The Romantic

""He wore things like white cardigan sweaters thrown ever so casually over his shoulders after a game of tennis, or a tuxedo with a white bow tie for afternoon tea, just for the fun of it," Keaton recalled in one of her memoirs, Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty. "He wasn't afraid of a polka-dot tie or handkerchief. He wore gray worsted wool suits with wide lapels, a waist button, a white shirt, and his collar up.""

"Grant was dazzlingly handsome, of course, but something else about him had leapt off the screen and captured her imagination. As she collated images of Grant, she also carefully recorded his fashion tips-the importance of a taut knot when tying a tie, the maxim that "clothes make the man," and so on. To Keaton, Grant represented a formative encounter with the elusive quality that she would spend the rest of her life chasing: beauty."

Diane Keaton began collecting photographs of Cary Grant as a girl and learned fashion lessons from his effortless blend of playfulness and elegance. She recorded his tips—taut tie knots and the maxim 'clothes make the man'—and regarded Grant as a formative encounter with beauty. Keaton believed timeless beauty required depth, darkness, originality, unconventionality, and fierce independence. She gravitated to stage and screen despite an industry fixated on a shallower definition of beauty. Keaton died at age 79. She was born in Los Angeles in 1946 as Diane Hall and grew up in a one-story tract house.

Read at The Atlantic