Dear Cary

The new book by Dyan Cannon is quite a treat. I read the whole thing from beginning to end without missing a word, that's how good it was. I usually find myself jumping to the good parts, the juicy parts, but here I simply couldn't afford that luxury. He was, of course, the most dashing, most sophisticated actor ever to grace the movies. She was the relatively unknown young actress who caught his eye and later captured his heart. She was envied by millions for having caught the man we all dreamed about, finding out mates dull and boring in comparison afterwards. But their life together was not a fairy tale and she writes about it with raw honesty and compassion. There are always two sides to every story and when they divorced, most of us were outraged. We felt she had used him for fame and forture, that she had never really loved him, etc, etc. Reading her book you realize she loved him desperately, passionately, like any of us would have. She probably grew up loving him as we all did, but he was not the flawlessly perfect diamond that shone so brightly on the screen. He was a complex man who had been seriously wounded at birth and never got over it. She couldn't overcome that, no woman ever would, and he was condemned to live eternally on celluloid, eliciting fantasies of glamour, self assurance and happiness he was far from feeling in his real life. Like Marilyn Monroe, these two greats, created masterpieces of themselves that will live on forever.