The marriage lasted three years.) Frugal habits can die hard, though, and in Grant’s case they seem to have been immortal.Īmong other tales, he supposedly marked the milk bottles in his refrigerator to keep servants from helping themselves to a swig, billed his houseguests for laundry and other expenses, and charged 25 cents apiece for autographs-pocketing the money while claiming it would go to charity, according to biographer Marc Eliot. (Inevitably, the press dubbed them Cash & Cary. By the 1930s he was not only one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood but married to one of the richest women in the world, Woolworth dime store heiress Barbara Hutton. Suave, funny, good-looking and cheap, cheap, cheap, Cary Grant (born Archibald Leach) grew up in modest circumstances in England before coming to the U.S. He dismissed the tale as “a story to warm the hearts of all who take orgiastic delight in picturing the rich as inhospitable, ungracious penny-pinchers,” adding with perhaps uncharacteristic generosity, “I can’t really bring myself to begrudge them their pleasure.” His company did, so he was really just looking after the interests of shareholders.
Getty didn’t deny it, but instead devoted pages of his autobiography to a spirited but less than convincing defense.Īmong his excuses: He didn’t personally own the home.
When he acquired a mansion outside London, observers might have thought he was loosening up a bit, but papers soon reported that he had installed a payphone for the use of guests, while also putting locks on all the other phones. Biographer Robert Lenzer reports that while Getty stayed in fashionable hotels, he typically booked the smallest and cheapest rooms available, and could be found “living out of a suitcase and conducting his business out of shoeboxes.”
Believed to be the world’s richest private citizen in his day, the oft-married and oft-divorced billionaire oilman loved hanging with the international jet set but hated paying for his ticket.
0 kommentar(er)
