A lot has been made recently of the United States — as a nation and as a superpower. In his new book, “American: Beyond Our Grandest Notions,” MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews looks into our history and shared culture and delves into the notion of what “American” really means. Read an excerpt from his book below.
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.” -The Great Gatsby
THERE WAS once an upscale men’s shop in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., that featured a shiny metal nameplate over the door of its dressing room. It noted that the shop had been honored to have had among its patrons “Mr. Cary Grant.” It seemed that the gentleman had experienced some unusually warm weather during a visit in Washington and needed a lighter weight suit than he’d brought along. It concluded the historic note by saying “Mr. Grant” had used this very same changing room to try on his unexpected purchase.
Why would a relatively posh men’s store in a high-end neighborhood make such a big deal out of a movie star stripping down to his underwear on its premises? Why would a store serving the well-to-do and the sophisticated get so wobbly in the knees as to give this guy the “George Washington Slept Here” treatment?
The best answer is to see one of his movies.
In a whole string of roles from Topper, Bringing up Baby, Holiday and Gunga Din in the 1930s to His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story and Notorious in the 1940s to To Catch a Thief, An Affair to Remember and North by Northwest in the 1950s, Cary Grant was the very model of the debonair American gentleman. He was both democratic and aristocratic, a man so charming and self-assured that every woman wanted him, every man wanted to be like him. He was an acrobat in a business suit, a man of dignity with the subtle physicality of a clown, a regular guy knowing full well how fortunate he was to be wearing such an expensive, well-tailored suit.
“Do you know what’s wrong with you?” one of his screen partners had pretended to scold him. “Nothing.” Director Alfred Hitchcock dared to say, “Cary’s the only thing I ever loved in my whole life.”
As a matter of fact, the man we know as Cary Grant loved the idea of becoming this world-class charmer so much that he decided early in his adulthood to do it. Born in Bristol, England, in 1904, Archibald Alexander Leach was the son of a tailor’s presser. How he got from there to having his nameplate on a Georgetown men’s shop is a great American story.
He began as a working-class English kid doing pantomimes at the theater. Then he got himself into music hall acts mimicking the popular singers of the day. He later picked up some magic tricks. The praise he was denied at home he earned at the theater. Stagestruck, he came to America. Here he picked up odd jobs, earning $5 a day, $10 on Saturday and Sunday, as a stilt-walker on Coney Island.
By 1931, Archie Leach was what he wanted to be-a working American actor. Landing the part of Cary Lockwood in a Broadway play, he liked the character’s first name and decided to take it. He added “Grant” to make him sound more American.
Watching the great playwright-actor Noel Coward in Private Lives he decided to be Coward.
To achieve this transformation, he spent endless hours practicing how Coward walked, how he spoke, even his facial expressions. “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person,” he would confess years later. “Or he became me. Or we met at some point.”
At the age of twenty-seven, the man we would love as Cary Grant was born.
It wasn’t as easy as it appeared. “I cultivated raising one eyebrow, and tried to imitate those who put their hands in their pockets with a certain amount of ease and nonchalance. But at times, when I put my hand in my trouser with what I imagined was great elegance, I couldn’t get the blinking thing out again because it dripped from nervous perspiration.”
What won Grant special devotion, however, was his refusal to deny who he was born. When we in the audience forgot about his Cockney background, he would remind us. “Listen!” he erupted in His Girl Friday, “the last man who said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before his throat was cut.”
“It was a knowing wink to the audience, his audience, a secret shared with strangers,” Grant biographer Graham McCann noticed. “It was the kind of gesture that would have endeared someone like Cary Grant to someone like Archie Leach. Cary Grant was not conceived of as the contradiction of Archie Leach but as the constitution of his desires.”
We couldn’t imagine him ever dying, of course. This was especially true as he aged gracefully, giving up films to become an executive with Fabergé. “I don’t know how I consider death,” he said. “So many of my friends have been doing it recently. My only fear is that I don’t embarrass others.”
He didn’t. Grant died at eighty-two during rehearsal for a touring one-man show featuring his old movie clips. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,” the actor once admitted amid all the fawning. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.”
Much like this beloved matinee idol, America itself is a confection. In the years after the Revolution, the Founding Fathers had a vision of a country and government they wanted. They then very consciously, not unlike Archie Leach, turned that vision into reality.
CONFECTING A CAPITAL
On a June afternoon in 1791, two gentlemen on horseback looked down from Jenkin’s Hill onto a stretch of Maryland flatland banking the Potomac River. One, an architect, had designed a new national capital for this spot. The other, a trained surveyor, was the new government’s first president.
Both Pierre L’Enfant and George Washington were men of vision and optimism. They had settled on a grand plan indeed: a capital city fit not for what had been just thirteen seaboard colonies but for a vast continental power. Jenkin’s Hill, which L’Enfant called a “pedestal waiting for a monument,” would one day be called Capitol Hill. L’Enfant’s blueprints would become the world capital bearing the name of his companion on horseback that day.
When you think about it, this country designed itself. Just as L’Enfant and Washington built a capital from scratch, so did Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and the others design a new kind of government on a blank page. And if it seemed precocious for a French-born architect who’d never before done anything like it to design a national capital, it was more precocious still for a group of men who had never done anything like it before to confect a country, to guarantee as “unalienable” a set of rights the world had never before recognized, to ensure not only its citizens’ lives and liberty but also their right to pursue “happiness.”
And just as Washington and L’Enfant set wide bounds for the future growth of the new capital’s geography, the designers of the Constitution generously conceived the new nation’s freedoms. Americans could decide who they wanted to be and try to become it. A country that had dared design itself based on its own grandest notions would not stand in the way of its citizens harboring and pursuing their own grand notions. America would be a place where a person could be who he or she wanted to be.
And it was to be a place were people thought big.
If L’Enfant could choose a “monumental concept, with a capitol building and a ‘president’s house’” connected by a grand “public walk” to serve as the national seat for thirteen recently united colonies, then the American people could dare to be equally monumental in charting the contours and heights of their own lives.
Just as this new republic would, in Thomas Paine’s words, “begin the world over again,” it would certainly be a spacious and adventurous home to those hoping to do that with their own lives and ambitions. America would be a country where anyone could grab a second chance.
Here, the way things are is not the way they have to be. They can be the way individual Americans want them to be.
THE GREAT GATSBY
In a country open to such big notions, the popularity of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby should be no surprise. It’s the story of Jay Gatsby, a young soldier training for World War I who meets a beautiful young socialite named Daisy. He falls in love with her only to get a letter, while serving in the trenches of France, telling him that she has married Tom Buchanan, a wealthy young man from Yale. At a practical level, he’d known it was coming. Rich girls like Daisy didn’t marry poor boys like him.
An eternal romantic, our hero refused to accept the verdict. Back from the war, Gatsby makes the right connections and becomes a rich bootlegger. Whatever it takes to become the man Daisy Buchanan would marry, he is prepared to do.
Having enriched himself beyond his wildest dreams, Jay Gatsby now sets about pursuing the only happiness he knows. He buys a giant mansion on Long Island right across the bay from that of Daisy and Tom Buchanan. From there he maps plans to win her back. He hosts loud and lavish parties open to all in the hope that she will show up at one. Finally, he makes the acquaintance and seeks the aid of his neighbor, Nick Caraway, whom he discovers is Daisy’s cousin.
Caraway, the story’s narrator, doesn’t know what to make of the man presiding over the garish mansion next door. “I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t-at least in my provincial inexperience I believe they didn’t-drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.”
But Gatsby needed more than money: he needed to be someone who had always had it.
“I’ll tell you God’s truth,” he says to the skeptical Caraway. “I’m the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West-all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It’s a family tradition.”
For Jay Gatsby, the dream Daisy inspired in him is as important as the woman herself. It isn’t what she felt but what he felt.
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” Nick warns him. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“You can’t repeat the past?” retorts an incredulous Gatsby. “Why of course you can!”
And: “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before. She’ll see.”
This blind faith that he can retrofit his very existence to Daisy’s specifications is the heart and soul of The Great Gatsby. It’s the classic story of the fresh start, the second chance.
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from the Platonic conception of himself. He was the son of God-a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that-and he must be about his father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, meretricious beauty,” Fitzgerald wrote, “so he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
There was also Gatsby’s smile. “It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you come across four or five times in life. It faced-or seemed to face-the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
The reader, like Nick Carraway, comes to like this guy. We love his dream because we have, all of us, shared something very much like it. “Gatsby was not a character,” said critic Alfred Kazin, “but an idea of the everlasting self-creation that Americans have mastered.”
Gatsby for me, is undeniably the great American novel. We celebrate its hero and his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” his “extraordinary gift for hope,” his “romantic readiness,” because we as a country share every bit of it.
GRACE KELLY
People think of Grace Kelly, the actress who became a European princess, as someone born to the role. In reality, Grace Patricia Kelly of East Falls, Philadelphia, was never a debutante, never applied for admission nor was received in “Main Line” society. She was a Roman Catholic and newly rich, a double bar to the ultra-restrictive social registry of that day.
But while she was never invited to make her debut by the Philadelphia Assemblies, she did possess an early claim to prominence: her father was a wealthy building contractor: “Kelly for Brickwork” was a familiar sign at area job sites.
John F. “Jack” Kelly was also a famous sculler in a city that to this day attaches great importance to the rowing sports. Yet he had become famous in his hometown as much for a notorious rejection as for his achievements. In 1919, Grace’s dad was scratched as an entry in the Diamond Sculls at England’s Henley Royal Regatta on the grounds that he had performed manual labor-that is, he had worked with his hands. He was not, according to the Regatta’s encrusted code, a gentleman.
Kelly reared his only son and namesake to one day avenge the slight. Grace, his second daughter, got no such paternal attention.
When she gained admission to New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts in September of 1947, her dad was supremely unimpressed.
That would change.
Grace Kelly’s ambition was to be the greatest Hollywood movie star ever. Two factors in her makeup made that a credible goal: the blond German beauty of her mother, combined with the Irish drive of her father.
However, the first sacrifice required of her was a daunting one. It was the way she talked: that grating Philly accent had to go. She could never be a big star with the sound of the rowhouses in her voice. She either had to lose it or give up on her dream.
“You have got to get rid of that terrible twang,” an Academy tutor would tell her point blank. And so she did. For this, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts was perfectly suited. “It takes a trained ear to detect all errors of pronunciation, accent and emphasis,” its brochure advertised, “but by careful and persistent criticism, the dialects of Pennsylvania or New England, of Canada or the South, are at last dethroned.”
“When Grace Kelly pronounced the word ‘rotten’ you could hear every single ‘t’ and a few more beside,” biographer Robert Lacey reports, “while her vowel sounds, tugged firmly away from East Falls, had ventured out across the Atlantic to hover remarkably close to the British coast.”
Grace no longer talked like her father, her mother, her brother or her sisters. To make her voice deeper and more resonant still, she would spend hours talking with a clothespin clasped to the end of her nose.
Her family was merciless. They called it “Gracie’s new voice.” A friend, hearing her at a cocktail party, decided she was actually speaking in a “British accent.” Grace defended herself, saying frostily, “I must talk this way for my work.”
“She got away from home early,” her brother, Jack Kelly, Jr., agreed in admiration. “None of the rest of us managed to do that.”
Her legendary film roles included: High Noon with Gary Cooper; Mogambo with Clark Gable, for which she won an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress; Dial M for Murder with Ray Milland; Rear Window with Jimmy Stewart; The Country Girl with Bing Crosby, for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress; and To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant which brought her to the principality of Monaco and her final role.
It was when she came home to East Falls with that Academy Award for Best Actress-a certified movie queen-that she and her father experienced what I can only call a “Gatsby”moment. More than being simply her father’s daughter, Grace Kelly now was greater than that. Her stardom made her the child of her own ambition. For the first time, the self-made, self-satisfied John B. Kelly had to accept that his offspring was daughter to a greater dream than his own.
This daughter, to whom he had given the least attention, the one in whom he had invested the least, the one who shared least in his love and devotion to athletic achievement, was now “Grace Kelly.”
The joining of her aristocratic manner-so assiduously honed at acting school-to her American ambition was what it took to put the icing on the cake. Grace Kelly was about to become Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace of Monaco. Her tabloid-glamorous marriage to Prince Rainier elevated her even above her role as an American star. A queen of the silver screen, she was now the genuine article. When she died in a car crash in 1982, she was mourned as a royal. Her memory is cherished not least in our shared hometown, Philadelphia.
RALPH LAUREN
The acronym WASP, for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, was coined by Professor Digby Baltzell to describe the typical member of Philadelphia’s Main Line society. Its allure arises as much from its exclusivity as from any inherent charm. But let’s face it, it sells; cars, clothes, furniture, dreams.
Just check the latest edition of Vanity Fair.
“My look is not really European,” Ralph Lauren has said. “It’s an American’s visualization of Europe in the 1930s. I look in from the other side.” We can see in the faces in his Polo ads that easy arrogance that says “I was born to this.” Just as Daisy Buchanan’s voice carried the sound of money, Ralph Lauren’s designs would give his customers the look of money.
But Lauren’s true “other side” is Ralph Lifshitz, the ambitious designer son of Russian Jewish immigrants. The tanned, handsome man recognizable everywhere from the gorgeously patrician layouts selling his clothing and cosmetics started out as a Bronx salesman of gloves, ties and perfume.
Lauren’s big break came when, in 1967, he managed to convince a leading neckwear company to carry a line of neckties that he had designed. The ties, constructed from leftover fabrics found in warehouses, were wider than the narrow ties fashionable in those years. Americans loved them, and an empire was born.
Say this for Ralph. He knew what we wanted because he was us. Growing up, young Lifshitz-just as we did-he fell for screen stars Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, attracted to their grand sense of style. And it’s precisely their classic American aesthetic he’s spent his life marketing. It didn’t surprise me to learn that the staples of his line aren’t so very different from the costumes he designed for the 1974 remake of The Great Gatsby.
Writer Neal Gabler argues that Lauren’s popularity comes from knowing that Americans will “pay to transform their lives into their cinematic fantasies: safari outfits to make one a colonialist from Out of Africa; denim jackets and jeans to make one a cowboy from a Hollywood western; finely tailored English suits to make one an aristocrat from any number of crisp drawing room melodramas.”
Lauren’s flagship store high on Madison Avenue, once a stately mansion, is the temple of assimilation where the newly rich come to worship the old rich and leave carrying clothes and furnishings that promise not just a comfortable look but a comforting history.
Lauren’s furniture is “cunningly cinematic,” writes Lauren-watcher Elizabeth Grice. “Long Island beaches, log cabins, English country houses, garden parties, the African bush. He dressed houses the way he dressed people, always mindful of the yearning for romance and escape … and the seductiveness of ideas.”
The great seduction of America, he was not the first to notice, is that wildest of personal liberties: to be who you want to be.
A SELF-MADE PEOPLE
To understand Americans, start with the fact that we’re a self-made country.
It’s an important notion. Free men gathered, articulated a social philosophy, designed a government and approved blueprints for a capital. Able to choose between British rule and self-government, they chose the latter, then defended the decision by force of arms. They discarded the society of their birth and constructed a new society of their choice. Had there not been an American Revolution, a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution-all freely agreed to-there would not be a United States of America.
This was not the case for the British or the Germans or any other nationality from which we descended, in the past or the future. Some of these either evolved through tribe, treaty and war, which was the pattern in Europe and Asia; others were carved up by imperial fiat, the norm in much of Africa and Latin America.
Many Americans would also create themselves personally.
Here a man or woman could change names, assume a new identity, hang out with other people who’d done likewise. It is the rare old acquaintance, much less a new one, who would question you seriously about your lineage or even ask casually what your father did for a living.
Such indifference to family and background leaves doors open here in socially mobile America that would be sealed shut in other, older, more regimented societies. Had Archie Leach stayed home in Bristol, England, Cary Grant would have never been born. Were this not America, a country where such things are possible, Grace Patricia Kelly would have not have become a princess.
This freedom wasn’t given to America. Rather, we grabbed it, held it, made it part of our Constitution. It shines today as our greatest national treasure. This country wasn’t here when we got here. If we are as wise as we’ve been fortunate that’s something we’ll never forget.
Matthews hosts MSNBC’s “Hardball.” Excerpted from “American: Beyond Our Grandest Notions,” by Chris Matthews. Copyright © 2002 by Chris Matthews. Published by Free Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.