Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [10]
Oh dear.
He didn’t just inquire about my availability for lunch or dinner, either. With sincere interest, he would ask: “How’s the family?” “How’s your brother’s music career going?” “How’s Bangs?”
Or “What are you up to today?”
“Today? I’m auditioning for a part in a movie.”
“What movie?”
“I’m not sure. They haven’t told me. I don’t even know what to wear.”
“Something simple and elegant.”
“What if it’s a comedy?”
“Still simple and elegant. That’s how one should be in all things.”
“And how should I act?”
“Act?” he said. “Don’t act. Just be yourself. You’re already a star. If you try to be something else, it’ll only be a lesser version of you.”
“How did you get so smart?” I asked.
“I’ve been around a long time.”
“What if I don’t get the part?”
“If you don’t get the part, it wasn’t right for you.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“You’re not free for lunch, are you?”
Yes, I was. But I wasn’t about to have lunch with Cary Grant. The more I talked to him, the more I liked him, and the more I liked him the more nervous he made me.
“Why have you been sitting home watching TV with me for the last few months when you could have been having dinner with Cary Grant?” Addie asked me one night, visibly frustrated.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I don’t understand you.”
“How could you? I don’t even understand me. Nice Jewish boys my own age—those I know how to handle. But a dashing, magnetic fifty-eight-year-old matinee idol with three ex-wives notched on his bedpost? I seem to have misplaced my instruction manual.”
“Stop playing hard to get!” Addie commanded. “He’s just asking you to have lunch with him.”
But I wasn’t playing hard to get. I was playing possum. Whenever I tried to make sense of the situation, my mind turned into a giant vat of spaghetti. How could I be sure he wasn’t just playing with me? Even worse, what if he was serious?
He was getting harder to resist and it was making me crazy. It was making my friends crazy, too, but for different reasons. “What is wrong with you?” demanded Darlene, my gorgeous friend who was a top model. “The dreamiest man in the world calls you every day, and you refuse to go out with him. Give him my number!” Darlene pled, only half-joking. “I’ll be happy to go out with him.”
My married friend Mary Gries, whom I’d met in acting class, was of a different opinion, though. “Dyan, always listen to yourself. If you don’t feel comfortable going, there must be a reason.” Mary was a number of years older than me, and I always appreciated her big-sisterly advice. In her marriage, she had experienced many ups and downs. “But,” she added, “don’t make too big a deal out of it.”
My male friends from acting class, however, were rabidly opposed. To listen to them talk, they apparently had confused Cary Grant with Jack the Ripper. “You cannot trust a man who’s been married three times,” my friend Bobby asserted with such authority you’d think he’d written a sociology dissertation on the subject. “One time, maybe. Two, possibly. But three? I would say anybody who’s been married three times suffers from deeply rooted intimacy issues.”
Skip Denning, a hunky fellow actor I’d met soon after I’d gotten to Los Angeles, was dead set against it too, though like Bobby he wasn’t exactly a neutral bystander; his long-standing crush on me remained unrequited, and I imagined this was more a blow to his ego than his heart. “He’ll try to get you hooked on LSD, Dyan! Do you want to wind up in a prison for the criminally insane, hallucinating about clowns with machetes? He’ll use it to brainwash you! What if he’s working for the Russians?”
Skip may have been an alarmist on the subject, but Cary’s flirtation with mind-bending drugs was real enough. This I learned when Skip backed up his testimony by prejudicially giving me an article from Look magazine. In it, Cary admitted to taking LSD, but he was emphatic that it was for