Bringing Up Baby

Good Stuff: A Reminiscence of My Father Cary Grant
by Jennifer Grant

Reviewed by Catherine Bailey

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Cary Grant retired from the silver screen at the age of 62, the year his daughter, Jennifer, was born. Given the generation gap that separated father from daughter, some degree of culture clash was inevitable (Cary could not abide Jennifer’s 70s pop polluting the airwaves inside his Cadillac, for instance), but the two possessed kindred spirits, and their respective zeitgeists stirred up more affection than conflict between them. Nearly a quarter century after Cary Grant passed away in 1986, Jennifer Grant has completed a memoir in his honor: Good Stuff: A Reminiscence of My Father Cary Grant, celebrating the twenty years they spent basking in one another’s company.

Jennifer’s memoir weaves a multi-media tapestry of her childhood and
adolescence in the Grant household. Much of the richness of the text we owe to the scrapbooking instinct of Cary himself. All of his own childhood memorabilia had burned up in a household fire in World War One-era England, and he had always keenly mourned its loss. When his daughter came into the world, he determined to preserve for her a tangible record of their lives together. Assiduously archiving every letter, photograph, drawing, audio and visual recording of her youth, Cary amassed a chronicle that spanned from Jennifer’s birth until the month of his death. These documents he kept in a fireproof safe at his Beverly Hills home until they passed to Jennifer with his estate.

Good Stuff sprang from this archive, and its pages hum with feelings of love, humor, and nostalgia. The physical record of letters allows for a level of clarity and insight that might otherwise have been lost. Jennifer introduces her father as an elegant, witty, and charitable man, a man who loved food as much as he loved mischief. Jennifer fondly recalls his private hoard of Cadbury chocolates and marzipan, which he kept stashed in a drawer. As a child, she snuck treats from his drawer, trespasses of which her father knew and tacitly approved. Cary had a fondness for the “pip” in his daughter and responded to her tomfoolery it with the kind of tongue-in-cheek scolding that encouraged more of the same.

Silliness, banter, and wordplay reigned in the Grant household. “Let’s get some halibut,” Cary would joke on their trips to Santa Monica Seafood, “just for the halibut!”

Cary Grant, born Archibald Leach, of Bristol, England, had little in the way of formal education and started out his career with hardly a penny to his name. A young “pip” himself in his day, he got himself expelled from grade school for peeping into the girls’ locker room. Jennifer reflects that her father balanced his light-hearted parenting style with an expectation that she act the serious student and obey his house rules. He did not want her growing up too fast. He forbade eye shadow well into her teens, and he enforced a strict curfew into her twenties, which Jennifer followed as religiously as Los Angeles traffic permitted. “Tardiness meant Dad would worry,” she writes, “I could feel it brewing from miles away.”

At every opportunity Cary worked to foster Jennifer’s interest in education and instill in her the value of learning. As an infant scooting towards Cary’s beloved bookcase, Jennifer is told by her father, “They’re beautiful aren’t they? Beautiful books. Oh yes I do, I have beautiful books that you’ll enjoy and treasure and cherish.” Even into his retirement, Cary could not leave off learning. Business fascinated him, and he sat on the boards of numerous companies in his later years, passionately unraveling what made things tick behind the scenes.

From an early age, Jennifer seemed to sense that her father’s life stretched out longer behind him than before him; even watching his old films served as an unwelcome reminder of the years she had missed spending by his side. She writes in Good Stuff that she feels his absence all the more after delving back through the letters and recordings of his voice. Cary Grant’s gift of archived memory to his daughter grew into her tribute to his life as she knew him-not as the leading man of Hollywood, but as her father. Anyone who has lost a loved one knows there is never enough time, and in the end, whatever precious memories remain taste bittersweet.

Excerpt: “How does it feel to see my father on-screen? It’s mostly squeamishly uncomfortable. Admittedly, I beam with pride and laugh out loud. However, there he was for all those years… doing all these amazing things, and I wasn’t there with him. Grace Kelly gets to swim in the sea with him. I’m a good swimmer. That should be me. Katharine Hepburn flusters him. I could do that. Tony Curtis is an impertinent rascal. That’s my job! If I yell loud enough, will he pop out of the screen for me?”

Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon

Catherine Bailey is a trained anthropologist and archaeologist. She currently works as a freelance writer and teacher in Los Angeles.

*Photo courtesy of tmw1340.


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