One of the greatest movie icons ever, Cary Grant, led a secret life for years, but now his ex-wife Dyan Cannon is talking about her marriage to the legendary actor and his drug-induced quest for enlightenment in her new memoir, Dear Cary.
"He had some very tough things happen to him as a kid. Some very dark secrets that he never really dealt with," Cannon told Jane Hanson and me on the set of "New York Live." "He thought LSD was the gateway to God. He wasn't using it as a party thing; he was using it to get to that inner peace of himself because he was really spiritual, the man was, and he thought when our marriage started to go south that if I took it with him, it would heal us."
Dyan admits do doing drugs with her husband about a dozen times but says it always felt wrong to her -- but she couldn't refuse the dashing Cary Grant.
"If you think he was charming on-screen, you should have met him-off screen," Cannon says. "I have never ever met a presence like that, or power in his being, and charm, and his tenderness. He was the whole package."
Cannon isn't at all concerned that by her divulging Grant's addictions, that his fans love him any less -- in fact, she thinks her telling of their relationship will have the opposite effect.
"I think people love him more for it. He was a wonderful man. A precious, wonderful, good, dear man who had demons he didn't deal with," says Cannon. "He thought the LSD would help him and it did, to a certain point, but he didn't deal with the things. He had a tragic childhood."
Just one of the demons Cannon details in her book is when his father told a 10-year-old Grant that his mother was dead. But 30 years later his father confessed his mother was alive -- he had put her in an insane asylum.
"So many people are walking around with broken hearts. I hope this book will inspire them. Just because you fall into the rabbit hole and get stuck doesn't mean you have to stay there. You can climb out. You can love again."
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