Cary Grant AT HOME

AFTER HIS RETIREMENT FROM MOVIE-MAKING, THE GOLDEN AGE LEGEND PLACED A PRIORITY ON FAMILY

- By LOUISE A. BARILE

"I enjoyed the profession very much, but I don't miss it a bit."
-Cary Grant, 1987

Bill Royce was amusing himself by playing piano when he heard a familiar voice behind him. “I was pounding away, singing, ‘I’ve got a lovely bunch of coco-nuts’—all of a sudden there is a voice joining me,” Bill shares with Closer. “I turn around, startled, and it’s Cary Grant.”

In the later decades of his life, Cary, one of Hollywood’s most popular leading men and a two-time Oscar nominee, retreated from filmmaking to enjoy his private life and devote time to raising his daughter, Jennifer, who was born when he was 62. “I live pretty quietly — but what does one expect a man my age to do?” Cary said in a 1987 interview. “I enjoy what I am doing... If I didn’t enjoy living in Beverly Hills, then I would move — I can afford to do that.”

Bill, author of the memoir Cary Grant: The Wizard of Beverly Grove, met the famed England-born actor in the 1970s. Although Bill would go on to become an Emmy-winning producer of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, back then, he was a 25-year-old fan magazine editor asked to housesit for the star. “He was in the middle of remodeling and he didn’t have a burglar alarm,” Bill explains. “So he had people watch his house when he went out.”

Bill and Cary were friends until the actor's passing in 1986.

After Cary surprised Bill at the piano, the men got to talking about music. Cary, who had grown up in working-class Bristol, had an affection for old dance hall music and disliked rock and roll. “I don’t know what the young people think or do; I only hear the emanation of their thoughts — rock groups and similar noises,” he once complained. “But if that’s what makes them happy, fine — as long as they don’t do it next to me.”