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Cary Grant
This nOde
last updated January 8th, 2002 and is permanently
morphing...
(8 Ahau (Flower) - 18
(K'ank'in) - 60/260 - 12.19.8.16.0)
Grant (grànt), Cary
1904-1986
British-born American actor
who was the epitome of the elegant leading man in films such as The Philadelphia
Story (1940) and North by Northwest (1959).
Grant, Cary
Grant, Cary (1904-1986),
British-born American motion-picture actor, known for his urbane and debonair
manner. He was born Alexander Archibald Leach in Bristol, England. In 1932
he went to Hollywood, California, where he appeared in a long series of
romantic and sophisticated comedy motion pictures that established his
reputation as one of Hollywood's leading men. One of his well-known films
is The Philadelphia Story (1940), with Katharine Hepburn.
Director Alfred Hitchcock
starred Grant in several films, including North by Northwest (1959), considered
by many to be their greatest collaboration. Grant also worked repeatedly
with director Howard Hawks, for whom he made such films as Bringing Up
Baby (1938) and Monkey Business (1952).
immediately.
Everybody groks that Archie Leach, the poor boy from Liverpool who became
"Cary Grant" never fully believed in "Cary Grant," since Cary was, after
all, his own invention
- Robert
Anton Wilson - _Ishtar Rising_
 |
LSD)
 |
12/2/97 - 11:46 AM
This information
was put up after discussion on the Cary Grant Mailing List brought up the
subject. It is not my intention
to offend anyone, and if you prefer to believe that your beloved Cary did
not take acid, feel free to do so!
Extract from CARY GRANT -
THE LONELY HEART
By Charles Higham and Roy
Moseley
.....And it was during Houseboat
that he began to experiment with lysergic acid,
or LSD. It is possible that Cary may have been aware of LSD as the so-called
"Truth Drug" employed by both British and American military intelligence
men in order to obtain information from prisoners.
The effect of lysergic acid was to remove inhibitions and to release the
unconcious mind; the drug was used in cases of sexual impotence. It had
a deeper and more lasting effect than hypnosis, emphasising every aspect
of the human mind to an extraordinary degree. The good and bad elements
in the psyche were unleashed, in sessions that made the subject see colours
and smell scents in a way that was not possible in normal conditions. The memory
chain was opened up, often with painful consequences.
This was a severe challenge, and on top of it the LSD patient has to deal with marvellous or horrifying hallucinations. Acid, as LSD became popularly known, can cause an individual to walk into his own bathroom and suddenly see violent streaks of colour in the basin, a flushing lavatory like Niagara Falls, a face in a mirror that turns into that of a gila monster, a vision of oneself as a baby or an old, dying human being, a magnificent athlete or a cripple. The patient can become violently hysterical or rigidly catatonic. For some people, the experience of LSD produced nausea, terror and despair. For others it brought exhilaration, visions of transcendent beuty and the confidence to deal with anything. Cary Grant went into LSD treatments to overcome his constant self doubts, his characteristic actor's feeling of unworthiness, of being less than a man, the pain of human relationships and the tormenting memories of his childhood.
He wanted to be the impossible: an average, "normal", uncomplicated human being who could experience simple happiness. But the fairy-godmothers who had bestowed upon him his many gifts exacted the familiar price of depriving him of the very things he wanted most. His actor's egomania would not tolerate such misjudgement on the part of the guardians and kindness, looks, and, more than that, the ability to enjoy day-to-day living without complications and without conflicting thoughts, the ability to relax, the ability to love and be loved, which of course starts with loving oneself. And for all his efforts, for all the rollercoaster rides of acid treatments, there were no signs that his wishes were to be fulfilled.
He underwent carefully guided
treatments with two of the leading proselytisers of the new cure-all: Dr.
Mortimer Hartmann and Dr.
Oscar Janiger. He conferred with Aldous Huxley, one of the self-appointed
shamens of mescalin, and he soon encounter the ineffable Timothy
Leary, whose conversion to this use of the drug eventually gained him
international notoriety as the idol of millions of students.
 |
Leary recalls that Cary had been involved with LSD for five years before Leary became the chief glorifier of the drug. He met Cary through a mutual friend, Virginia Dennison, a student teacher in the Ramakrishna Vedanta group, of which Huxley and Christopher Isherwood were adherents. Miss Dennison had taught Cary yoga. Leary was in San Francisco with his girlfriend, Peggy Hitchcock, and Cary invited the couple to lunch at his office. Leary says: "It was a thrill because it was the first time I'd been in a movie studio. Cary Grant was always my idol. When I was young I modelled myself on him; I'm very pleased, I think I made a wise choice. Cary was eager to meet me."
Later Cary told Leary how he discovered a love for Elsie Leach for the first time because of LSD; the drug enabled him to knit up some ravelled threads of his life. Over the years, Cary saw a good deal of Leary: he was helpful to the younger man, giving him advice on many things, including film making, in which Leary wanted to be involved. He questioned Leary closely when he started a training centre for the use of psychedelic drugs in Mexico, and Cary wanted to visit Leary there, but the Mexican Government closed the centre down. Leary insists:
The
joke of all this is that, in a sense, Cary Grant got me into psychedelic
experiences .* I was
a psychologist, from Havard, when I heard about Cary Grant getting into
[LSD]. That struck
me very much; that attracted my attention. I had been very much against
the use of drugs
before that; I had written books on the subject, because I felt that doctors
shooting patients
up and giving them pills was making them into an assembly-line cure. I
knew that the truth
drugs were being used by the CIA and the KGB, and that LSD was being used
in chemical
warefare, so I was much against it. Cary Changed my Views. He converted
me.
*It was generally claimed that the reverse was true.
Cary began telling anyone
who would listen that he was gaining strength through his treatments; he
was finding happiness for the first time in his life. He would turn up
on Saturday afternoons ath the offices of Dr. Hartmann and Dr. Arthur Chandler,
stretch out on a couch with an eye shield, block his ears with wax, and
revisit his past while music was played in the near darkness. He wrote
later: "I passed through changing seas of horrifying and happy thoughts,
through a montage of intense
love and hate, reassembling, through terrifying depths of dark despair
replaced by heaven-like religious symbolism." In another place he would
also write:
I had to forgive my parents
for what they didn't know and love them for wha they did pass
down - how to brush my
teeth, how to comb my hair, how to be polite, that sort of thing.
Things were being discharged.
The experience was just like being born for the first time; I
imagined all the blood
and urine and emerged with the first flush of birth. It was absolute
release. You are still
able to feed yourself, of course, drive your car, that kind of thing, but
you've lost a lot of
the tension.
He added that all human beings
were "unconciously holding their anuses". In one LSD dream, he
defacated all over the psychiatrists
office rug. In another dream,
he became an enormous penis, shooting of from earth like a spaceship. He
realised that in his earlier days he had despised himself. Betsy Drake
also went on record on LSD. She wrote, "You learn to die under [it]. You
face up to all the urges in you - love, sex, jealousy, the wish to kill.
Freud is the road-map."
Cary had several further discussions with Timothy Leary. Leary says:
He took me aside and started
pouring out things to me.... The LSD experience is a
life-changing experience.
Today, people are cool, they don't talk about it. But in the sixties,
with everyone running
around, taking off their clothes and saying they'd found God, and
John Lennon eating LSD
like popcorn, people talked about it a lot. Actors are insatiable
neurotics. Actors depend
upon getting love all the time. After all, Cary was the focus
of a
hundred million women
lusting after him. You couldn't expect him to be like the guy
next-door; he was carrying
the weight and freight of the world's fantasies. LSD helped him
with his burdens. And
he was always charming, professional, courteous, open and helpful. I
remember he said, referring
to his Universal cottage, "What do you think of this bungalow?
Would it be a good place
to have LSD?" I replied, "Well, I always like to have a fireplace
[during the experience]."
He said, "Well, I'm going to call the studio right now and have them
put a fireplace in."
That was typical of him.
Leary comments further upon
other reasons why Cary needed LSD:
All actors are impossibly sensitive and impossibly questioning. If the phone
doesn't ring every minute they're worried nobody loves them anymore. This
is not a neurosis that normal people have.
I don't mean to say that you can equate this neurosis with the kind of
self-questioning
of a man like Cary.
In the midst of meetings
with Leary, the psychedelic
nightmares
and happy dreams,
the visions of defaction and masturbation,
Cary Grant continued to act out the bland, meaningless humours ofHouseboat...............
12/2/97 - 11:41 AM
cary grant DID take acid!
I've seen a picture on the web of Cary Grant
taking acid. Can this be true?
While the origination of the often-posted acid
photo is unknown in its authenticity, Cary
Grant did take acid. Cary Grant's use of
Lysurgic Acid was limited to a psychotherapy program.
Timothy Leery claimed that Grant introduced him
to LSD. The complete story of Cary Grant's
Acid
Test is published in an excerpt from the book, "Cary Grant: the Lonely
Heart" by Charles Higham & Roy Moseley on the Ultimate Cary Grant Pages.
Los
Angeles region who participated
during the 1950s and early 1960s in
unprecedented academic studies of the then-novel pharmaceutical.
In just a few short years,
of course, LSD would become a chemical
taboo, the notorious "hippie psychedelic"
vilified by the media, criminalized in every state, classified by
the FDA as a Schedule I drug of no medical
value and banned globally by international treaty. But before
most Americans had heard of lysergic acid diethylamide, here in the shadow
of the Hollywood Hills students, professionals, clergymen, writers,
artists and celebrities enthusiastically turned on, tuned in and
didn't drop out.
 |
 |
Janiger's
study is also a time capsule back to a unique moment in the cultural history
of Southern California. Long before the acid underground surfaced
in San Francisco as the vanguard of the hippie movement, Los Angeles was
an intellectual hub for psychedelic research, and its acid salons
drew adventurous celebrities from Anais
Nin to Jack Nicholson, Aldous
Huxley to Andre Previn.
Those were heady days . . . in more than one sense. As Cary Grant rhapsodized about LSD's revolutionary potential that spring morning in Janiger's office, everyone could benefit from a good dosing. "Just a few healthy magnums of LSD in the Beverly Hills reservoir . . ."
[The doctor] had suggested that I listen to some music while the
drug was still effective. I am a composer and pianist, and I have
never before or since been so strongly affected by music. I listened
to recordings of some Brahms, Mozart and Walton, and was moved to
tears almost immediately . . . I then played the piano for approximately
40 minutes. I felt that I played extremely well and possibly with
more musical insight than before. I played among other things a Chopin
Fantasia which I had not looked at since my student days, and remembered
it perfectly and without flaws. A few days after the experiment I
again attempted to play this piece and found that I had retained
it completely. I would sometime be interested in repeating the experiment
and recording some improvisations while under the influence of the pills.
-Andre Previn
- John Whalen - Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic
Studies
Real name
Date of birth
Bristol, Gloucestershire, England, UK Date of death
Davenport, Iowa, USA.
Sometimes Credited As:
|
Actor filmography
(1960s) (1950s) (1940s) (1930s)
Greener,
The (1960) .... Victor RhyallDream
Wife (1953) .... Clemson Reade1947)
.... Richard (Dick) NugentTime
(1944) .... Jerry FlynnTruth,
The_ (1937) .... Jerry WarrinerButterfly
(1932) .... Lieutenant B.F. PinkertonSun
(1932) .... Ridgeway
Tribute To the Will Rogers Memorial Hospital, A (????) .... Himself
Usenet:
From: ucbesvax.turner@ucbcad.UUCP
(ucbesvax.turner@ucbcad.UUCP)
Subject: Re: Re: Speaking
of Casino Royale... - (nf)
Newsgroups: net.movies
Date: 1983-08-04 19:10:00
PST
#R:rlgvax:-94800:ucbesvax:6100007:000:467
ucbesvax!turner
Aug 4 05:30:00 1983
Re: David Niven & The Bishop's Wife
Sorry to go on like this...my father was a stunt man of sorts in this film, standing in for Cary Grant in the skating scene (they put some sort of Cary-mask on him, 'cuz he really doesn't look much like Grant).
His comment on Niven was, simply, that he was David Niven, and what more could you say? Well, so he isn't the most articulate man in the world.
No More on this, I Promise,
Michael Turner
ucbvax!ucbesvax.turner
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