Birthday Boy: A Star to Remember

Cary Grant would have been 106 today. He probably would still have been better looking than most of us and cooler than all of us, put together. When you've held your own against everybody from Mae West to Hitchcock - with more than a little Katharine Hepburn in between and even a little Audrey - I guess there's not much that fazes you.

And wasn't he lovely?

The Mrses. Grant

Poor dear Cary; such a complicated private life. He started with a luminous star, made immortal by Chaplin but essentially the celluloid version of a One Hit Wonder...

He continued as one of the two non-titled husbands of the World's Richest Girl, Princess Countess Mrs. Princess Sra. Baroness Princess Barbara Woolworth Hutton Mdivani von Haugwitz-Reventlow Grant Trubetskoy Rubirosa von Cramm Doan, seen here by Beaton...

...before moving on to a refreshingly simply named actress.

Who was followed, after a while, by a far less restful successor...

...before rounding things out with a granddaughter substitute.

But through it all, he never looked happier than when he bunked with the cowboy star who also shone in FredandGingerland. There's a lesson for us all there, but I'm too distracted at the thought of Randolph Scott in Barbara Hutton's tiara to think it through...

Why Hello There, Mr Grant!

This rather remarkable portrait is the work of one Kurt Kauper, a contemporary artist based in New York.

He applies his technique - a spare, reductive painting style reminiscent of magazine illustrations and of predecessors like Grant Wood, with a hint of Van Eyck and perhaps the quattrocento - to pictures like this, which startle with their combination of virtuosity and something unsettling - in the case of this run of paintings, unlikely subjects naked as the day they were born. He's done an entire series of Cary Grant, for example, and another of hockey players.

Grant is a canny choice: the most artificially (and successfully) constructed of male stars, a man defined by his dapper image who seems always and at the same time deeply familiar and somehow unknowable. And, of course, not at all hard on the eyes.

Stripped, he still radiates his familiar Hollywood confidence, striding through his archetypal star's house interior, but as viewers, we're distracted, by the tanlines (very period correct) and what they frame. It's kind of a stunt, but kind of wonderful.

I wonder if he could be persuaded to start an Upen Patel series...

Mirror, Mirror

Dear Mr. Cary Grant can be forgiven a moment's narcissism. Were that what was staring back at me in the mirror, I'm not sure I'd ever leave the house.

Happy Birthday, Cowboy

That tall drink of water, Randolph Scott, was born this fine day in 1898. His craggy allure and affable screen presence were for many years the best reasons to sit through the dozens of Westerns in which he was the most interesting thing on screen.

I like him best, though, earlier on, in the '30s, when he leavened his diet of sagebrush and chaps with a great deal more variety than you might think.

He made an effective aw-shucks-ma'am foil to Mae West, for example, in Go West, Young Man; he supported Kate Smith in her ill-fated foray out of her niche on radio; he even made a lively (non-dancing) sidekick to Fred Astaire in Roberta and Follow the Fleet (my two favorite Fred-and-Gingers, actually).

These days, though, he is in danger of being best remembered for his decade-long occasional cohabitation with Cary Grant at the latter's Malibu beach house. Well, whatever may or may not have gone on behind closed doors, they certainly made a striking couple, no?