grant as an ambitious young immigrant vaudevillian who reinvented himself so thoroughly, he ended up denying his true self in a homophobic industry. That’s the provocative claim in “Women He’s Undressed,’’ a new documentary about celebrated costume designer Orry-Kelly (released Aug. Ninety years ago, future screen legend Cary Grant shared a Greenwich Village love nest with an Australian man who went on to win three Oscars. What it's like playing Cary Grant, on acid Sophia Loren's life of drama, sex symbol status and scandalīilly Eichner to play Paul Lynde in ‘Man in the Box’ biopic Singer lists Cary Grant's onetime Los Angeles home for $10.5M