Alec in Wonderland at the Library

by Bill Peak

Not too long ago, while getting a haircut, my barber decided to show me his latest tattoo. Of course I exclaimed over it, made all sorts of appreciative noises, but then I was forced to admit I hadn't a clue what the word printed on his left forearm meant. The man was astonished. “That's [some-name-I'd-never-heard-of]! Star of stage and screen!”

Truth be told, though I tried to look appropriately abashed, I wasn't really surprised that I didn't recognize his idol. Nowadays I almost never do—Hollywood's A-list passed me by long ago. And even when I was young, I never really contracted the celebrity bug, never wrote a fan letter, never placed a star's picture on my bedroom wall, certainly never had one's name inserted in my flesh.

Until recently, I'd only read one book about a celebrity, Richard Torregrossa's Cary Grant: A Celebration of Style. My father always admired Grant, and emulating Dad in everything, I came to admire Grant too. I wanted to be tall like him, handsome like him, a lady-killer like him.

Well, that didn't work out.

But reading about the actor who created the screen persona I so envied, the man whose real name was Archibald Leach, I learned Grant felt the same way about him. “Every man wants to be Cary Grant,” he once told an audience. “Heck,” he said, “I want to be him too.”

A telling remark. And a cautionary one, for any man wise enough to attend to it. Reading Torregrossa's book, I learned that the star who epitomized savoir faire was, in fact, sadly unsure of himself. Cary Grant spent most of his life doubting that any woman could ever really love him.

For years the Grant biography represented my lone foray into the questionable literature of movie stardom, but then, last month, I streamed Alec Guinness's portrayal of George Smiley in the BBC's classic productions of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People and was struck, as I have been many times before, by the man's ability to assume an identity entirely different from his own, live in it as if it were his own, even as he clearly erects said phantasm on a foundation of pure Alec Guinness stone.

I decided I wanted to know more about such an artist, more than just the snippets to be gleaned from a Google search. So, naturally enough, I turned to the place where in-depth knowledge lives: the Talbot County Free Library. That worthy institution's online catalogue turned up three biographies for me.

Talbot's own collection contains My Name Escapes Me: the Diary of a Retiring Actor (a journal Guinness kept over several months in 1995 and '96), while, through inter-library loan, I found Piers Paul Read's Alec Guinness: the Authorized Biography and the autobiography Guinness wrote in 1986, Blessings in Disguise.

The diary, while full of trenchant observation, was too limited by time-frame to suit me, so I turned to the inter-library loans. I started with Read's book, but after a chapter or two I grew bored and picked up Guinness's. There I found most of the same information Read recounted, but this time told in that inimitable Alec Guinness voice.

And what a voice it is. How would you describe it? Diffident? Detached? Simple yet somehow, at the same time, intimating wisdom? And to recreate that voice in the written word, with all its knowing pauses and self-deprecating humor, is a testament to Guinness's skill as a writer. He is that rare artist who excels in two very different crafts.

Like his acting, which always seems to look out from his characters rather than in, Guinness's book is more about what he has seen and heard over the course of his long career than it is about his own life. Which, given what we do learn of his formative years—father unknown, mother an alcoholic wastrel, no university—may give us a clue to the man's genius. Perhaps he found his center by ignoring his center, always looking forward, outward, never allowing himself to dwell upon a past characterized by neglect and a lack of love.

Yet looking outward, he has given us so much. The acting of course—Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, the George Smiley portrayals—and now this first-person account of sixty of the greatest years in the history of film and stage, years studded with names like Gielgud, Plowright, Olivier, Lean, Laughton, Redgrave, and Quayle.

The stories Guinness tells—all with a bit of a chuckle and what appears to be a boundless reserve of humility—are witty, endlessly entertaining, and inevitably generous to their subjects. He ends Blessings in Disguise with the declaration that he is “unaware of ever having lost a friend.” And having read the book, it's easy to see why.

Comparing the work of Lawrence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, it was said that Olivier made you feel inferior to the characters he portrayed, while Richardson made you feel a character's equal, that here was a man you could approach and like. The same could be said of the roles Guinness performed, and the man who speaks with us from the pages of Blessings in Disguise.