The Acrobat by Edward J. Delaney
This is a fictional biography of a fictional person. It includes the contemplations of the real person who transformed into a celebrity and what he makes of the happenstance of this bizarre international movie stardom.
The real person fictionalized here is Archibald Leach, the son of, not even a tailor, but a pressor born and raised in Bristol, England. The fictional person fictionalized is Cary Grant. The novel deftly time travels through the early years of the acrobatic vaudevillian, gently bouncing us to the mind of the 50 to 60 year old star as he looks back at what was that all about while deciding what to do next.
The Acrobat, published in late 2022, is also timely in that it explores the LSD psychological therapy he undertook. There is a 21st Century resurgence into the idea of using psychedelics as a powerful tool for personal growth and renewed understanding of oneself.
The novel fits in with the work of popular best selling author Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind about his late in life explorations of various psychedelics. A follow up book This is Your Mind on Plants expands that study. How to Change Your Mind has been adapted into a four part Netflix documentary series which is bound to reach far more people than the diminishing number of book readers in the moving image age. The series serves as almost a commercial for psychedelics in that it is a far more positive view of this stuff than mainstream commercial entertainment did the first time around when it ping ponged from ridiculous and ineffective propaganda such as Art Linkletter’s unfortunate daughter, this is your mind egg in a frying pan PSA TV ads. All this after an extremely confusing introduction of the substances via hit new music, Are Your Experienced, rock star Beatles, and Leary evangelical promotion.
Another art LSD project played NYC last year. This one oddly enough was a Broadway musical Flying Over Sunset (FLYING OVER SUNSET - Montage). This musical is by James Lapine, a hit show maker with Stephen Sondhiem in the past and played at Lincoln Center. It is about the psychedelic explorations of Aldous Huxley, Clare Boothe Luce, and Cary Grant. (This writer has not seen or read this show's book.)
This reader tries to stay clear of celebrity, movie, rock star biographies. The notion being that after the early wannabe years in which bio info of stars might be practical and instructional, there is little point at gazing up at the kings and queens of our culture. Their lives are so extreme and odd they provide little useful info to the common person. We are all complicated and human, it is really more interesting what the simple complicated folk do to get by than the rags to riches freaks among us.
So why read The Acrobat? This reader was interested in the popularization of LSD, the new interest in it and how it was going to be shown in the novel. It was not new information that Cary Grant was an advocate and participant in LSD therapy. This reader in fact asked the star about this in a Q&A segment of a traveling live show Grant did 38 years ago at Proctor’s Theater in Schenectady, NY in 1984. The question was about LSD and he didn’t back off in the slightest. The battle shaming him over this was almost 25 years in the past. He said it was a significant experience for him. https://www.carygrant.net/articles/schenectady.htm
Cary Grant oddly enough was one of the first high profile personalities to talk publicly about LSD therapy and how he felt it benefitted his life. There was Huxley of course but not a movie star and not the biggest of movie stars at the top of the heap like Cary Grant. In this novel it involves a situation of mentioning it off hand and off the record to a showbiz reporter, but Grant thought this could harm the business of two movies he had in the can: Operation Petticoat and North By Northwest. So he denied ever having spoken to the reporter which couldn’t work out for him since the reporter had recorded an audio tape and also had photos. The reporter sued the star for defamation and they settled in a way that involved a wider distribution of the LSD story. Ultimately it was not a problem and had no effect on his career.
Grant was introduced to the therapy through one of his marriages, to Betsy Drake. They had met on her very first movie Every Girl Should Get Married. So naturally he married his co-star who should get married and did. They were married from 1948 until 1962, his longest marriage and her one. Betsy Drake never remarried and eventually got a Masters of Education from Harvard and became a child therapist while having no children herself. With the two of them hings had gone bad when he had an affair with Sophia Loren while they were making a movie together and wanted to go off with her except she then married Carlo Ponti. So Drake went to Dr Mortimer Hartman as part of dealing with the upset in their marriage and suggested that Cary do as well.
The novel handles the LSD experience quite well. This is done by staying away from dealing with it directly. The chapters tend to begin with an italicized page of two of dream like scenes, These could be interpreted as compilations during the blindfolded LSD sessions, but Delaney doesn’t tell us directly that it is a function of the LSD. This is the safe route. LSD, psychedelic experience is not easily or at all explainable through text and speech, and it’s the type of thing that one cannot assume is like alcohol or some other drug or cannabis. From reading the novel it is impossible to tell if the author himself is experienced and that is just fine. The focus of the novel is the turning point of an aging man in a very odd position in life that he doesn’t entirely understand since his life had become the role of Cary Grant. This gives the novel the appeal of a story that the average reader can get something from. Aren’t we all in masks, playing a type of role that is us but also oddly not? The novel is good in that it focuses on the point of the therapy, not the tools used in exploration or the razmataz special effects that the tool is famous for.
This fine, entertaining, short novel (267 pages) is packed with info on the early years of Archibald Leach through to the early 60s when he is pushing 60 himself and then stops. If the reader is already aware of the biography of this man, they might still get an interesting take on the star from Delaney’s point of view. Others will get an adequate amount of bio information to suffice and a good story about the inner workings of an aging and somewhat alienated man. It also shows how a difficult situation of a boy child and his mother, a confusing separation, can cause the man to perhaps have a hard time staying and trusting a long term relationship with a woman, a marriage or facsimile.
Recommended
The book was a New York Public Library brand new paperback.
Free ride.
