Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [44]
When the rehearsal broke for lunch, we joined Noël and Elaine at a nearby restaurant. After we sat down, Cary excused himself to go to the men’s room, and Noël reached across the table, put his hand over mine, looked at me intently, and said, “You know, my dear, I am wildly in love with that man.”
“That makes two of us,” I said, laughing.
“Touché!” he replied. “Alas, there are so many who ardently hoped he’d come over to play on our team . . . but I think it’s safe to say, he’s solidly set in his ways.” Noël gave me a reassuring wink. Of course, his statement was freighted with meaning. With that subtle message, Noël was—for my benefit—dismissing the rumors that had circulated about Cary for years.
But it certainly wasn’t as if I needed reassuring—especially after the previous night we had together.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Game Time
When I was a freshman at the University of Washington, one night my roommate and I got the brilliant idea of testing our drinking capacity. Being thrifty types, we walked to the drugstore and paid bottom dollar—99 cents—for a bottle of Nawico “port wine.” We figured we’d beaten the system. Nawico, with 19 percent alcohol, was much stronger than regular wine, which cost more and had a measly 12 percent alcohol. Then we snuck back into our room and drank the whole thing. Glug, glug, glug! Yippee ti yi yay! Oh, Nawico, we go, we go, whoopity whoopity woo!
Then we died and woke up in hell, where our heads were wedged in a vise grip that was being tightened and tightened by purple gargoyles until our little skulls were about to be crushed. I spent the next two days with my head nailed to the pillow—no classes, no meals, nothing. I was poisoned and had the unshakable conviction that I was dying, but all too slowly. When I finally recovered, I vowed never to get drunk like that again.
And I didn’t.
Until, that is, the night Cary and I went partying in L.A. with Roddy Mann, the beloved English journalist and novelist who was a good friend of Cary’s. Roddy wrote a hugely popular syndicated weekly column for the Sunday Express and Los Angeles Times and was read by millions, but he wasn’t dazzled by Hollywood. “Once you’ve been to five parties, it’s the same cast,” he told me over drinks at Chasen’s. “In Paris and London, politicians, journalists, and actors all mix together. Here you generally only meet people who do the same thing you do.” I told Roddy I’d felt the same way about Rome. “Oh yes, Rome. Wonderful. You know what I’m talking about then,” he said.
I liked Roddy. He was the kind of person who liked to push through social barriers; we had that in common. And Roddy liked to bend an elbow. Through several hours of revelry, I somehow got the idea that I could keep up with an English journalist. (Put English and journalist together and you get a liver as powerful as a nuclear reactor.) Cary was his usual moderate self, but I plowed along with Roddy, and I got as drunk as a rugby team after a tournament win.
We dropped Roddy off at his apartment, and on the way home I decided that it would be fun to do something hilarious. I could barely move, so my options were limited, but as Cary stopped for a light on Beverly Boulevard, I found I had just enough motor coordination left to yank the keys out of the ignition and toss them through the open window. They went flying into the grass of someone’s front yard. Hee hee hee! I gave Cary a blotto ain’t-I-cute smile and giggled with delight. Well, that grumpy old movie star just wasn’t into the spirit of the game. When he was really aggravated, he would mutter curses under his breath that kind of reminded me of a Cockney version of Popeye. He managed to pull over to the curb, slam the car into park, jump out, and slam the door so hard the car shook. I watched with delight as he stormed over to the sidewalk and combed through the grass, looking for his keys.
He didn’t find them. That was even funnier! He took a flashlight from the glove compartment then went back to look again. I stepped out