Grant's biographer Graham McCann mentions that Maureen Donaldson, a lover of Grant in the 1970s, claimed in her book that his mother "did not know how to give affection and did not know how to receive it either."
Grant's father later placed his mother in Glenside Hospital (a mental institution) and told the 9-year-old that she had gone away on a "long holiday", later declaring that she had died.