Dear Cary: My Life With Cary Grant (28 page)

“Cary, I want you to be clear on this,” I told him. “I do love you. I love you, Cary. Right here, right now, just the way you
are
.” I paused. “I'm not leaving you because I don't love you. I'm leaving you to save my life.”

It was the last time I would ever be alone with him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Grant vs. Grant

“B
ut I don't want it to get ugly,” I told my attorney, who was giving me the lowdown on divorce law. The lowdown was lower down than I could have imagined.

“For a couple to be granted a divorce, one of them has to be at fault,” he told me. “That's the way it is with fault-based divorce law. One party has to sue the other for some kind of wrongdoing to prove they should be allowed a divorce. It's backward, it's offensive, and one day it'll change, but right now it's the law.”

“What if
both
of them are at fault?”

“You're the one suing for divorce, so you have to prove Cary is at fault, and that means making your case.”

“We can't get along. Isn't that enough?”

“No, I'm afraid not. Grounds for divorce include physical abuse, adultery, and mental and emotional cruelty. The latter is the least injurious to the accused and the easiest to prove.”

“So what should I say? That he was mean to me? I was mean to him as well.”

“You going to have to loose the dogs on him, Dyan. Divorces aren't granted lightly. However unpleasant it may be, you have to convince the judge that life with this man is something you cannot bear to go on living.”

“I don't want to ‘loose the dogs' on Cary or on anybody else,” I protested. “There are some things I just won't talk about—that I'll never talk about, not in front of you, or a judge, or anybody else,” I said.

“Dyan, Cary knows this drill. He's been through it three times. He knows what the law requires and he won't take it personally. But anything significant you leave out will weaken your case,” my attorney said.

“Well, then I'll leave with a weaker case,” I said, to the lawyer's visible frustration.

This insistence on a no-holds-barred courtroom brawl drove me to the edge of despair. I had had a naïve, childlike faith in the justice system. I had thought the divorce would be like a dispute between two kids that was refereed by responsible adults. Now it was starting to sound like a rock fight.

“Can the hearing be in private?” I asked.

“No, unfortunately not.”

“You mean
anybody
can come into the courtroom? Including the press?”

“Yes.”

I melted into a puddle of queasiness. I really hadn't wanted things to get ugly. But from the looks of it, “ugly” was synonymous with “divorce.”

It didn't look any prettier when my attorney and I met with Cary's lawyers for my deposition. We were shown into a cold meeting room with stark fluorescent lighting and told to wait there for Cary's lawyer. Oh, make that
lawyers.
After a while, the door opened, and five men in dark Brooks Brothers suits filed into the room like a designer death squad. They took chairs at the opposite end of the table. I watched them as they sat down and looked at them while they looked at each other, then toward my attorney and me. One of them snickered, and I looked at my lawyer. He was fast asleep. I wondered if that was a sign of things to come.

O
n March 21, 1968, I linked arms with my attorney and trudged up the granite stairs of the Los Angeles County Courthouse. The journey to the top seemed interminable, like scaling a mountain summit, and with every step, I wanted to turn back.

But we marched on, through a hornets' nest of paparazzi who stung me with their flashbulbs and pelted me with questions that dissolved into a buzzy drone of nonsense. I kept my head low and my eyes on the ground, trying to shut it all out, until a TV reporter thrust a microphone into my face and asked, “Miss Cannon! Can you tell our audience what you're wearing today?”

My marriage was ending. And they were acting like I'd shown up for a movie premiere.

“I am wearing sorrow, along with doubt,” I said, and hurried the rest of the way to the entrance.

I'd already gotten a heads-up that Cary wasn't going to show up for the divorce. He'd been in a car accident in New York three days earlier and had broken several ribs. Thank God, it hadn't been more than that, but he'd prolonged his stay in the hospital, which gave him an excuse not to show. It was just as well, and really, I was relieved. Having to look across the courtroom at someone I still loved would have been further torture.

In the weeks leading up to the divorce, there were many times when I wanted to call the whole thing off. At night I'd twist and turn, wake up in a cold sweat with my heart pounding. I didn't want to give up. Many times, I almost called Cary to see if we could take another swing at working things out. I might have done it, but every time I came close to calling, my overpowering feeling of disorientation got the better of me. I was terrified I didn't have the fortitude to go through with the divorce, but I knew I didn't have the energy to try giving the marriage another shot.

T
he divorce proceedings were a blur to me, and I sat through them with a profound sense of disconnection. Addie and Mary both testified in my defense.

I felt my soul shriveling through all of it. Now the complaints I'd made against Cary, all of which were necessary in the pursuit of our mutual goal—divorce—were being amplified through the biggest loudspeaker in the world. When I had to state my reasons for wanting a divorce to the court, the events and incidents I cited sounded scary and weird, which if truth be told, they were, but my own words echoed back in a way that rattled me terribly. The little voice that had always been so reliable as my compass had become a traitor: it now berated me and undermined my sense of direction. Cary's attorneys made me sound like quite a disappointment as a wife and mother, and each remark and insinuation opened a new and frightful wound.

Throughout the proceedings, I felt myself being sucked into a miasma of emotions: a vortex of guilt, a riptide of despair, an all-consuming sense of failure. I felt I'd failed Cary. And Jennifer. And my parents. And myself . . . I felt that I'd blown it, that my own mental frailty, my own stupidity, and my own stubbornness had been the rotten beam that caused the roof to collapse on our family. But just as forcefully, deep in my core, there burned an inferno of outward blame. As guilty as I felt for the mess that our marriage had become, hot gusts of black rage tore through my brain when I thought of the man who promised to always love me and never leave me. And how whenever I tried to step into a new frame to become the person he wanted me to be, he always changed lenses.

I inhaled guilt, I exhaled anger. I felt like an old house that had been gutted by fire, with little left but a rickety, charred frame and a few shingles. In most ways, it was a divorce like any other: a merciless spectacle of gladiators and assassins. Even without the media, it would have been like putting my heart in a meat grinder.

I tried to tell myself that it was all just an unpleasant technicality and that the procedures and the news really had nothing to do with what had happened between Cary and me. But however I strived to armor myself against the onslaught of negativity, I couldn't completely protect myself from feeling judged, and harshly. I took everything personally.

The media, predictably, covered the divorce with savage intensity. For days, I couldn't turn on the television or the radio, or look at a newspaper, for fear of seeing my name or picture. To have the dirty laundry of one's own life aired in a courtroom full of people is bad enough; to have it aired in the press was a horror that is unimaginable to most people. Naturally, the headlines sounded like posters for third-rate film noir movies. I was simultaneously portrayed as a gold-digging party girl, a shy and woebegone waif, a calculating femme fatale, the innocent victim of a domineering megalomaniac.

I did not recognize myself in any of these sketches, but on some level I bought into all of them. I no longer had any defense against suggestion, and I was open to all of it. I was like a sack of guts without a rib cage, with no protection against anything that was said about me in the courtroom or written about me in the papers.

After three days of testimony, I was granted a divorce on the grounds of “mental and emotional cruelty.” I was awarded full custody of Jennifer, with Cary being given visitation rights.

I was awarded $2,500 a month in alimony for the first six months, $1,750 for the next eighteen months, and $1,000 per month for the year after that. For child support, I was awarded $1,500 per month.

I came out of the marriage with no home and no car, but I didn't care. I felt like I had been in a prison and I wanted out.

O
n the way home from court I developed a powerful craving for Mexican food. It came out of nowhere—the only other time I'd wanted it so badly was when I was pregnant. We stopped at Casa Vega. Of course, you
can't
have Mexican food without margaritas, or it's not Mexican food. I had several, and so did Addie and Mary. I looked around the room at the festive sombreros and the faux colonial plaster and realized the last time I'd been there was with Cary when I was pregnant. For a moment I started to really sink, but I buoyed myself with another margarita. An hour or so later, Addie and Mary poured me into the car and we sailed for home, where I purged the meal.

The minute the divorce was over, a black hole had suddenly taken up residence in my spirit. The Black Hole wanted what it wanted, and when it got it, it wanted more. The Black Hole wanted anything that could temporarily make me forget about the pain. I fed the Black Hole, and fed it and fed it. I went to doctors. I had a doctor who prescribed for my insomnia and a doctor who prescribed for my sleepiness. I had many doctors and they all made their contributions, and before long I had a complete pharmaceutical wardrobe—something for every occasion.

The Black Hole liked alcohol, too. With Cary, I had gotten used to wine with lunch and dinner, but I soon discovered that tequila was a far more effective delivery mechanism for alcohol. Every day was Cinco de Mayo, as far as I was concerned, and I couldn't wait for margarita time, which started at six, then five, then four . . . then whenever the Black Hole decided it was booze o'clock.

The Black Hole liked marijuana, too, and I made the Black Hole marijuana brownies, which it accepted gratefully, and of which it always wanted more.

More, more, more.

Now that the divorce was over, I had to move once again, and I rented a small house on North Beverly Drive, partway up the canyon. Mom came down to help me move, and really just to keep me company. When the nanny was off and I had to be away, she took care of Jennifer. I was aware that Mom thought I wasn't up to keeping it all together on my own, but I let her think that. I was happy to have the help. Feeding the Black Hole was a full-time occupation.

I was fine. I knew I was fine. Couldn't get out of bed on a lot of days, but what's wrong with staying in bed? Many nights I stayed up into the wee hours, drinking and playing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” at full blast until one of the neighbors shouted. It made me feel better, so what was wrong with that?

Yes, I was fine. But my mind had split into two parts: one part floated serenely like a balloon above the unhappy memories and the sense of failure, and the other part was . . . well, hurtling through space like a damaged satellite. How could I have let Cary go? I'd had it all. Successful husband, beautiful child, gorgeous home, and I walked away from it—only because I was
weak
. And when things got too loud, I just stopped hearing them, whether it was the voice of another person or the voices inside my head. I just disconnected, like I'd started doing with Cary. Lips moved, but all I heard was the sound of wind.

The ever-so-fine part of me had started dating a guy named Dennis. He was brilliant, magnetic, stunningly handsome, and occasionally coked out of his mind. Unlike Cary, he didn't want to change me, and I couldn't get enough of him, which is to say I couldn't have all of him.

He wasn't sure he was a one-woman man; he'd made that clear. But I would change that. Besides, I
wasn't
just
one
woman. I was a whole bouquet of women, all unique, all deserving of love. All I needed was a guy who wanted to get to know me so he could introduce me to myself, and I was completely sure Dennis was the guy.

One night I had a dinner date with him. He was supposed to pick me up at six. Seven went by . . . at eight I tucked Jennifer into bed, sang her a song, and read from her beloved Winnie the Pooh book.

Then it was nine . . . not even a phone call. At ten, I tried to call him, but there was no answer.

I went to my bedroom and took a few tokes. At eleven, I changed into my white nightgown and brushed my teeth. I looked in on Jennifer, who was sleeping peacefully, and said good night to my mother. Then I sat on the edge of my bed and listened to the rain beating against the window.

I wondered if there was anything that could make the pressure in my head go away.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Zoo Time

I
t took three men to hold me down.

They were big men, the size of linebackers. I wasn't sure where I was, but I
was
sure I wanted to get out of there, and all 108 pounds of me surged with what seemed like superhuman power. And now the linebackers were in formation, closing in on me in the small antiseptic room inside a nondescript brick building somewhere . . . I didn't know where.

“Come on, now, just calm down,” one of them said.

I charged in between them, squeezed out the other side, and was about to shoot out into the hallway, but one of them managed to hook his massive arm around my waist. I kicked, I screamed, I threw elbows, I bit, I raked at them with my fingernails, I pumped my legs, I threw fists, and I writhed and I twisted like a million volts of electricity were blazing through me.
Who are they? Why are they doing this to me?

The men came at me from every direction, but it was as if I was a human oil slick—as they tumbled, tripped, and slammed back against the walls, they just couldn't get a grip on me. But finally, after a long tussle, one got a firm hold on me while another came at me with a hypodermic. I felt like a jungle cat on the nature show
Wild Kingdom—
about to be hit with a tranquilizer and relocated to a new habitat.

Linebacker Number Three hit me with the needle.

Lights out.

“W
here am I?” I asked when I awoke, groggy and disoriented.

“Hi, Dyan,” said the man who was sitting next to my bed. “I'm Dr. James and you're in a very safe place,” he said. He had corn-colored hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He looked kind of like John Lennon, except he was about forty. I recognized him, but at the moment I wasn't sure where from. “You're in the hospital. You've had a little setback.”

“Where's my daughter?” I asked, suddenly alarmed.

“Your mother is taking good care of her and there is no need at all to be worried.”

“Oh.” That was all I could say.
Oh.
I directed my unfocused gaze at Dr. James's face. He looked very kind. He said I was safe. That was all I could process at the moment.

“We'll soon be talking about what's happened, Dyan, but first I want you to shower, get dressed, and have something to eat. We want you to get up and start moving around. You'll feel better a lot faster that way.”

Dr. James patted my arm and left. I pulled the covers up over my head. I didn't leave my room for two days. Nor did I eat, shower, brush my teeth, or make my bed—all of which were directives from the nurse who came to my room several times a day. Why make my bed when I hardly got out of it? Mostly, I slept. When I didn't sleep, and even when I did, I watched the grainy black and white TV set in my mind's eye. At the bottom of the screen was an endless stream of banner headlines:
Dyan ruined her marriage. Dyan is a worthless piece of garbage. Dyan was a lousy wife. Dyan can't do anything right . . . Poor Dyan.

On the second day, Dr. James came to my room. I knew I was disheveled and I was aware of being tragically unwashed, but I didn't care. I looked like I felt and I had completely exhausted my supply of fake happy faces.

“How are you feeling?” he asked. Well, I was staring into a huge bottomless pit of loss that I felt nothing could ever fill. But right now I just wanted out of this place. The doctor seemed sincere, though. He didn't talk to me like I was crazy or anything, and although I was becoming increasingly angry over my confinement, I relaxed a little in his presence.

“I don't understand why I have to be here,” I answered.

“You've had a bit of a breakdown,” he said matter-of-factly.

“
What?
” A breakdown? I really had no idea what he was talking about.

“Can you make yourself get out of bed today?”

“I need my medications,” I said.

“And what medications are those?”

I looked at him and thought about it. Blue ones, black ones, red ones, purple ones . . . He gave me a penetrating look through his wire-rimmed glasses and said, “Your mother brought me all your prescription bottles. I see you've got doctors in every corner of town writing you prescriptions. But, Dyan, these uppers, downers, and in-betweeners you've been taking are way too much for anybody. So we'll be weaning you off them.”

“But—”

“No ‘but's. Dyan, any doctor who spent five minutes with you would know that your nervous system is made for chamomile tea—not drugs. You may experience some withdrawal symptoms, and we'll keep an eye on that, but I don't think you'll have much trouble. You're here to get well and dumping the pills is a
huge
part of that.”

Dr. James left and I stayed in my room for two more days, ignoring the nurse's continuing insistence that I make my bed, take my shower, blah-blah-blah. On the fourth day, though, I caved in to hunger and asked for something to eat. The cost of the meal, I was told, was to get cleaned up and make my bed, which seemed like the equivalent of running a marathon.

But I did so, and then forced myself to go to the dining room. I was looking around the room, trying to figure out where the food was—lunch was over and nobody seemed to be around. Then a pleasant young orderly approached. “Need something to eat?” he asked with a friendly, midwestern farm boy smile. I nodded. “I think I can find you a sandwich,” he said. “Then from now on you can choose your meals from the menu.” I took a seat and he slid a tray in front of me. “That'll put you right.”

“Thank you,” I said, thinking it was the first time those two words had come out of my mouth in four days as I shoved the cheese sandwich into my mouth almost whole.

The next day I had my first session with Dr. James.

“It's good to see you up and moving around,” he said. “Now, Dyan, do you know why you're in the hospital?”

I clenched my jaw. I didn't like the question. “I don't know,” I said. “I guess. Not really. But I'm okay now and I want to leave. I miss my daughter.”

“Let me just ask you this: do you remember what happened before we brought you here?”

I remembered a lot—everything actually. So what if I'd climbed out the bedroom window in the rain wearing only a white nightgown and had clawed my way up a steep, muddy hill barefooted? I needed some fresh air.

Seemed perfectly normal to me.

Or it did at the time. But when I started mentally retracing my steps for the first time since I'd been thrown in la loony bin, my actions did seem a little strange.

Actually, they seemed positively nutso.

Once I'd squeezed outside the window and splashed along the streets for a while that rainy night, I found an open garage with a car in it. I resolved to get farther away than I could go walking, so being the resourceful type, I decided I would hot-wire the car. They did it all the time in movies; how hard could it be? I opened the hood, looked at the engine, and was quite disappointed not to see two bright red wires marked “HOT” waiting to be twisted together.

That was so not fair. I decided to keep on walking.

I came to a very steep hill, at the top of which was a big, white two-story house. It was stark white but completely dark inside. I started scrambling up the hill, and as it got steeper, I found myself on all fours, grabbing at roots and scrubby canyon oaks to pull myself upward toward the house.
I'll be safe there,
I thought. I climbed and climbed, and stopped a few times and rested. I thought I would never get to the top of the hill.

By the time I reached the front door I was covered in mud and scratches. No lights were on in the house, but I rang the doorbell anyway. Above me, a pair of French windows flung open and a man looked down at me. “Who are you? What do you want?” he called from the window above.

I didn't answer. I couldn't talk.

He tried again.

“Where did you come from?” he said.

I pointed up to the sky.

The couple who lived there were kind. They brought me inside, dried me off, gave me a robe, fixed me some eggs, and asked if there was anyone they could call. I remained mute. They told me to watch out for their cat because the cat hated everybody. The next thing I knew, the cat was purring in my lap, much to its owners' astonishment.

Outside the windows, the sun was starting to break through the dark. I'd been wandering the streets all night like a lost, wet ghost, and I dozed off for a while. Then I heard the doorbell. The husband got to his feet and answered. A second later, he said, “Your friend Vince is here.”

I looked into Vince's sweet face and saw his pained smile, the worry he was desperately trying to disguise. I stared at him like he was an apparition. “How're you doing, Dyan?” he said. I didn't answer.

He went on. “Your mother called. Your bed hadn't been slept in. The window was open.”

I went into the bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the edge of the tub. I could hear whispering in the living room and the sound of a rotary phone dial. Then Vince called through the door. “Dyan,” he said. “I want you to listen to me.”

I wrestled the bathroom window open and climbed out.

Vince was a step ahead of me. As I came out the window, he helped me to the ground and held on to my arm. A couple of minutes later, an ambulance arrived and Mom was standing next to it. She was crying, but I couldn't for the life of me understand why. Beside her was a man I didn't know, but he seemed very kind. He led me to the back of the ambulance and said, “You're in good hands, Dyan. We're going to take you to a place where you can get some rest.” That sounded good to me. I was so tired.

The driver and the kind man gently guided me onto a gurney and slid me into the ambulance. Mom climbed in next to me and held my hand. “Everything is going to be all right,” she said. “I
promise
you, everything is going to be all right.”

S
o now, five days later in Dr. James's office, I recounted the broad outlines of the story to him.

“What was going on before you climbed out the window?” he asked.

“My boyfriend was supposed to come over for dinner and he didn't show up.”

“Hmmm, okay. I don't think you had a breakdown because of a broken dinner date. Let me ask you this: were you taking any nonprescription drugs?”

I hesitated to tell him about the marijuana, but I figured I might as well come clean. “I was smoking a lot of pot. And drinking a lot of margaritas.”

“What else?”

“Well, I don't know if this counts, but I took a lot of LSD with . . . my ex-husband.”

Dr. James put down his pen and asked, “Why would you think that LSD doesn't count?”

“It's not a drug. It's a chemical.”

He shook his head and took off his glasses. “Dyan, all drugs are chemicals, and LSD is the most dangerous psychotropic I know of. How many times have you taken it?”

I calculated about ten or twelve times, the most recent being about six months earlier.

“That's ten or twelve times too many,” he said, and looked at me very directly.

“My husband said he'd taken it more than a hundred times.”

“Everybody has an individual tolerance for these things. But for some people, once can be fatal. Let me tell you something, Dyan. I had a kid in here a couple of weeks ago who'd been tripping out on LSD. We got him stabilized but he took it again and jumped off a building, thinking he could fly. He broke every bone in his body and is lucky to be alive. Hear me good, Dyan. You can't even get in the same zip code with that stuff. Now or ever.”

But I had known that, hadn't I? All along, something inside had warned me that I was dancing with a dragon. But I went ahead with it, because I wanted to please Cary, and he was convinced it would change my life. Well, it certainly did.

Dr. James telling me this gave me quite a boost. For the first time in longer than I could remember, someone had validated a belief of mine. My instincts had been right about LSD all along! And it seemed just possible that there might be some other things I'd been right about.

Dr. James looked at me thoughtfully. “The pills, the pot, the booze—none of it's good, and all of it can cause severe depression. But I don't think that's what caused your breakdown. LSD can chase your mind into a rabbit hole, and unfortunately, it can get stuck there. In my opinion, LSD is what tipped you into the basket. With your level of sensitivity, you are lucky to be alive.

“I'm so glad you told me, Dyan. That explains a lot.”

T
he next afternoon, I met Gina, the occupational therapist, who sat me down with a sheath of cheap leather, some white string, and a plastic needle. I gave her a what-the-hell look. When she told me I was going to make a wallet, I nearly took a bite out of the material and a bite out of Gina. After she left, I sat at the table stitching my wallet together, cussing Gina and Dr. James, the nurses, and the world. Who were they to treat me like a kid in Girl Scout camp? What really got me riled up, though, was when I found myself actually
enjoying
my craft project. I was making something. It felt good, though I had trouble admitting that to myself.

In the evenings, there were group sessions. I didn't say much, but as I listened to the others, what made the biggest impression on me was how normal they all seemed. Of course, this wasn't a mental ward for the criminally insane, along the lines of
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest,
but I was struck by how we were all there for the same reason: we'd lost our ability to cope. They were people who had hit bumps in the road, just like I had. Among them was a twenty-year-old girl who had tried to kill herself, a teenager who'd been driven to a breakdown not unlike my own by his parents' bitter divorce, and a battered housewife in search of a way to forgive her husband.