No doubt, a complete and unvarnished portrait of Grant is a legitimate aim for any biographer. Having concluded that previous writings on Grant were "hopelessly inaccurate," Eliot means to set the record straight. Eliot's carefully footnoted biography appears to be the result of meticulous research, which he says he spent five years doing. The question is particularly puzzling since Eliot's book is the product of a self-admitted fan who says in an afterward that he became "hooked" on Grant after he first saw Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest as a boy. Still, when a new Grant biography is as warts-and-all as Marc Eliot's Cary Grant (Harmony Books, $25.95), you have to wonder about the author's intent. "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant," he famously said. And since that image was one of idealized male perfection, the real man has to suffer by comparison. But since his death in 1986 he has become fair game for any author willing to dig up the most intimate and unflattering details about the man behind the celebrated screen image. Throughout his lifetime, Grant tried, if not always successfully, to keep his private life closely guarded, especially by today's standards of celebrity overexposure. It's probably inevitable that a biography of Cary Grant is going to produce at least some small degree of disillusionment.
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