LSD, Sophia Loren and living in Bachelor Hall: things Ты didn't know about Cary Grant 

Cary Grant is a name that evokes the Golden Age of Hollywood. Indeed, it was a name that was picked purely for that reason, chosen from a list in a movie studio by Archie Leach, a Bristolian who, after a semi-homeless, partially orphaned, childhood, found his way to America and became one of Tinsel Town’s brightest stars.

Leach was born in 1904 to an alcoholic tailor and a seamstress whose depression landed her in an asylum by the time he was nine. Leach’s father told him that his mother had died of a heart attack - it would take several decades for him to learn the truth: that she was alive and living in an institution. When he died on November 29, 1986, he had made more than 70 films, had been married five times and, thanks to a lifetime of frugality, left an inheritance so large it could accommodate his therapist generously.

But even by the standards of Hollywood’s classic rags-to-riches stories, Grant’s life was a fascinating one. His sexuality was widely questioned, he introduced his legions of midwestern housewife fans to the benefits of LSD and there was the belief that he was a spy.

There's no way I could have had an affair with [Grant] because he was homosexual.

Many have said that his best known film, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, was also his most fitting role: that of a man mistaken for someone who didn’t actually exist. As Grant famously said himself: “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

Thirty years after Grant’s death and countless biographies have delved into his life, striving to solve some of its many mysteries. Many will remain unknown, or become the stuff of urban legend. But whether as Leach or Grant, the man lived a remarkable life - here are some of lesser known aspects of it:

1. He only got into LSD thanks to his third wife, Sophia Loren and a shipwreck

Betsy Drake with Cary Grant in 1957

It is well-known that Grant was a fan of dropping acid. He was one of Hollywood’s earliest adopters of the experimental psychiatric drug, first taking it in 1958 – a decade before Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test would rebrand the hallucinogen as a habit associated with youthful hippies and reprobates.

Grant’s acid-taking was strictly regulated: he would go to The Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills at 9am every Saturday morning. There, under the care of his therapist, Mortimer A Hartman (whom he called ‘My wise Mahatma’), he would trip for six hours before being driven home. His commitment lasted three years, during which he became a vocal advocate for the drug, which he felt helped him deal with his troubled childhood and years of what was medically defined as “prolonged emotional detachment”.

But it was Grant’s third wife, Betsy Drake, who encouraged him to visit Hartman. He had previously benefitted from her advice – Grant was convinced that he had removed scars from his body by self-hypnosis that he had been practising after Drake recommended it. As for Drake, she was inspired to take LSD after being left traumatised after surviving a shipwreck in which 51 people died.

It was a horrific ending to an ill-fated journey: Drake had flown to Italy in 1956 to join Grant on set of The Pride and the Passion. What she hadn’t realised, but was apparent to those making the film, was that Grant was in the midst of an affair with Sophia Loren. When Drake turned up, she was roundly ignored by Grant. She looked to ease her distress with a quiet return to the US on the SS Andrea Doria, but the boat sunk after crashing into an ocean liner. Drake was left with night terrors, and found the results of using LSD revolutionary, telling Grant that she had “come up against true reality in myself for the first time”.

As for Grant, he wasn’t shy about his experiences, publicly announcing that “in one LSD dream I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from earth like a spaceship.” He spread the word in interviews with Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. His gratitude to Dr Hartman was long-lived: he left him £10,000 in his will.

In some of the more extravagant posthumous retellings of Grant’s adolescence, he has been referred to as “New York’s number one gigolo”. This may have been pushing it a bit: there’s no records of the young Leach being paid for sex. He did, however, make ends meet after a stint in New York as an acrobat with Bob Pender\'s Knockabout Comedians as an escort. At 18 he was invited to fill empty seats at dinner parties of the rich and famous, including the soprano Lucrezia Bori. By day, he used his theatre skills to be a walking advertisement on stilts.

Cary Grant with Alfred Hitchcock in To Catch A Thief - both owned Sealeyham terriers

One of Grant’s most endearing features was his transatlantic accent, a far cry from the Bristolian burr he had grown up with. But it meant that he pronounced his name in two ways: both to rhyme with “Gary” and “wary”, favouring neither one over the other for 55 years – as a result, nobody knows which is correct.

Before he was Cary Grant, Leach was Cary Lockwood, the name of a role he filled in Broadway musical Nikki in 1931. When the musical closed, he went to Los Angeles, seemingly on holiday, but he was invited to dinner at the home of B P Schulberg, then the head of Paramount, within hours of arriving in Hollywood. He signed a contract, but only after being made to change his name. Cary Lockwood was suggested, but the surname had to be changed: Grant was chosen, “matter-of-factly”, the actor later recalled, from a list of possibles.

Archibald Leach became Cary Grant by law in 1941. His name, however, lived on thanks to his Sealyham terrier (a terribly vogue pet in Sixties Hollywood: Humphrey Bogart, Elizabeth Taylor and Bette Davis all kept them - Hitchcock had four), who was named Archie Leach.

4. The Queen enjoyed To Catch a Thief so much she bent royal protocol to say so

In November 1955 The Telegraph’s film correspondent filed a brief bulletin:

A message from Buckingham Palace on Tuesday morning told the organisers of the Royal Film Performance that To Catch a Thief (Odeon, Leicester Square) had been "thoroughly enjoyed" by the Queen.

This, I understand, is not the usual Royal phrasing and we may deduce more than the usual Royal courtesy.

Grant was a good friend of Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, to the extent that he was even best man at the Bond producer’s wedding. Broccoli was keen to have Grant take on 007 for Dr No, despite the fact Grant was nearing his sixties. Grant was the one who killed the idea after saying he would only commit to one film.

Although Grant was initially keen to tell the world about his love of LSD, he hadn’t considered the impact it might have on the box office success of Operation Petticoat, from which he would keep 75 per cent of the profit, until it was too late. He had given an in-depth interview to Joe Hyams, a journalist from the New York Herald Tribune, which was a coup for the paper and heavily trailed before its publication.

When the studio got wind of the piece, Grant lost his nerve and ordered that Hyams spike it. It ran, so Grant’s lawyers, with help from Universal Studios, tipped off gossip columnist Louella Parsons to write a story calling Hyams out as a fraud. Hollywood’s publicity departments pulled all of their interviews with him and refused to arrange any others, Hyams’s career was in tatters - his son was bullied at school about his lying father. Hyams later sued Grant - who, after the success of Operation Petticoat, went back to his evangelism about LSD - and the matter was solved out of court. Grant also invited him to write his memoirs.

Cary Grant poses with his wife, Dyan Cannon, and their baby, Jennifer Grant 

Grant only had one child: a daughter named Jennifer, in 1966 (when he was 52). When Grant was dating Maureen Donaldson, a photojournalist, in the mid-Seventies, Jennifer was a fan of rock star Alice Cooper, who happened to be Donaldson’s friend. However, Grant wasn’t. He described Cooper as “just a homely man once you scratch off all that hideous makeup”.

Donaldson wanted to change Grant’s mind: if only she could get him along to one of Cooper’s shows, he would understand why they are friends. Grant acquiesced, but only in disguise. Donaldson dressed him in sunglasses and the showy attire more befitting an industry agent, and he wore earplugs during the show.

Afterwards Grant summed up the experience: “You know what it’s like? Remember I told you about the time I took LSD in my doctor’s office and s--- all over his rug and floor? Well now I know how that poor doctor felt.”

8. He spent 11 years living with a man in a house called Bachelor Hall

Quite remarkably for a man who managed to have five wives, one of his longest relationships with fellow actor Randolph Scott. The pair lived together either side of Grant’s first marriage, to Virginal Cherrill in 1934. When he became divorced shortly afterwards, they rented a seven-bedroomed Santa Monica beach house which they christened Bachelor Hall.

Scott and Grant’s friendship was never stated to be anything more than platonic, although the pair appeared to play up the rumours that abounded about their sexuality, apparently finding humour in the sensation their matching sportswear and domestic pursuits caused. Scott once signed a dinner party menu: “To my spouse, Cary”.

Speculation over Grant’s sexuality continues to this day. Although it’s believed that Hollywood gossiped about his bedroom preferences throughout his career, one of his biographers, Charles Higham, claims that it was only in 1965 that he first heard Grant’s sexuality discussed, by Marlene Dietrich, who told him: “There\'s no way I could have had an affair with [Grant] because he was homosexual.”

Although Grant’s daughter said Grant “somewhat enjoyed being called gay. He said it made women want to prove the assertion wrong”, it didn’t stop him from suing Chevvy Chase for $10 million for slander in 1980 after the emergent star said of Grant: “I understand he was a homo.” Grant responded: “True or untrue, I’m old enough not to care”.

Grant’s sexuality was more widely discussed after his death, to the extent that in the Eighties two separate books were published about it. In 2012 more kiss and tells came out from Scotty Bowers, a Hollywood sex fixer who claimed to have received money from Grant for sex.

Hitchcock was known for his draconian directing methods. While his treatment of Tippi Hedren in The Birds and Marnie was arguably some of his worst (he kept the actress isolated and subjected her to an exhausting routine), he kept Grant confused while filming his 1959 thriller. The actor was baffled by the film’s script and told Hitchcock during filming: “It\'s a terrible script. We\'ve already done a third of the picture and I still can\'t make head or tail of it!”

His confusion reigned until the premiere, when the film was widely praised. Until then, Grant remained convinced that it would be a turkey.

Grant may have spent several weeks in utter confusion but he was handsomely rewarded for it. His contract stipulated that he should be paid $5,000 extra per day for each day the production ran over schedule. The whole lot ran considerably beyond schedule - 78 days, in fact. Which meant that on top of his agreed $450,000 salary, he also earned a further $390,000. Together, and adjusted for inflation, that’s $6.2 million.

Grant with Barbara Hutton, whom the FBI reportedly thought was funding the Nazis

Grant never confirmed this, but there was the belief that, along with the three films a year and weekly acid trips, he was hired by US authorities for intelligence purposes. In 2005, a biography published by Marc Eliot concluded that Grant was hired by the FBI to spy on his second wife, Woolworths heiress Barbara Hutton. The US authorities reportedly thought she was sending money to the Nazis.

A decade earlier similar claims had arisen from biographer Graham McCann, who claimed  that Grant “was trusted as a recruit for the [US] security services”, although “his duties involved little more than keeping a steely eye on the activities of Errol "Blofeld" Flynn and Gary "Goldfinger" Cooper.”

Somewhat bizarrely, Grant gave up his glittering movie career in 1968 to become a director of Faberge. His duties involved attending sales conventions and Faberge plants around the world, for which he was paid $15,000 a year and given use of a luxury Manhattan apartment and use of the company’s fleet of private fleet of helicopters and planes.

This seemed to be the biggest lure for him, he told the Dallas Morning News: “Faberge has its own set of jets so at least I don\'t have to walk head bowed to the back of the plane and sit with a magazine in front of my face. They always know who you are anyway. You have to learn to sit in the back row when you are publicly known. Before, I was always running in back alleys and stumbling over orange peels to avoid the fans."

Star wars: Hollywoods most explosive - and expensive - divorces

Berlin Film Festival: Refugee drama The Other Side of Hope combines poignancy with torrents of laughter - review

John Wick: Chapter 2 review: Keanu Reeves's trigger-happy sequel gets the job done

Hidden Figures review: a space-race segregation drama full of star power

'I've got a bad feeling about this': Harrison Ford's injuries, escapades and brushes with death

Hugh Jackman reveals new skin cancer treatment and implores followers to wear sun cream

Moustaches, milkshakes and muscles: the inside story of Tom Hardy and Charles Bronson's unlikely friendship

Harry Potter actress poses for Playboy, says 'naked is normal'

Gallery: Harry Potter's Scarlett Bryne and 30 other child stars - then and now

The Amazon's darkest secret: Percy Fawcett and the truth about The Lost City of Z

Transporting and profound, The Lost City of Z is an instant classic - review

Gallery: Victoria Beckham and Corey Haim in love: Hollywood's most bizarre celebrity Valentines

Valentine's Day: 15 great romantic gestures you can steal from movies

Gallery: From TV modelling to Taboo and CBeebies (!): Tom Hardy's career in pictures

What's on TV tonight: Tom Hardy on CBeebies, Andrew Marr: My Brain and Me, plus finale of The Moorside

Gallery: Culture stars who died in 2017: from Tara Palmer-Tomkinson to Sara Coward

Comment: Right-on, know-nothing, cheap-political-point-scoring celebs have ruined the Baftas for the rest of us

Action movie banned in Uzbekistan because it doesn't star Morgan Freeman

Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrive on Bafta red carpet

Bafta winners 2017, full list: victory for La La Land and I, Daniel Blake

New Ghost In the Shell trailer sees Scarlett Johansson roam a futuristic, cyberpunk Tokyo

In order to bring you award-winning content and investigative journalism from your favourite writers, we rely on revenue generated by advertising.

Please consider supporting us by turning off your ad blocker. Just a couple of clicks will make a big difference.