Dear Cary

Dear Cary is Dyan Cannon’s book about Cary Grant, and the Google Books record gives its full title as Dear Cary: My Life with Cary Grant. The publisher description in that record calls Cannon an actress and filmmaker and says she recounts her “topsy-turvy relationship” with Grant. The same description aims the book at “romance lovers of all ages”. Open Library files it under subjects that include marriage, wives, biography and motion picture actors and actresses.

The catalog lists 14 other books about Grant, all classed as biography, and Dear Cary carries the same label. Thirteen of them came earlier, from Lionel Godfrey’s Cary Grant (1981) to Marc Eliot’s Cary Grant: a biography (2004), and three of those are by Geoffrey Wansell (1983, 1984 and 1996). Only Scott Eyman’s Cary Grant (2020) came later. Wikipedia’s article on Grant refers to Wansell, Eliot, Graham McCann and Richard Schickel as biographers, and it names Cannon as his wife from 1965 to 1968.

For fans

What the publisher says

The publisher description in the Google Books record is the fullest account of the contents. It says the story began with the romance of Grant’s famous films, naming Charade, To Catch a Thief, An Affair to Remember and The Philadelphia Story. It says the story then took a series of “tragic and unpredictable twists and turns”. It also promises a view behind the scenes of Hollywood’s Golden Age, and it claims the book shares “Grant’s inside story for the first time”. That claim is the publisher’s own, and the catalog lists 13 books about Grant published before this one.

The library records

The records differ on the edition. The catalog facts give 2011 and It Books. Google Books gives 20 Sep 2011, Harper Collins and 407 pages, while Open Library gives It Books, an edition date of 3 Apr 2012 and 368 pages.

The marriage in Wikipedia’s account

Wikipedia’s article on Grant supplies the dates of the marriage. The couple married on 22 Jul 1965 at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, and their daughter Jennifer, his only child, was born on 26 Feb 1966. The article says Grant retired from the screen in 1966, when she was born, so that he could focus on raising her. The couple separated in August 1967 and divorced in 1968, and the article states that Grant was emotionally abusive to Cannon. It also reports that Cannon told a court hearing he was an “apostle of LSD” who was still taking the drug in 1967.