Dear Cary: My Life With Cary Grant (21 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Culinary Capers

“Y
es, 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.

F
or 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.

O
ne 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 you'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.

D
espite 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.”

“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.

W
hen 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 . . .