Wishful Drinking

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!)