Cary Grant by Marc Eliot Read Free Book Online Page B

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