Archie was grateful for all such excursions, but he particularly enjoyed his visits to the Metropole. It was a loud, exciting place, with a piano accompaniment which, he recalled, tended to aim more for plangency than for any discernible tune. It showed the kind of movies and performers he liked most (such as slapstick comedies and stars like Charlie Chaplin, Chester Conklin, Fatty Arbuckle, Ford Sterling, Mack Swain and ‘Bronco Billy’ Anderson), and these occasions were probably the only times when he had the opportunity to establish any real rapport with his father, who sometimes treated him to an apple or a bar of chocolate.
Elias also took his son to the theatre. At Christmas it was pantomimes at such grand places as the Prince’s and Empire theatres. At other times of the year it was music-hall acts, such as magicians, dancers, comedians and acrobats. Elias, ‘in a tight-throated untrained high baritone’,46 taught his son how to mimic some of the singers of the time (in such songs as ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’ and ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’), as well as encouraging him to learn some of the magic tricks he had seen. Archie was enchanted. He started to visit the theatre whenever he had the opportunity. He was often alone and unsettled at home, an only child who was ‘loved but seldom ever praised’,47 but now he had found an attractive distraction. ‘I thought what a marvellous place.’48
CHAPTER II A Mysterious Disappearance
Death merely acts in the same way as absence.
MARCEL PROUST
[I made] the mistake of thinking that each of my wives was my mother,that there would never be a replacement once she left.
CARY GRANT
Archie Leach was just nine years of age when it happened.1 He had just arrived home, shortly after five o’clock, after an ordinary, quiet, uneventful day at school. He was shocked to discover that his mother had disappeared. She had said nothing to him on the previous day to prepare him for her absence. No one, in fact, had said anything to suggest to him that his mother might not be waiting for him, as usual, at this particular time on this particular afternoon. It was, quite simply, a mystery.
His mother had, it was true, grown stranger, more unpredictable in temperament and behaviour, over the past few months, and he had been aware, to some extent, of the change. She had become increasingly – perhaps even obsessively – fastidious: Archie had noticed that she would sometimes wash her hands again and again, scrubbing them with a hard bristle brush; she would also lock every door in the house, regardless of the time of day, and she had taken to hoarding food; there had even been odd occasions when, inexplicably, she would ask no one in particular, ‘Where are my dancing shoes?’;2 and on some evenings she would sit motionless in front of the fire, saying nothing, gazing at the coals, the small room draped in darkness. Archie had also grown accustomed – but by no means immune – to the noisy quarrelling between his parents, as well as to the equally common periods of icy silence which usually followed these arguments.3 Nothing, however, prepared him for such a sudden and dramatic disappearance as this.
Two of his cousins were lodging in part of the house at the time, and, when he realised that his mother had gone, he sought them out to see if they knew of her whereabouts. According to one source, they told Archie that his mother ‘had died suddenly of a heart attack and had had to be buried immediately’.4 The more common version, however, first put forward by Grant himself, has Archie being told that his mother had gone to the local seaside town of Weston-super-Mare for a short holiday.5 ‘It seemed rather unusual,’ he recalled much later, with a bizarre attempt at English understatement which perhaps had come to serve, in public, as a relatively painless way of obscuring a painfully disturbing memory, ‘but I accepted it as one of those peculiarly unaccountable things that grown-ups are apt to do.’6
If his father attempted to reassure him that his mother would soon come home – and it seems that he did so – then it was not long before Archie realised that she was never going to return:
There was a void in my life, a sadness of spirit that affected each daily activity with which I occupied myself in order to overcome it. But there was no further explanation of Mother’s absence, and I gradually got accustomed to the fact that she was not home each time I came home – nor, it transpired, was she expected to come home.7
Towards the end of his life he admitted that, once some of the shock had worn off, ‘I thought my parents had split.’8
What had really happened to Elsie Leach was that her husband had committed her to the local lunatic asylum, the Country Home for Mental Defectives in Fishponds, a rustic district at the end of one of Bristol’s main tramlines.9 Elias had arranged for the hospital’s staff to collect her from their home earlier in the day, and then, after settling her in, he went back to work. He never told his son the truth about the matter.
The asylum at Fishponds was, by quite some way, the worst of the two institutions for the mentally ill in Bristol at that time. Conditions were filthy, and supervision negligible. It cost Elias just one pound per year to keep Elsie inside as a patient. She stayed there for more than twenty years, until, in fact, her husband’s death in the mid-1930s. Was he her gaoler? British law prohibits the unsealing of psychiatric case records until a hundred years after the patient’s death, and, as Elsie lived on until 1973, the actual reasons for her incarceration may remain ambiguous until well into the next century. Dr Francis Page, a Bristol physician, has said that it was ‘always presumed she was a chronic paranoid schizophrenic’, but he also acknowledged that he ‘never did know the official psychiatric diagnosis’ that had been used to keep her institutionalised.10 She was, it is clear, prone to periods of acute depression, and it is conceivable that she could have suffered a nervous breakdown at this time. It is not so obvious, however, why this in itself should have convinced Elias that the only possible solution would be to abandon her inside the most wretched institution he could find. Ernest Kingdon, a cousin, visited Elsie regularly in Fishponds, and he has insisted that he found her to be resilient and intelligent: ‘She used to write beautiful letters asking why she could not be released.’11
Although the precise state of Elsie Leach’s mental health remains a matter for speculation, it is much easier to establish the reasons why Elias Leach was prepared – or perhaps determined – to have her committed and out of his life. It was a fact – a fact that Cary Grant never acknowledged or commented on in public – that Elias Leach had a mistress, Mabel Alice Johnson. It might have been the shock of her husband’s indiscretion which precipitated Elsie’s breakdown, although, by that time, their marriage was probably not much more than a sham, and