Dear Cary: My Life With Cary Grant (29 page)

Forgive him?
I thought.
Huh. That's an interesting idea.

One night I lay sleepless. I was detoxing from the pills and I was in a cold sweat, but my mind burned like a forest fire. I tossed and turned, took deep breaths when I found myself hyperventilating. I stood in the corner, thinking I would stand until sleep came over me, but it didn't.

And it slowly dawned on me:

I was in Fishponds.

A mental institution.

A lunatic asylum!

Had it been like this for Elsie?

Did an ambulance come for her, or did Elias tell her they were going for a ride, when the destination was really Fishponds? Did they take her by her wrists, and bind them to a stretcher, and take her away? Did she scream and fight and kick when they closed the door on her in her room at Fishponds? Did she know she'd be there for the rest of her life, her disappearance a mystery to her only son?

In a panic, I packed my bag. I was getting out of there first thing in the morning. But would they let me leave? What would I do if I did leave? I collapsed in the chair, feeling defeated. My mother had signed me into this place, and I wasn't even sure I could sign myself out. But my parents were due to visit the next day. Visitors from the outside were greatly restricted. But at the end of the second week, Dr. James had agreed that a visit from my parents might be beneficial. He was also sympathetic to how desperately I missed Jennifer, and they at least would provide a firsthand account of how she was doing. But the next day, as the time for their visit approached, I found myself sinking. I felt ashamed of myself and sorry for them—to have a daughter who'd been completely knocked off her trolley.

There is nothing more miserable than trying to act like you're all right in front of the people who know better than anyone that you're not. Mom and Dad both showed the strain of this painful charade.

Of course, right off I asked about Jennifer. My parents had told her I was working far away and that I would be back very soon. I asked Mom if she was reading Pooh Bear to her and singing her to sleep every night—which was really crazy, because nobody knew better than me what a great mom my mom was. “Every night,” Mom assured me. “She misses you, honey, but she's fine. And she made this for you.” Mom took a drawing from her purse. It was a picture of a lion and a giraffe, standing next to each other. Apparently, in Jennifer's world, lions and giraffes got along just fine. She had written a little note in small, messy block letters. “I helped her a little with the lettering, but the words are all hers,” Mom said.

I read them. They said, “I miss you. You are the perfect mom. Come home soon.” She had signed it, “With lots of hugs and love, Jennifer.”

I looked at the drawing and wept.

I miss you. You are the perfect mom
.

“I want to go home,” I said.

“It's not time, honey,” Mom replied. “But hopefully it won't be long. As soon as the doctor says it's all right . . .” She touched my cheek. “Let yourself have this time to sort things out.”

I'd been determined to have Mom get me released from this loony bin that very day . . . but if even Mom thought I needed to be here . . . I must still be pretty shaky, I thought.

Dr. James had, of course, met Vince the night I went off wandering, and he allowed me a visit with Vince a few days later. He was my only other visitor the whole time I was there.

“How did you find me that night?” I asked him.

Vince sighed and then he smiled. I took that as a good sign. Vince was completely transparent. He couldn't conceal his feelings any more than a leopard can hide his spots. “I drove around the neighborhood for three hours,” he said. “We were all just beside ourselves. Then it came to me to call Lily. I called her from a phone booth and we prayed. I got back in the car and about twenty minutes later I saw the lights on in that big white house, and . . . I can't really explain it, but I knew that's where I'd find you.”

“That's unbelievable,” I said.

“I would've thought so too a couple of years ago,” Vince said. “But now it's not so unbelievable.”

“And why is that?” I asked.

“It's a big subject,” Vince said. “But it all comes down to faith. Once you get a little glimmer of how powerful faith really is, a lot of things that used to be impossible to imagine seem perfectly natural.”

“And you learned that from Lily?”

“Lily showed me where to look,” Vince said.

It was the first time I'd thought about Lily for a few months, but I remembered those few words she had said to me that had spoken so much—not just for their content, but for some intangible echo of truth that reverberated around them.
That doesn't sound like love . . .

It was another night of staring at the ceiling with my mind churning like a geyser pool. That word “faith” pricked at my thoughts. I'd had faith in Cary. I'd had faith in love. I'd had faith in marriage. To put your faith in something, I thought, was like taking all of your worldly possessions, as well as your body, mind, and soul, and putting them on the roulette table. That's what I'd done and I'd gone bust. From now on, I thought, I was keeping my faith to myself. Except,
who was “myself”
? If I were going to put my faith in myself, I was really in a sorry situation. There were times when I felt all that was left of me was that muddy white nightgown pinned to a laundry line and whipping in the breeze.

I'd put my faith in Cary to the extent that I had lost the ability to think for myself. I had let him think my thoughts for me, and I had struggled mightily to learn how to think
his
thoughts. I did that to save him the trouble of having to constantly instruct me on the science of thinking Cary Grant thoughts with a Dyan Cannon mind.

And I had come to believe my inability to do this was a terrible shortcoming.

Now Vince and Artis were putting their faith in Lily . . . but who was Lily? Vince had said Lily had told him “where to look.” I wondered what he meant by that. But was putting one's faith in Lily any better than putting one's faith in Cary?

I was so used to serving that without a master I felt like a vagabond roaming alone in the dark. Who would I now serve? On my worst nights, I desperately wanted to be back serving Cary once again. But at the same time I was bitterly angry at my fallen idol, and in that anger came a certain kind of energy. Anger is a powerful thing. It had given little, petite me the strength to thwart three monstrous linebackers. Anger, I thought, kept Elsie alive all those years. Anger could blow up the world.

But something told me that I didn't want to let anger be my life force.

The problem was, I couldn't see any alternative.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Breakthrough

I
began to settle into the daily routine of the hospital. Morning shower. Make the bed. Breakfast of fake scrambled eggs, a pleasant bacon-like substance, limp toast, and Tang—I ate like I'd been in a famine. A session with the doctor. Lunch. A group session. Arts and crafts. Quiet time. Dinner and television and then back to bed.

A middle-aged woman moderated the group sessions, and she'd call on us like we were shy schoolchildren, urging us to talk. One woman talked about having been molested; one man talked about his mother, who didn't love him; another woman talked about her husband, who had cheated on her with her best friend. At first, I didn't want to hear their pathetic stories, and I didn't want to tell them mine. But gradually the stories didn't seem so pathetic. I started to understand where they came from and how they got where they were. They were normal, intelligent people who had been pushed over the edge, one way or another, just like me. All seemed fragile. They had reached a point where the pressures of daily living had become too difficult to bear.

I could relate to that.

It was at least a couple of weeks before I could muster the presence to say anything when called upon. Finally, when I decided to speak, I blurted out, “My husband said maybe a breakdown would be good for me. But I think I'd rather have gone to Disneyland.” There were a few empathetic chuckles. We were all in the same boat, and the biggest wall that could be broken down between people was judgment. “Well, I got what
he
wanted.” There was some more sympathetic giggling. “And I feel like I've been wandering through the scariest funhouse ever created. I see myself in all these different mirrors, I can't tell whether I'm eight feet tall and six inches wide, or six feet wide and eight inches tall.”

“What do you think he meant when he said a breakdown would be good for you?” the moderator asked.

“You know, I think there was a part of me he would never be able to control, and he couldn't stand that. But now that I
am
broken, who's going to put me back together again?”

“Do you really think you're broken?” the moderator asked, prodding me.

“No,” I said, though my answer truly surprised me. “I think I'm badly bent.”

The group laughed, and as the session went on, a few other people who had never shared before opened their mouths for the first time.

T
he afternoon was playtime—board games, cards—just like kindergarten for loonies. Or we were allowed to go back to our rooms and enjoy a little solitude, which is what I usually chose. Then we had dinner and watched television. One evening, we were watching a rerun of
77 Sunset Strip.
I was drowsy and hadn't tuned in to the fact that it was an episode of the show that I'd been in. One of the other patients recognized me. “Look,” she said. “That's you!”

I started to freeze in embarrassment, but I thought,
Isn't this just what you always wanted, Dyan? To be known for your acting?
So what if I was in the nuthouse? That was only an image of me on television, one that had nothing to do with who I really was.

“That's me all right,” I said, mustering a fairly sincere laugh.

“You're an actress!” one lady exclaimed.

“Yes, I am,” I said. “I'm really just here to research my next role as a patient in a mental ward.”

They laughed with me, not at me. “Well, you know where to find extras!” one man said.

I smiled at the idea of making my own movie with my fellow patients as extras. In a way, this whole thing—my whole life, in fact—seemed like a movie. But from where did the movie of my life originate? You can't change what's happening in a movie by going up to the screen, reaching into it, and changing what the characters are saying and doing. So what could I do to change it?

It occurred to me that what I was seeing in the movie of my life came from a projector of some sort—just like all movies did. And I thought,
Well, if I don't like the movie, why not change the reel?

I stayed with that thought for a while. I was tired of watching the movie about Dyan being heartbroken, miserable, and crazy as a cage full of howler monkeys. I wanted a change. I wanted to watch the movie about Dyan restored to full strength and vitality, full of energy, love, and mirth.

C
oming off the pills, I had many sleepless nights with too much time to think, and I had no appetite. But gradually, my appetite started to come back, and when it did, it did so with a vengeance. I certainly needed nourishment, but I also was aware that I was using food to fill the void that I'd been using drugs for. Neither me nor my fellow patients were likely to ever miss a meal. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks—yeah, it was hospital food, but it was
food
.

Out of habit, I reflexively went to the bathroom to purge after the first couple of meals, but I stopped myself. It no longer felt right, but I still struggled with it. The compulsion began to lessen, though it would take months more of determination to abandon it completely. However, I knew I needed to get my strength back, and to do that I needed to keep what I ate. Over the weeks I made progress and started gaining weight.

I started to feel my mind lightening and I really started to feel like I was in the safe place I needed to be, as Dr. James had said so emphatically. I started to trust Dr. James, as well as the other facilitators. I guess that was what they called progress.

One night when I was fast asleep, a bolt of light from the hallway shot across the floor. I opened my eyes, then closed them again, thinking it was a nurse who'd come in by mistake. The door closed, and then I felt the covers being pulled off of me and I looked up to see that midwestern orderly who had been so nice and gotten me my cheese sandwich. Before I knew it, he pushed my shoulders to the mattress, climbed on top of me, and started kissing me. When he reached for my legs, I grabbed his wrist and hissed into his ear, “Get out of here right now or I'm going to scream.”

“Why would you do that?” he grunted. “I
work
here and you're
crazy
. Who's going to believe
you
?”

I screamed like a banshee. Farm Boy rolled off the bed onto the floor, sprang up, and bolted. A nurse rushed in, asking what had happened, and I told her.

“I saw him running out of your room,” she said. “Don't worry! We'll take care of it. You're safe now.”

Yeah, right. I shoved a chair against the door and lay in bed all night, unable to sleep. Was I ever going to find a safe place?

Dr. James came by at about nine in the morning. When he came in, he saw my packed bag resting by the door.

“I'm sorry, Dyan,” Dr. James said. “You'll never see that orderly again.”

“I want out of here,” I said. “Now.”

He sat down on the chair I'd blockaded the door with. “Dyan, I am as upset as you are by what happened last night, and I accept full responsibility,” he said. “I am taking every measure, for your safety and that of all the other patients, to make certain nothing like that ever happens again. I understand you wanting to leave, but you've been making good progress. And I'll work with you to the best of my ability to make sure this doesn't result in a setback for you.”

“I was almost raped last night,” I said.

“But thankfully, you weren't. A lot of terrible things can ‘almost' happen. But you can work with it, if you try.”

“How?” I asked skeptically.

“It's like we've been talking about. We can't change the past and we can't control the future. What happened is over and done with, and thank goodness you're all right. You can turn it into either a setback or a stepping stone.”

“You can't keep me here,” I said, persisting, though I wasn't actually sure whether he could or not.

“That's true enough. But, Dyan, this unfortunate incident aside, aren't you starting to feel more stable?”

I didn't answer because I didn't want to admit it was true.

“Please stay with this, Dyan. You're doing so well,” Dr. James said. “Stick with the truth. It won't let you down.” He turned and left the room.

I looked at my bag.

I've got to leave, I've got to get out of here,
I thought
. There's absolutely nothing wrong with me
. And then suddenly, I stopped.
Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. What is the truth here? I broke down, that's the truth. But, Dyan, they're not trying to lock you up and throw away the key. You're not Elsie and this is not Fishponds. And there are people out there who love and care about you. Your mom, your dad, Addie, Mary . . . most of all your daughter—she needs you!
And then I stopped and thought,
But even if there was no one in the entire world who cared about you, would your life still be of value? Think about that. No more pity party. Snap out of it!

Something was changing, shifting, moving.

T
he next morning I played hooky from the group session and went into the game room. There were a number of books on the shelves and I chose one at random, looking for something fairly mindless to gaze at. This one was a picture book written for young people called
Creatures of the Wild
. I opened the book to a section on monkeys and started reading.

There was a story about how hunters caught monkeys. The hunters would go to the place where the monkeys lived and dig holes in the ground the length of the monkeys' arms. They would place jars in the bottom of the hole and then jostle big sacks of nuts around as the monkeys watched them from above in the trees. Finally, the men would pour nuts into the jar at the bottom of the hole and leave.

The monkeys would see the nuts placed in the holes and would scurry down from the trees to get their share when the hunters had gone. But the hole was wider at the bottom than at the top, and with their fists clenched around the nuts, the monkeys couldn't get their arms out. They had to let go of the nuts first. But unfortunately, they held on. So when the hunters came back, the monkeys were trapped. What monkeys loved more than anything was their freedom, but they'd sacrificed it for a few lousy nuts. All they had to do was let go, and they'd be free. But they held on.

Why did that strike such a chord in me? And then I realized that I was just like those monkeys. I was stuck. Really stuck, because
I wouldn't let go . . .

But I couldn't let go, because I didn't know how.

T
hat afternoon, I had a session with Dr. James and I told him about the monkeys. He smiled. “What do you have to let go of?”

“I don't know,” I answered.

“Think about it.”

I was quiet. “Okay, come to think of it, I don't want to let go of anything.”

“Why not?”

“Well, at least the monkeys had their damn nuts to hold on to. If I let go, what will I hold on to?”

The doctor just looked at me expectantly.

“Doctor! I asked you a question! You infuriate me when I ask you a question and you don't answer! You're the smart one here. What will I hold on to if I let go?”

He just stared at me, not saying a word.

“I've lost everything,” I said. “Do you understand? There's nothing to hold on to.”

“Think about it.”

“Damn it! What's to think about? This stinking world doesn't work! People make promises and break them. They get your hearts, then twist them and turn them until you're on empty. Okay? Okay! I'll let go of that. How's that?” The words were boiling out of my mouth, and it seemed like I didn't have anything to do with them.

“That's a good start,” the doctor said. “What else?”

“I'll let go of all of the hurt. I'll let go of all of the pain. And I'll let go of not wanting to help myself. And I'll let go of
him.
”

“Him? Him
who
?”

“Him, Cary. And all of the hims that hurt me.”

There was a long pause and then the doctor said, “Good. Very good. So you see, Dyan, you do have the answer.”

“I do?”

“Yes. You let go of the pain and you hold on to the peace. When you let go of the hurt, it's gone. When you loosen your hold on the sadness, joy takes its rightful place. Do you see that?”

“I'm not sure I do.”

“Okay, you asked me what you would have to hold on to if you let go, right? After you let go of all the things you just talked about, what you have to hold on to is a fresh new concept of yourself.”

I was very quiet.

“This is big, Dyan. Give it a chance.”