Cary Grant, a bisexual hooked on LSD who lived with actor Randolph Scott

"He is a completely made-up character."

Cary Grant confessed that he was playing for the public all his life a role that did not correspond to the reality of his privacy.

He was hooked on LSD, fell madly in love with Sophia Loren, was bisexual, and lived with actor Randolph Scott.

All of these revelations are made in a new book on the charismatic Hollywood actor out this week,

by author Scott Eyman.

The book explores Grant's rise to fame, his five marriages, and years of therapy dealing with his narcissism and temperament.

“I pushed all my loved ones away.

I was afraid that they would try to hug me and discover that I was hollow, just a hollow man. "

After 40 years in the film industry where he made 73 films, Cary Grant's best performance was playing himself in real life.

"I'm a completely made-up character. I'm playing a role. I'm not really Cary Grant in any way. In my mind, I'm just a vaudeville named Archie Leach. But I think Cary Grant has done wonders in my life," Grant says in the new Scott Eyman's book published by Simon & Schuster.

Grant was born Archibald

Leach, from Bristol, England, a teenager who wandered the docks looking for work as a cabin boy on a ship.

Eventually he joined an acrobatic company and learned to walk on stilts.

Leach came to New York in the mid-1920s in search of fame and fortune and decided not to return to England.

He quickly learned that he had to change his name and make up an accent to hide his lack of class and education.

He copied traits from the people he most admired to divert attention from the fact that he had dropped out of school at 14.

Grant always dragged the wounds of a painful childhood, marked by the absence of his mother and the authority of his father, Elías Leach, dependent on drink.

At the age of 9, her father told her that her mother had been away from home for a while for a "long vacation."

However, the truth was that he had committed her to a mental hospital against her will.

For years he thought his mother was dead.

With the help of Dr. Mortimer Hartman and more than a hundred LSD sessions, which he considered "life-changing", he suffered what he defined as a "psychic explosion."

For the first time, Grant stopped blaming his parents for the duality he had created.

"I learned that no one else kept me unhappy except me. I had a lot of problems over the years, but they were Archie Leach problems, not Cary Grant. I have spent most of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant, without be sure of neither. I have only recently begun to unify them into one person. "

Grant was an advocate of using LSD.

"It empties your subconscious and intensifies your emotions a hundred times and breaks memory blocks so that one can obtain information about oneself and relationships with others," says Dr. Hartman in the book.

In those years, other celebrities in Los Angeles signed up for this drug, such as Henry Luce and Clare Booth Luce, Christopher Isherwood, Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley, Andre Previn, Esther Williams, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper.

Although she was married up to five times, Cary Grant's preference for men was an open secret until his death.

However, he never admitted it.

Among her close male friendships, the one she maintained for years with actor Randolph Scott, whom she met on the set of the movie

(1932), stands out.

Cary and Randolph immediately decided to live together.

They did so for more than a decade.

She also had a relationship with Orry-Kelly, who won three Oscars for his work as a costume designer.

The son of a tailor, born in a town near Sydney in 1922, at the age of 24 he went to New York to be an actor.

After a brief, somewhat disastrous experience on Broadway, he quickly became noted for his artistic eye and instinct with the needle.

Shortly after arriving, Orry-Kelly met a young English immigrant who had also arrived pursuing the dream of being an actor.

He was called Archie Leach then, although years later he would be known as Cary Grant.

The two began a relationship of lovers;

They lived together in Greenwich Village, on the money Kelly's mother sent, Grant's money as a

of rich women, and their first jobs in show business.

Together, after a brief stint in Reno, chased by gangsters, they reached Hollywood, where they both triumphed separately.

Grant had a reputation for being possessive of his wives.

With the first of them, actress Virginia Cherrill, he was only married a year.

The divorce turned into a rugged process in which she accused him of mistreatment, which was never proven,

In 1945, Grant married the Woolworth heiress, Barbara Hutton, who spent her days playing tennis and her evenings hosting dinner parties.

Hutton complained that Cary was different from his on-screen image and was not "funny and mischievous all the time."

"He could be a terrible bastard," said Dudley Walker, his valet.

“You were lucky if I gave you a five dollar bottle of men's cologne once a year for Christmas.

And he was a bad drinker.

It got really nasty and cold.

He became sadist ”.

The economic hardships that he suffered in his childhood made him control the money he earned a lot.

Despite earning more than $ 3 million per movie, which made him the highest paid actor of his time, Grant had a well-deserved reputation as a tightwad in Hollywood.

Grant's marriage to Hutton lasted only three years.

Wife number three was actress Betsy Drake, who convinced Grant to take LSD.

But that marriage was doomed when Grant fell madly in love with Sophia Loren while filming in Spain.

But the actress had lost her mind to Italian producer Carlo Ponti, who made her a star.

Cary Grant went crazy.

He had never been rejected by anyone before.

"It broke my heart," he lamented.

Shortly after Grant proposed to actress Dyan Cannon after seeing her on a television show, they had a daughter, Jennifer, whom the actor adored.

This marriage was full of confrontations and accusations of mistreatment.

He married Barbara Harris, director of public relations, once again.

He was 46 older than her and haunted her for two years.

Grant died in November 1986.