Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [1]
He’d starred in about a bazillion movies, including three of my all-time favorites: An Affair to Remember, with Deborah Kerr (a five-hankie weeper); Indiscreet, with Ingrid Bergman; and, at the top of my list, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.
But that still wasn’t enough. “I’m sure Mr. Grant will still be there when I get back,” I said. “If I ever decide to go back.” There was a knock at my door. “Oops,” I said. “Gotta go . . .” I hung up and opened the door and Charles Fawcett—we all called him “Charlie”—stepped through, kissing me on both cheeks.
“You ready?” he asked.
“I need a minute,” I said. “I was just on the line with my agent. She wants me to fly back to Los Angeles to meet Cary Grant.”
“For a movie?” Charlie asked.
“That’s what she says.”
“If he’s going to cast you in something, it’s worth the trip. But if it’s just a get-acquainted kind of thing, let him wait.”
I loved Charlie Fawcett. I had met him two months earlier in a remote Portuguese fishing village, on the set of a low-budget movie that I’ve done my best to forget. It was my second movie; my first was The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, about jewel thieves in Prohibition-era New York, and that film, along with a string of television credits, had led to the job in Portugal. Alas, we all knew from the start that we weren’t making a masterpiece, but the bright side was that we all relaxed about it and had fun. We all lived in the same bed-and-breakfast, started the morning with good food and strong coffee, laughed our way through our morning table-read, then went off to make the best of another day of second-rate filmmaking.
I fell in love with Charlie by the end of that first week. He was a good actor who treated acting as a bit of a lark. His services were in demand, and he earned enough at it to subsidize the low-key, bohemian lifestyle he enjoyed as an American expatriate in Rome. Beyond that, he didn’t attach much importance to it.
Charlie was truly larger than life. In World War II, he joined the British Royal Air Force as a Hurricane pilot. He fought with the Polish army after the German invasion, and fought again for six months with the French Foreign Legion in Alsace. Then to Greece to take on the communists in the Greek Civil War. As if that weren’t enough, in the waning days of World War II, he freed a half-dozen Jewish women from concentration camps by marrying and divorcing each one in rapid succession. That got them an automatic American visa and allowed them to leave France. If I had to choose one word to describe Charlie, it would be “noble.”
I had a little crush on Charlie, the kind of crush that gives you a feeling of boundless emotional safety along with a little jolt of physical attraction. That makes the friendship really interesting—whether or not you act on the attraction, though it is usually better if you don’t. It’s the best type of crush, and Charlie couldn’t have agreed more.
“My favorite kind,” he once told me. “Let’s try to make it last.”
Charlie was a man of experience, a man of the world, and I was a spirited Jewish girl from Seattle, barely past college age, who’d had sex only once in her life (though it was so inept, I’m not sure it even qualified). Charlie was the rare man who placed more value on the unspoiled fabric of our friendship than he did on a night of tangled sheets and awkward “see you later”s. I think he sensed my innocence and figured there’d be enough contenders to relieve me of it without his joining in.
Once we bonded on the shoot, we were inseparable: Charlie, me, and Bangs, my beloved Yorkshire terrier, who’d joined me in Portugal midway through the shoot. Bangs was my best buddy. Without Bangs on the pillow