Dear Cary: My Life With Cary Grant (26 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Standoff

D
ad called from the airport the next morning as soon as he arrived. Cary had already left for the studio. By then, I'd pulled myself together, more or less, but I dissolved into tears as soon as I laid eyes on him.

He didn't say anything, but his eyes flashed with shock when he saw me. He wrapped me up in his arms and held me for several minutes. When he let go, the shoulder of his jacket was damp with tears. We sat down on the couch.

“What's going on, sweetheart?” Dad asked me firmly. “Tell me.”

It came out in drips and drops, then splatters, then torrents. I'm not sure I was really even aware of what I was telling him, but he knew it was bad. I finally wound down. Dad looked at me and asked, “Is that all, Dyan?”

“Yes.” I sighed.

He looked at me. “Dyan, Addie told us you've been taking LSD. Is that true?”

Well, Addie and I were certainly going to have a little talk, too.

“Yes,” I replied weakly.

Dad was now on red alert. I could see his Adam's apple bobbing up and down as he tried to swallow his alarm.

Once again, I found myself defending Cary. I tried to explain to Dad that LSD wasn't for fun, that it was part of Cary's spiritual exploration, that he was such a believer in the drug as a force for good . . . that Cary believed it had brought him closer to God.

“Dyan, I can't speak for Cary, but as far as I can see, the only thing it's bringing you closer to is misery. Honey, listen. I've been reading up on this stuff, and there's only one conclusion to come to: it is
extremely dangerous.
You know they're talking about outlawing it, and they should. It's insane that it's not
already
against the law.” Dad put his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. “You're playing with fire, and your mother and I are extremely concerned.”

There was nothing I could say. I buried myself in my father's arms and I wept.

C
ary came home in the early afternoon. The four of us—Cary, my dad, Jennifer, and I—spent some polite time together. Cary went on as if nothing was amiss, but there was an unsettling glint in his eye. On the outside, he was low-key and friendly, but underneath the mask, he was like a cat in a crouch, waiting to pounce. The forced civility was driving me nuts. Right about when I didn't think I could stand it any longer, it was Jennifer's feeding time. It was a relief to escape to the nursery, where I gave her a bottle and I sat rocking her, taking refuge from the tension in the living room.

After a while, I heard Cary and Dad talking in the hallway. They were speaking softly. But there was an edge to the conversation that made me uncomfortable. I tucked Jennifer into her crib and stepped out of the bedroom and literally into the middle of that conversation.

“Why are you giving her drugs, Cary? What do you think it'll accomplish?”

“LSD saved my life, Ben. And it can save hers too.”

“From
what,
Cary? Is her life in jeopardy? Because if it is, I want to know about it!”

“Anyone who hasn't faced the truth about themselves is in jeopardy.”

“She doesn't need drugs, Cary. She needs love.
Your
love. And it doesn't look to me like she's getting a lot of that.”

“How would you know about that, Ben?”

“She's my daughter. And I
know
her better than anyone.”

“Well, she's
my wife,
Ben. She lives under my roof. That means she's under
my
jurisdiction now.”

Jurisdiction.
The word stopped me cold. I wasn't under his wing. I wasn't under his roof. I was under his “jurisdiction.”

They were both tall men, and I stood between them, my head at the level of their chests as they battled over my well-being, eye to eye. They were so absorbed in the subject of
me
that I don't think they even realized
I
was there.

And maybe I wasn't, I thought. I felt more and more like I was turning into a ghost, invisible to the two men I loved most in my life, watching voicelessly as they argued with the deeply swallowed anger that is peculiar to gentlemen, which they both were. I thought of the night in the desert when they plunged into the cold pool and yelped like coyotes as if they were two lost brothers who'd finally found each other. And I started to feel as if I were watching them through a thick pane of glass, as if I were standing in front of an aquarium, close enough to touch the life inside the tank, yet unable to.

I had gone numb to my core. I couldn't feel, couldn't talk, couldn't hurt, couldn't love.
Maybe this is what death is,
I thought. No, not just death. This was hell: I was gone but my power of observation remained, and I wanted to shut it off but I couldn't. Somewhere in my soul, a light had gone out.

I turned and went back into the nursery.

Late that night, alone in the kitchen, I wrote:

Do you know what I mean when you swallow a scream

And pretend it's not there yet it's filling the air

All around me I see the pain I can't feel

All around me I feel the pain I can't see

How it hurts to be me

How it hurts to be me

T
he next day, I drove Dad to the airport. The showdown between Cary and him had ended in the only way possible: Cary was the sheriff in the town where I now lived, and Dad had to go back to his own territory. For practical purposes, I was inanimate as a sack of flour. In the car, Dad didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to say. So we didn't say much of anything until we got to the airport and I pulled up to Dad's terminal. We sat in the car for a moment, both of us looking straight ahead. Then Dad put his hand over mine and, still looking through the windshield, said, “Dyan, why don't you get on the plane and come home with me?”

I rested my head on the steering wheel.

“I can't, Daddy.”

“I guess I knew that.” He sighed.

After Dad got home that night, Mom called. “Take Jennifer, get on a plane, and come home,” she told me. “You need a time-out and you need rest.”

“I can't run away now, Mom. I have to face this and fix it.”

“You can't fix it if you're feeling broken. Dyan.
Please
.”

“Sorry, Mom.”

For two days, Cary and I didn't say a word to each other. I kept my attention centered on Jennifer, holding her close, trying to shield her from the hostility that swirled around the house like dust devils. Through her, I could still feel the pulse of life beyond our tormented household, though that pulse was weak. Cary would take her and play with her when he got home while I retreated to the bedroom and lay on the bed, limp as a rag. A voice inside kept telling me,
You can't do this anymore
. It was answered by another voice that said,
But you have to. You have to go on. Not just for yourself, but for your daughter
. I cried a lot, and in fact, just about anything could trigger my tears. A song, a television commercial, a squirrel outside the window. I spent a lot of the day softly weeping.

On the third day, Cary broke the silence. When he came home, I was in the bathtub. Crying again. I was drained. I looked up to see him standing in the doorway.

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

“Because I'm sad.”

“It seems like you're crying a lot lately.”

“I've been sad a lot lately.”

He was quiet. Very quiet. Then he looked at me with undisguised irritation. “I asked you a question,” he said. “I want to know what you're crying about.”

I buried my face in my hands.

“Dyan, talk to me!”

The words took on a life of their own, rushing out of my mouth before I could edit them:

“Cary, don't you have everything you want? I know I'm not the perfect wife, but I'll try harder. I'm still
Dyan,
Cary. I'm not your mother, who disappeared on you. I'm not your father, who lied to you. I'm
Dyan.
And I love you and we have a wonderful child together and you finally have the family you've always wanted.
Why are you throwing us away?
”

It was as if he hadn't heard a word. As if he couldn't or
wouldn't
allow himself to hear it. I looked up at him. His face was as wooden as a totem mask.

“What happened to the laughter?” I asked softly. “We were always laughing together. What happened?”

“That was a different time,” he said grimly.

“You want to know what I'm crying about, Cary? I'm crying because you made me promise that I wouldn't let you do this. You made me promise that I wouldn't let you turn me into Elsie. Don't force me to break my promise. You're the one who's cracking our foundation. You're not giving our marriage a chance. It's almost like you want me to leave. Do you want me to leave, Cary?”

“Maybe that's all I'm good at—making people leave me.”

He slammed the front door as he left the house.

I heard Jennifer start crying. I got out of the tub, took Cary's heavy robe off the wardrobe hook, and went to the nursery. I wrapped the robe around Jennifer and me and quieted her.

Cary didn't come home that night. I took Jennifer to bed with me. On the nightstand I saw the stack of newspaper and magazine clippings Cary had deposited there for my education. I started to read them, thinking he'd be pleased that I'd done my homework . . . then I realized the insanity of thinking
Reader's Digest
articles would make any difference in this mess of a marriage. I lay there, trying not to toss and turn so I wouldn't disturb Jennifer. I got very little sleep. I thought maybe Cary had slipped in during the night and gone to sleep in one of the extra bedrooms, so I went to check. But no, he hadn't come home. At seven, I called Cary's bungalow—no answer. I called Addie and told her the situation. I thought maybe I should call the police. She said I shouldn't. She said to calm down and wait, that he was only shaking it off by himself somewhere. At ten, I called the bungalow again. Dorothy answered. She said he wasn't there, but I wasn't sure I believed her. I wasn't sure of anything.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Breaking Points

I
had just put Jennifer down for her noon nap when the intercom buzzed. The nanny came into the nursery to tell me that Stanley Fox was outside the gate, and should she let him in? I nodded and went to open the front door.

“Stanley! Is something wrong? Has something happened to Cary?”

“No, Dyan, Cary's fine,” Stanley said.

“Oh, thank God.” I let a shiver run through me. “He didn't come home last night. I've been so worried.”

“Dyan, can I come in?”

I'd always liked Stanley and found him to be a calming presence. When other people were getting excited or wound up, Stanley was the calm in the storm. That day, though, there was something about Stanley that put me on edge. Something was amiss and I knew it, but I had no idea what. “Can we go into the study?” he asked.

“Of course.” I offered him coffee. He declined in a way that indicated he wasn't going to stay long.

The only furniture in the study was a desk and two chairs. Stanley sat down in the chair behind the desk, intertwined his fingers, and leaned forward—almost as if I'd
asked
for this conference. I sat down, facing the window. Outside, the swimming pool caught the noon sun and kicked a beam of light through the window. It backlit Stanley so that the light burst in all around him while his face was in shadow.

“Dyan, from what I understand, things haven't been going very well between you and Cary. And I'm sorry to hear that.” Stanley was a slow and smooth talker. It was part of his negotiating style—long, elongated words oozed out like molasses while his mind was spinning at a thousand rpms. It was driving me crazy. I wished he'd come right to the point. Right then, Jennifer started crying. I went to the nursery and quieted her down, then returned to the study and sat back down across from Stanley.

“Well, I talked to Cary this morning,” he said. “He thinks it might be best if you two separated.”

I went into shock. All of my instincts had told me to brace myself for a left hook. But this punch came out of nowhere. I really didn't see it coming. It didn't register.

“You know, Stanley, I've been up all night waiting for my husband to come home, and I'm a little bleary. What does that mean—‘separated'? I don't understand.”

“Dyan, I'm sorry, but it means he wants a divorce.”

The man who said he would love me forever and never leave me didn't love me anymore and wanted to leave me. My head hurt.

“Excuse me for a minute.” I went to the hall and took three deep breaths, then returned and sat down again.

There was a long and naked silence between us. Finally, I said, “Stanley, what kind of a man would ask another man to go to his home and tell his wife that he wants a divorce?”

Stanley stayed cool as rain, didn't blink, just looked at me for a second and said, “I'm sorry about this, Dyan. I'll let myself out.”

My heart was in my throat. I couldn't breathe.

I sat there for a long time, thinking. Memories arose and dissolved. Some lingered longer than others. Cary with his socks stuck to the kitchen floor in a puddle of gooey, dried cola. Cary crashing his car the day he came to propose and chickened out. Cary kissing me in London with my face all spattered with red blotches.

I called Addie and told her what happened. She asked if she should come over, but I told her I needed to be alone and not think. But about ten minutes later when I thought I was going to lose my mind, I called my mom and dad and told them the news. “I made a commitment to marry, and until death do us part,” I told them. “But I'm dying here.” I sobbed. “What shall I do? I don't know what to do.”

“The first thing to do is to take a few breaths and get as calm as you can,” Dad said. “Don't try to make any important decisions when you're this emotional.”

“Then what?” I asked dispiritedly.

“Honey,” Dad said, “I can only tell you what works for me when things are tough. I pray.”

“To whom?
My
god has let me down.
My
god has asked for a divorce.
My
god doesn't want me anymore. And I will
die
without him. You have to understand that. I will die.”

My dad said, “Honey, Cary Grant is not God.”

My mother chimed in and said, “Ben, that's the first time you and I ever agreed on anything to do with God. Your dad's right, honey.” Then I heard my mom start to cry.

Dad said, “I'm going to send you a ticket. We want you to come home.”

“I'll keep you posted,” I told him.

I spent the rest of the day in a fugue of numbness. When the phone rang, I didn't pick up; I knew it was my parents and I really didn't have anything to tell them. In a way, though, I felt relief. Finally, Cary and I had pulled off our masks. We had dropped the pretenses and the politeness, stopped pretending that the boat wasn't about to capsize. There was something liberating about that. Or maybe I was just getting weirder faster than my situation was.

W
hen Cary finally came home late in the day, he sat down across from me in the living room. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. I didn't. After a few moments, he said, “Stanley told me he talked to you.”

After a pause I said, “You know, Cary, after Stanley left, I remembered the time I was in the hospital and you told me you were a coward. I didn't believe you then. I do now.” We stared at each other for a bit, saying nothing. “Tell me exactly how you want me to do this,” I said.

“It's up to you.”

“Cary, you just asked me for a divorce. Or rather, your attorney did. Please.
Please
tell me, what happened to ‘I'll love you forever and I'll never leave you'?”

“You were different then.”

“So were you . . . What do you
want,
Cary?”

“A happy family. Peace. Joy.”

“And how are you contributing to that?”

Cary moved toward me. “Honestly, Dyan, I don't want you to leave,” he said, and started to put his arms around me. But I pushed him back.

“Please tell me how in the hell you're able to reconcile ‘I don't want you to leave' with ‘I want a divorce.' Maybe I'm slow, but to my mind, they don't fit together very well.”

“Dyan, maybe it was a bad move. I was upset and I didn't know how else to get through to you.”

“You're playing with me like I'm some kind of a yo-yo, Cary.”

I went into the bathroom and turned on the tub faucet. I sat on the edge of the tub for a few minutes, just listening to the water.

When I came out, Cary was in his armchair, holding Jennifer, talking baby talk to her. It was dusk and the sunset was a melting smear of gold-tinged pink filling the living room's long picture window. A single lamp cast the two of them in a low, golden light: Cary with his collar open and tie loosened, just the hint of a five o'clock shadow, holding our pink, happy baby in her blue jumper. She gripped his finger with her tiny hand. He kissed her nose. She broke into a big baby smile. He broke into a big daddy smile. Baby love. Daddy love . . . Gorgeous to watch.

The specter of prying Jennifer loose from Cary with divorce was more terrifying, more painful, and more unbearable than any session of LSD. The way things were, there were three of us in a lifeboat that only had room for two. I had been drinking salt water for too long, and I wouldn't last much longer if I kept it up. But to push Cary out of the boat and separate him from his family? He would drown, I thought. He would drown in anguish. Of course, he would be able to see her, but I felt deeply that he needed the
complete
family—Jennifer
and
me—to keep his dream.

I was convinced of this. I was sure I was the only thing holding the three of us together, individually and collectively, but I was not far from drying to dust and scattering to the four winds. Even if I managed to keep myself in one piece, though, what would the poisonous and oppressive atmosphere do to Jennifer?

Over and over, I tried to balance these ideas against each other. I got nowhere.

I was scared for myself. I was scared of dying. Something was wrong with me. I hadn't been myself in a while, and I wondered if it had something to do with LSD. I had been having memory lapses and midstream gaps in my concentration. I would forget what I was saying in midsentence, forget what I was doing in midaction, forget where I was going, even from room to room. I kept thinking tomorrow would be better. I was
certain
tomorrow would be better. But what about today?

I brooded over what to do. Cary was obsessed with the idea that LSD would make me whole. I wished I could believe him, but how could I when the wondrous benefits he claimed to have received from it were invisible to me? But I had to do it, I decided. For the sake of being able to say I'd tried everything, I had to give it one more shot.

That night we lay on the bed in the dark, each stretched out with our arms folded over our chests, like two bodies in repose on a funeral slab.

“If you want me to try LSD again, I will,” I said.

Cary stretched his arm across me and pulled me closer. “I knew you weren't a quitter,” he said. “You almost made it last time. Dyan, I can't even describe to you what's waiting for you on the other side. Only that it is a whole new universe.”

“Is that where God lives?” I asked wearily.

“Thank you for trusting me, dear girl. You won't be sorry.”

So, to reach one more time for that golden star of transformation, I went back for another dose. I took Vince and Artis up on their long-standing offer to take Jennifer and the nanny for a day. They came for them at about ten, and we took the drug at eleven. An hour later I looked out the long living room window at the swimming pool, from which sprang a tall, powder-blue maple tree, into which a huge flock of crows descended. I could hear them cawing, and the sound of it grew louder and louder, becoming ever more distorted until it sounded like the motor of a chain saw, except much lower. The crows and the whole tree turned red—and then faded into a rose-colored glow that reminded me of the taillights of an old Chevy. Then the birds dissolved into a unified mass around the tree in the shape of a gigantic heart that throbbed and thrummed with a terrifying echo.

Cary asked what I was seeing, and I described this to him. “Stay with it,” he told me, but I was getting very uncomfortable.

I was utterly convinced that my blood vessels were going to burst through my skin any minute. Oh, and my teeth were buzzing. “Cary, I think I'm really going to lose it.”

“You can handle it. You're getting there.”

“Getting where?”

“Let your mind enter the vision. The truth is wrapped up inside of it.”

I looked at Cary. There was a kind of energy pulsating from his body that I wasn't sure I could see but that I could definitely feel. Thought waves that traveled across the room like blue smoke and curled around my skull. Cary's thought waves. They circled around my mind and tightened until I felt like an iron mask had been clamped over my head. “Cary, I think you'd better give me a Valium,” I said. My rib cage was constricting around my lungs and before long my internal organs were going to be squeezed up my throat and out of my mouth.

“Stay with it, Dyan. It may not be easy but it's worth it.”

I looked back at the tree, which had turned into a mass of black, undulating energy, and I had a terrifying sensation that it was pulling me into it. I described that to Cary and pleaded with him to give me a Valium. “Not yet,” he said.

“Yes,
now
. I'm being sucked into a dark tunnel.”

“Dyan, you have to find out what's on the other side.”

“Oh my God, Cary! I'm in the tunnel. Get me out of here! Get me out of here! It's so dark. It's so dark.”

“You've got to go through that tunnel, Dyan.”

“Cary, listen to me. I can't breathe. I'm going to
die. I'm going to die.
”

“And then you'll be reborn!” Cary kneeled beside me. His eyes were two pools of mercury. “You'll be reborn and you'll be new!”

“Make it stop! Stop it now!” Then I screamed for my life.

T
he next few days, we retreated back into that old, lethal politeness—the cold war of our marriage. It could have gone on like that indefinitely, perhaps even forever. At first, I dealt with it by not thinking about it. But then I reassessed the situation. The LSD experiment was finally and permanently over and done with. “Never again,” I'd told him after that last gruesome time. I meant it and he knew it. “My psyche won't take another battering like that.”

“If it won't, it won't,” Cary said curtly, walking away.

Where did that leave me? Acting was out—Cary had put down his foot about that. The only avenue open to me was redoubling my efforts at being a wife, mother, and homemaker.

I decided that a nonworking mother with only one child didn't really need a nanny, and in fact, having one left me with too much time on my hands and nothing much to do with it. I regretfully let Kathleen, our nanny, go. I told her she was wonderful, but that I thought I needed to take charge of the home myself. I'd be a full-time mom to Jennifer and more of an all-around homemaker for her and Cary, who I naively thought would be pleased.

Pleased he was not, and in fact he became visibly upset when I told him. He challenged my strategy on every level. What if he needed me for some reason and I was stuck in the kitchen “trying” to cook? He needed me to be available when he wanted me. I liked the idea that he wanted me close by. Maybe in some crazy way, it meant I was making progress. But he concluded by insisting that I call Kathleen and tell her to come back before somebody else hired her.