Credit: Dangerous Minds / RKO publicity

So much of the story of Cary Grant is completely bonkers when you look at it as a whole.

I mean, for one thing, the man had one of the least glamorous upbringings a Hollywood icon ever had. We’re currently in an age where stars aren’t made unless they were born rich, preferably to someone with at least three Oscars sitting on the shelf in their downstairs loo. Because of that, it’s always important to remember an upbringing like the one had by Cary Grant, who wasn’t just brought up in poverty; he was brought up in poverty on the other side of the world, not only in Hollywood, but in America as a whole.

It’s true. Grant was born Archie Leach in Bristol, England, the son of an absent mother and an alcoholic father. His journey to stardom took him through some serious alternative routes, from regional tours of his native England to a long stint on Vaudeville stages in New York. Despite making a name for himself in Hollywood as a byword for earnest, debonair masculinity, the very ideal of the American man, Grant was quite thrillingly alternative in his way.

If you need proof, look no further than the fact that in the 1950s, Grant began a very forward-thinking search for himself. The man felt like not only had he made his name playing roles, but that “Cary Grant” was nothing more than another role, a way of hiding from his traumatic childhood and bad decisions. He tried hypnosis and yoga as ways of connecting the dots that made him who he was, but neither of them worked.

What did, at least for a little while, was LSD. Lots of it.

Wait, so Cary Grant was tripping balls for the entire 1950s?!

That he was, dear reader, that he was.

Grant never quite lost the spectre of Archie Leach that haunted him for the rest of his life, but his experiments with LSD meant that he was able to see the connective tissue between them. He was able to accept both Grant and Leach as two sides of himself that could live in the same body. The effect of beginning his experiments with acid was actually pretty shocking, as the once rigidly private Grant began reaching out to all who would listen to him.

Some of these were slightly bizarre. One of the first places he contacted, singing the praises of LSD, was Good Housekeeping of all places, feeling like contacting the press would be the best way of spreading the good news about his newfound drug of choice. Some were a little more sensible and arguably, even more influential than he himself, talking about the drug.

After all, one of the people he contacted raving about LSD was the writer and psychiatrist Timothy Leary, who was turned onto the drug by Grant.

However, if you look at what Cary Grant had to say about his initial trips, you might think that all of this talk about aligning his identities might be a little strong. After all, not every LSD trip is a life-altering dive into your psyche. Most of the time, you get the weirdest shit imaginable, and Grant was no different.

According to him, the trip that shook him most was one where he “imagined [himself] as a giant penis launching off from Earth like a spaceship.”

LSD then. It may start with vaguely pornographic sci-fi visions, but it can also fix your self-image the way it did for Cary Grant. If that’s not a convincing pitch for it, I don’t know what is!