Dear Cary

by Dyan Cannon

  But there was something else at play, too, and you didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure it out. Having a child on the way was dredging up a lot of unpleasant memories for Cary, and they played musical chairs with his emotions and his imagination. He would be sitting back in his armchair, nursing a drink and lost in silence, and then suddenly spring up, take me in his arms, and say, “Please, let’s never argue in front of our child, Dyan.”

  “I don’t want us to argue, period,” I’d say. And he’d recall the terrible shouting matches between his parents and shake his head sadly. My parents, of course, had their own bouts of yelling, but I never once feared that our family was falling apart, though I hated it when they fought. My parents’ battles were always a draw, but Elias and Elsie’s dramas gave Cary every reason to fear the worst. And the worst happened: his mother suddenly vanished and his father abandoned him.

  “A child needs to know that his parents are completely devoted to each other,” he said more than once. “If children grow up thinking one of their parents is going to jump ship, it does horrible things to them. It puts a real crack in their foundation.”

  “Family history doesn’t have to repeat itself, Cary.”

  “Damn it! I watched it, I did it, I didn’t know how to stop it!”

  “What are you talking about, Cary?”

  “Without meaning to, I turned every one of my wives into Elsie.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean by that.”

  “Dyan, my mother vanished on me. One day, gone—out of my life. I realized at a certain point that I drove my wives away before they could vanish on me.”

  Cary cupped his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes.

  “Will you promise that you will never let me do that to you?”

  “Of course, I promise you, Cary.”

  I felt that Cary had opened a window that allowed me to see into his heart in a way I never had—perhaps in a way that no one ever had. No wonder it was so painful for him to trust.

  As it happened, we had returned from our honeymoon just days before the Watts riots erupted and the streets of south Los Angeles churned with violence. From our privileged house on the hill, we could see the pillars of smoke rising from the fires in the distance, giving the sky an ominous violet tinge. Cary would stay glued to the news, and at times he seemed to take the melee personally. The rapidly expanding Vietnam War colored his outlook, as well. “The world’s split into two camps,” he would say. “Times have never been more dangerous. We have to do everything we can to keep our child safe.”

  “Of course we will, Cary! But you lived through two world wars,” I reminded him. “Life has to go on, even though the world’s not perfect.”

  One evening, he had come home in a brighter mood than usual. “Get dressed,” he said. “I’m taking you to Musso & Frank for a good steak. You need some protein!”

  I came out of the bedroom a little later wearing slacks and a sweater. Since our wedding, he was rarely pleased with what I chose to wear, even if it was an outfit he’d picked out for me. For that matter, I no longer had much in the way of clothing that he hadn’t picked out for me. “I have been doing my best to elevate your sense of style, but you seem to be completely attached to old thought patterns,” he said.

  That made me laugh. “Cary, we’re going out for protein, not fashion.” I’d about had it up to my birth canal with being constantly voted the worst-dressed woman in Los Angeles, and I told him—sincerely, not in anger, because I really just wanted things to go smoothly—“Cary, just lay out what you want me to wear, and I’ll wear it. Because I can’t seem to ever choose the right thing.”

  “Don’t you see?” he said, like Perry Mason cross-examining a witness. “It’s not what you choose. It’s why you choose it. It’s to purposely displease me.”

  “In that case, why don’t you call up Sophia Loren? I get the impression she knew how to please you in all sorts of ways.”

  “Oh, you look fine,” he said wearily. “Let’s go.” He’d already taken the wind out of my sails, and at that point I’d rather have stayed home. But I didn’t want to make waves, and we went. Cary ordered a steak; I asked for a cheeseburger, but he overruled me. “You need good, lean protein,” he said insistently. We sat there eating in silence until midway through the dinner when Cary put down his fork and looked up at me. I felt like his eyes were boring into my mind.

  “It could be so different,” he whispered. “Wouldn’t you like to see every dream you’ve ever had unfold right before your eyes?”

  “That’s already happening,” I replied. “I’ve got you. You’ve got me. And we’ve got a baby coming. But I get the feeling that for you, something’s missing.”

  “Something is missing.”

  “What?”

  “You.”

  “Me?” After a long pause, I said, “Where did I go?”

  “Dyan, it’s not where you went. It’s where you haven’t gone. You haven’t been to yourself. None of us can be fully present until we’ve taken that journey.”

  Oh, Lord. Please, not again.

  He went on. “I have a session with Dr. Hartman tomorrow. Why don’t we go together?”

  At that moment, I would have driven a motorcycle up a stunt ramp and through a tunnel of flaming hoops to please Cary. But LSD again?

  “Not on your life, Cary. Or mine. Do you want the baby to come out with two heads?”

  “Dyan—”

  “Please, Cary. Please. Call it maternal instinct, but this is not the time for another experiment. We have to protect the baby before it’s born, not just after.”

  The next day, Dr. Wise Mahatma canceled the session because of a family emergency, and Cary decided to play space cowboys and Indians on his own, at home.

  “I’ll be in the bedroom for the next few hours,” he said around noon. “Please see to it that I’m not disturbed. Would you mind unplugging the phone?”

  “Is this really a good idea?” I asked. “Don’t you need someone to monitor you?”

  “I’m a seasoned professional,” he said. “I’ll be okay.”

  “What should I do if something goes wrong?”

  “Nothing’s going to go wrong. I know what I’m doing.”

  I was grateful that the afternoon passed uneventfully. At about five, Cary came out of the bedroom and took a tranquilizer. He plopped down in his armchair, and a few minutes later he was smiling and relaxed.

  “You seem to be very serene and content,” I said.

  “I had a really good experience. Hopefully, one day you will too . . .”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Then Cary smiled and said, “Why don’t you come over here and let me rub your tummy?”

  I was thrilled. He’d never asked to do that before. I went to him. He ran his hand over my expanding belly, then pulled me closer and pressed his ear to it for a few moments. Then he looked up at me.

  “I never want to be far away from either one of you,” he said.

  Maybe LSD actually did have the “dismantling effect” Dr. Hartman had described. If this was indeed the effect it had on Cary, there must be something to it. He was showing his softer side again. And it wasn’t just refreshing. It was fulfilling and necessary. The baby and I both needed it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Culinary Capers

  “Yes, Stanley . . . that’s great. You know how I feel about it. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a good romp. And it’ll be a relief to play the kindly old uncle instead of the geezer-in-progress chasing after a girl young enough to be his great-granddaughter. All right. Glad we’ve finally got the green light . . . on the thirteenth. Oh, at least five or six weeks . . . See you at the studio at two . . .”

  He was talking about Walk, Don’t Run, in which he would star as a wealthy industrialist (and knight of the realm) who plays matchmaker between Samantha Eggar and Jim Hutton amidst the chaos of the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,�
�� I said, thrilled to be going to Tokyo and delighted that Cary would be working again—and hopefully let up on worrying about everything concerned with the baby and me. Addie said it seemed to her like I was having the baby and Cary was having the hormones.

  “When do we leave?” I asked.

  “Silly girl. You can’t travel. You’re pregnant.”

  My mouth opened but nothing came out. Finally, I managed to say, “What are you talking about? I knew you were going to Tokyo, so I asked the doctor about it last week. He said it was fine for me to travel.”

  “I just think it’s wiser for you to be here, close to your doctor. If something happened in Tokyo, we’d have to fight our way through the language barrier. We don’t know the medical system there, and it’s too risky. Better to play it safe.”

  “Cary, I’m sure Dr. Moss can refer us to an American practitioner in Tokyo. And besides that, I don’t want to be away from you that long.”

  “Everything you’re saying is true, and I don’t fancy being away from you that long either. But it’s a tight schedule, and my work is cut out for me. We wouldn’t have any time to be together anyway.”

  “That never stopped us from being together on location before.”

  “Well, all that’s changed.”

  “Obviously.”

  Whenever I wanted to cry, I went into the bathroom. It was the one room where I could lock the door without raising suspicion. Something was off, I told myself. Seriously off.

  For the next several days, I felt like I was enveloped in a shroud of gloom. Why didn’t Cary want me with him in Tokyo? I must have been doing something wrong and I continually examined myself for faults, frequently arriving at very unsettling conclusions. Maybe I wasn’t intelligent enough for him. Or beautiful enough. Or supportive enough. Funny or witty or sexy or thoughtful or attentive enough. Then I got into the “too”s . . . Maybe I was too simple, too loud, too gullible, too clingy, too . . .

  Maybe I was not enough of anything and too much of everything.

  Maybe I wasn’t good enough to be Mrs. Cary Grant. Maybe to another woman, his moods were as plain as newsprint. Maybe another woman would not find his silences the least bit vexing or mysterious. Maybe with another woman, he wouldn’t lapse into those silences. Maybe another woman could read his mind. I couldn’t, and I berated myself for it. I had all of the burden of a guilty conscience. And the fact that I couldn’t put my finger on what I felt guilty about made me feel even worse.

  Maybe I should really learn to cook.

  I became quieter and quieter. I became afraid of bothering Cary by . . . by what? By being present, I guess. If my presence bothered him, I would become invisible until I understood what I could be that suited him at that moment. But the more space I gave him, the colder the space between us became. He withdrew from me physically, too.

  Most of our communication now occurred around the clippings from magazines and newspapers he deposited on my nightstand. Most were about child rearing. Some were about the brain and the mind. Many were about the miracle powers of LSD. Cary used to clip news items or other bits of reading that he thought I’d find interesting, and I always enjoyed discussing them with him. Now they were like homework, and I read them because I knew he would quiz me on them later.

  Three or four days before he left for Tokyo, I was in the dining room when suddenly a black cloud spewed out from the wood, scaring the daylights out of me. I ran through into the living room and through the front door, and I felt certain it was chasing me. It was creepy and so disturbing I thought I was going to give birth on the front stoop. I called an exterminator from a pay phone, who later pronounced the house half-eaten by termites. We would have to vacate while the house was fumigated and renovated.

  And so, Cary left for Tokyo, and I was left with the task of finding us a house to live in as fast as possible. I spent weeks looking at houses with Cary’s real estate agent. I airmailed photos to Tokyo for Cary to see. We wound up renting a home off Benedict Canyon recently vacated by the Beatles.

  While Cary was gone, I found myself more relaxed but also more riddled with uncertainty. The time difference between Los Angeles and Tokyo made it hard for us to talk much by phone—or at least that’s what Cary said. Japan was across the international dateline, so practically speaking, it was just seven hours earlier there. I couldn’t really see why it was harder for him to call from Japan than from Europe.

  But absence really does make the heart grow fonder, and when I thought of Cary, I thought of him at his best, in his warmest and most loving moments. I got butterflies when the news that I was pregnant broke in the press. Particularly, one headline in a New York paper made me chuckle: CARY’S FOURTH EXPECTS FIRST.

  But he could be like a blender churning up mixed signals, and one of his letters left my head spinning like I had knocked back a pitcher of gin fizzes:

  “Please come to me soon”? After he’d absolutely refused to let me accompany him on the trip? It was hard to reconcile one with the other. In a moment of despair, though, I had a flash of insight. I really had no doubt that Cary loved me. But maybe it was hard for him to love me at close range, and therefore when feelings of tenderness welled up in him, he could say things from a distance—and on paper—that were painful for him to express when we were face-to-face.

  I wished I were in Tokyo, or that Cary was back home. I wished the baby would be born so we could stop seesawing between anticipation and anxiety.

  One day my mother called to suggest that the two of us meet in Las Vegas for a weekend. “Why don’t we kick up our heels before the baby comes?” she said. “It’s the last time you’ll have the freedom to do that kind of thing for a while. Just us girls.” I loved the idea. And though here I was about to become a mother myself, I really felt like I could use some mothering of my own. By now, Cary had been home from Tokyo for several weeks, and the emotional climate had continued to be mostly cloudy with patches of sunshine.

  “No,” Cary said when I told him the plan. “You’re not going.”

  I followed him into the bedroom, where he was busy changing into his lounging clothes. “But, Cary, the plans are all made. It’s my mother, and it’s just for two nights.”

  “I don’t want to argue about this,” he said.

  “I mean, Vegas isn’t Tokyo. It’s just a forty-minute flight and they speak English there.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Cary, think of it this way. It’s the last time for a very long time Mom and I can go somewhere together, just the two of us. It would be a really meaningful trip for Mom and me.”

  Cary sighed and softened. It was like seeing a porcupine put down his quills.

  “Dear girl, when you put it that way . . . All right. I know I may sound unreasonable at times, and maybe I’m being unreasonable. But it’s only because your safety and the baby’s mean so much to me.” He held me and stroked my hair.

  Another crisis averted. Whew.

  “I’ll call Charlie Rich and get you set up at the Dunes,” Cary said.

  That night, when we were settling in for bed, my sweet tooth was whining for some chocolate. When Cary had gone to the kitchen for a glass of water, I remembered the stash of Picnic bars in his nightstand, and I took one. He walked in just as I was taking my first bite.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” His voice was so cold and metallic I could almost taste it.

  “I wanted something sweet.”

  “And you took one of my Picnic bars? I don’t care if we’re married. I don’t care if you’re pregnant. I don’t care who it is. You have no right to go rooting around in my personal drawer without permission. No one does.”

  I took a breath. I looked at the candy bar and suddenly felt deeply ashamed, literally like the little fat kid whose stepmother catches him with his hand in the cookie jar. “I . . . I didn’t know that drawer was off-limits. I’m sorry . . . Honestly, I didn’t. I’ll put it back.” I started to rewrap it.

  “So y
ou’re going to put a half-eaten Picnic bar back in my drawer?” He was truly enraged. “Give me that.” He plucked the candy bar out of my hand and flung it into the wastebasket.

  “How am I supposed to live like this?” he railed. “I can’t find anything in this house since we’ve moved. And you’re like a poltergeist, always moving things around. How am I supposed to live like this?”

  But was it really about the candy bar? I absolutely knew one of us was crazy. I just couldn’t decide who. “Cary, it’s just a candy bar.”

  “No, Dyan, it’s got nothing to do with the damn candy. It’s about respect. You’ve got such a weak sense of self that you turn me into an authority figure, and then you intentionally do these things to rebel.”

  “I do?”

  “You see what I mean? I try and try and I can’t explain anything to you.” With that, he got into his side of the bed with his back to me and turned out the light.

  Despite my candy-plundering ways, Cary followed through with his promise to call Charlie, who gave Mom and me a beautiful suite at the Dunes. She arrived before I did and was hanging her clothes when I got there. She hugged me, moved back to look me over, and asked, “So what’s going on?”

  “Did Dad lose his marbles when you got pregnant with David?” I asked.

  “Not more than half of them,” she answered.

  I had told Mom a fair amount about Cary’s tragic—there was really no other word for it—family life, but we went over it again in vivid detail. “Your husband has a very big scar on his heart,” Mom said as I sat beside her while she fed a stingy slot machine nickels. “He really wants things to be different for his child, but he’s also really scared.”

  “I feel so helpless,” I said. “I wish there were something I could do to heal it.”