My family name is Leach. To which, at my christening, was added Archibald Alexander, with no opportunity for me to protest. For more than half my fifty-eight years I have cautiously peered from behind the facade of a man known as Cary Grant. The protection of that facade proved both an advantage and a disadvantage. If I couldn't clearly see out, how could anyone see in?

I was born in the provincial city of Bristol, England, but have avidly frequented the brightest capitals of the world ever since, and now keep a permanent residence in the so-called, through misnamed, glamour capital of Hollywood.

I had no sisters, was separated from my mother when I was nine years old, was stammeringly shy in the presence of girls; yet have married three times and found myself making love on the screen -- in public, mind you, in front of millions of people -- to such fascinating women as Ingrid Bergman, Doris Day, Mae West, Irene Dunne, Deborah Kerr, Eva Marie Saint, Sophia Loren, Marlene Dietrich and Grace Kelly.

I was an only child, and first saw the light of day -- or rather the dark of night -- around 1:00 a.m. on a cold January morning, in a suburban stone house which, lacking modern heating conveniences, kept only one step ahead of freezing by means of small coal fires in small bedroom fireplaces; and ever since, I've persistently arranged to spend every possible moment where the sun shines warmest. My father made no more than a modest living and we had little money. Yet today I am considered, except among the wealthy, to be wealthy. I received only a sketchy education by most scholastic standards, lacked confidence and the courage to enjoy life, but on the screen seem to have successfully epitomized an informed, capable and happy man. A series of contradictions too evident to be coincidental. Perhaps the original circumstances caused, created and provoked all the others. Perhaps they can all be reconciled into one complete life, my own, as I recall each step that led to each next step and look back on the path of my life from this older and, I trust, more mature viewpoint.

I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant; unsure of either, suspecting each. Only recently have I begun to unify them into one person: the man and boy in me, the hate and the love and all the degrees of each in me, and the power of God in me.

I've read many paragraphs, many articles, many books about many people in many professions, and I've read about myself. And it's seldom that I can say on reading such information, "I know that man or woman." Indeed, often, when I read about myself, it is so not about me that I'm inclined to believe it's really about the writer. Much of it is fantasy, exaggeration, drivel or further embellished retellings of past inaccuracies. For instance, hardly a week goes by that I don't read about my proficiency in yoga, my fanatical attention to diet and my regular swimming workouts. In truth I know little or nothing about yoga, and had it not been for my second wife, Barbara Hutton (whose ability to sit peaceably for hours in the lotus position gained my admiration buy, I lazily admit, not my imitation), I might never have known anything at all about even the basic yoga positions. My diet is extraordinary perhaps only from the viewpoint of my close friends, who have named me "the scavenger" because, after finishing every morsel of my own meal, I look around to purloin whatever little delicacies they've left uneaten on their plates. Being a good leaver is practically a requisite for any friend who is invited to luncheon or to dine with me, I can tell you. And about the only regular swimming I do is in my head around each April fifteenth, when I'm confronted with those astronomical income-tax figures.

Now if those sorts of exercises -- or lack of them -- keep me fit, then I've got the right system. On the other hand, if I happen to drop dead tomorrow, then I've obviously been doing it wrong.

As a younger man it puzzled me that so many people of prominence seemed so carelessly eager to reveal intimate, and what I considered to be private, matters about themselves, in public print. Why did they do it? Was it vanity? Did they crave publicity at any cost? Were they desperate to correct or revise past impressions by telling what they thought to be the truth about themselves? Did they write about themselves rather than suffer a further succession of inaccuracies written by someone else? Or did they hope that by personally telling their own personal experiences they might help their fellowman? I now recognize that it's each of those motivations, but also believe that if only one thing I write about myself can prove of aid to only one reader, then it's been worth the effort and time expended.

We all try to occupy ourselves as best we can, even if it proves to be the worst we can, from the moment we're born until the moment we die. The circumstances governing the methods of the occupation are created by our parents when we are very young; and mine, like most parents, I suppose, did the best they could to prepare me for life, according to the limits of their knowledge.

I doubt if I was a happy child because, like most people, I conveniently find it difficult to remember those early formative years. Also, I had no other child with whom to exchange notes or attempt to ascertain the degree of his or her happiness as compared with mine.

My earliest memory is of being publicly bathed in a portable enamel bathtub, in the kitchen before the fire at my grandmother's house, where my mother was, I suppose, spending the day. It was quite an old house which either had no bathroom or, more likely, was unheated and too cold for me to be there. I was just a squirming mass of protesting flesh: protesting against being dunked and washed all over in front of my grandmother. The enormity of such an offense. Now if that is my earliest memory why had I, a mere baby, such a sense of embarrassed shame? How could I have learned such overwhelming modesty at such an early age? What misteaching could have possibly been accountable?

My second memory is of being awakened late one evening by the noise of a party far below in the drawing room, and of my father's coming up and carrying me downstairs on his shoulders to be shown off to the guests and to lisp unhappily and haltingly through the first poem I ever learned. There I was wrapped in a blanket reciting Up in a Balloon So High while my father, showing both pride and strength at the same time, held me at arm's length high above his head in the air. It was a high-ceilinged room and I remember being very close to the high center chandelier. I think my father was high too.

It seemed to me that I was kept in long baby clothes much longer than any other child and perhaps, for a while, wasn't at all sure whether I was a boy or a girl. Then, later, I was kept far too long, I swear to you, in short pants. I wore curls too long, too, and like most little boys ached for the day they'd be cut off. I wonder why little boys are ashamed to be mistaken for little girls. Why do they take such pride in being little boys? Do little girls take similar pride in their sex and not wish to be mistaken for little boys?

My young father earned his first money, according to the only record obtainable, pressing suits -- coats and trousers and vests -- for a Bristol clothing manufacturer, and progressed in that firm too slowly to satisfy my mother's dreams. Yet somehow she managed to keep me warmly clothed and well fed. Which was quite an accomplishment because, although I was a skinny child, I was a voracious eater.

We could afford only a bare but presentable existence and, since my parents did not seem particularly happy together anyway, the lack of sufficient money became an excuse for regular sessions of reproach, against which my father resignedly learned the futility of trying to defend himself. This is not to say who was wrong or right. They were both probably both. From my childish viewpoint I couldn't properly assess their emotions or their reasoning. I seemed to be caught in a subtle battle which eventually took residence inside my own slowly forming character.

I had no opportunity to observe or associate with other adults, and although my father and mother each came from a large family, and I had many aunts and uncles, few of them, as far as I could appreciate, glowed with the joy of life.

Physically, my parents appeared ideally suited to each other. I have photographs of them, taken a few years prior to my birth, constantly before me on my office desk at Universal-International Studios, where I spend many hours. My father was a handsome, tallish man with a fancy moustache, but the photograph does not show that he possessed an outwardly cheerful sense of humor and, to balance it, an inwardly sad acceptance of the dull life he had chosen. My mother was a delicate black-haired beauty, with olive skin, frail and feminine to look upon. What isn't apparent in the photograph is the extent of her strength, and her will to control -- a deep need to receive unreservedly the very affection she sought to control. I remember the grief of my father and mother the morning King Edward VII died, and saw them sharing a common bond of sympathy. A rare moment.

And, before that, I now recollect awakening in my crib during a thunderstorm and seeing them outlined against the window by a flash of lightning. Their backs were toward me and their arms around each other's waists as they looked out at the rain; and now, today, as I think of it, I recall the intense feeling of being cut out from their unfamiliar unity.

They were churchgoing people named Elias James Leach and Elsie Kingdom Leach, of Episcopalian Protestant faith, polite to strangers and observant of the laws and social mores. I was taught "to speak only when spoken to," that my father was not "made of a mint of money," and that "it dos not grow on trees." I learned to brush the mud off my shoes and onto the mat before entering the house, to hang up my school cap and coat on the allotted peg in the hall, to care for my clothes since "they are not made of iron."

A few years after my birth we moved to a bigger house; perhaps to accommodate the process of my growth. It had a long garden. In one section there was a large patch of grass surrounding a fine old apple tree near which my father lovingly sank strong, high, wooden supports for a swing. I took pride in the fact of that swing, the possession of it, but lacked the daring and abandon of a free swinger; and my father's rhythmic shoves, although gentle, seemed much too perilous. Either I have always lacked bravery or, as I prefer to regard it, never been foolhardy.

Since then I have attempted gradually to overcome my fear of heights. Even by learning, years later, to walk on stilts in a theatrical troupe specializing in pantomime and acrobatics. I've flown for years in all sorts of weather in all sorts of aircraft: in open cockpits; intrans-continental Ford trimotors; in unscheduled small airmail planes in snowstorms over the Alleghenies; and, happily many times, alongside the most able pilot of them all, Howard Hughes, in his converted bomber -- sometimes setting down on small Mexican fields into which only such a confident, experienced flier would attempt to land. Yet no cure of my acrophobia was so decisive as making two films for that remarkable director, Alfred Hitchcock: To Catch a Thief, in which I dashed over sloping rooftops of four-storied French Riviera villas with no net below, while trying either to rob Grace Kelly or to save her from being robbed; and North by Northwest, in which I heroically hung both up and down on replicas of sections of Mount Rushmore, rafter-high on the tallest stage of Hollywood. I've always felt queasily uncertain whether or not Hitchcock was pleased at seeing me survive each day's work. I can only hope it was as great a relief to him as it was a disappointment. Still, I rescued by Eva Marie Saint and Grace Kelly, and each of them went on to raising happy and beautiful children. I wish I could say the same.

At the end of our garden there were wild strawberry patches leading to fields which today are covered by suburban houses, but which at that time, since I was only four years old, were forbidden and unexplored territory for me. We often ate under the shade of our apple tree, particularly on summer Sundays, on a trestle table set up for the occasion, while my father jumped up every moment or so to inspect the progress of each item in his vegetable garden. I, on the other hand, was constantly told to sit still and "stop bobbing up and down." I could never understand the equity of a rule that didn't also work for one's parents. But those, I now appreciate, were the happiest days for the three of us.