Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [113]
“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.
On 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.
The 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