Cary Grant, Cheapskate

That's Ari Onassis.

Try reading the article r1…

I recall reading one biography about Grant where a member of his dinner party at some restaurant was ready to punch him for telling everyone what they ordered, how much they should tip too. Someone just snatched the bill from his hand and paid for everyone.

From the picture, I assumed it was Aristotle Onassis?

I recently read Dyan Cannon's memoir DEAR CARY: MY LIFE WITH CARY GRANT and he comes off like such a big, self-absorbed, inconsiderate, pompous asshole! Not at all like his charming, debonair Hollywood image. When he sold her beloved dog while she was in the hospital giving birth I just wanted to kill him. LOL! However, it was clear that she was trying to paint him in a positive light, too. I can only wonder how he'd come off if she had been 100% honest.

Why’d he sell her dog, r5?

for the money

He said he could only deal with so many bitches.

Do you think Aristotle Onassis had a big dick?

Keira Knightley is a notorious tightwad.

Keira is too cheap to buy some normal sized titties.

That's Natalie Portman, hon.

I think the cheapskate trait comes from having so little when he was a child. That threat of poverty I guess never left Grant's psyche. He didn't seem like a nice man, making Dyan Cannon continually try LSD.

R6 the excuse he gave was that the dog would somehow be a danger to the baby. He didn't elaborate and wouldn't discuss it further. He never told her where she sent the dog and she never got it back. Needless to say, she was devastated because she had had the dog since it was a puppy and heretofore had been her baby. In fact, Dyan suspects that he may have been jealous of how much she doted on the dog.

He really could be a real jerk. I’ve heard about the restaurant stories before.

Archie Leach grew up in poverty with an insane mother. Anyone who experienced the depression will understand the mindset that produced his frugality.

My daddy may have been cheap, but he was totally heterosexual!

One of these men is not like the others...

They are all too cheap to pay for their own publicity photos.

Archie had incredible plastic surgery. I think that the surgeons were honestly better back then in Hollywood. They all seemed to have been tweaked and looked amazing. Now they look like lizards who are about to burst out of their cheeks. Oy vey!

I didn’t notice it until I read it, that Cary’s front teeth were misaligned because he was too poor to get a chipped front tooth capped. So he had a dental student merely close the gap where the pulled tooth used to be. Once you see it, you’re not gonna be able to unsee it.

He was generous to me. After splashing me with mud, he paid to have my outfit cleaned. And he paid for my wardrobe at Bergdorf Goodman, including a mink coat.

Frugality is a virtue IMO. But being an ill mannered cheapskate is beyond ridiculous. Billing his houseguests for laundry services? Cutting buttons off old shirts? He should have been sectioned. Miserly bastard.

I wonder if he charged Orry-Kelly or Randolph Scott or fellatio?

Being brought up in poverty with a crazy mother might leave a person a bit fucked up about money and success, which certainly had a different feel in his hands than in Barbara Hutton's.

Still, he managed an accent and pattern of speech that was above his upbringing, he learned poise and the value of appearances, and he certainly played a host of privileged men and a few poseurs. Along the way he might have learned to dial down the check-splitting and other habits that painted him in a bad light. Cutting the buttons off spent shirts could have been his at-home cheapskatery.

At least J. Paul Getty was funny and self-aware some of the time about his cheapness, not that he otherwise seemed a man who liked to laugh very hard at himself.

Spending money as a group, there's an obligation to make the people with the least money feel something of the ease of the richest person there. A person who grows up poor would know that, I think, or be able to recognize it. Maybe Grant was dining with swells all at the same pay grade, broadly speaking; still, don't make a fucking scene about someone had a salad and I don't want to pay for it because I didn't... That's a bit stupid for a man in his place, but little things often hint at bigger.

Grant was one of the first big Hollywood stars to act as a freelance agent rather than as a studio slave, and he was very canny about his contracts and his image. This left him rich as hell, but he sometimes turned down good parts because they didn't pay well enough or he thought they wouldn't fit his image. If you want a good bio that captures his contradictions, the recent bio Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise, is excellent.

All his penury meant that he left his beloved only child set up for life. His daughter later said that she didn't work that hard at her acting career because she was never desperate for money, so she didn't take parts she didn't care about. Also, her father didn't want her to be an actress, and though he died when she was 20, it took her a long time to get over her father's disapproval. He was sure devoted to her, though: He had a room in his house that was basically a Jennifer museum, holding hundreds of photos and every school project she ever made.

Sort of remember him being a kind of dancer for hire in dancehalls when he lived in New York with Orry Kelly. A bit like Crawford, everything Grant got, he got it himself, through his own hard work and talent. No rich family, no well connected buddies with favors etc. Reading this though, he does seem like a miserable bastard.

R13- She needed to take LSD after she found out Cary Grant was a Connoisseur of COCK.

The story about his teeth seems to come from Grant telling an interviewer that it happened when he was a kid and he had the tooth pulled so his dad wouldn't notice and get angry. He says in his story that he had the tooth pulled at a school where "extractions were either free or reasonable enough for me to pay out of my weekly pocket money," which is weird. Wouldn't he remember? And how did the teeth naturally grow in so straight?

A friend of mine had an uncle (by marriage) whose family was friends with Grant in the 1960s, and he said as a little kid he was captivated by the single front tooth and stared at it constantly. I'd probably have said something to the little twerp, personally.

R24 by the inch.

I didn't know that and didn't need to know that. Thanks a lot, R21.

The rest of his face was so perfect I guess that it was easy to ignore it.

And you have to dig this up 35 years after his death??? What's the point? So he could reform in his reincarnation????

Doesn't Tom Cruise have that one front tooth thing going?

I heard Cary was so cheap, he used recycled cum loads to butter his toast.

Tom Cruise has really crappy looking veneers. And it doesn't appear he brushes very often. Look at the dark film around the upper edge of those choppers. Nasty/

Didn't he decline to take any form of alimony from Hutton even though he was entitled to a considerable amount?

At a certain point of frugality, mental illness or deep psychological factors are in play. He wasn't cheap, he was in need of treatment.

For a male to take alimony from a woman in the 1940s, it would have been one of the ultimate forms of emasculation.

He had a great ass!

R9: that’s Kissinger, in the rather unlikely event that you’re *not* trolling

R39 He was the only one of her husbands that didn't take her money.

Cary wasn't as cheap as another Brit who grew up dirt poor - Charlie Chaplin. And Chaplin was fabulously wealthy, much richer than Cary. They both had mentally ill mothers who abandoned them when they were kids so that must have contributed to their terror of being left with nothing.

Cary Grant was a very angry guy for years due to his horrific childhood and his LSD therapy mellowed him out. So the cheapskate thing isn't surprising.

"At a certain point of frugality, mental illness or deep psychological factors are in play. He wasn't cheap, he was in need of treatment."

I was thinking along this line when reading this thread. Extreme frugality can be like anorexia or other extreme behaviors--a manifestation of the need for control. For some people, money matters a lot but control is absolutely everything.

The "Selling the Wife's Dog" story sounds like a man who wants to show his wife who's the boss (ie, who's in control).

Cary Grant looked a little exotic. Was he mixed with anything? He didn't look 100% white to me. He just didn't have the white trash genes.

My fave miser Grant story is that he use to buy 2 ply toilet paper unroll and separate it and make two rolls.

Grant liked to tan a lot, especially when it became fashionable in the '50s. By the '60s he looked like an Oompa Loompa. He was still attractive as an old man, but his skin was quite leathery.

He not only didn't take Barbara Hutton's money, he supported her the last years of her life.

Smart guy, he had it in his contract that he could keep all the suits he wore in his movies.

My favorite Cary Grant story. A reporter sent a telegram to his agent: "How old Cary Grant?" Cary answered the reporter directly: "Old Cary Grant fine. How you?"

R46 I'm fairly certain Cary Grant had some Jewish heritage.

R52 In a biography I read it stated that he was circumcised. A lower class Brit at the turn of the century?

I thought the LSD "treatment" by his psychiatrist was so he could force himself to have sex with a woman - and prove to his bitchy old mother that he's wasn't gay. I think his 'mother' wasn't really his mother but she took in her husband's illegitimate son (by a Jewish woman)

Oh - and when Cary found out about the Jewish woman, he donated money to Jewish causes? and also, he hauled his newborn daughter to the old hag mother to provide proof of his het-ness.

He wouldn't look Jewish at all.

He was gorgeous. Too elegant to be 100% straight. 100% straights are always scratching their ass and balls, passing gas.

I never realized how much Aristotle Onassis looked like Stavros Niarchos.

And not Cary Grant.

Vanity Fair of our olden times, just a few years ago, actually had an article about Cary and his LOVE of LSD as panacea.

I always seem to kill threads... .

During his marriage to Barbara Hutton they were known as "Cash and Cary".

[quote]100% straights are always scratching their ass and balls,

I've seen John Travolta do this in a couple of movies so as to appear straight, e.g., [itailc]Basic[/italic] and [italic]Michael[/italic].

I read a Grant biography years ago. It made me sad that as he got older he kept marrying younger women. Never embraced his elegant aging fully. The book also said he was very careful with money due to his impoverished childhood.

Poor Jackie was married to two of the cheap bastards on this list

It's no wonder she had to go on Assistance

There's a relatively new biography out on Cary Grant by Scott Eyman. One of the absolute best books I've read in years. Tons of research, and lots of dish from other actors, celebs, friends...without being dishy. They just reflected on the man they met, knew, worked with...or loved.

And yes, while he was VERY private about his private life, his sexuality was, well...fluid.

But charging his houseguests for use of his telephone sounds borderline sadistic.

Fred MacMurray was notoriously cheap.

But not as bad as Grant.

Fred was also withholding.

MacMurray was another one who came across as an asshole.

His daughter Jennifer is a millionairess. Thanks, Daddy!

I’m a millionaire too

I didn't know the story about his front tooth. He still had a great smile, and white teeth. I did notice that something was a little off, but not bad at all...just that his teeth weren't perfect, as most people don't have perfect teeth. It didn't take away from his looks at all.

I recently watched the Bishop's Wife with Grant, David Niven and Loretta Young. Cary played an angel but he gave the same performance he did in Hitchcock's Suspicion and I kept expecting him to poison Loretta. Seriously miscast.

R73 as handsome as Cary Grant is, he is not angelic at all. Plus, he was already in his forties. Angels need to be youthful. Who had the looks at the time? Guy Madison? He would have been 25 at the time of filming.

But Guy was too young to play opposite Loretta. Plus, he was a terrible, terrible actor. Pretty or not.

R73, Niven was originally cast as the angel, so could've been worse. No one enjoyed working on the pic, except for little Karolyn Grimes (who'd just come off of 'It's a Wonderful Life'). She loved Grant, who took time out to tell her stories, go ice skating with her, etc., but couldn't stand Loretta Young because of her BAD BREATH.

Didn't Loretta Young have a child with Cary Grant - that she hid and had adopted? (but then later, got her back?)

Oh wait, that was Clark Gable ? Oh something like that happened to somebody

R77...That was Clark Gable.

R76, she had bad breath? That’s why she broke up with Clark Gable. Their combined halitoses were too much to bear.

Saw him one time in person, at Disneyland in the mid-1970s. He narrated the Candlelight Processional that they do every Christmas season. He did it several times in the 1970s. I only had a vague idea of who he was, as I hadn't seen any of his movies yet. He was just "some famous person" for all I knew at that time. He had white hair, and lots of it, and wore thick-rinmed glasses as he looked down reading his script. I wonder if he charged Disneyland for doing it. I believe the people who do that don't get paid.

Was he gay or bisexual?

R18 Peck was straight. Brando and Grant were bisexual. Hudson was gay.

Monty Clift was definitely gay, too..

R81, Grant was bisexual.

Found him funny never sexy. He looked like he was carved from old mahogany.

R85 what does that mean?

I bet Grant got a free hotel stay and tickets to all the best stuff at Disneyland in exchange for doing Candlelight: Jennifer was a kid in the 70s, and it would have been a great cheap vacation for her and her parsimonious dad.

R86: Not R85 here, but am guessing he said that because Grant spent decades under tanning lights or the sun. He insisted (seriously) that his skin color be a little darker than any of his (white) co-stars. He thought it helped him stand out in scenes...

Dark hair and tanned skin photographs better in black and white film, right?

He was probably bi so he wouldn't have to pay for pussy.

Yup R89.

Re: Clark Gable

Supposedly once a year, Grant and Gable met to trade monogrammed gifts they'd received that they didn't really like.

R92 how come?

They were each other’s Secret Santa’s, Rose @ r93!

They had the same initials, r93.

Did Archie Leach legally change his name to Cary Grant?

Clark Gable was his real name.

If people went through the Great Depression, they tend to be tightwads, too...they always fear poverty is right around the corner