When you qualify for the mental hospital, you have to sign yourself in, like commitment papers, I guess; but I was so far gone I didn’t know what I was signing or doing, and so when they put the papers in front of me, I took the pen and I signed with my left hand, “Shame.”
That’s how I signed in for the mental hospital. How sad is that?
Oh, and my form of mental illness is also a tiny bit infectious by the way. I may have gotten it from Amy Winehouse’s toilet seat. So, by the end of this book you could be gay and insane! Unless you began that way.
Anyway, ever since my fateful announcement on Diane Sawyer that I was mentally ill—like anyone really needed to know that. Don’t you hate it when celebrities just blah blah blah—talk about themselves—I mean, who asked?—I find it all so wearying
Anyway, where was I? So having waited my entire life to get an award for something, anything (okay fine, not acting, but what about a tiny little award for writing? Nope), I now get awards all the time for being mentally ill. I’m apparently very good at it and am honored for it regularly. Probably one of the reasons I’m such a shoo-in is that there’s no swimsuit portion of the competition.
Hey, look, it’s better than being bad at being mentally ill, right? How tragic would it be to be runner-up for Bipolar Woman of the Year?
The first time I did drugs was when I was thirteen. Before we lost all our money, my family had a vacation house in Palm Springs, about two hours outside of Beverly Hills, where I ostensibly grew up. So periodically my mother used to rent that house in Palm Springs to these people who, after one of their stays, left behind a bag of marijuana. Who knows? Maybe they left it intentionally, a kind of chemical sacrifice on the altar of appreciation for their time there. Anyway, after my mother found the pot, she came to me and said, “Dear, I thought instead of you going outside and smoking pot where you might get caught and get in trouble—I thought you and I might experiment with it together.”
Well, frankly at the time, and let’s face it—even now—I couldn’t imagine anything weirder. But what actually came to pass was that after presenting this bi zarre, albeit marginally appealing proposal, my mother got swept back up in the whirlwind of her life and promptly forgot about it. But being the crafty, eager-for-the-altered-state person I was destined to become, I absolutely did not. So once it became obvious that our proposed experiment had slipped my mother’s mind, I snuck into the lab of her sacheted underwear drawer and stole the pot, subsequently experimenting my brains out in my backyard tree house with my friend May—who coincidentally also ended up in A.A.!
And you’ve got to figure that I enjoyed it, because I ended up experimenting with marijuana for the next six years until it suddenly—and I think rather rudely—turned on me. Where at the onset it was all giggles and munchies and floating in a friendly haze—it suddenly became creepy and dark and scary. What was a junkie to do? Well, the answer was quite obvious—I needed to find a new replacement drug. This was when I was about nineteen, while I was filming Star Wars. (It ultimately turned out to be Harrison’s pot that did me in.) So, after carefully casting about for a substitute substance, I finally settled into my new drug digs—hallucinogens and painkillers. Mind expanders and painkillers. (Though over time and protracted use their meanings got jumbled until they became mind reliev ers and pain expanders—a place where everything hurt and nothing made sense.)
Anyway, at a certain point in my early twenties, my mother started to become worried about my obviously ever-increasing drug ingestion. So she ended up doing what any concerned parent would do.
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 blase 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,
