Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [30]
I lugged myself out of the car and hooted and hollered, yipped and yowled and howled. I stood in the middle of the street, crying. “My God, Cary, what if I don’t get her back? What am I going to do?”
“Dyan.”
“She’s my baby, Cary. Why the hell did we have to go out for lunch? We could have just ordered something!”
“Calm down.”
“Cary, I think I heard her! Honestly. I think I heard her!” I ran along a driveway to a backyard where children were playing and a dog was yapping. But it wasn’t Bangs. I went back to the car, dejected.
After two hours more of fruitless searching, my eyes were swollen, my nose was red, Cary was exhausted, and Bangs was still missing. “We’re not going to find her this way,” Cary said.
“We’ve got to keep looking.”
“Dyan, you’ve got a show tonight.”
“I’m not stopping until I find her.”
“Let’s at least swing by the hotel just to check.”
And there was Bangs, happily accepting cookies and milk from the manager’s wife. “We were trying to find you,” she said. “Your dog walked right into the office five minutes after you left. I think she was looking for you.” Bangs ran and jumped up on me. I swept her up into my arms.
“We tried to pet her but she is definitely a one-woman dog!” the manager said.
“And I’m a one-dog woman!” I said, my heart melting.
“I’m a one-woman puppy myself,” Cary said, wrapping Bangs and me in his arms.
With Bangs’s return, I happily pulled myself together for the show. We had a great night, Cary was beaming and had high praise for my performance, and we got Bangs into the restaurant for dinner (with a little help from Cary’s star power).
The next morning, Cary had to leave for L.A. after breakfast, and I was walking him to his car when he stopped, reached for my hand, looked me in the eye, and said, “I am completely enamored of you, Dyan.”
He kissed me, got into the car, and drove off.
Enamored. I thought I knew what it meant, but I wanted to make sure. I ran back to my room and called my mother. “Cary just said something to me, something important, but I want to make sure I know what he meant,” I said.
“What did he say?”
“He said he was ‘completely enamored of’ me.”
“It means he loves you so much it makes him feel like he’s on fire.”
“Wow! Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. But go find a dictionary and look it up.”
Just to make sure, when I got home, I looked it up. In Webster’s Ninth: enamored: inflamed with love.
Strange, I thought. That’s exactly how I feel about him: inflamed with love.
He had said, “I’m completely enamored of you, Dyan.” And that was almost as good a feeling as finding Bangs.
My sense that our relationship was deepening into something quite serious got a real boost a few days later. Cary called me from New York, where he was finalizing the agreement to star in Charade. He started out by grousing about the “obscene age difference” between himself and his costar, Audrey Hepburn, which was the only thing that had him wavering about the film.
“I don’t want to come off looking like some lecherous old cradle robber,” he said, sighing.
“But, Cary,” I pointed out, a touch perplexed, “Audrey is nearly ten years older than me. How come it bothers you in movies but not in real life?”
“Silly girl,” he clucked. “Real life, my real life, isn’t anybody’s business but my own—except for the parts I choose to make public. But my image on the screen is bound by the shackles of social convention. A certain degree of wholesomeness is required of me. Or what most people consider wholesomeness, which doesn’t really have much to do with true wholesomeness.”
“Cary, I don’t think it’ll take a big leap of imagination for women to see why Audrey’s character would be attracted to you.” To say the least, I thought.
“Still . . .”
Then he dropped the bomb.
“Dear girl, I’m going to make a visit to England in a couple of weeks, and I’d like very much for you to come along.”
“England?”
“Family visit, mostly.”
“Family visit?”
“Yes. I’d like to introduce you to my mother.”
That, of course,