Cary Grant’s own words about his early acrobatic training and how this developed into training as an actor

(While at school, but working in the evenings at the Bristol Empire), I learned about Bob Pender’s troupe of young performers — or knockabout comedians, as they were called — the ranks of which were being regularly depleted as soon as each boy came of military age; and before I knew it I was writing a letter to Mr. Pender purportedly from my own father. I enclosed a snapshot and, since I was tall for my age and thought I looked older, conveniently neglected to explain that I was not yet fourteen and, therefore, not legally allowed to leave school.

You wouldn’t believe it, but in no time at all, although it seemed weeks to a fellow with a surreptitious eye on his father’s mailbox, back came an answer from Bob Pender suggesting to my father that his promising-looking son Archibald should go to Norwich, where the troupe was performing, for an interview; what’s more, he enclosed the railway fare! Never was there such inner excitement. Of joy, disbelief, fear, confidence and indecision. In the secrecy of my room I could neither sleep nor sit. I packed and unpacked; and after hours of coin spinning and head scratching found myself quietly leaving the house in the middle of the night and walking the deserted streets toward the railway station where, dizzy at my own daring, I waited for an early-morning train. To Norwich. And adventure.

I can’t remember anything about the journey. I was probably trying to figure out what my father would try to figure out. He and I often awoke and left the house at different hours without seeing each other. So it might be quite some time before I would be missed. After traveling for at least four hours I arrived at about 10 a.m. and went directly to the theatre where, putting his troupe through their morning limbering-up exercises, I found Bob Pender.

He was a stocky, strongly built, likable man of about forty-two who had been renowned as the great Drury Lane clown. I suspected that he suspected that Archie and Elias James Leach were the same correspondent, but he introduced me to his kind wife Margaret, a well-known dancer whom he’d met when she was ballet mistress at the Folies-Bergerè in Paris, and they questioned me about my birth certificate, which I said was home. Which was true. It was. After looking me over carefully they agreed that if it was still all right with my father they would apprentice me to their troupe. They gave me a short handwritten contract stipulating that I as to receive my keep and ten shillings pocket money weekly. And hallelujah, I was an actor!

Over the years I’ve signed many lengthy, involved typed contracts calling for me to earn great sums of money, but no employment contract since has ever matched the thrill of that one sheet of ordinary notepaper stating that I was to have the opportunity of learning a profession that appealed to me more than any other in the world.

I was taken to live in the same digs (another actors’ term: short for diggings; meaning room-and-board in a private house) with Mr. and Mrs. Pender, and two or three of the youngest members of the company who were also kept under the proprietor’s parental wings; and the following morning, on the bare theatre stage, I began instruction in ground tumbling and acrobatic dances along with an athletic group of ten or eleven teen-age boys from all walks of life. As the newcomer, the novice, I felt, and looked, clumsy and inept among the others, and my progress suffered from the disparity. But slowly, and too often painfully, I showed improvement and began to feel the pride and confidence of accomplishment. I was resigned to the fact that it would be some time before I was proficient enough actually to join the others in front of an audience.

…It was inevitable, of course, that my father would find me. It took him a good ten days, though, by which time we had moved on to a town called Ipswich. One night between shows the stage-door keeper told me that a man who said he was my father was waiting to see me. And there he was all right.

Luckily, Bob Pender was just coming out of his nearby dressing room, and I managed to introduce them to each other before father and I were able to exchange too many unamusing words which we might later regret. Now my father was a high-degree Mason, whatever that meant, and so was Bob Pender. There was as lucky a stroke of fate as ever took care of matters! They wore similar insignia dangling from their watch chains, and within the space of a handshake seemed to have arrived at some special understanding. So, while I anxiously twiddled my thumbs and thoughts, they went off together for a drink at the next-door pub. In order, they said, to decide my future. How do you like that? It was decided I needed to finish my education.

So, back I was taken to Bristol without ever once performing on the stage; though I told every open-mouthed classmate that I had. Still, by way of compensation, I held many an audience of small fellow Fairfieldians goggle-eyed. Some even came back for an encore and brought a friend. I demonstrated cartwheels, handsprings, nip-ups and spot rolls — my complete theatrical repertoire up to that point. But they soon tired of me and, when I could no longer get the conversation around to my wondrous experiences in the theatre and had slowly deflated to my accustomed insignificance, I grew lonely for the boys of the Pender troupe and determined to rejoin them.

Although I regret the recollection, I did my unlevel best to flunk at everything. The only class I attended with any interest and alacrity was the twice-weekly instruction in the gymnasium. I never truly enjoyed acrobatics, and wanted to keep fit, and add to my proficiency only as a means to an end.

(Once I turned fourteen) I was back with the Pender troupe; and with three months we were playing that very same Empire Theatre in my hometown, by which time I was actually appearing in the act. I didn’t have much to do but, with my old friends all around me backstage and my father seated in the audience, I excitedly threw myself into a performance that made up in exuberance what it lacked in experience.

Father enjoyed a glad reunion and a drink as well with Bob Pender and, after the evening’s last performance, we walked home together in the quiet summer darkness of the Bristol streets. We hardly spoke, but I felt so proud of his pleasure and so much pleasure in his pride. And I happily remember that we held hands for part of that walk.

Touring the English provinces with the troupe, I grew to appreciate the fine art of pantomime. No dialogue was used in our act and each day, on a bare stage, we learned not only dancing, tumbling and stilt-walking under the expert tuition of Bob Pender, but also how to convey a mood or meaning without words. How to establish communication silently with an audience, using the minimum of movement and expression; how best immediately and precisely to effect an emotional response — a laugh or, sometimes, a tear. The greatest pantomimists of our day have been able to induce both at once. Charles Chaplin, Cantinflas, Marcel Marceau, Jacques Tati, Fernanel, and England’s Richard Herne. And in bygone years Grock, the Lupino family, Bobby Clark, and the unforgettable tramp cyclist Joe Jackson; and currently the more familiar Danny Kay, Red Skelton, Sid Caesar, and even Jack Benny with his slow, calculated reactions. Surprisingly, Hitchcock is one of the most subtle pantomimists of them all; it’s such a pity he doesn’t do it professionally, so that everyone might have the joy of watching him as I have.

While playing the great Gulliver circuit of vaudeville theatres in London, most of us boys lived with Mr. and Mrs. Pender in their big suburban home in Brixton. It had a long garden walk at the front and a smaller garden at back, and was quite near (as we always brightly informed every other vaudevillian) to the house of Lady de Frece, better known as Vesta Tilley, the greatest music-hall star of that day.

We slept in dormitory-style rooms. Lights out at ten; up, washed, dressed, and downstairs for breakfast at seven-thirty; followed by an hour’s reading or recreation and later the morning’s limbering-up exercises.  One day a lady in the next-door house walked to the front gate, past the trees where she could get a clearer view of a daylight air raid, and was swiftly and shockingly decapitated by a piece of shrapnel in the morning sun of her English garden.

The day that first world war ended we were playing in Preston, Lancashire. There were very few people in the theatre that evening, and after the show I walked around the centre of town with some of the other boys. The streets were filled with people, but there didn’t seem to be any particular gaiety. As in every other town in England, so many of Preston’s families had lost a husband or son, or someone close to them, that the finish of the war was hardly an occasion for revelry but rather for reverie. Their only consolation was that there was never, never again to be another war. No. Never. That was on November 11, 1918.

I spent the following Christmas at Colwyn Bay, a small seaside town in Wales. Playing in a theatre built on, of all windy wintry places, a pier. So many young former members of the company were already being discharged from the army that Bob Pender obtained engagements for two complete troupes in the type of Christmas shows that so particularly suited our tumbling talents: the traditional English pantomimes. Which aren’t pantomimes at all, by the way, but fairy stories such as Cinderella, Mother Goose, Puss in Boots, and so on, told in part musical-comedy and part slapstick form. They’re colourfully and quite expensively presented in most English towns for usually, a packed eight-week run. The best troupe, the older troupe, played the better pantomime in Liverpool.

So that’s how I came to be in cold Colwyn Bay; walking the next-to-highest stilts in a graduated line of other stilt walkers, with my head inside a huge papier-mâché mask on which sat a large, white, limp lady’s bonnet with a frill around it, and my elongated body and long, long legs encased in a great calico dress that had frilled collar and cuffs to match the hat. Well, naturally! It was the most spectacular of the many acts we performed to delight children who yearly sit entranced at the magic of English pantomime.

At each theatre I carefully watched the celebrated headline artists from the wings, and grew to respect the diligence and application and long experience it took to acquire such expert timing and unaffected confidence, the amount of effort that resulted in such effortlessness. I strove to make everything I did at least appear relaxed. Perhaps by relaxing outwardly I could eventually relax inwardly. Sometimes I even began to enjoy myself on the stage.

The troupe prospered and expanded and I got a raise to 1 pound a week pocket money (almost $5 at the rate of exchange in those days, and what’s more it bought more), and one day Bob Pender announced the longed-for news that he’d booked an engagement for himself and a company of eight boys to appear in a Charles Dillingham production at the Globe Theater in New York City!

…After customs’ inspection, at which I had absolutely no treasures to declare, one of producer Charles Dillingham’s representatives herded us directly to the Globe Theater where we waited around, stealing wide-eyed glances at Broadway and Times Square, while our mentor, Bob Pender, went into grave discussion with his old friend Fred Stone, the versatile star of the musical comedy that was rehearsing there. It transpired that, because of Mr. Stone’s change of routines in his new show, our act was to be placed in Mr. Dillingham’s other production, which was about to open at the New York Hippodrome.

So off we scurried to present ourselves at the Hippodrome, then on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets: the world’s largest theatre; playing daily matinees and night performances, except Sundays, to 10,000 people a week, more than 2,000,000 people each season. It contained a revolving stage a city block wide and possibly a half block deep, on which appeared only the most renowned and spectacular acts of those days, selected from every nationality and country: “Poodles” Hanneford and The Riding Hanneford Family; Marceline the clown; The Long Tack Sam Company of Illusionists; Joe Jackson the tramp cyclist; Powers Elephants, an amazing water spectacle in which expert girl swimmers and high divers appeared and reappeared in an understage tank containing 960,000 gallons of water; a highly trained ballet corps of 80 members; a chorus of 100 singers — and us; our little petrified troupe of English music-hall knockabout comedians, pantomimists and stilt-walkers.

There were more than 1,000 people in the cast and approximately 800 nonperforming employees. It was necessary for everyone, from stars to roustabouts, to punch a time clock so that, by curtain time, each person would be accounted for or, if there were absentees, replacements speedily rearranged in the various acts and chorus formations throughout the show.

It was an astonishing assemblage. A talented, colourful family of colourful, spangled performers in a mammoth, colourful extravaganza and, from opening night to closing, our troupe was an unexpectedly big, colourful success. In the show — and in the family. That remarkable international family. We loved them all, and reflectively they loved us. What you give you get.

Because of our youth, we teenagers lived under the jurisdictional eyes of Bob and Mrs. Pender — across the hall from them, in a sort of long Pullman apartment, in which each of us had to go through one another’s bedrooms to get to the bathroom. The fellow at the end had the comfort of being closest, but the discomfort of the traffic’s full concentration. I was the farthest away, nearest Eighth Avenue. We had rotating duties. I learned to keep accounts for, cater for, and market for, to wash dishes for, to make the beds for, and to cook for every other occupant of that apartment, according to the daily allotted task.

…Well, that Eighth Avenue apartment was no mansion, I can tell you. It wasn’t even much of an apartment, and the nearest thing to a swimming pool was the kitchen tub where we nightly lined up after the show, to wash our socks and handkerchiefs and, whenever the order of the day demanded, the dish towels; followed by a cue at the communal iron and ironing board. I was able by now to keep house, cook, sew buttons on, and do my own laundry, and consequently had a fair degree of independence.

…With the Hippodrome season closing…our troupe departed for Philadelphia to begin what turned out to be a glorious tour of the entire B. F. Keith Vaudeville Circuit. We performed in new, first-class, well-equipped theatres in Cleveland, Boston, Chicago and throughout the principal cities of the East, including, at the tour’s end, the epitome of variety theatres, that goal of all vaudevillians, the Palace in New York City.  It was 1921.

…At the tour’s end, accompanied by other ambitious members of the troupe, including Bob Pender’s younger brother, I decided to remain in America and try to obtain work on my own. After kindly giving me the amount of my return fare to England in case I should ever need it, Mr. Pender left for London with his sadly depleted company — the company he had so patiently and lovingly worked to train and maintain. It must have been very disappointing and difficult for him to leave so many of his boys behind in America, our land of opportunity; but youth, in its eagerness to drive ahead, seldom recognizes the troubles caused or debts accrued while passing. And here, as I reminisce, the fullness of my gratitude to Bob Pender and his wife, both of whom are now dead, wells up within me. I hope they know.

…That summer, like most summers in the theatrical world, jobs were scarce. Especially for nontalking vaudevillians. There was a wide gulf between a talking actor and a silent actor, and no one seemed willing to help me bridge it. “Have you ever spoken lines?” “What experience have you had?” Even today it’s difficult for me to believe I once dreaded those questions at each interview, and in every agent’s office.

…I sat and stood around the National Vaudeville Artists Club in West 46th Street, a comfortable haven after the hot pavements I walked daily that summer of 1922, hoping for a dropped word, a clue about a job.

…After a few jobless weeks my savings were spent, and I began nibbling into the emergency money put aside for return passage to England. Eating, for such a ravenous appetite, was a bit of a problem; but fortunately, being a tall dark-blue-suited young bachelor who wouldn’t arrive wearing brown shoes, fall off the chair, or drink from a finger bowl, I was often invited at the last minute to round out the guests at dinner tables on which were some fine spreads.

…One evening a young man named Marks whose father, I believe, conceived the idea of daylight saving time, invited me to dine at his family’s home on Park Avenue…at the dinner I met a man named George Tilyew. We exchanged the “and-what-line-of-business-are-you-in?” genialities, and he told me he had offices at Coney Island in Steeplechase Park, which I gathered his family owned, operated, leased or managed; I wasn’t fully listening at that point because my mind, always alert to the possibility of a job, was wondering how best to benefit from the introduction. Steeplechase? Hmmmm! An amusement park, wasn’t it?

…I remembered seeing a man walking on stilts along Broadway advertising something or other, and heard myself suggesting to Mr. Tilyew that perhaps I could do the same for him. He agreed that perhaps I could. I said, yes, well, perhaps I could advertise Steeplechase Park by walking up and down in front of the place…Mr. Tilyew said yes, perhaps I could, it might be a fine idea, and would I see him at his office whenever convenient? Would I?

In 1922, Coney Island was clean, freshly painted and well dept. There was little or no traffic on the main avenues, and people dressed in their carnival best….I presented myself to Mr. Tilyew for the job at his Steeplechase Park and he, true to his word, presented me with a doorman’s uniform: a bright-green coat with red braid and a bright-green jockey cap with read peak. Well! I supplied the long tubelike black trousers — specially made, too; cost a bomb — and stilts to go with them, and there I was, high in the air, striding slowly up and down, up and down, up and down, advertising the place. I wore no placards, just that resplendent uniform and an unstiff upper lip.

You see how everything we learn comes in handy? If I hadn’t been badgered, cajoled, dared, bullied and helped into walking those high stilts when I was a boy in the Pender troupe, I might have starved that summer — or gone back to Bristol.

…I got $40 a week. Pretty good in 1922, when it bought so much more than it buys today. Five dollars a day except for Saturdays and Sundays. I got $10 for each of those two days, due to occupational unpredictability. You see, with the children out of school roaming around looking for something educational, my tall figure presented a tempting target for aspiring Jack the Giant-killers. Saturdays and Sundays were hazardous. No doubt about it.

There were all sorts of opening moves, and from my altitude I could follow the beginning of each manoeuvre, the strategy and deploy. I could predict the concerted rush, and spot the deceptive saunter resulting in the rear-guard shove; or the playful ring-around-the-rosy, with me as the rosy, beaming daffily down on the little faces of impending disaster. I dreaded the lone ace who came zeroing in out of the sun, flying a small bamboo cane with a curved handle. One good yank as he whizzed past and he’d won the encounter hands down (my hands down), with full honours and an accolade from admiring bystanders.

After a few graceful air-clutching staggers, it still took about three lifetime seconds for me to topple — TIMBER! — and by the time I was spread-eagled on the street, those frolicsome urchins were yards away, innocently pointing at airplanes that weren’t there.

Still, I occasionally outwitted them by grabbing a nearby awning, while parrying with an elongated wooden leg; but often some sturdy young squirt, joined quickly by volunteers of his cowardly gang, and sometimes even a crazy stranger or two, would grab the stilt’s foot and tug steadily. It became an interesting speculation which would come away first — the awning, or me. Usually I came away first, resulting in an entirely different, much more entertaining, sort of flailing parabolic descent, known as the backward high gruesome. Well, that job didn’t last long, I can tell you.

I had kept in touch with other ex-members of the Pender troupe, and through them learned that R. H. Burnside, the Hippodrome director, was trying to round up as many of us as possible, to utilize our acrobatic abilities in his next production. The previous season’s show was called Good Times, and the coming season’s Better Times. I hope everyone’s life makes such seasonal progress.

Mine did…(but) after that successful 1924 vaudeville season, during which most of us saved sufficient money to feel our independence, we also began feeling the strain of our incompatibilities. And so, unable to amiably discuss our mutual dissatisfactions, we disbanded and returned to New York. Some of the troupe left for England, and others, including myself, remained in America.

I wish I could report a sudden meteoric rise of career, but summer and its slack theatrical season was around again. I remained in New York, eking out my savings while living in a very small but clean, pleasant room at the National Vaudeville Artists Club, where I was again permitted to run up bills while trying to run down jobs. I still think of that club and its staff with fond, grateful memory. At night, many well-known theatrical figures of vaudeville and musical comedy came there for late supper after their shows, and at almost any other time during the day I could be surrounded by the sound of friendly voices. I met performers of every kind and often teamed in temporary partnership with young comedians no more experienced than myself, in order to obtain a day’s work here and a day’s work there. Usually somewhere close to New York, on a Saturday or Sunday, when small theatres advertised, as a sort of weekend bonus, three or four “outstanding” acts, to embellish their movie program.

We were paid the regular minimum scale of $62.50 a day. For the two of us. Less 10 percent agent’s commission. Less cost of travel, less cost of keeping our clothes clean for the performances, less tips at the theatre and meals between shows. Leaving less and less and, too often, nothing. But I was glad for the work. The experiences were of incalculable benefit, because it was during these one- and two-day engagements that I began learning the fundamentals of my craft… Eventually, after graduating to more entertaining routines with more accomplished comedians and more regular bookings, I played practically every small town in America. As the “straight man,” I learned to time laughs. When to talk into an audience’s laughter. When no to talk into the laughter. When to wait for the laugh. When not to wait for a laugh. When to move on a laugh, when not to move on a laugh. In all sorts of theatres, of all sizes, playing to all types of people; timing laughs that changed in volume and length at every performance.

I was 21 years old and still six years away from Hollywood. Six years of intensive, diligent work toward an unknown goal.

Extract from “Archie” original published in the Ladies Home Journal in 1963, compiled by Jo Weeks.