Dear Cary

by Dyan Cannon

  “Of course I do, dear girl,” he said, taking a gulp of his drink and reaching for my remaining egg roll.

  “Cary, wait. Is that how you really think of me? What was it you said? ‘Evolved’? Do you think I’m evolved, Cary?”

  Cary leaned forward and pinned me with his gaze.

  “Listen to me, Dyan. Each of us creates our own reality. And if we get stuck in a certain reality, it’s up to us to get out of it. Transformation is possible for everyone.” Something about the way he spoke made me feel like I was being addressed by the village wise man.

  “How do you transform, then?”

  “First, you have to be open to change.”

  This was starting to sound all too familiar.

  “Do you think you need to change, Cary?”

  “I have changed. I was stuck inside a mask that people recognized as Cary Grant, and I was suffocating. Dyan, I know what it’s like to feel like you can’t breathe! But you can breathe again!”

  “I never had trouble breathing before I met you, Cary,” I said.

  “That’s because you . . .”

  “Because I what?”

  “Well, you’re . . . complacent. Just not as alert to the possibilities as you can be.”

  I felt blood rush hot to my cheeks, but somehow I stayed calm. I didn’t know the answer to any of this, but all of a sudden, for the first time, I knew the question. Now, after all of this confusion, it seemed so obvious.

  “Cary, I have a question. A simple question for you.”

  “Go ahead, shoot.”

  “Do you love me—”

  “Oh, Dyan, don’t be silly. You know—”

  “Stop. Hold it. Please. Just let me finish. You keep asking me to change. I get that. And I’ve tried. Honestly, I have. But, Cary, right here, right now, do you love me—me—just the way I am? Right now?”

  Cary seemed stunned by the question, as if it had never occurred to him. He looked at me blankly.

  “Well?” I asked.

  Cary was at a loss for words.

  I held my breath and gazed at him.

  His face was blank.

  Nothing.

  Then I took his hand gently in mine and kissed it.

  “Thank you for being honest with me, Cary.”

  Still nothing.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  I took my purse and left the table, but as I started to exit onto the street, I realized there was one more thing that had to be said. I went back to the table where he sat, looking rather stunned.

  “Cary, I want you to be clear on this,” I told him. “I do love you. I love you, Cary. Right here, right now, just the way you are.” I paused. “I’m not leaving you because I don’t love you. I’m leaving you to save my life.”

  It was the last time I would ever be alone with him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Grant vs. Grant

  “But I don’t want it to get ugly,” I told my attorney, who was giving me the lowdown on divorce law. The lowdown was lower down than I could have imagined.

  “For a couple to be granted a divorce, one of them has to be at fault,” he told me. “That’s the way it is with fault-based divorce law. One party has to sue the other for some kind of wrongdoing to prove they should be allowed a divorce. It’s backward, it’s offensive, and one day it’ll change, but right now it’s the law.”

  “What if both of them are at fault?”

  “You’re the one suing for divorce, so you have to prove Cary is at fault, and that means making your case.”

  “We can’t get along. Isn’t that enough?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. Grounds for divorce include physical abuse, adultery, and mental and emotional cruelty. The latter is the least injurious to the accused and the easiest to prove.”

  “So what should I say? That he was mean to me? I was mean to him as well.”

  “You going to have to loose the dogs on him, Dyan. Divorces aren’t granted lightly. However unpleasant it may be, you have to convince the judge that life with this man is something you cannot bear to go on living.”

  “I don’t want to ‘loose the dogs’ on Cary or on anybody else,” I protested. “There are some things I just won’t talk about—that I’ll never talk about, not in front of you, or a judge, or anybody else,” I said.

  “Dyan, Cary knows this drill. He’s been through it three times. He knows what the law requires and he won’t take it personally. But anything significant you leave out will weaken your case,” my attorney said.

  “Well, then I’ll leave with a weaker case,” I said, to the lawyer’s visible frustration.

  This insistence on a no-holds-barred courtroom brawl drove me to the edge of despair. I had had a naïve, childlike faith in the justice system. I had thought the divorce would be like a dispute between two kids that was refereed by responsible adults. Now it was starting to sound like a rock fight.

  “Can the hearing be in private?” I asked.

  “No, unfortunately not.”

  “You mean anybody can come into the courtroom? Including the press?”

  “Yes.”

  I melted into a puddle of queasiness. I really hadn’t wanted things to get ugly. But from the looks of it, “ugly” was synonymous with “divorce.”

  It didn’t look any prettier when my attorney and I met with Cary’s lawyers for my deposition. We were shown into a cold meeting room with stark fluorescent lighting and told to wait there for Cary’s lawyer. Oh, make that lawyers. After a while, the door opened, and five men in dark Brooks Brothers suits filed into the room like a designer death squad. They took chairs at the opposite end of the table. I watched them as they sat down and looked at them while they looked at each other, then toward my attorney and me. One of them snickered, and I looked at my lawyer. He was fast asleep. I wondered if that was a sign of things to come.

  On March 21, 1968, I linked arms with my attorney and trudged up the granite stairs of the Los Angeles County Courthouse. The journey to the top seemed interminable, like scaling a mountain summit, and with every step, I wanted to turn back.

  But we marched on, through a hornets’ nest of paparazzi who stung me with their flashbulbs and pelted me with questions that dissolved into a buzzy drone of nonsense. I kept my head low and my eyes on the ground, trying to shut it all out, until a TV reporter thrust a microphone into my face and asked, “Miss Cannon! Can you tell our audience what you’re wearing today?”

  My marriage was ending. And they were acting like I’d shown up for a movie premiere.

  “I am wearing sorrow, along with doubt,” I said, and hurried the rest of the way to the entrance.

  I’d already gotten a heads-up that Cary wasn’t going to show up for the divorce. He’d been in a car accident in New York three days earlier and had broken several ribs. Thank God, it hadn’t been more than that, but he’d prolonged his stay in the hospital, which gave him an excuse not to show. It was just as well, and really, I was relieved. Having to look across the courtroom at someone I still loved would have been further torture.

  In the weeks leading up to the divorce, there were many times when I wanted to call the whole thing off. At night I’d twist and turn, wake up in a cold sweat with my heart pounding. I didn’t want to give up. Many times, I almost called Cary to see if we could take another swing at working things out. I might have done it, but every time I came close to calling, my overpowering feeling of disorientation got the better of me. I was terrified I didn’t have the fortitude to go through with the divorce, but I knew I didn’t have the energy to try giving the marriage another shot.

  The divorce proceedings were a blur to me, and I sat through them with a profound sense of disconnection. Addie and Mary both testified in my defense.

  I felt my soul shriveling through all of it. Now the complaints I’d made against Cary, all of which were necessary in the pursuit of our mutual goal—divorce—were being amplified through the biggest loudspeaker in the world. When I had
to state my reasons for wanting a divorce to the court, the events and incidents I cited sounded scary and weird, which if truth be told, they were, but my own words echoed back in a way that rattled me terribly. The little voice that had always been so reliable as my compass had become a traitor: it now berated me and undermined my sense of direction. Cary’s attorneys made me sound like quite a disappointment as a wife and mother, and each remark and insinuation opened a new and frightful wound.

  Throughout the proceedings, I felt myself being sucked into a miasma of emotions: a vortex of guilt, a riptide of despair, an all-consuming sense of failure. I felt I’d failed Cary. And Jennifer. And my parents. And myself . . . I felt that I’d blown it, that my own mental frailty, my own stupidity, and my own stubbornness had been the rotten beam that caused the roof to collapse on our family. But just as forcefully, deep in my core, there burned an inferno of outward blame. As guilty as I felt for the mess that our marriage had become, hot gusts of black rage tore through my brain when I thought of the man who promised to always love me and never leave me. And how whenever I tried to step into a new frame to become the person he wanted me to be, he always changed lenses.

  I inhaled guilt, I exhaled anger. I felt like an old house that had been gutted by fire, with little left but a rickety, charred frame and a few shingles. In most ways, it was a divorce like any other: a merciless spectacle of gladiators and assassins. Even without the media, it would have been like putting my heart in a meat grinder.

  I tried to tell myself that it was all just an unpleasant technicality and that the procedures and the news really had nothing to do with what had happened between Cary and me. But however I strived to armor myself against the onslaught of negativity, I couldn’t completely protect myself from feeling judged, and harshly. I took everything personally.

  The media, predictably, covered the divorce with savage intensity. For days, I couldn’t turn on the television or the radio, or look at a newspaper, for fear of seeing my name or picture. To have the dirty laundry of one’s own life aired in a courtroom full of people is bad enough; to have it aired in the press was a horror that is unimaginable to most people. Naturally, the headlines sounded like posters for third-rate film noir movies. I was simultaneously portrayed as a gold-digging party girl, a shy and woebegone waif, a calculating femme fatale, the innocent victim of a domineering megalomaniac.

  I did not recognize myself in any of these sketches, but on some level I bought into all of them. I no longer had any defense against suggestion, and I was open to all of it. I was like a sack of guts without a rib cage, with no protection against anything that was said about me in the courtroom or written about me in the papers.

  After three days of testimony, I was granted a divorce on the grounds of “mental and emotional cruelty.” I was awarded full custody of Jennifer, with Cary being given visitation rights.

  I was awarded $2,500 a month in alimony for the first six months, $1,750 for the next eighteen months, and $1,000 per month for the year after that. For child support, I was awarded $1,500 per month.

  I came out of the marriage with no home and no car, but I didn’t care. I felt like I had been in a prison and I wanted out.

  On the way home from court I developed a powerful craving for Mexican food. It came out of nowhere—the only other time I’d wanted it so badly was when I was pregnant. We stopped at Casa Vega. Of course, you can’t have Mexican food without margaritas, or it’s not Mexican food. I had several, and so did Addie and Mary. I looked around the room at the festive sombreros and the faux colonial plaster and realized the last time I’d been there was with Cary when I was pregnant. For a moment I started to really sink, but I buoyed myself with another margarita. An hour or so later, Addie and Mary poured me into the car and we sailed for home, where I purged the meal.

  The minute the divorce was over, a black hole had suddenly taken up residence in my spirit. The Black Hole wanted what it wanted, and when it got it, it wanted more. The Black Hole wanted anything that could temporarily make me forget about the pain. I fed the Black Hole, and fed it and fed it. I went to doctors. I had a doctor who prescribed for my insomnia and a doctor who prescribed for my sleepiness. I had many doctors and they all made their contributions, and before long I had a complete pharmaceutical wardrobe—something for every occasion.

  The Black Hole liked alcohol, too. With Cary, I had gotten used to wine with lunch and dinner, but I soon discovered that tequila was a far more effective delivery mechanism for alcohol. Every day was Cinco de Mayo, as far as I was concerned, and I couldn’t wait for margarita time, which started at six, then five, then four . . . then whenever the Black Hole decided it was booze o’clock.

  The Black Hole liked marijuana, too, and I made the Black Hole marijuana brownies, which it accepted gratefully, and of which it always wanted more.

  More, more, more.

  Now that the divorce was over, I had to move once again, and I rented a small house on North Beverly Drive, partway up the canyon. Mom came down to help me move, and really just to keep me company. When the nanny was off and I had to be away, she took care of Jennifer. I was aware that Mom thought I wasn’t up to keeping it all together on my own, but I let her think that. I was happy to have the help. Feeding the Black Hole was a full-time occupation.

  I was fine. I knew I was fine. Couldn’t get out of bed on a lot of days, but what’s wrong with staying in bed? Many nights I stayed up into the wee hours, drinking and playing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” at full blast until one of the neighbors shouted. It made me feel better, so what was wrong with that?

  Yes, I was fine. But my mind had split into two parts: one part floated serenely like a balloon above the unhappy memories and the sense of failure, and the other part was . . . well, hurtling through space like a damaged satellite. How could I have let Cary go? I’d had it all. Successful husband, beautiful child, gorgeous home, and I walked away from it—only because I was weak. And when things got too loud, I just stopped hearing them, whether it was the voice of another person or the voices inside my head. I just disconnected, like I’d started doing with Cary. Lips moved, but all I heard was the sound of wind.

  The ever-so-fine part of me had started dating a guy named Dennis. He was brilliant, magnetic, stunningly handsome, and occasionally coked out of his mind. Unlike Cary, he didn’t want to change me, and I couldn’t get enough of him, which is to say I couldn’t have all of him.

  He wasn’t sure he was a one-woman man; he’d made that clear. But I would change that. Besides, I wasn’t just one woman. I was a whole bouquet of women, all unique, all deserving of love. All I needed was a guy who wanted to get to know me so he could introduce me to myself, and I was completely sure Dennis was the guy.

  One night I had a dinner date with him. He was supposed to pick me up at six. Seven went by . . . at eight I tucked Jennifer into bed, sang her a song, and read from her beloved Winnie the Pooh book.

  Then it was nine . . . not even a phone call. At ten, I tried to call him, but there was no answer.

  I went to my bedroom and took a few tokes. At eleven, I changed into my white nightgown and brushed my teeth. I looked in on Jennifer, who was sleeping peacefully, and said good night to my mother. Then I sat on the edge of my bed and listened to the rain beating against the window.

  I wondered if there was anything that could make the pressure in my head go away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Zoo Time

  It took three men to hold me down.

  They were big men, the size of linebackers. I wasn’t sure where I was, but I was sure I wanted to get out of there, and all 108 pounds of me surged with what seemed like superhuman power. And now the linebackers were in formation, closing in on me in the small antiseptic room inside a nondescript brick building somewhere . . . I didn’t know where.

  “Come on, now, just calm down,” one of them said.

  I charged in between them, squeezed out the other side, and was about to shoot out i
nto the hallway, but one of them managed to hook his massive arm around my waist. I kicked, I screamed, I threw elbows, I bit, I raked at them with my fingernails, I pumped my legs, I threw fists, and I writhed and I twisted like a million volts of electricity were blazing through me. Who are they? Why are they doing this to me?

  The men came at me from every direction, but it was as if I was a human oil slick—as they tumbled, tripped, and slammed back against the walls, they just couldn’t get a grip on me. But finally, after a long tussle, one got a firm hold on me while another came at me with a hypodermic. I felt like a jungle cat on the nature show Wild Kingdom—about to be hit with a tranquilizer and relocated to a new habitat.

  Linebacker Number Three hit me with the needle.

  Lights out.

  “Where am I?” I asked when I awoke, groggy and disoriented.

  “Hi, Dyan,” said the man who was sitting next to my bed. “I’m Dr. James and you’re in a very safe place,” he said. He had corn-colored hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He looked kind of like John Lennon, except he was about forty. I recognized him, but at the moment I wasn’t sure where from. “You’re in the hospital. You’ve had a little setback.”

  “Where’s my daughter?” I asked, suddenly alarmed.

  “Your mother is taking good care of her and there is no need at all to be worried.”

  “Oh.” That was all I could say. Oh. I directed my unfocused gaze at Dr. James’s face. He looked very kind. He said I was safe. That was all I could process at the moment.

  “We’ll soon be talking about what’s happened, Dyan, but first I want you to shower, get dressed, and have something to eat. We want you to get up and start moving around. You’ll feel better a lot faster that way.”

  Dr. James patted my arm and left. I pulled the covers up over my head. I didn’t leave my room for two days. Nor did I eat, shower, brush my teeth, or make my bed—all of which were directives from the nurse who came to my room several times a day. Why make my bed when I hardly got out of it? Mostly, I slept. When I didn’t sleep, and even when I did, I watched the grainy black and white TV set in my mind’s eye. At the bottom of the screen was an endless stream of banner headlines: Dyan ruined her marriage. Dyan is a worthless piece of garbage. Dyan was a lousy wife. Dyan can’t do anything right . . . Poor Dyan.