Authors: Marc Eliot
Back home he had barely unpacked when Dyan Cannon went into labor. On Saturday, February 26, 1966, Grant drove his wife to St. John's Hospital in Burbank, where just eighteen minutes later she gave birth to a four-pound, eight-ounce baby girl they named Jennifer Diane Grant.
A day later, Grant, still at the hospital, met with the gathering press corps and had this to say: “One does join in the stream of life with parenthood. There's an advantage to being older, wiser and more mature when you become a father for the first time, and there are disadvantages, too. A person can never fully understand a child until he understands himself.”
From the moment of Jennifer's birth, Grant eagerly assumed the role of adoring father. He awoke promptly each morning at seven-thirty to kiss her good morning and supervise her feeding before leaving for the studio to work on the final edit of
Walk, Don't Run,
after which he rushed home to spend more time with the child he happily described to friends as “the most completely perfect baby in the world.”
When Jennifer was barely three months old, Grant insisted that he and Cannon take her to Bristol, to meet Elsie. Fearful that his mother did not have much longer to live, he was determined that she meet her granddaughter.
In England, Grant doted on Jennifer and spent nearly all his time with Elsie. Years later Grant would recall the visit this way: “I was sitting up front in the car with the chauffeur, and [Elsie] was sitting behind with my cousin. Mother tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Darling, you should do something about your hair.' I asked her what should I do about my hair, and she explained, ‘Well, dear, it's so white. You should dye it. Everybody does these days.' ‘But why should I,’ I asked. ‘Because it makes
me
look so old.'” Whenever she talked to Cannon, Elsie referred to her as Betsy.
Grant happily squired his mother and daughter around town, accepting the congratulations from the crowds that followed them wherever they went. Cannon, feeling a bit left out, asked Grant if he minded her going to London by herself for a few days. She was surprised when he told her no, she couldn't
go, and shocked when he took away her keys to the car. When she asked why, he explained that the trip was being paid for by Columbia Pictures, in exchange for some personal appearances he was to make in connection with the upcoming release of
Walk, Don't Run,
and therefore she had to stay with him so as not to run up any unnecessary charges. Cannon could not believe what she was hearing. From then on, to pass the rest of her time in Bristol, she kept to herself, read a lot, walked through the town's many churches, and spent afternoons chatting with Grant's friendly relatives.
When at last they did get to London, it was for the studio's arranged press junket, which he had insisted Cannon accompany him on. When a reporter asked if he had any plans to star in a film with his wife, the question seemed to visibly annoy Grant, who responded that he thought he had made it clear to the world that
Walk, Don't Run
was his last movie. The rest of the press crew laughed out loud when Cannon nodded her head vigorously up and down in response to the same question, indicating that she very much wanted to make a movie with her husband. Grant did not appreciate the gesture and openily and angrily glared at her. The incident was reported as a “disagreement” in the next morning's papers.
GRANT WAS OPPOSED
not only to continuing his own career but to Cannon's continuing hers, something that did not sit well with her. He didn't care. He insisted his wife be a stay-at-home mother and devote herself to the full-time job of raising their daughter. A few days later, speaking to a luncheon for Columbia executives attended by the British press, Grant, out of nowhere, suddenly changed the subject to marriage and declared that the institution was dying. By the year 2066—one hundred years from now, he emphasized—it would be outmoded. Why? Women were more in competition with men than ever before.
By the time they returned to Los Angeles, in October, Grant had become angry and bitter about Cannon's unwavering decision to keep acting, and she began to suspect that because of it her marriage to Grant might actually be in trouble. Ever since her head-shake joke at the London press conference, he had seemed a completely different person from the one she married. Now,
whenever she tried to get his attention away from the baby, even for a moment, he become verbally abusive. A month later he locked her out of his bedroom and put a lock on the outside of hers to keep her in it at night. And when she insisted she was ready to go back to work, Grant threw a fit, angrily complaining that her proper place was at home taking care of Jennifer.
A few weeks later they attended the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration of Grant's old friends Rosalind Russell and Freddie Brisson, hosted by Frank Sinatra and his wife, Mia Farrow, at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Cannon was startled when Grant suddenly and inexplicably broke down in tears, something Cannon found not only embarrassing but a sure sign that her husband had gone completely off the deep end. Later that day Grant took his friend Bill Frye aside and asked him to arrange a flight for him and his wife back to Los Angeles.
As soon as he and Cannon returned home, she packed her bags, took Jennifer, and left, she said, for an extended stay at her parents' home in Seattle. Grant was disturbed and frightened, and when he got Cannon on the phone he tried to get her to come back home by promising he would, after all, costar with her in a film. He already had a project picked out, he said, a script called
The Old Man and Me
that he had optioned a while back but never pursued.
Cannon would have none of it. A few weeks later, when she finally did return to Los Angeles, it was to a small rented apartment in Malibu. Not long afterward word of their separation reached the press. On August 22, 1967, just seventeen months after their wedding day, Cannon sued Grant for divorce on the grounds that he had treated her in “a cruel and inhuman manner.” In her court papers she stated that the couple had been living apart since the previous December, which was technically true, as Grant had been in Japan during that period filming
Walk, Don't Run.
Cannon's suit estimated Grant's worth in excess of $10 million and demanded “reasonable support” for her and their baby daughter. Also in her papers Cannon stated that she had begun psychiatric treatment, presumably due to Grant's “cruel and inhuman” treatment.
He was at first devastated. Losing his wife
and
his baby was too much for him. Then his rage kicked in. If Cannon wanted to leave, fine, but he was
going to fight to keep Jennifer. He put together a powerhouse team of lawyers and filed a countersuit in which he described Cannon as an unfit mother and demanded sole custody of his daughter.
Against the advice of his legal team, Grant tried to call Cannon several times a day. At first she refused to talk to him, but after a while she responded, especially when he agreed to provide her with an interim allowance of $4,000 a month, which she desperately needed. By September they were seen together around town, at restaurants, at Dodger Stadium, in Las Vegas, always with baby Jennifer in tow. Things appeared better between them, but despite Grant's pleas that she come home, Cannon insisted on staying in her own apartment, and demanded that they both attend marriage counseling. Grant resented the suggestion, but agreed in order to keep seeing his wife and daughter. (But he never paid for the sessions. The doctor eventually sued him to collect $7,000 in uncollected bills.)
Even so, Cannon refused to rescind her suit for divorce. That November she left for New York to star on Broadway in
The Ninety Day Mistress
and took Jennifer with her. Grant found out about when she was going, followed her to the airport, and got himself booked on the same flight. In New York he booked a room at the Croydon, the same hotel where she was staying. This last move proved too much for her, and through her lawyers she advised him she was about to obtain a restraining order unless he checked out. Reluctantly Grant—who did not wish to go to another hotel, where he knew he would surely be hounded by the press—took up an invitation to stay with one of his old friends from Hollywood, Robert Taplinger, who had recently moved to New York to run a major public relations firm.
Taplinger, whom Grant had met on one of his earlier films, was a notorious ladies' man, best remembered for his torrid affair with Bette Davis. He now had a huge bachelor pad on East 49th Street, where, for business, he entertained clients every night. That did not bother Grant at all, who was grateful for all the familiar faces that came by. Another thing that Grant appreciated was the close tabs Taplinger could keep on Cannon. As a bigtime PR executive, he was able to get advance warning on virtually every New York social and PR move Cannon made and happily passed them all along to Grant, who made it his business to show up at the same functions as his wife.
Taplinger, like many of Grant's friends, worried about his increasingly obsessive behavior toward Cannon and thought it might be good to distract him before he got in serious trouble for it. He began throwing small dinner parties in his friend's honor and made it a point to always include three or four young, single, and beautiful women, in the hope that one of them might catch Grant's eye.
One did. Her name was Luisa Flynn, a tall, slim, dark-haired Argentine beauty who was living in New York to represent a British-based firm with ties to Argentina specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Among all the hopeful beauties who paraded in front of Grant like so many finalists in the Miss America pageant, only Flynn, a divorcée with a six-year-old child who had kept her married name, paid no attention at all to Grant. In her early thirties, her first impression of him was that, while he was extremely good-looking, he was also quite old. After he had introduced himself to her, she asked someone his real age. Told he was sixty-three, she dismissed any and all further thoughts about him.
Grant, however, took a liking to her and struck up conversations at subsequent Taplinger parties. Flynn later recalled the extreme bitterness that punctuated all his talks: “He struck me as an angry and bitter man, and said awful things about his wife, from whom he was separated at the time. He always had a drink in his hand, and I thought that was probably fueling the level of his anger.”
There was something else Flynn noticed about Grant: he always mentioned Mae West. West had grown old and lonely, he said, and whenever he was in New York, where the aging onetime sex goddess was, he made it a point to visit her and talk about the old days. Flynn found that side of Grant endearing and thought to herself that West was far more suited to be his mother-surrogate than she.
As Cannon's Broadway stay lengthened, Grant began to look for reasons to remain in New York. He signed on with Columbia Records to make a Christmas album of readings from classic material, with Peggy Lee singing backgrounds. Unfortunately, the recording sessions left him maudlin and melancholy, and he started calling Cannon again, daily, sometimes hourly,
begging her to at least spend Christmas with him so that he wouldn't have to be alone over the holidays. She agreed, and they all had fun, but she still would not budge on her decision to pursue the divorce.
In January 1968 a disconsolate Grant returned to Los Angeles, but soon afterward began to commute weekends to New York to be near his wife and child. He always stayed with Taplinger, and whenever Flynn showed up tried to engage her in conversation.
To one of Taplinger's dinner parties, attended by such luminaries as Kirk and Anne Douglas, Aristotle Onassis and Maria Callas, Rosalind Russell and Freddie Brisson, Irene Mayer, and several of the upper echelon of international banking, Flynn decided to bring along her six-year-old son. Grant was immediately drawn to the boy and marveled at how physically beautiful he was. At one point Grant took Flynn aside and offered her a million dollars in cash to have his baby. Flynn brushed off the suggestion as a joke.
Also at the party that night were several film producers trying to get Grant to return to movies. More than one approached Flynn and asked her to use her influence, such as it was, to get him to consider their scripts. A famous French director said he would put up millions for the chance to work with Grant. Flynn merely directed them to the actor, made the appropriate introductions, and stayed as far away from the situation as possible, believing what Grant had told her so many times, that he had no intention of ever returning to film.
One other person he met while at one of Taplinger's soirées was Paul Blackman, the president and CEO of Fabergé. Blackman was a client of Taplinger who was assigned the job of finding celebrities to represent the company's products.
March 20, 1968, was the date the Los Angeles Superior Court had set to begin hearing testimony in Cannon's suit for divorce. As the day approached, Grant grew more apprehensive. On March 12 a few New York friends of his got together and threw a dinner party at Delmonico's in his honor, to try to cheer him up prior to his leaving for the airport to catch an evening flight for Los Angeles. He planned to leave from the Manhattan restaurant and go directly to Kennedy Airport. One of his friends offered to send him in a limousine.
Grant accepted. Gratia von Furstenberg, a young, good-looking woman in charge of special events at Delmonico's, went along for the ride to make sure a slightly inebriated Grant safely made it onto his flight.
The 1968 stretch Cadillac never made it to the airport, colliding with a truck on the Long Island Expressway. Ambulances quickly arrived with lights flashing and sirens screaming, then took Grant and Furstenberg to St. John's Queens Hospital, where he was treated for minor cuts and bruises, the worst being a nasty slash across his nose. Furstenberg suffered a broken leg and collarbone.
The accident couldn't have occurred at a worse time, and the presence in the limo of a pretty twenty-three-year-old, Grant knew, did nothing to help his upcoming court battle. The next morning his worst fears came true, when details of the accident, including the presence of Furstenberg in the limo, made front-page news across the country. Worse, everyone except Grant seemed to revel in their fifteen minutes of fame. A hospital spokesman told a hastily called press conference that his patient had only suffered surface wounds and that “Grant is as good-looking as he was yesterday. The only problem is that the nurses may kill him with kindness.”