Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [49]
When I looked across the table, I found Cary and Aristotle talking intently, and I overheard Elsie’s name. Then I heard Ari say, “If Willie Mays were in center field and dropped the ball with the bases loaded, you’d blame his mother.”
Cary glanced at me just then, still hostile, then excused himself and went to the men’s room.
Ari turned to me and said, “Dyan, my dear, it is a sad fact of life that men who have difficult relationships with their mothers carry it over to the other women they love.”
Suddenly, Maria spoke, softly but pointedly. “Yes. My mother said the same thing: if you want to know how a man’s going to treat his wife, look at how he treats his mother.”
He smiled at Maria and said, “Thank God I had a wonderful relationship with my mother. But things are never so simple. Cary still torments himself over his mother’s unhappiness.”
“Have you met Elsie?” I asked.
“No, and I don’t need to. Life has been very cruel to her, I know. But Cary is trying to reverse a tragedy that was not of his own making. She is not going to change, and nothing he will do can appease her anger, let alone make her happy.”
“Ari, you’ve had more experience in life than I have, but I believe people can change.”
“Be patient. He loves you and he’s worth it.”
Just then Cary returned to the table. “Am I missing something important?” he asked.
“Yes,” Ari said. “Dancing. I think you should ask Dyan to dance.” It sounded more like an order than a suggestion. Cary held out his hand to me and we went to the dance floor.
Ari, that born diplomat, had saved the evening. From there, things improved enormously. Cary’s spirits lifted, and we drank and danced, and had a memorable night.
We joined Ari and Maria the next night, too (this time I wore a conventional cocktail dress). On our way out, when the hatcheck girl retrieved my simple, waist-length wool jacket, Ari feigned horror. “Cary, this is outrageous! Do you want this poor girl to freeze to death like some poor street urchin? She needs a proper winter coat!”
After my rehearsal a couple of nights later, Cary and I were about to leave for dinner when he got hung up by a long-distance script conference for Charade with Stanley Donen. It was going to take a while, so I offered to run over to Reuben’s Restaurant, on Fifty-eighth Street, and bring back dinner. As I left the hotel and made my way down the street, I paused at the corner and looked up, hoping to see Cary at his window. Sure enough, there he was, still on the phone, watching for me. He waved and blew me a kiss. I blew one back. The sight of him standing there in the window watching over me made my heart melt. I felt completely safe, cared for, and protected.
“Would you just look in the bedroom and see if my reading glasses are there?” Cary asked when I came back with our food. There, lying on the bed, was a full-length sable coat, the most beautiful coat I’d ever seen, on-screen or off. I was bowled over.
“I just want you to be warm,” he said. “In New York and in Bristol.”
“That should do the trick,” I said. “But what about my heart? Will it keep that warm, too?”
“You know a coat can’t do that, silly girl. But I can.”
The coat was lovely, but his mention of Bristol meant more. It meant he saw us going back there in the future. It meant he saw me in his life. But for how long?
The day before The Fun Couple opened on Broadway, I was a nervous wreck. I paced. I sat down. I stood up. I paced some more. Cary was expected in Paris the next morning for meetings on Charade. He suggested he could defer his trip for a day, but I encouraged him to go. My parents were coming, and introducing them to Cary on opening night was more pressure than I could handle. “Dear girl, you’re carrying on