The acrobat
(Book)

"This is a work of imagination, inspired by a life"--Epigraph.

""Everyone wants to be Cary Grant," mused the world's most famous leading man. "Even I want to be Cary Grant." Who was Cary Grant, really? Who was he meant to be? Who in the end did he want to become? It is 1959, the year of his greatest successes but also at the zenith of a charmed career, and the 55-year-old man who calls himself Cary Grant is on a deep journey into the self. Introduced to the wonders of LSD as part of his therapy at The Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills, he embarks on the hundredor more trips into his past, to the long-ago person he knows to be Archie Leach. The Acrobat combines fact and fiction to explore the life of Cary Grant. Using Grant's altered state as a jumping off point for each chapter, The Acrobat moves back and forthin time to look at Grant's troubled upbringing, his start in English vaudeville as an acrobat and stilt walker, his world on the set, and his relationships with the people who were prominent in his life: Howard Hughes, Randolph Scott, Blake Edwards, TonyCurtis, two of the five women he married, and more. Amidst the endless versions of himself and the characters that he played, this riveting investigation of the actor's life and mind takes us beyond where biographies have tread to offer a new perspectiveon a complex Hollywood legend"--,Provided by publisher.