Dear Cary

by Dyan Cannon

  “Honey, you’ve got to swallow a lot of words to keep peace in the family, but there’s a point where you have to put your foot down. You can’t let him run over you. I don’t know if a wound like that ever completely heals, to tell you the truth. So when he acts up, ultimately you have to draw a line in the sand . . . ahh, all I’m getting is lemons . . . Okay, let’s get some dinner. Lady Luck is not smiling at me.” She turned and looked at me. “It’ll all settle down, honey.”

  I wasn’t sure.

  When I got back home, I did my best to put Mom’s advice into practice. Being with Cary was still like trying to read by a lightbulb with a short in it—every time you’re about to give up and turn it off, it comes on strong.

  I did make a resolution to get a little more serious about cooking, not that I thought that would fix any or all of our problems. One morning when he was leaving, I promised him a home-cooked meal. That made him smile. I spent a couple of hours that afternoon making a lasagna recipe I’d been meaning to try, and trifle, his favorite English dessert. The trifle turned out great, but my lasagna wouldn’t pass muster as prison food. It made canned lasagna taste like the cooking of an Italian grandmother. Bangs wouldn’t even taste it, though Gumper was less discriminating and finished the whole mess. Well, I’d tried. It was time to run some of Cary’s errands, and I noticed a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken—so we’d have chicken for dinner and trifle for dessert.

  As the time for Cary to come home neared, I started feeling guilty about serving Kentucky Fried Chicken to Cary when I’d promised a home-cooked meal. Then I used my powers of reason to convince myself that as long as he thought it was a home-cooked meal, then that was as good as the real thing. Giving in to my predilection for culinary forgery, I dumped the chicken from its bucket onto a serving platter, put the mashed potatoes in a bowl, and slid them both into the oven. I knew it was a wacky thing to do, but I also had known that passing off La Scala’s rosemary chicken as my own was strange too. I didn’t want to lie, so I never claimed to have made it. Well, it worked once . . .

  And it worked again. Cary pronounced it absolutely the best fried chicken he’d ever had, and he stuffed himself. Thank you, Colonel Sanders. After dinner, Cary ducked into the bedroom and came out holding something behind his back.

  “Whatcha got there, Irving?” I asked.

  “My little contribution to this wonderful feast.” And he held out two Picnic bars, one for each of us. “You’ll have to forgive my little outbursts,” he said. “I’m pregnant, you know. It’s hormonal.” We laughed together.

  In the next few days, I heard him extol the glories of my chicken to three or four people on the phone. One of them was Artis Lane, a painter who had done a portrait of Cary several years earlier. I’d met Artis and her husband, Vince, through a close friend and former vocal coach, Laura Hart. Since Cary and I both knew Artis through different channels, and we’d been talking about getting together with her for some time, Cary made a date with Artis and Vince. Vince and I connected like we’d already known each other for a hundred years. I didn’t know it then, but in the time to come, Vince and Artis would prove to be two extraordinarily important people in my life.

  In late January, about a month before I was due, Addie threw me a magnificent baby shower at the Beverly Hills Hotel and invited about two dozen women. After a lavish lunch, I docked myself in a big, comfortable chair and started opening gifts.

  In the midst of the festivities, Cary popped in to say hello and the girls were all atwitter. Many hadn’t met him before, and I once again witnessed that unassailable Cary Grant magic. It was as if a projector had switched on. They were watching a Cary Grant movie, but in 3-D. He stayed for a half hour, and for much of the afternoon the girls couldn’t stop marveling at my good fortune.

  “Think about it, Dyan. Cary Grant is every woman’s dream, and you’re the one who’s married to him.”

  As paper gift wrapping accumulated next to my chair, bits of conversation about married life floated past my ears like ticker tape in a parade. Birthday surprises, forgotten anniversaries, infidelities, unexpected moments of joy, painful disappointments. They talked about what Dan, Harvey, Stewart, or Tom did or did not do, and what was wonderful and what was not. And so it was with Cary Grant. The names didn’t matter. But when the women carried on about how dazzling, wonderful, thrilling, and romantic my marriage surely was—because I was married to Cary Grant—I felt like I was listening to a fairy tale about a white knight and one lucky damsel, but a fairy tale that had nothing to do with me. My marriage wasn’t any more or less a fairy tale than theirs were. It just seemed to be. Of course, I’d wanted to believe in that fairy tale too, and just because my bubble had been burst didn’t mean theirs had to be. Yes, it was an amazing thing to be married to Cary Grant, but I didn’t think of him as “Cary Grant.” I thought of him just as my husband.

  “It must be so exciting!”

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘exciting,’ ” I said. “We’ve got a very quiet home life. When he’s not making a movie, he comes home at five and kicks his shoes off at six.”

  “What do you do for dinner?” another asked. “Do you have a cook?” I started to feel like somebody had called a press conference.

  “Yes, we have a cook, and his name is Colonel Sanders.” And I told them the story of my counterfeit fried chicken, which had them splitting their sides.

  Several days later, as I was taking a long soak in the tub, Cary stepped into the bathroom with a newspaper. “I think you should see this,” he said.

  I thought he wanted to share another article about childbirth, or child rearing—or tennis—but this had nothing to do with motherhood or sports.

  “Just a bit of gossip I thought might amuse you,” he said, then read from the paper: “ ‘A friend in Beverly Hills tells us that Cary Grant has been singing the praises of his new wife’s cooking, particularly the fried chicken she served him on a recent weekday evening . . . However, Dyan Cannon, the mother-to-be of Mr. Grant’s firstborn child, confided to a friend that she is no Julia Child and that she passed off a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken as her own cooking, which won her heaps of the glamour god’s gustatory goodwill. If that’s the way to Cary’s heart, we wouldn’t be surprised to hear of women from around the world lobbing drumsticks over the Universal Studios wall . . .’ ”

  Cary cocked his head and looked at me quizzically. I pinched my nose and hid underwater for as long as I could hold my breath. When I came up for air, he was still there.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh dear. Oh my God.”

  Cary broke into hearty laughter. “That’s the most amusing gossip item I’ve ever read about myself!” he said. “And maybe the only one that ever got the facts straight! Good stuff.” He started to leave, then turned.

  “Dyan, seriously, there’s something you’ve got to keep in mind. When it comes to this creature known as Cary Grant . . . the walls have ears.”

  I’d heard the line about “living in a fishbowl,” of course. Now I really understood what it meant.

  Later that night at about half past ten, I was rooting through the refrigerator. Other than cheeseburgers, I hadn’t had a lot of cravings, but now my appetite was raging like an unfed guard dog. “What are you looking for?” Cary asked.

  “Mexican food.” That was a little peculiar. I’d only had Mexican food about twice, but for some reason nothing else was going to appease me. I was obsessed with chicken enchiladas, which I’m not sure I’d even had before.

  Cary smiled tenderly and took me by the arm. “The lady wants Mexican food, the lady gets Mexican food.”

  “Where are we going to find it at this time of night?”

  “Casa Vega. Their specialty is being open until two A.M.”

  The restaurant was just a fifteen-minute jaunt over the hill, down the canyon, and east along Ventura Boulevard. We walked out with a double order of enchiladas for me and carne asada for Cary. We were quiet in the car, but it was a different ki
nd of quiet than the icy silence that enveloped us so much of the time now. Halfway back home, Cary took my hand and spoke softly. “Dyan, you’re the only woman I’ve ever trusted enough to have a baby with,” he said. “This is what I’ve always wanted—a real family. I wanted it so badly it terrified me.”

  I slid close to him and rested my head on his shoulder. “I understand, Cary. But this is a different family than the one you came from.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Do you know what forever is?” he asked.

  “A long time?”

  “That’s how long I’ll love you.”

  “And I hope after that, too,” I said.

  “You’re going to have a tough time getting rid of me, even then.”

  I slept that night like I hadn’t in months.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Completion

  On February 25, 1966, I got up feeling on top of the world, had a cup of tea, and suddenly felt a trickle of wetness running down my thigh. My time had come. Cary grabbed his keys and almost knocked me over on his way to the phone to call the hospital. Bangs knew something was up and she started to bark. I grabbed my overnight bag, we got in the car, and Cary started the engine.

  “Just a second,” I said.

  I ran back into the house as Cary yelled, “What are you doing? We’ve got to go!” Bangs ran to meet me and I scooped her up into in my arms.

  “You just wait,” I said, scratching the fur on her neck. “You’re not going to believe what I’m bringing home for you. You’ll love her as much as I do, and you’ll want to protect her as much as I do, and we will be a happy family together.” In my mind, the baby was a girl. I think I just knew. And a girl was what I wanted. My own mother had meant so much to me through my entire life that I loved the idea of re-creating that relationship with my own daughter. Bangs was giving me sandpapery kisses with her little tongue. “See you in a couple of days, sweet Bangs. Take good care of the house!”

  “Slow down!” I yelled to Cary when we were on the road. He was driving like Godzilla was chasing us. “I’m not going to have the baby in the car!” Twenty minutes later, I was in the delivery room and in labor. An hour later, I was still in labor. Five hours, ten hours, fifteen hours . . . maybe the baby had heard Cary saying what a terrible place the world was, because she obviously was in no hurry to come into it. When it became apparent that we were in for a long haul, Cary persuaded the hospital staff to give him the room next door.

  My labor pains were off the charts and Dr. Moss was preparing to give me an epidural when Cary objected. “Dear girl, we’ve been over this. A natural birth is best for the baby and for you.”

  “THEN GIVE ME LSD! WOULD LSD BE OKAY? I’LL TAKE ANYTHING!”

  “Dyan, truly, I am feeling the pain as deeply as you are.”

  “YOU’RE FULL OF SHIT, CARY! Aaaaaaargh!”

  When Cary left the room, I got the drugs.

  It wasn’t until the next day, February 26, 1966, that our little bundle of joy finally made her way into the world. She weighed seven pounds, nine ounces. She was perfect. We named her Jennifer.

  Flowers and gifts poured in from around the globe. Cary watched, bemused, as a parade of nurses brought me one bouquet after another, filling my room with color.

  “Dyan, I thank God for bringing us together. This is truly the happiest day of my life.”

  “It is for me, too,” I said. And it was. I don’t think I’d ever seen Cary look so exhausted. “Cary, go lay down awhile. You look beat.”

  “I am. Twenty-two hours of labor is no joke. I’ve never been through anything like this before!”

  I heard muffled giggling from the middle-aged nurse who’d just come in and overheard this last bit. She covered her mouth to keep from laughing and left to regain her composure. I took Cary’s hand. “Go rest,” I said maternally. “You’ve had a tough night. I’m so glad you overcame your fear of hospitals.”

  Cary kissed me and went to lie down in his room.

  I dozed for a while and awoke to see a nurse carry two vases of flowers out. I also noticed that about half the flowers had been removed. I asked her what she was doing. “Oh, Mr. Grant is so happy but so tired. He asked for some of the flowers in his room so he could look at them and think of the baby and you while he was resting,” she said, giving me a wink. “He was in labor for a long time, you know!” That gave me a chuckle.

  That afternoon, I finally had Jennifer to myself. Cary had gone to take care of some business, the nurses and the child experts who were teaching me the fundamentals of motherhood (burping, diaper changing) had dispersed, and I drank the privacy and the quiet like nectar. Rocking Jennifer in my arms, I felt our two beings dissolve into one in a way that was not possible between any two beings but a mother and her child. And I talked to her in the secret language of mother and baby. I promised her I would be the best mother I could possibly be, that I would love her and defend her and teach her and nurture her, and that no harm could come to her that was in my power to stop. I said it with words, but I also said it with my heart. Jennifer looked at me for a long second, then relaxed her head against my breast. She had understood my pledge. I knew it in my heart.

  My parents had arrived in time for the birth, and along with Addie, they stayed with me for practically every minute during the three days I was in the hospital.

  Cary left ahead of us through the hospital’s front entrance to divert the press. (“She’s my best production,” he told them. “She’s the most beautiful baby in the world.”) I was wheeled through a side entrance where a car and driver were waiting to take us home.

  When we turned into the driveway, Cary came out of the house wearing a silk top hat and a grin as wide as the Panama Canal. He opened the car door for me and showered me with kisses. “Welcome home, Mrs. Grant, and my dear daughter, Jennifer!” He gingerly took Jennifer in his arms and touched noses with her. “This is the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life,” he whispered to her. Cary’s eyes were soft with emotion. I’d really never seen him this way. I started to tear up, and when my parents came out into the driveway, I completely dissolved with emotion.

  It was certainly the happiest moment of my life.

  Logs were ablaze in the living room fireplace, and Cary had filled the house with flowers. There we were, all together: three generations on my side of the family, and two on Cary’s. Jennifer gurgled and cooed. When my dad came over to kiss her cheek, I saw him flick away a tear—the first tear I’d ever seen come to his stoic eyes in all my life. I felt a wave of utter completeness. I felt myself totally immersed in the stream of life. I wished time could stand still.

  “It’s just astounding,” Cary said. “Cards, flowers, and telegrams have come from all over the world.”

  I plopped down into the chair with Jennifer, grateful to be off my feet.

  I looked around the room, and it struck me that something was missing.

  “Oh, I haven’t seen Bangs yet. Bangs! I can’t wait for Bangs to meet Jennifer.” Mom stood up and left the room. I hollered again for Bangs. “Come here, baby! Where is she?” I asked, looking around.

  “Bangs is gone, Dyan,” Cary said in the kind of hushed voice people use in church.

  “Gone? Gone where?” Had the maid taken her for a walk? Was she at the vet’s?

  “I found her another home,” Cary said.

  “Her own house in the Hollywood Hills? You didn’t have to do that.” I laughed. I thought he was joking. In the corner, my father had put his head down and was staring at the floor.

  “No, Dyan, I gave her away.” Oh my God. He was serious. He actually gave my Bangs away? I opened my mouth but I couldn’t talk.

  “Infants and dogs aren’t a good mix, Dyan,” he said. “We’ve talked about that.”

  “Cary . . .” I raised my hand up and opened my mouth again, but still nothing came out, at least for a few seconds. “Cary, wherever she is, go and get my dog. Go and get my dog! Now!” I watched
my dad get up and leave the room. “Cary, I’m serious. Bangs is part of our family. How can you give away family? And how could you give away something that belonged to me without talking to me about it?”

  Bangs was much too gentle to hurt anything or anyone. How could he possibly imagine her hurting Jennifer?

  “Animals can experience extreme jealousy around newborns,” Cary said professorially. “They can undergo profound personality changes.”

  “You had no right, Cary. No right.”

  He walked toward me to put his arms around me. I stretched my arm out and stopped him.

  “Do not come over here and try to touch me,” I told him. “And don’t pretend to love me. Because anybody who loved me could never do that.”

  I went to my room and locked the door.

  About an hour later there was a knock. It was Mom. “Honey, let me in,” she said. I did. She came in and just held me in her arms for a long while. “Dyan,” she said, “I know how much you love Bangs. But for the sake of your marriage and your daughter, you’ve got to let this go.”

  “Mom, Bangs has been with me for ten years. Yorkshire terriers only bond with one person. She won’t live long with anyone else.”

  Mom wrapped her arms around me and hugged me tightly. “Honey,” she said, “life isn’t always fair, and neither is marriage. But I’ve got to admit, what a day to have something like this happen.”

  “I don’t know how to live with this.”

  Mom looked at me and said, “You’ll have to find a way to try.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Big Freeze

  The waiter brought us another round of margaritas, and I took a sip, already feeling a little buzzy from the first. I rarely drank since having Jennifer, but it was her nap time and the nanny was with her, so I joined in the festivities. Darlene rubbed a coconutty suntan lotion on her arms, and her husband, Hal, leaned back and massaged her neck. Cary shuffled a deck of cards. Half of his attention was on his game of solitaire, and the other half was on the conversation, which was light and intermittent.