Wishful Drinking (9 page)

She called Cary Grant.

In case you haven’t heard, one of the many things Mr. Grant was known for at the time was the fact that at some point in the sixties he famously did a course of LSD while under a doctor’s supervision. It’s always been difficult for me to imagine this

do they actually drop the acid in the doctor’s office? Does the doctor do it too? I always thought there was a kind of strange dignity and an even stranger credibility given to acid done under the cool shade of medical supervision. Sometimes, when I heard the phrase “experimenting with drugs,” I imagined someone in a white coat excitedly emerging from a lab carrying a smoking beaker and shouting, “I found it, I found it!” But when I heard that Cary Grant had experimented with acid under the supervision of his doctor, well, in a way it was as if he was dedicating his hallucinogenic jaunt to modern science. I imagined him doing it a little reluctantly and with a quiet dignity. After, of course, washing his hands and putting on one of those backless hospital garbs ten minutes before the medicinal acid kicked in.

Anyway, my concerned and caring mother called Cary Grant and told him that her daughter had a problem with acid. You know, like I was mainlining the stuff. You have to admit though, on a certain level, it was an incredibly darling thing for her to do—especially when you factor in the fact that I loved Cary Grant. I still do—only now at more of a distance. He’s probably the only famous person I was ever really in awe of. Having two celebrity parents, and a few celebrity boyfriends, it was extremely rare for me to get star struck. Not that I was blasé about famous people—I just wasn’t bowled over and tongue-tied and staring, as if I’d just undergone more electroshock therapy or stuck my finger in a socket.

But Cary Grant, well

he just killed me. I mean, I was completely blown away by him. He had it all—an easygoing class, quiet confidence, wit—all in this beyond-handsome package. So when the phone rang and a familiar voice informed me that he was Cary Grant—even a Cary Grant that was gonna maybe give me a “just say no” drug lecture—well, initially I was, in fact, totally tongue-tied. Normally, I wouldn’t have believed that the person on the other end really was Cary Grant—but when he told me my mother had asked him to call, well that sounded eerily like some bizarre thing my mother would do.

In a way, there was actually a precedent for this Cary Grant intervention call.

Some years prior, I was in London en route to my mother’s wedding (I don’t like to miss any of my parents’ weddings). She called me at the hotel where I was staying, and when I didn’t answer the phone she became understandably concerned. So she let the phone ring and ring and ring—until finally she panicked. She knew I was in the room so, in her mind, probably the only reason I wasn’t answering the phone was that I had overdosed. So she did what any normal concerned mother might do when troubled about her daughter’s well being.

She called Ava Gardner.

And she asks Ava to come to my hotel and get the concierge to let her into my room to make sure I’m not dead.

Anyway, the reason this relates to Cary Grant—if it isn’t obvious—is that the Ava Gardner Rescue Squad (good title for a rock band) is the reason I would even begin to believe that someone telling me that they were Cary Grant might actually in fact be Cary Grant. So initially when I got on the phone with Mr. Grant, I was incredibly nervous seeing as how I was on the phone with no less then my fucking hero, but once we began to discuss my acid addiction, after a freakishly short time I found myself chatting gaily with what might as well have been a Cary Grant impersonator. (Because let’s face it, there was no actual visual confirmation that this was, in fact, Cary Grant.) So I think I finally convinced him that, despite my mother’s insistence, I didn’t have an acid problem (which, for the most part, was true). What I did have was an opiate problem, but frankly that was none of Cary Grant’s fucking business. No matter how much I admired him.

Anyway, though we chatted for about an hour or so, I have basically no memory of what we discussed. Oh yes, there was one thing

Chevy Chase and how he had insinuated on some talk show that Mr. Grant was bisexual. Now, as it happened, I was working on a film with Chevy at that time (a marvelous film called Under the Rainbow—a riveting film about the making of the Wizard of Oz—starring Chevy, me, Eve Arden, and three thousand dwarves), and Chevy and I were getting along somewhat less than a house on fire. So on top of our LSD chat, we had that in common. Poor Chevy Chase relations. So when our hour-long chat was up, I bid Mr. Grant a grateful goodbye, gleefully told all my friends, and end of story. Now, I thought, I had a Cary Grant story to tell my children and grandchildren for years to come. Right?

Well, as it turned out, actually no—not right—because my Cary Grant story continued and this time from an unexpected direction.

A few years later my father went to Princess Grace’s funeral in Monaco.

Please ask me if he actually knew the princess. Of course he didn’t. My father had never even met the woman—either prior to her ascent to the throne when she was “just” plain old Grace Kelly, the Oscar-winning movie star or after she became Monaco’s very own royal highness.

But I learned that you don’t actually have to know the person whose funeral you’re attending. In fact, sometimes, depending on the person, it’s better that way, but my father had his own reasons for going to the funeral for this very famous, beautiful woman. Publicity.

So there’s my father wandering around aimlessly at this far-flung funeral of a famous woman—one of the few beautiful women of his generation that he hadn’t slept with—shmoozing with the thousands of other mourners, trying to make eye contact with someone who he could grieve with and maybe generate a photo op in the process, when he spies Cary Grant. And something clicked in his brain and that something turned out to be the dim recollection of a story he’d only just recently been told.

What was it again? Oh yeah—something to do with his first-born daughter.

By now he’s walked up to my hero and he says the first thing that pops into his head, which is something along the lines of “My daughter Carrie is addicted to acid, and I’m very worried about her. Would you mind maybe having a talk with her?”

Great. I’ve now gone from having an acid problem straight to a full-on LSD addiction (as if such a thing were possible). I’m mainlining the stuff.

So here we go again. Poor Cary Grant (I’m sure he’s very rarely been called that) gets back from the funeral and in due course calls me again to discuss my issue with slamming acid.

Well, if I was embarrassed the first time he called me, this time I was completely humiliated. I explain to Mr. Grant, after thanking him profusely for taking the time out to counsel me on my alleged dependence on hallucinogens, that, in fact, I didn’t spend all that much time with my father—the time required to be able to accurately ascertain as to whether or not I had any sort of problem, much less a drug one. I suggest to Mr. Grant that my mother would probably be in a much better position to determine whether or not I was tripping my brain out on a daily basis than my father, who I’d spent, on average, one day a year with.

So Mr. Grant says, “Well, it was very nice of your father to express his concern. It’s very difficult to maintain a relationship with a child after the mother and father have divorced. I have a daughter myself and I see her as much as I can, but when a child divides her time between two houses, no matter how you try it’s impossible to spend as much time with your child as you’d like to.”

So perhaps my father’s motive hadn’t been solely to find a subject matter to talk to Cary Grant about at the photo-op funeral. Mr. Grant didn’t seem to think so. So maybe this was another example of nothing ever being just one thing. No motive is pure. No one is good or bad—but a hearty mix of both. And sometimes life actually gives to you by taking away.

Anyway, Mr. Grant and I stay on the phone for over an hour talking about this and that—how he wishes he could be a more involved parent—you know, the usual shooting-the-shit-with-Cary-Grant-type thing. It was great.

The phone call eventually comes to a close, and I immediately go to the liquor store and buy him a bottle of wine from his birth year, which is something like 1907, and now he calls me again to thank me.

And in that final phone call, I believe he told me, “I don’t even like wine.”

I mean, we’re ultimately talking about no less than three calls from Cary Grant. The guy was practically stalking me!

Anyway, cut to a few months later, and I’m at this premiere or charity event or something and I turn and there, just a few feet away from me, actually in the flesh—as far in as you could get—is Cary Grant. Big as life and twice as famous.

But this time it’s not just some disembodied voice that sounds a lot like Cary Grant—no, this is the real deal. Classy and handsome and just about everything a human can possibly be when they’re a DNA jackpot. But am I intimidated? Oh, my god, yes.

So—with my heart pounding in my ears and my nose and my hair, I sheepishly approach my ideal and very timidly tap him on the back, withdrawing my hand immediately as if I burned my finger on his radioactive sizzling hot, iconic back. Whereupon Cary Grant turns, and I immediately start backing away from him, as though one of us was contaminated.

“Hi. I’m Debbie Reynolds’s daughter,” I admit as though this was a crime. “We talked on the phone?”

I’m stooped over like someone frightened and ashamed.

“Anyway, no big deal—I don’t want to bother you—I just wanted to say hi.”

“Oh hello, yes. How are you?”

I’m still backing up, forcing him to follow me.

“Oh, I’m fine,” I whisper. “Everything’s great! Good to see you. Bye!”

And I fled the scene of this social crime, never to return.

Years later, while I was in Australia doing some terrible film, they announced on the radio that Cary Grant had passed away. And I remember getting this pain—the kind you get when you experience a body blow. Or lose something essential.

Who would talk me out of slamming LSD now?

So I think to myself after all this, after all the night clubs and the gay husband and the rehabs (one of my fellow inmates at the last rehab I was in was Ozzie Osbourne

that went well!)

so, after all the rehabs and all the mental hospitals, I think to myself: If what doesn’t kill you makes you—well, what doesn’t kill you makes you not dead but if what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, then I should be able to lift Cedars-Sinai Hospital and glow in the dark. So I say to myself at this point—BRING IT ON!!!

Don’t ever say that. Because it will be brought.

’Cause that’s when my friend Greg died.

THE NEWLY MADE BYSTANDER

I didn’t realize I actually had post-traumatic stress disorder at the time, but why would I think I had that? Anyway, how would I know which was post-traumatic stress, which is addiction, which is bipolar, which is Libra? Also, I thought you had to go to Iraq to get post-traumatic stress disorder—and you do—but you can also just come on over to my house!

Anyway, a few months later, I guess my friends were getting worried about me because I wasn’t talking—and most people know that I’m essentially voice activated—and I was smoking like it was food, so I finally agreed to go to this grief counselor they’d found for me.

And my favorite thing this woman said to me was, “I’m so sorry we had to meet under these conditions.”

Hello!? You’re a grief counselor! What other conditions would we meet under?

Then she says, “I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through.”

You can’t!? Well if you can’t then I’m really fucked.

Anyway, a couple of weeks later, my daughter, Billie, who was about thirteen at the time, tells me that she wants to be a neurologist with a specialty in schizophrenia when she grows up.

So I say, “Why not be a grief counselor? We’ll see each other more.”

My daughter, Billie, is incredible. Even though she’s a teenage girl and they so often end up thinking their moth ers are lame and/or insane (and in Billie’s case, she’s not completely wrong). She’s so pretty (she looks a lot like my mother) and she’s a straight-A student—except for chemistry and when’s that gonna come up? And, she’s a great writer and has a wonderful singing voice. (Where’d she get that?) And she just got her driver’s license so pray for me.

Anyway, once, when Billie was about four we were driving along in Florida and she sees this church and she points to it and says, “What’s that?”

So I said, “Well, baby, that’s where people go to worship God.”

And she says, “God, like the God Bless You God?”

Like that’s his main claim to fame.

I took a job at one point when Billie was about three or four with a magazine who would send me to different places with her and one of her friends and then I would write about it. I wanted to call it “Billie’s Holiday,” but they ended up cleverly calling it “Travels With Billie.” So we got to go to all sorts of places. One time, we went to Vegas and visited my mother’s hotel where there were actually slot machines that, in order to win, you had to get three faces in a line of my mother’s smiling face but no matter how many times I tried to get a jackpot with my mother’s head, I never seemed to be able to win. I couldn’t hit the jackpot with my mother’s smiling face! If I’d dreamt that, a shrink would have a field day analyzing its deeper meaning.

Billie has always been a very verbal and watchful child. And you know what’s terrible nowadays is everything that is on TV and the internet. You know, you get movies that are rated PG or PG-13, but it’s not a system that accurately indicates just how sophisticated or explicit these films are. Anyway, one day, Billie and I were watching Muriel’s Wedding, and I was thinking: Well, this is okay, right? I mean, why shouldn’t she see this? I didn’t remember it as anything inappropriate, so I’m sitting there with her and suddenly one of the girls in the movie says: “She sucked your husband’s cock.” And then another woman responds: “Oh, well, she also sucked your husband’s cock.” Now, I’m sitting there next to Billie and I’m devastated. What do I say, if anything? She’s about seven at the time.