Cary Nation is still abuzz

Cary Grant’s 100th birthday celebration this year has been festive, with several of his classic films making their DVD debuts and Turner Classic Movies premiering a well-received biography on the suave Englishman, along with a retrospective of many of his most popular movies.

Now Crown Publishing Group offers something more Page 6-ish: “Cary Grant: A Biography” by Marc Elliot, who has written about pop culture for 25 years. Crown is describing “Cary Grant” as the first “substantial biography” of the actor who died in 1986 at age 82. But a good bit of the substance involves rumors and innuendo.

Though the recent documentary insisted the five-times-married Grant was not gay, for instance, Elliot dives into tales of his purported homosexuality.

He describes Grant’s relationship with Randolph Scott this way: “When both men found themselves assigned to roles in ‘Hot Saturday,’ they discovered the physical attraction between them strong and immediate.... Sex was almost like an afterthought, a natural extension of the buddy-buddy British-schoolboy-type friendship they shared....”

And a legend lives on.