Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [23]
I had never been kissed like that.
Cary Grant liked me.
And I liked Cary Grant.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fork in the Road
As much time as we spent together over the next four or five months, we still made time to be with our own friends. I was still close to Michael. Objectively, Michael and I were perfect for each other in many ways. In most ways, actually, except for the one thing that matters more than anything: we didn’t have that old black magic, as they used to call it. Or I didn’t have it for Michael. There is no accounting for chemistry, but one fact of life you can’t get around is that if you ain’t got it, you ain’t got it, and nothing’s going to change it. But I loved and admired Michael, all the more for his profound unselfishness. The fact that he wanted a romance didn’t stop him from loving me as a friend.
Cary could be possessive, but he was cute about it. He’d offhandedly inquire what I’d been up to and harrumph good-naturedly if I’d been out with a male friend.
“Michael again?” he remarked once. “What is it with you and Michael?”
“Cary, he is a dear, sweet friend and a nice Jewish boy.”
“I know nice Jewish boys,” Cary said with mock seriousness. “Nice Jewish boys like the same things other men like, and I’m not talking about chicken soup.”
“I promise, you have nothing to worry about.”
Early one evening, I met Michael at the furniture store he owned on Melrose Avenue. Just as we were heading out for a movie, the phone rang. He answered it and looked up. “It’s for you,” he said. He didn’t look thrilled.
It was a little startling that Cary had tracked me down. But in those amazingly peaceful days before cell phones, Addie always knew where I was in case I got a call for an audition. When Cary told me why he called, I understood perfectly. He’d gotten a dinner invitation from Clifford Odets, the playwright. To me, he reigned supreme. I’d done his play The Country Girl in acting class, and I loved Awake and Sing! and Golden Boy.
I protested that I had plans, but Michael had picked up the bit about Clifford Odets having a dinner party and he just simply refused to let me miss it. I was torn; I really wasn’t one to switch plans on anyone unless it was a matter of life and death, but this was really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If we’d switched places, I probably would’ve pushed Michael out the door too.
Cary was waiting for me outside Odets’s house. As we stepped inside, I took in a room that was positively sticky with fame. There was Frank Sinatra, Danny Kaye, and an older man I didn’t recognize whom Cary introduced as Howard Hughes, with whom he was friends.
“I thought Howard Hughes was a hermit,” I whispered as we walked away.
“I wouldn’t call him a hermit,” Cary said. “He just generally prefers to keep as much distance between himself and the human race as possible.”
For reasons not apparent to me in the moment, the most memorable part of the evening, though, would be meeting the host. Odets was about Cary’s age; they’d been friends for a long time. Clifford was not someone you’d pick out of a crowd as being anything special, but once you started talking to him, his brilliance was electrifying. He had a receding but untamable thatch of wiry brown hair, sensuous lips, and a piercing gaze. He was not handsome, but as your eyes warmed to his countenance, he became beautiful.
Cary had described Clifford as a “leftist intellectual,” and I wasn’t really sure what I’d find to talk about with him. But after Cary introduced us and then went off to greet some other friends, Clifford and I connected over something very basic: our Jewish heritage. Clifford, too, came from Russian-Jewish stock; his masterpiece Awake and Sing! followed the tribulations of a Jewish immigrant family in New York who faced grinding poverty. When I told him my mother’s family had left Russia to escape the pogroms, and that my great-grandmother had been killed in one of the waves of violence, his heavy eyebrows knitted together