At Cinema Rediscovered back in July, people were invited to find out about and discuss plans for this year’s Cary Grant festival. I love the Reuben Library at the British Film Institute in London, so I was delighted when Charlotte Crofts, the festival organiser, took me up on my offer to find out what I could from libraries. She also put me in touch with Kate Holmes who kindly sent me lots of useful links; from her I found out that not only does Bristol have its own theatrical library, but so does the University of Kent and the Billy Rose Collection at the New York Public Library.
My first visit was to the Bristol Central Library, right next to the Cathedral. The librarians there were extremely helpful and showed me their amazing index files which anyone can search through – which included a card on Cary Grant , though none on the Pender Troupe (I didn’t have time to find out if they had any on the Hippodrome or the Empire Theatre). The file on Cary Grant was a trove of newspaper cuttings from the Bristol Evening Post. Although none of the clippings were earlier than the 1970s, lots of them included Cary talking about his early days as an acrobat and coming back to Bristol as a movie star, including going to the Hippodrome every Christmas for the pantomimes.
The people at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection were very helpful, and explained that they only had a small file on Cary Grant with a few photographs and press cuttings from his later film career. I was able to search the University of Kent archives online, but they didn’t have anything on the Pender troupe or Cary’s early career as an acrobat either. Luckily, I was able to go to London twice, and the librarians at the BFI said that they have a lot of fairly contemporary material on vaudeville, acrobats and circuses, some of which can be seen in their film booths; you can see examples here and here of the sort of thing that’s been made freely available. I found out that there’s nothing to see on the Pender troupe more than what’s online already, showing the Pender stiltwalkers in 1922 (that film was made two years after Cary’s part of the troupe had left for New York, but I like to think that he would have worn one of those costumes). However, I also discovered that a Gaumont film was made starring the Pender stiltwalkers in 1910. There’s no record of that movie being held anywhere now, but maybe one day a copy will be found.
Meanwhile, I got in touch with my intrepid niece Emma Kira Weeks, who’s just finished an actor musician degree in Guildford. She is taking classes at Juilliard and spending a good deal of time with people working on Broadway. I’ve learnt a lot from her about the camaraderie of performers. For instance, I didn’t know that visiting the orchestra pit during a show is a thing, but she told me that musicians go to each other’s performances that way to gain experience of how different conductors and bands work together. She did it all the way through her degree in the UK, and now does it in New York, as her friends in London put her in touch with band musicians working there. She already uses the New York Public Library, and very kindly agreed to search the Billy Rose collection, as they hold a lot of material that isn’t yet digitized.
Emma spent a good deal of time with the archivists, texting back and forth with me and sending photos throughout her sessions. The archivists didn’t come up with anything extra on the Hippodrome or acrobats, but said they had a file on the Pender troupe. We were both very excited about this, and our anticipation grew as it took a long time to arrive–we were imagining an enormous amount of material being unearthed. They told her it was ready just before she had to leave, and she thought she wouldn’t have time to go through it all, but “the file” turned out to be a single photograph. We’re not allowed to reproduce any of her photos of the material, but we can report that this one was captioned as a head portrait of Bob Pender (in our opinion, looking extremely young and glamorous).
In contrast, they had an enormous amount of material on Cary. Again, it was all dating from his film career, but there was over a hundred press clippings. The library is free to everyone, so do visit if you are able to go to New York yourself. The file included original typescripts of some interviews and a typescript sent out by Harry Brand, the director of publicity at the time for 20th Century Fox. It was fascinating to see that almost every interview included slightly contradictory information about his life before his film career.
In following Emma’s (and Cary’s) footsteps from here to New York, I felt his elusiveness – no moving images from the Pender years; files from New York, but no photos of him to share with you; interviews, but each giving a tweaked version of his life before the movies. Archie didn’t show his face. The nearest I got to the child from Bristol, magnetised by the thought of showbusiness, was these English boys. But I leave the last words to Emma. She had never seen Cary before, but after her searches texted, “my goodness, he was goodlooking, wasn’t he”?
Jo Weeks
November 2024