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. He had such a great sense of personal integrity, and we wanted to capture that sense of bravery in the film. Kelly, who was seven years older, writes in his memoir that he met the struggling performer Archibald Leach β who would change his name to Cary Grant in β just before his 21st birthday in January He promptly moved in with Kelly.
Mann says in the documentary, arguing that Kelly and Leach were definitely a couple. 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 β and Leach volunteered to stencil on designs and sell them backstage at vaudeville houses for a cut of the action.
Branching out a couple of years later, the two men briefly ran their own speakeasy in Manhattan β and had an even more short-lived casino in Nevada before they were shut down by gangsters who demanded money to spare their lives. While Kelly stops short of claiming that Leach was his boyfriend β something the documentary states outright β Kelly leaves a clear impression of someone whose heart was broken many times.
Kelly paid off the bills and suggested that Grant move in with another handsome young Paramount contractee, Randolph Scott. The debate over whether the former Archie Leach was gay, bi or straight has centered for decades around his on-and-off cohabitation with Scott in a beach house in Malibu, which was documented in a famous series of still photographs of them in domestic poses.
When Grant married actress Virginia Cherrill in , Mann says in the documentary, Scott attempted suicide. Grant and Kelly, meanwhile, had drifted apart. There was never really anything to hide. But the cheeky Aussie ends his book with a devastating anecdote about the notoriously cheap Grant. They will give you the rental fee and the cost of the chauffeur. The former Archie Leach never publicly acknowledged his relationship with Kelly β but when his old friend died of liver cancer in , Grant was one of the pallbearers.
