Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [27]
“Me? Not my daughter?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “The delivery guy was very specific. He said, ‘These are for Mrs. Freezing.’ ” Freezing, Friesen—close enough.
We went upstairs. There was a note from Cary to my mother. “Dear Mrs. Friesen, I’m very fond of your daughter. I do hope we meet soon.”
“How did he know I was here?” Mom asked.
I thought for a second. “Addie.”
“I don’t know what to say,” my mother said. “Maybe he comes here and does some flips for you and then you’re happy. Life is short, so short. So you decide. Either let him back in, or leave him behind.”
A couple of days after Mom left came the terrible news of Marilyn Monroe’s death, which was ruled as a “probable suicide.” I thought about Cary, knowing that he’d been very fond of her. He’d only met her a couple of times, but she touched him deeply. “Something about her just cries out for protection,” he’d told me. I thought he might need someone to commiserate with, so I called him and I was right.
“Poor girl,” Cary said. “She didn’t trust herself, so she was constantly putting herself in other people’s hands. She tried to be who they told her to be. Drugs didn’t kill her. Confusion did.” He sighed. “Well, we’re still here. Doesn’t it make you appreciate how fragile life is?”
“She was only thirty-six,” I said. “What a waste.”
“Dyan, life is too short for two people who love each other to go on bickering like this. Will you meet me for dinner?”
“Mr. Grant, as always I am your humble servant.”
Restaurateurs tended to bow a lot when Cary showed up, but in contrast to Ong Ling’s discreetly respectful bow, Michael Romanoff’s bow was a sweeping and grandiose firework display of theatrical sycophancy. He curled his vowels with a hard-to-place east European accent and every gesture had the deliberation of a novice silent movie actor. As Cary said later, he could have been a Russian who had learned to speak English late in life, or an American hoping for a part as a Soviet spy who had hired an alcoholic dialect coach. In reality, he was a Lithuanian peasant who grew up in Brooklyn and who did his best to conform to a Hollywood notion of what Russian royalty would act and sound like.
“And—oh my goodness—to behold such beauty!” He was talking about me now. He folded his hands and swiveled his eyes toward the heavens. “Your table awaits you. This way!” Another Bolshoi-big sweep of the arms.
“My goodness!” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Well, he is a prince,” Cary said with a wink.
“Really?”
“Prince Michael Dimitri Alexandrovich Obolensky-Romanoff, nephew of Czar Nicholas II. Or Prince Et Cetera for short. That’s if you listen to the optimists. Or, if you listen to the cynics, he’s Harry Geguzin, former Brooklyn pants presser.”
“Whom do you throw in with? The optimists or the cynics?”
Cary gave a gentle laugh. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s just as much Prince Et Cetera as I am Cary Grant. Live and let live, darling! That’s my policy. We’ve all got our foibles.” With that, he gave me what I can only call a meaningful glance. Just as meaningfully, I looked away.
“Dyan, you have to let go of this,” Cary said. “I made a mistake and I can’t unmake it. Clifford was quite taken with you. I was mad as a hornet when he asked for your number and I gave it to him. I was damned upset.”
“Upset? What reason did you have to be upset?”
“I guess I’m spoiled and like to get my way.”
“What happens when you really don’t get your way, Cary? Are you going to start writing my phone number on bathroom walls?”
Cary exhaled and clenched his jaw as if bracing himself.
“It’s very hard to explain,” he said. “It . . . ah . . . well . . .”
I waited. I looked at him in complete amazement and said, “Mr. Grant, is it possible that you are at a loss for words?”
“Um, I, well . . . yes.”
“Is that as close to an apology as I’m going to get?”
Cary flexed his throat muscles as if he were trying to swallow a sausage whole, and though it may have been my