Dear Cary: My Life With Cary Grant (25 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY

Shrinking

“D
yan, sit down,” Cary said the next evening, his voice filled with paternal gravity. “We need to talk.” I sat down across from him on the couch. “I'm very worried about you, Dyan. You're turning into a ghost of yourself.” I looked at him blankly. I thought about shutting out his words, but I continued to listen. “I'm sending you to New York.”

“What in the world for? I just got off the plane.”

“Dyan, the time has come for some professional help.”

“Professional help for
what
?”

“For our relationship.”

“Okay then, are
you
coming?”

“No, I'm not. Mortimer has recommended a psychotherapist and I think it's very important that you spend some time with him. I've been on the phone with him myself, and I have to say I'm very impressed. This man, Bernard Martin, has broken new ground in the field, and Mortimer says he's the best in the business.” Cary went on. “I wouldn't have you bother with any of the garden-variety shrinks.”

“If this is for
our
relationship, then why would I need professional help more than you do?”

“Mortimer helps me with my issues with LSD therapy. But you've made it very clear that that's not for you.”

I couldn't argue with that. Cary was indeed doing LSD with his mahatma. I didn't want to do LSD with his mahatma. I didn't want to leave Jennifer either. I told him I wouldn't go without her, and if I couldn't take her, then I wasn't going. Cary insisted that it wasn't practical since I'd be having daylong sessions with the doctor and that I needed to keep my attention solely on that. We argued over that one for a while, and finally I caved because I felt it would be best not to put Jennifer through the disruption of the trip.

“When do I leave?” I asked with a long sigh.

“Tomorrow.”

“
Tomorrow?
Cary, that's impossible.”

“I'm sorry for springing it on you like this, but this is the only week Dr. Martin will have time. He's extremely busy, and he's cleared his schedule just for you. I would have told you sooner, but I didn't want you dwelling on it while you were in Portland.”

Cary had called his friend Johnny Maschio and asked if his wife, Connie Moore, would be willing to go with me to New York. I didn't know Connie very well. She wasn't a close friend, but I liked her a lot, though it was odd that Cary would choose someone I hardly knew to accompany me on the Journey to the Center of My Mind. So Connie made the Sunday afternoon flight from L.A. to New York with me. At first it was a little awkward for both of us, but we soon got comfortable with each other.

That night we checked into the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, on Central Park, and the next morning, just before ten, I went to my appointment with Dr. Bernard Martin. He was in his early forties, with a voluminous body and a little head. I kept wanting to call him Dr. Pillsbury, after the Pillsbury Doughboy.

“Let's get started,” he said. The fact that he had cleared his schedule for me made me uncomfortable. I didn't know very much about psychotherapy, but something seemed amiss with the idea of being head-bombed for a whole week straight. If I really had that many bats in my belfry, it seemed like I ought to either be kept in a cage or rent my brain out to science.

I arrived in the morning and stayed as long as I could tolerate it. Sometimes the sessions were so draining that I'd have to break after an hour or two and walk around Central Park for a while to air out before we resumed. At other times we talked straight through the day into early evening.

Naturally, we talked about my childhood, and Dr. Martin alternately seemed deeply disappointed and downright put out that I would not own up to any mind-shattering childhood trauma. Naturally, we rehashed the history of my relationship with Cary. Not so naturally, he seemed to know a whole hell of a lot about my marriage for someone who was supposed to be a neutral, nonpartisan mental health practitioner. He asked me if I was committed to the marriage, which infuriated me. He asked why I was so intent on acting when I'd agreed to give up my career. That absolutely wasn't true, so it doubly infuriated me. He pointed out that Cary was giving up
his
career, which first of all was not an established fact, and second of all, well . . . that infuriated me, too.

“Cary's in his sixties, and I'm in my twenties,” I said. “Cary has made ten zillion movies, and retiring isn't the same as giving up your career. I'm just getting started.”

To which the doctor said, “Hmmm.”

The doctor said that a lot, and it unnerved me because I didn't know if that meant I was on the wrong track or the right track. And it added to my already deep doubts about my own actions. I began to wonder if I really had been selfish, which is the message that seemed to underlie everything the doctor said . . . or didn't say.

After my sessions, Connie and I would go out to dinner. I liked her, but she seemed like someone who'd been sent on a mission she wasn't prepared for. “Cary is happy for the first time in his life, Dyan,” she'd say, patting my hand. “He's absolutely crazy about you.” I wanted to say to her, “What makes you so sure? You don't live with us. You hardly ever see us!”

For five days, I felt like I was getting up every morning and going out to stick my head in a blender. I broke down more than once.

“What is it he doesn't like about me?” I asked pleadingly. “You seem to know all these details about our marriage. What has
he
told you?”

Beneath his doughy poker face, Dr. Martin looked uncomfortable. He said nothing for a minute, but instead of pressing him, I rushed in to fill the void.

“He seems to want to change
everything
about me,” I said.

“He cares about you, Dyan.”

“Then why isn't he
here
? Why aren't the
two of us
having this conversation with you?”

“Sometimes individual therapy is more effective than couples' therapy,” he said. “I've talked to Cary at length, but we're here now to talk about you.”

The dialogue went in circles, and so did my thoughts. Dr. Martin obviously thought something was wrong with me, but he couldn't or wouldn't say what. He would only say that I should consider my husband's feelings. Whatever Cary thought was wrong with me changed from minute to minute. Was I so mentally disordered that I couldn't find the signal in the noise? I began to feel more confused than ever.

One afternoon, I really lost my cool. “This is all so baffling to me. I zig when I should zag, I go left when I should go right, I look up when I should look down. I feel like I'm being . . .
pushed over the edge.
”

“You think Cary is trying, as you say, to push you over the edge?”

“When we were in Las Vegas, he actually suggested that a breakdown might be a good thing. Then he backed off it, saying he didn't really mean it that way. What do you make of that, Doctor?”

“I don't think Cary meant it in the way you took it,” Dr. Martin said. “What he probably meant is that he'd like to see you replace some of your old ways of thinking with new ways of thinking.”

“And who decides on the new ways of thinking?”

“I see we have a lot to discuss,” the doctor said.

That was our last session.

And if I wasn't crazy
before
I had those sessions with Dr. Martin, I was probably as mad as a meat axe by the time they were done.

When we got on the plane, I think Connie was as ready to go home as I was. I settled back into my seat and accepted a cocktail from the stewardess. An hour into the flight, Connie dozed off and I was left to my own thoughts.
What a strange journey this marriage has been,
I thought. I remembered the women at my baby shower, all believing that because I was married to Cary, my marriage must by definition be wonderful. I'd thought at the time they were naïve, but maybe, just maybe,
because
he was “Cary Grant,”
I
had expected more. Maybe because he was “Cary Grant,” I'd done the same thing all those other women had done: made a god out of him, someone who could do no wrong. A perfect man. Poor Cary. What a load. After all, he was only human, with feet of clay just like all of us. He was one in a million and an amazing talent. But like the rest of us, he had problems waiting to be worked through. And I had been too self-absorbed to understand that.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Tripping and Zipping

I
f Cary hoped for me to come home transformed—which, clearly, he did—he was sorely disappointed. I was still the same old knob-jamming, crooked-parking wreck he'd packed off to New York, except noticeably worse for wear. I tuned him out even more. I dealt with it by going ever more numb on the inside. The more his lips moved, the less I heard.

One night, in desperation, when Cary was in the den watching television, I went into the bedroom and called my mother. “I've tried absolutely everything and now I don't know what to do,” I said, and spilled my guts. “He hardly touches me anymore. He's gone all day and when he comes home, it's silent. The atmosphere in the house is like a tomb. Everything he tells me to do or not to do is supposed to be for Jennifer's benefit, but he spends as much time away as possible. I've tried everything I can think of and nothing changes things between us. Mom, I'm worried about raising our daughter in this atmosphere.”

“She's only a baby.”

“It doesn't matter. You know that, Mom. Kids
feel
those things.”

“Have you tried telling him all this?” Mom asked.

“He doesn't hear me. And I've started tuning him out too, because I can't take any more criticism. I'm having trouble eating, I can't sleep. He's not the same man I married.”

I went on for at least fifteen minutes, lying on the bed on my stomach, hanging my head over the edge with the phone. When I took a breath and rolled over on my side, there was Cary standing next to the bedroom door. I could tell by the look on his face that he'd heard every word.

“I've got to go, Mom,” I said abruptly. “I'll talk to you later.”

Cary and I looked at each other for an unbearably long time. Finally, he broke the silence. “You need help,” he said.

“Cary,
we
need help.”

“I don't feel the same about you anymore, either.”

“You mean you don't love me anymore?”

No answer. Finally, he said, “You've changed.”

Something in me died. “But that's what you wanted. You
wanted
me to change. So I tried. Now you don't want the change anymore. So now what do I do?”

“I've told you so many times how I did it. It's up to you.”

“Do you mean LSD, Cary?”

There was another long silence. “It's up to you,” he repeated. “I can't do it for you.”

“LSD didn't work for me, Cary. And I don't think it works for you either. I think you just think it does.”

It was like I'd stepped out of a heated room and into a freezer.

“We have it all,” I said. “Why are you throwing it away? You finally have the family you've always wanted. But it has to be a two-way street here, Cary. You can't govern with an iron hand. It's hard to bend under that.”

“It's up to you.”

Up to me. I lay awake that night thinking it over. If I went along with Cary and tried LSD again . . . really, what choice did I have? If that's what it took to bring peace to the family, how could I refuse? He said he didn't feel the same way about me anymore. For Jennifer's sake, we couldn't go on like this much longer. Every day, she was becoming more aware, and the dreadful cloud of unhappiness that hung over us would, sooner or later, start to affect her, too. There was only one way to turn it around. I'd give it my all. Again.

That Saturday, Cary and I began the first of a dozen or so stay-at-home space odysseys. “The family that trips together zips together,” I said, raising my water glass in a toast and swallowing my microdot.

“It's good to keep your sense of humor, but you've got to be open to the experience,” Cary counseled me. We were wildcatting—that is, taking LSD, the two of us, without the dubious “monitoring” of Cary's “wise mahatma.” On the days of our trips, the nanny would take Jennifer to the park for playtime and then bring her back for her nap. I would spend the morning with her before she'd go and then hopefully be in shape to look after her by dinner. I was trying to have a good attitude about this experiment. I was truly feeling desperate, and I really hoped that some kind of light would go on and dispel the infernal darkness that was swallowing me and my marriage. My mind was a tangle of contradictory thoughts about the whole thing. I tried to have faith that the wisdom of the ages that Cary insisted was surging through those silvered temples of his was real. I wanted to believe it possible to emerge from a mind-blowing, ego-shattering, soul-freeing trip as a shiny new and reconstituted Dyan Grant. A new version of me that would effortlessly meld into one with my husband—one that he would love again.

Maybe it helped that I went into it prepared for the worst, because the first experiment in our series wasn't so bad. I don't know if the images this time were actually less scary than they'd been before, but I followed Cary's advice and just let them happen without reacting. For example, I felt myself growing roots from my arms and legs that penetrated brown, rich earth that was warm and moist, almost like chocolate pudding. I saw faces in the unlit fireplace. One of them lingered for a while, abiding there with a benign and reassuring smile. I stayed focused on it—I felt safe with the smiling face. After four or five hours, I started feeling squeezy and Cary gave me a Valium. When Cary took a Valium, he just mellowed out and relaxed. But Valium hit me like chloroform. It was only half past five in the afternoon when I took it, but I slept until late morning.

So we had several trips through successive Saturdays. The hallucinations were sort of like snowflakes: each one unique, all of it snow. I would close my eyes and see a child's finger-painted flowers on the inside of my eyelids. When I blinked, the colors would change. I would hear things: something unseen going
boing, boing, boing
or dry leaves rattling in the wind. I would look at Cary and his face would turn into the sun, or the moon—or, once, a broccoli crown. But what did any of it amount to? That big light I was waiting for did not come on. Midway through those weeks, I stopped believing in their existence.

“I just don't know what I'm supposed to be getting out of this,” I told him.

“Dyan, don't try to interpret it. Just
experience
it!” Cary steered me to a chair, took my hand, and actually got on his knees. He was acting more like he was proposing marriage than when he actually did propose marriage. “Please trust me,” he whispered. He was smiling very serenely, very reassuringly. “We're all trapped in one tiny little identity or another, and that goes for me at least as much as anyone. It's an identity that was imposed on us, Dyan, and the only way to find freedom is to be free of
it.
If you just
go with it,
I promise you that you'll feel that false identity peel away like old paint. You'll expand into a place where there are no fences, no limitations,
nothing
to close you in. You can call it ‘God,' or you can call it ‘the universe,' but you'll realize that you are one with all of creation.”

“Cary, this is really powerful stuff and it scares me. I'm worried about the long-term effects.”

“But, dear girl, that's what I'm talking about. That
fear.
Nothing will shut you off from the universe like fear,” he said. “I've taken at least a hundred trips by now. It can take quite a few before you really have the breakthrough.”

“But what am I supposed to be looking for?”

“If you decide what you're looking for, you'll just be creating a false expectation. But when you do break through that barrier, you'll find an inner peace that you never even have dreamed about. Finally, you'll understand what I've been saying. And everything that stands between the two of us, you and me, will fall away like an old fence. That, I promise.”

I did not know what to do. I was taking acid trips to find what I had always been looking for. The problem was, nobody would let me in on the secret of what I had always been looking for. Everyone else knew, but not me. Everyone—well, Cary and Dr. Martin—seemed to think I needed to change, to discover some cosmic truth, and that it was right there in front of me. It was like a package in the mailbox, already delivered, and I was just too stubborn to reach in and take it.

So far the trips had not been particularly terrifying, but they definitely were affecting my nerves. They killed what little appetite I had, disrupted my sleep even more, and made it hard for me to focus. The Valium hung over me for two days after I took it, and I was simultaneously as nervous as a cat and drowsy. I kept slipping more and more often into that place where I could see Cary's lips move without hearing any words. But through it all, I kept telling myself I was fine. Somewhere down in that cave was the voice that kept telling me I was anything but fine, but the voice was so deeply buried it was easy enough to shut out. The only thing that kept me glued together was my love for Jennifer. Caring for her, holding her, feeding her—I at least had that unquestionable reason for being in the world.

Addie dropped by one weekday afternoon for a visit. We sat by the pool together, with Addie rocking Jennifer in her lap. We kept the conversation focused on the baby for a while, each knowing the other was building up to the real subject.

“Dyan, are you okay?”

“Why do you ask?” The question was sincere, as far as it went. I was fine, I told myself, and if I told myself that, then I should tell Addie that too.

“You're wasting away to nothing,” Addie said. “Dyan, you don't look well. What's happening with you and Cary?”

“The family that trips together zips together,” I said. Ha ha. I liked that line. I thought it was funny.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Well, Cary wants me to take LSD. So we take LSD together.”

“Dyan, this has gone far enough. I'm very worried about you.”

Addie suggested I come and stay with her for a few days, but I wouldn't have any of it. Cary wouldn't like that, I told her. And besides, I was fine. I was really sure I was fine.

After a few weeks of our weekend day-tripping, Johnny and Connie invited us to spend the weekend aboard their yacht. They knew, of course, that Cary and I were having trouble, and they probably thought a change of scene—in their happily married presence—would do us good, shake us out of our despondency. I think even Cary had had enough LSD for a while, so we accepted. Even though it was the nanny's weekend off, Addie thought it was a good idea for us to have a couples' weekend, and she encouraged me to go. She also volunteered to stay with Jennifer.

The weather was clear, the water was fine, the bar was open. Connie and Johnny were so warm and accepting, I felt like I could finally let my guard down. I had a gin and tonic, then another one, and felt the tension of the past weeks drain away. I found myself appreciating alcohol. It didn't make me turn into a glass of milk or a mighty oak. Alcohol was simple. It lifted my worries. And so I had a few more, losing sight of the fact that my tolerance for booze was about on par with a four-pound Chihuahua's.

“Let's dance!” I yelled at some point in the day when the Beatles' “All You Need Is Love” came on the radio. For that song, we all danced like we didn't have a care in the world.

The weekend went by in a haze of Bloody Marys, medium-rare burgers, and boozy merriment. Cary drank a lot too, and it was one of the rare times when I saw him hovering somewhere between tipsy and drunk. That was fine with me. He was pleasant when he drank, and I didn't object to anything that made him lighten up.

A few days later, Cary came home with photographs from our festive evening on Johnny and Connie's yacht. Apparently, I had a really good time. I looked at the photos and saw a slender, twentysomething gal in a bikini living it up with her good-looking husband on a gorgeous yacht. I sent some of the pictures to my mom.

“You look way too thin,” she told me when she called. “And sad.”

“You got the pictures?”

“Yes, I got the pictures. And I want to know what's going on.”

Then Dad got on the extension. “Sweetheart, we're very concerned about you.”

“I'm fine, really,” I said. “Just very busy.”

“Addie doesn't think you're all that fine,” my mother said.

So. Addie had spoken to them.

“I'm coming down to see you,” Dad said. “I'm flying down tomorrow morning. I'll call you as soon as I get to my hotel.”

It wasn't a suggestion and it wasn't negotiable. It was my dad in action, and I couldn't have stopped him if I'd wanted to. I
didn't
want to. The idea that I was in free fall was starting to bubble up, and I welcomed his steadying presence.