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.
10
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 mothers 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.