Screen
actor Cary Grant, left, is greeted by actress Betsy Drake on his return
by ship from England in 1949. They married that year. Ms. Drake died on
Oct. 27 at her home in London. (AP)
By Adam BernsteinNovember 11
Betsy
Drake, an actress and writer who in the 1950s introduced her
then-husband, Cary Grant, to the hallucinogen LSD, endured his
infatuation with Italian screen siren Sophia Loren and survived the
sinking of the Andrea Doria ocean liner, died Oct. 27 at her home in
London. She was 92.
Her death was confirmed by a friend, Michael Schreiber, who did not cite a specific cause.
Ms.
Drake, whose grandfather helped build the landmark Drake and Blackstone
hotels in Chicago, described a life of glittering highs and shattering
lows. She spent her earliest years in Paris, where her American
expatriate parents embraced the roar of the Roaring Twenties.
The
stock market plunge of 1929 ended the frivolity and their marriage, and
Ms. Drake was shuffled among relatives along the East Coast. She took
to acting first as a balm and gradually as a career.
By the time
she left the all-girls Madeira School in McLean, Va., at 17, she had
begun to draw attention for her good looks and rumba skills. She
attended a theater school in Washington and found work in New York as a
Conover model and Broadway understudy.
Drake
aboard the Ile de France as she arrived with over 700 other survivors
picked up by the French liner after the crash of the ocean liner Andrea
Doria in July 1956. (AP)
She won a movie studio
contract in 1946 but grew so restless and bored that she feigned mental
illness to break the arrangement. The next year, she landed a leading
role in the London production of “Deep Are the Roots,” a drama about
race relations directed by Elia Kazan.
Grant — 19 years her
senior, twice divorced and one of the world’s most debonair and
captivating movie stars — saw the play and was struck by Ms. Drake’s
charm and low-voiced allure. By chance, they soon met aboard the Queen
Mary on a voyage to New York, and they shared an intense shipboard
attraction. She soon moved into his Los Angeles home.
With Grant’s pull, she won a contract at RKO studios and debuted opposite her future husband in a confection called “Every Girl Should Be Married”
(1948) as a resourceful woman in pursuit of her romantic prey, a
bachelor pediatrician. New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther called
her “foxily amusing.”
Ms. Drake followed that film with starring
roles in trifles such as “Dancing in the Dark” (1949) with William
Powell, “Pretty Baby” (1950) with Dennis Morgan and “Room for One More” (1952), again with Grant. Rejecting a lavish build-up, she pulled back from her careerto focus on her home life.
She
and Grant had married on Christmas Day 1949, with industrialist Howard
Hughes as best man. According to an account she later gave to Vanity
Fair, she cooked Grant’s meals, greeted him at breakfast each day with a
poem and studied hypnosis in an effort to wean them both off cigarettes
and hard alcohol.
She persuaded Grant to retire — briefly — but
could not interest him in fatherhood. They delved into
transcendentalism, mysticism and yoga. She became a writer and took up
causes including the plight of homeless children in Los Angeles.
Grant
was lured back to work by director Alfred Hitchcock for “To Catch a
Thief” (1955), co-starring Grace Kelly and set in the French Riviera.
The marriage began to deteriorate and was mostly fallow by the time
Grant left for Spain to film “The Pride and the Passion,” a Napoleonic
drama released in 1957.
Betsy Drake, who has died aged 92, was an actress who became the third, and most long-lasting, wife of Cary Grant.
Grant had first set eyes on Betsy on the London stage in 1947, and
when, by coincidence, they both found themselves on the Queen Mary
returning to the United States, he effected an introduction.
When the
liner docked in New York, Betsy bolted into the heart of the city to get
away from him, but he sought her out. Within months he had persuaded
her to move to Los Angeles, where she signed with RKO and David O
Selznick and then found screen stardom opposite Grant in Every Girl Should Be Married (1948), as a woman in pursuit of her romantic prey.
Fan magazines of the late 1940s reported a fairy-tale courtship. The
pair made headlines when they flew to Arizona to marry on Christmas Day
1949, with their pilot and Grant’s best man, Howard Hughes. Betsy Drake
went on to appear in starring roles in Dancing in the Dark (1949) with William Powell, Pretty Baby (1950) with Dennis Morgan, and Room for One More (1952), with her husband, before she decided to put her marriage ahead of her career.
Grant’s first marriage, to the actress Virginia Cherrill, had lasted
only a year, and his second, to the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton,
ended after three years. But as far as the public was concerned, he and
Betsy had perfected the ideal marriage, and Betsy was often asked for
her advice on how to maintain a happy relationship. She was at her
husband’s side in Cannes in 1954 while he made To Catch a Thief with Alfred Hitchcock, and in 1956 she travelled to Spain to join him on the set of The Pride and the Passion.
But it was there she realised her husband was falling in love with
his co-star Sophia Loren. Furious and upset, she ran off before the
press found out and sailed back to New York on the ill-fated Italian
liner Andrea Doria, which collided with another ship off the coast of
Nantucket and capsized. Betsy Drake was one of the 1,660 passengers and
crew rescued. She lost $200,000 worth of jewellery and, although she was
physically unharmed, the disaster seems to have had a huge
psychological impact.
The actress Rosalind Russell later recalled that Betsy Drake “simply
stopped functioning, either as an actress or in any other field in which
she had once been interested”.
Things went from bad to worse after Sophia Loren came to America to star with Grant in the romantic comedy Houseboat
(1958). Betsy Drake had written an early script for the film, hoping
that it would be a vehicle for her and Grant. But Grant insisted the
script be reworked with Sophia Loren playing Betsy’s role.
Looking
for a way to alleviate her emotional turmoil, Betsy took the advice of a
friend who recommended she try a new therapy called LSD. She became a
fervent convert and persuaded her husband that he might benefit from it
too. Grant became involved in some 100 therapy sessions over several
years and became the hallucinogenic drug’s most visible advocate several
years before Dr. Timothy Leary. Indeed Leary recalled that it was
reading about the actor’s use of the drug that persuaded him to give LSD
a try.
Betsy Drake credited LSD with giving her the courage to leave her
husband. “After an LSD session, one morning in bed while we were both
having breakfast, Cary asked me a question and I said, ’Go f–
yourself’,” she recalled. “He jumped out of bed, buttoning the top of
his pyjamas, his bare bottom showing, and slammed the bathroom door.
That was the true beginning of the end.”
She and Grant were divorced in 1962 after 13 years of marriage.
Betsy Gordon Drake was born at Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, on
September 11 1923 to wealthy parents. Her grandfather had built
Chicago’s Drake and Blackstone hotels. After the crash of 1929 the
Drakes returned to Chicago, where Betsy was parked at the Drake with a
nanny while her parents lived at the Blackstone. They soon divorced and
Betsy’s mother suffered a nervous breakdown. Betsy spent the rest of her
childhood being shuttled between relatives in Washington DC, Virginia,
and Connecticut.
She found solace in acting and, after dropping out of high school,
made the rounds of New York auditions, modelling and understudying on
Broadway until she was cast by Elia Kazan for a production of Deep Are
the Roots, opening in London. It was there that she was spotted by Cary
Grant.
When rumours circulated that Grant was gay, Betsy Drake memorably
replied to the effect that they were too busy making love for her to ask
(she used an earthier expression). But she reflected later that she
felt he had never loved her: “I lost myself trying to please him. The
only way we could see to save us was by getting into yoga and LSD, but
that didn’t work either.”
She and Grant, who married twice more, remained friendly. Meanwhile
her experiences with LSD led her to take an interest in mental health
and she began volunteering at hospitals for the mentally ill. In the
early 1970s she published a novel and enrolled at Harvard, earning a
Master’s of Education in Psychology.
Betsy Drake eventually moved to London. She never remarried.
Cary Grant called one morning. He was the only person who could coax
two syllables out of my first name. "Di-ick, this is Cary," he
announced crisply. Never any danger of mistaking the voice we all knew
better than our own. Funny how easy those stars were to imitate.. and
how impossible to replicate. I asked how I could help him. For a press
agent.. a flack, a publicity guy.., three out of four calls are asks.
How-can-I-help-you? cuts to the chase. "You know this fellow Vernon
Scott, don't you? United something," Cary began. "United Press
International." "That's the one. I wonder if he would write a story
for you.. something I'd like to clear up." Cary liked to clear things
up. He'd called me early in our association to clear up the matter of
the English muffins at New York's Plaza Hotel. It was widely rumored
for decades that he once had called the manager of the hotel (in some
reports it is Conrad Hilton whom he called) to find out what had
happened to the other half of one of the two English muffins on which
his eggs Benedict were supposed to have arrived. The rumor had it that
he had requested that the other half be brought up to his room since
he'd paid for it. That, he had told me on the prior call, was
nonsense. He had merely inquired if the other half became part of
someone else' eggs Benedict or if it was wastefully discarded. He was
told it was put to good use, and he was fine with that. "Do you want me
to quash that rumor?" I'd asked during the muffin call. "No, I just
wanted you to know. It's too late now. That muffin has done its
damage."
But this time, it was clear that he wanted me to take
action. "What's the problem, Cary?" "One of those women's magazines,"
he said, "they've printed this story quoting me as having said that I
never loved any of my wives." "That's pretty rude. Did you ever say
that.. or anything like it?" "LIKE it, yes... yes , I did. I once
commented that I had never LEFT any of my wives. They all left ME. Do
you think you can get friend Vernon to speak to me to tidy that up?"
"Cary," I said, "this is one I think I can sell."
Cary Grant and third wife Betsy Drake on location for their 1952 movie, Room for One More. Opposite, at home in the 1950s. Her experiences with LSD therapy led him to try it. Photographs: Left, from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Right, from The Everett Collection.
Before Timothy Leary and the Beatles, LSD was largely unknown and unregulated. But in the 1950s, as many as 100 Hollywood luminaries—Cary Grant and Esther Williams among them—began taking the drug as part of psychotherapy. With LSD research beginning a comeback, the authors recount how two Beverly Hills doctors promoted a new “wonder drug,” at $100 a session, profoundly altering the lives of their glamorous patients, Balaban included.
Our story is set in the years before Mad Men, when Eisenhower was in the White House and America had only 48 states. Our stage is Beverly Hills, still a small town in 1958, where movie stars and other entertainment-industry leaders led active but traditional, even somewhat constrained social lives.
There was a zone of privacy in that time and place we can’t begin to imagine today. Money, emotional traumas, and personal doubts were simply not discussed, even by the closest of friends. Appearances were accepted as reality, so people kept very busy making sure every aspect of their lives looked correct. That didn’t mean having the most lavish house, the heftiest jewels, or the largest private plane, as it came to in later decades. It did mean dressing, behaving, and speaking appropriately; appearing to be happily married, in love, or looking for love en route to marriage; not complaining about one’s career or annual income; and being enormously ambitious without evidencing any ambition whatsoever.
Social lives were just as circumspect. Dinners were small A-list gatherings at Chasen’s, Romanoff’s, Don the Beachcomber, or poolside barbecues at private homes. The most visible scandals arose when dancing partners who were married—but not to each other—indulged in excessive caresses or when someone (almost always a man) drank too much, though boozy belligerence and even outright drunkenness were rare to invisible.
Almost everyone smoked carton-loads of regular cigarettes, but a “joint” was a body part or a lower-class dive. If people were “doing lines,” you’d have guessed they were writing screenplay dialogue or song lyrics. And if you mentioned “acid,” you’d mean citrus juice or a stomach problem. Nobody in Hollywood—or almost anywhere else in the United States—had ever heard of LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide. Timothy Leary wouldn’t even pop his first mushroom until 1960. So it was very out of character that against this background a group of more than 100 Hollywood-establishment types began ingesting little azure pills that resembled cake decorations as an adjunct to psychotherapy.
“When I’d say I was in therapy with a doctor using LSD, people thought I was talking about World War II landing ships”—L.S.T.’s—remembers Judy Balaban, the daughter of longtime Paramount Pictures president Barney Balaban. She didn’t know much about LSD when she started taking it, in the late 50s, but, she laughingly says, “I figured if it was good enough for Cary Grant, it was good enough for me!”
If appearances were important to those behind the camera, they were crucial to stars of the big screen. And as far as the public of 1958 was concerned, Betsy Drake and Cary Grant had “perfected the ideal living pattern” after eight years of wedded bliss. According to the fan magazines, theirs had been a fairy-tale romance: Cary had seen Betsy on the London stage in 1947, and then, when they both serendipitously found themselves on the Queen Mary returning to the States, he begged a friend, the movie star Merle Oberon, to arrange an introduction. After an intense several days on shipboard, Betsy bolted into New York City, but Cary sought her out. Within months he had persuaded her to move to Los Angeles, where she signed with RKO and David O. Selznick and then burst to screen stardom opposite Grant in Every Girl Should Be Married. The Los Angeles Timesproclaimed her “the freshest, most distinctive personality since [Jean] Arthur,” and Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper declared her to be “at the threshold of a brilliant career.”
Grant and Drake made headlines when they flew to Arizona to elope on Christmas Day 1949 with their pilot and Cary’s best man, Howard Hughes. Betsy made a few more films before she decided to put her marriage ahead of her career. Determined to be a successful wife, she sought ways to become indispensable to a man who already had a secretary and valet. She developed into a great cook and became his trusted sounding board. She studied hypnosis and, at Cary’s urging, helped both of them to stop smoking, but when he asked her to do the same for his drinking, she agreed to banish only hard liquor and not the wine and beer she enjoyed.
Betsy was beseeched for her advice on how to have a happy marriage, and newspapers and magazines praised the couple’s simple yet complete lives, at their homes in Palm Springs and Beverly Hills or on location. She was at his side in Cannes in 1954 while he made To Catch a Thief with Alfred Hitchcock, and then she went to Spain to join him on the set of The Pride and the Passion. But it was there she realized her husband was falling in love with his co-star Sophia Loren. When Loren came to America not long afterward to star with Grant inHouseboat, it was clear to Betsy that her marriage was over.
Behind the smiling pictures, Betsy was miserable. Though still in love with Grant, she tried to find the strength to leave him, but her shattered childhood had given her no psychic grounding to weather this rejection. She had been born in Paris in 1923 to wealthy parents—her grandfather had built Chicago’s Drake and Blackstone hotels—and the family was living the good life in France alongside the Hemingways and other American expatriates. But following the crash of 1929 the Drakes returned to Chicago, where Betsy was ensconced at the Drake with a nanny while her parents lived at the Blackstone and worked at writing a play. They soon divorced and Betsy’s mother suffered a nervous breakdown; Betsy spent the rest of her childhood being shuttled among relatives in Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Connecticut.
Without realizing it, Betsy found solace in acting; when she answered the phone pretending to be someone else, the stutter that plagued her miraculously vanished. But it wasn’t until she appeared in a school play and the audience burst out in “this wonderful laughter” that she felt an approval she had never known before.
Dropping out of high school, she made the rounds of New York agents and auditions, modeling and understudying on Broadway until she was cast by Elia Kazan for a production of Deep Are the Roots, opposite Gordon Heath, opening in London. It was there that Cary had seen her, but taken as she was with him, she was also afraid. Betsy had had lovers before, but she resisted marriage, in large part because of what she had witnessed at home. Yet Cary was so persistent in his courting that she became convinced he was the anchor she had been seeking all her life. Twenty years her senior, he became “my lover, my husband, my everything.”
With her marriage now in tatters, Betsy knew she had to talk to someone and, swearing her friend Sallie Brophy to secrecy, poured out her heart. Sallie, a stage and television actress who had suffered from depression since childhood, told Betsy that she was trying a new kind of therapy with a wonder drug that had the power to break through to the subconscious. She insisted that Betsy meet her therapist, but when they arrived at his Beverly Hills office, Betsy refused to get out of the car. So Sallie went inside and brought the doctor out. He talked to Betsy through the open car window:
“You are desperate, right?”
Betsy nodded.
“Well, then why not give this a try?”
Hardly the most persuasive argument—or the most thorough intake interview—but Betsy saw the logic and agreed to come back the next morning. She was feeling somewhat more hopeful that night when she joined Cary, Clifford Odets, and Jascha Heifetz for dinner at Chasen’s. She told them, “Tomorrow I am going to take LSD.” But the men looked at her blankly and then went on with their conversation. “They didn’t know what I was talking about,” she says. “No one had heard of it.”
“I Had a Strange Feeling…”
Twenty years earlier, in 1938, a 32-year-old Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann had synthesized the concoction while experimenting with fungus in search of a stimulant for the central nervous system. “I had a strange feeling that it would be worthwhile to carry out more profound studies,” Hofmann later said. After trying the drug himself, first by mistake and then intentionally, he added, “I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature.”
He labeled the chemical LSD-25, because it had been the 25th variation in his experiments. His employer, Sandoz laboratories (now a subsidiary of Novartis), began providing the substance to researchers in hopes of finding profitable applications. By the mid-1950s, the C.I.A., the U.S. Army, the Canadian government, and Britain’s M.I.6 had all jumped in, hoping LSD would serve as a truth serum or a new method of chemical warfare. Prisons and the military provided fertile and secret testing grounds. Other practitioners, varying widely in their legitimacy, experimented on derelicts, terminal cancer patients, residents of veterans’ hospitals, and college students. Within the psychiatric profession word spread that LSD held the potential to cure alcoholism, schizophrenia, shell shock (now known as post-traumatic stress disorder), and a wide range of other problems. Between 1950 and 1965, a reported 40,000 people worldwide would be tested or “treated” with LSD.
Sandoz was so loose with its requirements for obtaining the drug that when Oscar Janiger, a Los Angeles psychiatrist, wrote the company in the mid-1950s asking for a supply to give to consenting patients, on whose experiences he would then report, he was sent his own private stock of LSD. Artists told other artists, ministers told other ministers, and the good doctor was soon spending most of his time hosting experiments. Along with Dr. Sidney Cohen, Janiger expanded his efforts into a “creativity” study through U.C.L.A., where writers, painters, and musicians such as André Previn experimented with the drug.
Aldous Huxley, the renowned author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, was one of the first in Los Angeles to take LSD and was soon joined by others including the writer Anaïs Nin. The screenwriter Charles Brackett discovered “infinitely more pleasure” from music on LSD than he ever had before, and the director Sidney Lumet tried it under the supervision of a former chief of psychiatry for the U.S. Navy. Lumet says his three sessions were “wonderful,” especially the one where he relived his birth and, after checking with his father, learned that the experience was factually accurate, not simply symbolic. Another early experimenter was Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright and former American ambassador to Italy, who in turn encouraged her husband, Time publisher Henry Luce, to try LSD. He was impressed and several very positive articles about the drug’s potential ran in his magazine in the late 50s and early 60s, praising Sandoz’s “spotless” laboratories, “meticulous” scientists, and LSD itself as “an invaluable weapon to psychiatrists.”
It was in the mid-1950s that Sallie Brophy’s therapist, Mortimer Hartman, began experimenting with LSD. A radiologist, he had undergone five years of Freudian analysis and was thrilled to find a drug that seemed to let the unconscious burst to the forefront, instantaneously dissolving the ego instead of slowly peeling it away layer by layer. Claiming LSD “intensifies emotion and memory a hundred times,” as Hartman toldLook magazine in 1959, he became so enamored with the drug that he shifted away from radiology and joined forces with the psychiatrist Arthur Chandler to create the sedate yet pretentiously named Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills. Their next step was to secure a direct source of the drug from Sandoz for what they said would be a five-year study of LSD as a catalyst in the treatment of—as they affectionately named this new class of patients—“garden-variety neurotics.”
The tall and gangly Hartman opened his institute on Beverly Hills’ exclusive Lasky Drive. The rooms were furnished with sofas and decorated in what one patient remembers as “inexpensive and undistinguished browns and beiges,” with wood paneling halfway up the walls. Hartman and Chandler were partners, but Chandler, whom another patient describes as looking like “an unfunny Walter Matthau,” continued to work out of his house off Coldwater Canyon. In the words of a doctor who knew them both, Chandler served as a “drag” on the potentially “grandiose and messianic” Hartman, who was, after all, a doctor, but not a trained psychiatrist.
At most universities and hospitals, students and volunteers were paid for their willingness to test LSD, but Hartman and Chandler reversed the equation, and even though they saw only a few patients a day, the doctors were paid very well for their time. Aldous Huxley wrote to a friend that he found it “profoundly disturbing” to meet “two Beverly Hills psychiatrists … who specialize in LSD therapy at $100 a shot—really, I have seldom met people of lower sensitivity, more vulgar mind!”
Yet the two treatment rooms at the Psychiatric Institute were soon booked five days a week after patients such as Sallie Brophy began recommending the therapy to friends such as Betsy Drake. Shown into one of the small rooms and told to lie on the couch in the corner, Betsy was given a pair of blinders to wear to block out any distractions. Assured that the tiny blue dots in the little white paper cup came straight from the Sandoz laboratories, she was soon feeling a “horrible crushing,” and, in very real physical pain, she realized she was re-experiencing her own birth. The session lasted several hours and she was given a Seconal to “bring me down” slowly. Enthused by what she considered an incredible experience, Betsy went home and called her mother, with whom she hadn’t spoken in more than a decade. “I told her, ‘I love you,’ and after all that time, she just said, ‘Of course you do, darling,’ and hung up.”
The failure to reconnect in a meaningful way with her mother didn’t dampen Betsy’s optimism about the therapy. Fifty years later, sitting in her cozy London home with her bobbed hair now gray but her high cheekbones and radiant smile evidence of her long-ago stardom, she says her memories of her experiences under LSD are still crystal-clear, the revelations still vivid. The unconscious, she says, “is like a vast ocean. You don’t know where you are going to go. There is no past, present, and future—all time is now. The amazing thing about the drug is the things you see. The palm trees look different. Everything looks different, and it teaches you so much.”
Once a week for several months, Drake returned to Hartman’s office for her sessions and her LSD, arriving at eight A.M. and staying until as late as seven at night. Like a dentist leaving a patient after administering novocaine, Hartman was in and out of the room, sometimes putting on music to enhance the atmosphere. Because it was mandated that patients not drive themselves home, friends such as Judy Balaban picked her up.
Judy was only 26, but she had been married for six years to Jay Kanter, agent to stars such as Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, Marilyn Monroe, and Grace Kelly, who were also close friends. (Judy had served as a bridesmaid at Kelly’s royal wedding, in Monaco.) Judy and Jay had two young daughters, and friends assumed her family was as perfect as it looked, but she was troubled by the sense that her life had become perfunctory, and she felt unconnected to her children. This hidden dissatisfaction with outwardly happy lives was a common theme among Betsy and Judy’s circle of friends, which also included the actress Polly Bergen (recently seen on Desperate Housewives as Felicity Huffman’s mother), who was married to agent Freddie Fields, founder of the precursor to ICM; Linda Lawson, a rising ingenue who was dating and would eventually marry the agent and future producer John Foreman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid); and Marion Marshall, an actress who had recently divorced the director Stanley Donen and would go on to marry the actor Robert Wagner.
In some sense, all these women were living the lives they had been raised to think they wanted. John Foreman later summarized the classic conundrum of marriages in the 1950s: “The guy rides up on a white horse, sweeps the girl off her feet, and says, ‘Marry me and I’ll give you everything you want.’ Years pass and the wife comes to the painful conclusion that she is miserable. ‘Why are you unhappy?’ asks the husband. ‘What do you want?’ ‘I don’t know,’ the wife responds helplessly. ‘I thought you knew and were going to give it to me.’ ”
A few of these women had tried analysis, but none had ever been given prescriptions from their psychiatrists. Yet LSD was seen as a powerful tool to break through confusion and inhibition. As Bergen says, “I wanted to be the person, not the persona,” and what attracted her to LSD therapy was “this possibility of a magic wand” that would force her to open up. Marshall, who went to Hartman’s office once a week for about a year, is quick to point out that she never thought of the regimen as “taking a drug. It was therapy. It was what my doctor told me to do, so I did it.”
Their descriptions of their experiences on LSD can sound today like a rehash of New Age clichés, but at the time—before the Beatles and the Jefferson Airplane were literally singing the praises of psychedelic drugs, before every college student was reading Carlos Castaneda—their perceptions were fresh and revelatory. Like Sidney Lumet and Betsy Drake, Judy relived her birth and often felt during therapy as if she had left her body and “fused” with the universe. “You experienced this otherworld consciousness and became part of what I imagined was ‘the infinite mind of man.’ ”
Linda Lawson was unprepared when she took the little blue dots, put on her blinders, and was soon suffering “a burst of rage and sobbing.” She was once again a 13-year-old girl, reliving the death of her father, “who had never raised his voice and was always so loving” but had left her to live with a mother who she felt didn’t know how to love her. In grappling with her issues of abandonment, Linda grew so trusting of Hartman (she found him “sweet, if a bit skeletal”) that when he urged her to move in with John Foreman she did so. And when the doctor added Ritalin—a stimulant that can affect brain chemistry—to her regimen, she didn’t question him.
“My Wise Mahatma”
Cary Grant’s initial impetus for visiting Dr. Hartman was a concern about what his wife might be saying about him. Grant methodically cultivated his debonair image and had been a leading man for more than 25 years. It was an unparalleled achievement, all the more remarkable because he had accomplished it by creating his persona out of whole cloth. He was a poor and emotionally abused boy of 14 named Archie Leach when he left his Bristol, England, home several years after his mother had simply disappeared; it would be decades before he discovered she had been institutionalized, possibly by his father, who had another family on the side. Grant came to America as an acrobat, soon began acting on the stage, and was famously “discovered” in 1932 by Mae West, who gave him his first featured film role, in She Done Him Wrong. He had transformed himself with a new accent and educated himself about art, clothes, and etiquette, in the process becoming the proverbial man of the world whom every woman wants and every man wants to be. He had perfected his exterior beyond his wildest dreams, but the inside was something else again. His self-deprecating remark “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant—even I want to be Cary Grant” had more than a ring of truth to it.
At the time he began treatment with Dr. Hartman he was 55 and separated from Betsy, his third wife. His first marriage, to the actress Virginia Cherrill, had lasted only a year, and his marriage to the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton ended after three years. (He was the only one of her eventual seven husbands not to take money from her.) Cary remained friends with Betsy, sometimes even staying with her for weekends, but Betsy was busy trying to reclaim her own life. He may not have been aware of how devastated she was by their breakup, but he did know there was a very real void in his own life.
Leery of doctors, in part because he believed Barbara Hutton’s hypochondria had led to unnecessary operations and pain, Cary was not ready to be impressed with Hartman. Yet he quickly became intrigued, started calling the doctor “my wise Mahatma,” and began what would be some 100 therapy sessions over several years.
There is no question that, at least for a period of time, LSD truly transformed Cary Grant. “When I first started under LSD, I found myself turning and turning on the couch,” he later told a friendly reporter. “I said to the doctor, ‘Why am I turning around on this sofa?’ and he said ‘Don’t you know why?’ and I said I didn’t have the vaguest idea, but I wondered when it was going to stop. ‘When you stop it,’ he answered. Well, it was like a revelation to me, taking complete responsibility for one’s own actions. I thought ‘I’m unscrewing myself.’ That’s why people use the phrase, ‘all screwed up.’ ”
Few of the participants mentioned their drug therapy to friends who weren’t also in therapy. They did, however, talk with one another; as Judy Balaban says, “What I had with Cary and Betsy was a kind of soul-baringness that the culture didn’t start to deal with until years later. We continued to have that even when our lives went off in different directions.” When the actor Patrick O’Neal asked Judy about LSD during a dinner party at Oscar Levant’s house, she started to explain, but Oscar interrupted with his own pithy summation: “Patrick, you don’t get it. Judy was taking LSD for exactly the opposite reason you and I take stuff. She is trying to find out about things. You and I are trying to obliterate them.”
Yet that was a conversation among a small group of close friends. Beyond scientific journals and mentions in Time magazine, there was still little information about LSD available to the public. Then, much to his friends’ surprise, Cary Grant began talking about his therapy in public, lamenting, “Oh those wasted years, why didn’t I do this sooner?”
This kind of sharing, as we might now call it, was very out of character for a man to whom his carefully cultivated image was so important that he had maintained more than 20 scrapbooks of the international coverage he had received. When he started taking LSD he stopped saving articles, even though there were dozens of interesting new ones he could have cut and pasted into those blank pages.
“The Curious Story Behind the New Cary Grant” headlined the September 1, 1959, issue ofLook magazine, and inside was a glowing account of how, because of LSD therapy, “at last, I am close to happiness.” He later explained that “I wanted to rid myself of all my hypocrisies. I wanted to work through the events of my childhood, my relationship with my parents and my former wives. I did not want to spend years in analysis.” More articles followed, and LSD even received a variation of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval when that magazine declared in its September 1960 issue that it was one of the secrets of Grant’s “second youth.” The magazine went on to praise him for “courageously permitting himself to be one of the subjects of a psychiatric experiment with a drug that eventually may become an important tool in psychotherapy.”
Many reading those articles had to be intrigued, but MGM’s great aqua diva, Esther Williams, was one of the few who could pick up the phone, call Cary, and have him invite her over to discuss it. Williams had captivated audiences with her dazzling smile, her synchronized swimming, and her perfect athletic body in films such as Million Dollar Mermaid and Dangerous When Wet, but now she was in her late 30s and had just been through a wrenching divorce, only to discover that her now ex-husband had spent all her earnings and left her with a huge debt to the I.R.S. As she put it in her autobiography, “At that point, I really didn’t know who I was. Was I that glamorous femme fatale?… Was I just another broken-down divorcée whose husband left her with all the bills and three kids?”
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Now here was Cary Grant saying, “I know that, all my life, I’ve been going around in a fog. You’re just a bunch of molecules until you know who you are.” In a fog. That was exactly how Esther was feeling, and she was desperate to break through it. Cary warned her, “It takes a lot of courage to take this drug,” because “it’s a tremendous jolt to your mind, to your ego.” After Williams assured him she had “to find some answers, fast,” Grant agreed to introduce her to Dr. Hartman.
Esther, who has lived for years in Beverly Hills with her longtime husband, Ed Bell, still has a swimming pool and still remembers her experience with LSD vividly. She eagerly took her little blue pills and was thrilled to discover that “with my eyes closed, I felt my tension and resistance ease away as the hallucinogen swept through me. Then, without warning, I went right to the place where the pain lay in my psyche.” She returned to the day when she was 8 years old and her beloved 16-year-old brother, Stanton, died. The family had moved from Kansas to Los Angeles, convinced Stanton was destined for stardom, and his death devastated each family member in different ways. Under LSD, Esther saw “my father’s face as a ceramic plate. Almost instantly, it splintered into a million tiny pieces, like a windshield when a rock goes through it.” Then she saw her mother’s face on that terrible day, and “all the emotion had drained out of her, and her soft, kindly features had hardened.”
During the session Esther realized—“observing it from a distance as if I were acting in or watching a movie”—that ever since the day her brother had died her life had been consumed by the necessity to replace him in every sense of the word, and “suddenly this little girl was in a race against time to be an adult.”
Exhausted but calm, Esther left the doctor’s office and returned to her Mandeville Canyon home, where her parents, still emotionally broken by Stanton’s death, were waiting to have dinner with her. She “understood them that night in a profound way, and while I sympathized, I was also sickened by their weakness and their resignation. I saw that they both simply had given up, which, no matter what life had in store for me, was something I could never and would never do.”
But the evening wasn’t over for Esther. After she had said good night to her parents, she went to her bedroom, undressed, and washed. When she looked in the mirror, “I was startled by a split image: One half of my face, the right half, was me; the other half was the face of a sixteen-year-old boy. The left side of my upper body was flat and muscular.… I reached up with my boy’s large, clumsy hand to touch my right breast and felt my penis stirring. It was a hermaphroditic phantasm.” Esther has no recollection of how long she stood there, but there was no question that now “I understood perfectly: when Stanton had died, I had taken him into my life so completely that he became a part of me.”
“Well, Let’s Just End This”
For Esther Williams, Cary Grant, Betsy Drake, and many others, the experience of taking LSD had a profound effect on them. Over and over in interviews, former patients recounted how it changed their perception of the universe and of their place in it. Most agreed with Sidney Lumet, who says LSD provided “remarkable revelations” he continues to consider very useful to this day. Yet, in many cases, their experiences were not all positive, sometimes because of unexpected reactions to the drug, sometimes because of odd, even irresponsible actions by the therapists, who were in uncharted waters, way beyond normal medical protocols.
Marion Marshall had a frightening session where she was convinced a huge black-widow spider was going to attack her. She pulled off her mask to talk to Hartman, and when she told him what was happening, he said, “Well, let’s just end this.” But Marion insisted, “No, I am going to go back and face it.” She put her blinders back on, and “it turned into the best session I ever had. I faced my fears, whatever they were. It was like the death experience that people describe; all of a sudden everything was white and wonderful.”
She had won her revelation in spite of Hartman, who was even less helpful during what turned out to be Judy Balaban’s last experience with LSD. “It started out like all my sessions,” she recalls. “I went into the fusion [with the universe] state and got all the way out there, no longer connected to my body. But suddenly I hit the dysphoric side rather than the euphoric side I’d always gone to, and I was scared for the first time in eight months. I wanted to return to my body, but couldn’t. I was so disconnected I couldn’t even make my mouth work. Usually when you were fused, you could speak if you needed to. Not this time. After a couple of minutes of silence that felt like a year, Hartman said, ‘I don’t know where you are, kid …you’re on your own!’
“You’re on your own! Now I was really terrified! I’m stuck in this abstract universe, disconnected from my body, and no one knows how I can get back to myself! He gave me a shiny yellow pill—Compazine, I think—but it took several more hours for me to reconnect my body and my mind. I didn’t blame Hartman for putting me there, but I did blame him for abandoning me verbally. For months afterward, usually at night, I would return to that fused state and be afraid I couldn’t get back into myself. Finally, another doctor taught me how to breathe properly when an incident began, and then I was able to stop it before it took hold of me. I never had even a hint of another one again.”
Polly Bergen had been going to Dr. Chandler’s house once a week for several months, but when the little blue pills didn’t seem to work anymore, he gave her injections of Ritalin. “Because I don’t seem to have available veins elsewhere, he shot it into my hand, and when it didn’t go into my veins, I watched as my hand started to swell with fluid. All the while he kept talking on and on about his own experiences. I had to tell him it wasn’t working, and he took the needle out, but that’s when I realized I was being treated by someone who was high, stoned, completely gone.”
Having lost all confidence in Chandler, Polly stopped seeing him, but periodically she “started disappearing into this dreamlike state, not actually leaving my body, but reliving these experiences: being born, being a child in a crib.” The flashbacks scared her, and they didn’t stop until she and her husband sat down with another psychiatrist, who explained the drug and its effects, something Chandler had never done.
Linda Lawson kept trying to see the positive side of her treatments until, during one of her sessions, she heard the tinkling of glass. She lifted her blinders to see where the noise was coming from and saw Chandler “playing with these pieces of glass, making a mosaic. He was stoned and just somewhere else entirely.” That did it for Linda, but occasionally she would visit him “just to sit up and talk,” concluding that “he was probably a very good therapist before he started getting so stoned himself.”
“Too Much of a Good Thing”
Betsy Drake credits LSD therapy with “giving me the courage to leave my husband” and, for the first time, to truly speak her mind. “After an LSD session, one morning in bed while we were both having breakfast, Cary asked me a question and I said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ He jumped out of bed, buttoning the top of his pajamas, his bare bottom showing, and slammed the bathroom door. That was the true beginning of the end.”
She and Cary were divorced in 1962 after 13 years of marriage—his longest—but they remained friendly for the rest of his life. The therapy had intensified her interest in the mental-health field; she began volunteering, then studying, at U.C.LA.’s Neuropsychiatric Institute and other Los Angeles hospitals. In the early 70s she published a novel and enrolled at Harvard, earning a master’s of education in psychology, specializing in psychodrama therapy, where patients act out problems instead of discussing them.
Cary continued to sing the praises of LSD, and his belief in it was evidenced by the fact he left Dr. Hartman $10,000 in his will. But when the actress Dyan Cannon divorced Grant in 1968, after less than three years of marriage, LSD was used against him. In seeking custody of their daughter, Jennifer, Cannon’s lawyers claimed that he was “an unfit father” because of his use of the drug and his resulting “instability.” However, when the respected psychiatrist Judd Marmor testified that Grant had told him LSD had deepened the actor’s “sense of compassion for people, deepened his understanding of himself, and helped cure his shyness and anxiety in dealing with other people,” Grant was given two months a year with his daughter and the right to overnight visits.
Grant’s defensive posture regarding LSD during his last divorce reflected the dramatic shift in public opinion. Beginning in 1962, the Food and Drug Administration began demanding to see the records of doctors such as Hartman and Chandler and appeared at their offices to confiscate their LSD supply. The doors of the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills closed suddenly that same year. Linda Lawson remembers being deep into her drug-induced state when Hartman informed her, without giving any reason, that he was leaving California and this would be her last session with him. The proliferation of LSD as a street drug and reports of suicides and other tragic consequences of LSD abuse led to national legislation criminalizing its possession in 1968. There wasn’t much resistance from its earliest adherents. Clare Boothe Luce was said to have cautioned, “We wouldn’t want everyone doing too much of a good thing.”
Nevertheless, one of the common threads among the interviews we conducted with past patients was that, no matter how they felt about their personal experience with LSD, they resented that Timothy Leary’s much-publicized campaign to “turn on, tune in, drop out” had sparked a backlash against a drug they still believe to be a potentially beneficial telescope into the subconscious. Their time might have finally come, for today, after 50 years of its being demonized, LSD is beginning to make a comeback in the laboratory. No breakthroughs are expected soon, but researchers from around the world gathered in California this past April to compare notes, and scientists at Harvard and the University of California at San Francisco have received permission from the F.D.A. to experiment with LSD once again.
Gehman, Richard Good Housekeeping, September 1960, p. 64 A psychological look at Grant's personal life with the actor telling about his authorized experiments with LSD and the effect it has had on his life.
"Archie Leach"Grant, Cary Ladies Home Journal, January/February 1963 (Part 1), March 1963 (Part 2), April 1963 (Part 3) In these three articles, Grant goes into a great deal of personal recollection and introspection on his childhood, his attraction to show business, his personal life and his stardom. Part I covers his childhood until he came to America with the Pender Troupe. Part II covers his early years working in New York City and offers his insights into several key people in his life. Part III starts in 1922 and takes him through his early years in Hollywood and his psychiatric use of LSD. Originally these articles were to have been written by Joe Hyams who sent the articles to Grant for approval. Grant then rewrote the articles. Hyam's by-line was removed and he and Grant split the $125,000 fee.
"At 62, Cary Grant Tells: Why I Waited Till Now to be a Father"
Jamieson, Rose Photoplay, May 1966, p 57 Grant offers his theories on having children and comments on his leading ladies.
"Best Regards to Mr. Cary Grant"
Madcos, Rita McCall's, August 1967, p. 62-63 A charming, fictional short story about one woman's wish to meet Cary Grant while in Germany filming I Was a Male Warbride.
"Billing Without Cooing"
Bart, PeterNew York Times, November 15, 1964 Article delves into the guidelines stars establish for their films' promotional material.
"Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn"
Look, December 17, 1963, p. 87 Photos of Grant and Hepburn from Charade and with other of his leading ladies with article about Grant's appearance in Washington D.C. when he was helping Bobby Kennedy's drive to stem school dropouts. Cover Photo.
"Cary Grant: the Perennial Dreamboat in a New Role"
Gordon, S. Look, July 26, 1966, p. 70 A day in the life of Grant that emphasizes his love of baseball.
"Cary Grant"
Roman, Robert C.Films in Review, December 1961, p. 577-598 Typical career article with several dated inaccuracies such as listing his mother as dead. Highly illustrated with film photos.
"Cary Grant: As His Best Friends (and Ex-friends) Know Him"
Davidson, MurielGood Housekeeping, November 1962, p. 80 Many good quotes in this article have found their way into books. While Davidson has some of Grant's early biography muddled, the bulk of the article, with quotes from Grant's friends and acquaintances, is very enlightening.
"Cary Grant and the Widow He Wants to Make His Wife"
Owen, JasonPhotoplay, December 1969, p. 60 Narrative of Grant dating Clothilde Feldman, widow of the Hollywood agent turned producer Charles Feldman, during a Greater Los Angeles Press Club Charity Tennis Tournament.
"Cary Grant Can't Wait to Be a Father"
Rivers, NaomiPhotoplay, February 1965, p. 29 Grant offers his views on having and raising children. The author also presents her views on the women with whom Grant has had relationships and might have had children.
"Cary Grant: Confidential File"
Hamilton, SaraPhotoplay, April 1960, p. 52 Grant Comments on Suzy Parker and on how he enjoyed the preview of The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. This article also mentions that Betsy Drake was the author of the screenplay forHouseboat.
"Cary Grant: Dinner on His Bed"
Thyssen, Greta and Marilyn BeckPhotoplay, March 1962, p. 66 This question-and-answer interview with Greta Thyssen discusses what it's like to date Cary Grant.
"Cary Grant Turns Cop"
Life, December 10, 1965
"Cary Insulted Me, Threatened Me, Hit Me!"
O'Brien, FredPhotoplay, June 1968, p. 14 Sensationalistic article centering on Dyan Cannon's testimony during her divorce proceedings.
Cary Grant - Showing His Age?
Screen Album; 1964
"Drugs and Cary Grant"
Graham, Don Photoplay, August 1967, p. 38 Grant's bachelor-like lifestyle and his relationship with women is discussed along with his psychotherapy which employed LSD.
"The Good Gray Grant"
Archer, EugeneNew York Times Encyclopedia of Film, August 22, 1965 A look at Grant's special appeal as an actor.
"Grant Quitting Films For a New Cary Face"
Buie, JudiDallas Morning News, September 11, 1969, p. 20A
"How a Star Fills a Director's Chair"
Business Weekly, December 21, 1968, p. 92-94 Description of Grant's role within the Rayette-Faberge company and compares it with that of other business people/movie stars like Bob Hope, Art Linkletter and Polly Bergen.
"How Many Titles of These Cary Grant Movies Can You Name?"
Ladies Home Journal, March 1963, p. 46 Game to match 14 photos from Grant's movies to the name of the film. Placed in conjunction with Grant's autobiography in the same issue.
"Love -That's All Cary Every Thinks About!"Sheilah Graham Motion Picture, June 1964; p. 58
"Mrs. Cary Grant Talks about Marrying and Divorcing Cary Grant"
Battelle, P.Ladies Home Journal, April 1968, p. 106 Grant's fourth wife, Dyan Cannon, addresses her marriage to Grant, its dissolution, and how she is resuming her life and career.
"New Look of Cary Grant"
Good Housekeeping, January 1965, p. 44
"Old Cary Grant Fine"Time, July 27, 1962, p. 40 A look at the personal side of Grant with emphasis on his economic standing, his off-stage life, his years with Betsy Drake and his minimal number of friends.
"The Pleasure of His Company"
Benson, SheilaLos Angeles Times, January 15, 1964, Section C, p. 17 A tribute to Cary Grant on his 80th birthday. Notes the writings of Thomson and Kael and offers a view of what makes Grant special.
"The Richest Man in the World"
Screen Album, August 1963; p. 36
"To the Sexiest Sixty-Year-Old in the World we say …
Happy Birthday Cary"
Lyle, Jae Photoplay, February 1964, p. 43 Extensive discussion on Grant's use of LSD.
"To Catch a Star"
Levy, Robert Dun's Review, September 1968, p. 90-92 Discusses Grant's new job as marketing consultant for Rayette Faberge.
"The Tragic Love Story of the World's Most Attractive Man"
Carole Robbins Modern Screen, May 1967, p. 52
"Unlikely Role for Hairy Cary"
Life, December 18, 1964, p. 99 Photos from Father Goose.
"Until Wealth Do Us Part"
Ace, G.Saturday Review, September 23, 1967 p.10 Column is a "fictional" account of the author's imagined conversation between Dyan Cannon and Grant about the causes of their divorce.
"What It Means to be a Star"
Grant, Cary Films and Filming, July 1961, p. 12-13 After a brief biography, Grant spends the rest of the article imparting his philosophies on life and entertainment.
I'm often asked for advice or an opinion about clothes, and I always try to answer the best I can, but I'm not inclined to regard myself as an authority on the subject. Many times during my years in films, some well-meaning group has selected me as best-dressed man of the year, but I've never understood why. The odd distinction surprises me: first, because I don't consider myself especially well dressed, and, secondly, I've never, as far as I can compare the efforts of others with my own, gone to any special trouble to acquire clothes that could be regarded as noticeably fashionable or up-to-date.
Some of my suits are ten to twenty years old, many of them ready-made and reasonably priced. Those that were custom-tailored were made by many different tailors in many different cities: London, Hong Kong, New York and Los Angeles. I believe that American ready-made clothes are the best ready-made clothes in the world: that the well-dressed American man makes a better appearance than the well-dressed man of any other country.
No, it isn't only money that determines how well a man dresses—it's personal taste. Because of the demands of my work, I've purchased dozens of suits over the years and they all have one attribute in common: they are in the middle of fashion. By that I mean they're not self-consciously fashionable or far out, nor are they overly conservative or dated. In other words, the lapels are neither too wide nor too narrow, the trousers neither too tight nor too loose, the coats neither too short nor too long. I've worn clothes of extreme style, but only in order to dress appropriately for the type of character I played in particular films. Otherwise, simplicity, to me, has always been the essence of good taste.
I believe men's clothes—like women's—should attract attention to the best lines of a man's figure and distract from the worst. In all cases, the most reliable style is in the middle of the road—a thoughtful sensible position in any human behavior. Except perhaps on the freeway—but, even then, the middle lane, providing of course, it's on your side of the road, usually gets you where you're going more easily, comfortably, and less disturbingly. And so it should be with clothes. They should be undisturbing, easy and comfortable.
There are many established stores or haberdasheries in each city, and probably in your neighborhood. Look at the suits in the windows. See how they compare with those worn by men whose taste you respect and admire. Think about the practical, functional and long-wearing qualities as they apply to your particular job or social activities. It's better to consider carefully before buying than to regret your purchases for months afterwards. Study the cut, the price.
And here, by the way, is a tip. If the sleeves seem disproportionately wider than customary, it indicates a very deep armhole. Don't contemplate buying if you are of average or slim size—you'll get a well-fitting back but an extremely loose-fitting front and sleeves that tend to ride up if you lift your arms. A deep armhole is popular with many manufacturers because each coat fits a wider range of customers.
How much on should pay depends on how much one has to spend. I'm reminded of a piece of advice my father gave me regarding shoes: it has stood me in good stead whenever my own finances were low. He said it's better to buy one good pair of shoes than four cheap ones. One pair made of fine leather could outlast four inferior pairs, and, if well cared for, would continue to proclaim your good judgment and taste no matter how old they become. The same applies to suits, so permit me to suggest you buy the best you can afford even though it means buying less. Rather like the stock market: it is usually more sensible to buy just one share of blue chip than 150 shares of a one-dollar stock.
What should one buy? Well, if a man's budget restricts him to only one suit, then I would choose something unobtrusive. A dark blue, almost black, of lightweight cloth, serviceable for both day and evening wear. I suggest lightweight because nowadays most restaurants, offices, shops and theaters are well heated during fall and winter. I found that so even, surprisingly, in Moscow. With such modern indoor comfort, one need only be concerned with cold weather while out-of-doors.
Which brings us to overcoats. I've learned to wear overcoats that button up to the neck yet still appear neat when left open. It mystifies me that some men wear heavy single-breasted and even double-breasted, overcoats to protect themselves from cold, yet expose the most vulnerable part of their chests with V-neck openings. By wearing an overcoat that buttons to the neck, there is no need for a scarf.
The topcoat I use for traveling can be worn spring or fall. It's black and therefore not only less apt to show dirt and travel stains, but usable for both day and formal wear. It's made of a gabardine-type waterproof material, with slash side pockets that enable one to reach through easily for change, or to carry a book, or something similar, protected from the rain. There is also a detachable lining that buttons inside for very wintery days. An all-purpose coat.
What about a second suit? Well, I think a grey worsted or flannel would be most serviceable. Not too light in color, not too dark. And, this time, of medium weight but not more than what is known as ten-ounce cloth. It might be advantageous to purchase an extra pair of trousers for wearing separately with a sweater or a sport shirt. A grey flannel suit, with or without extra trousers, together with a sport coat could, at a pinch, be sufficient for a weekend in the country.
A sport coat ought to be easy-fitting, its pattern neither loud nor flashy. If you're unsure which plaid or check to choose, then one of those dark blue, single-breasted blazers that have been worn by all classes in England for years, and have since become popular here, is acceptable for most casual wear.
Except, of course, on very hot days. During summer I've taken to wearing light beige, washable poplin suits. They're inexpensive and, if kept crisp and clean, acceptable almost anywhere at any time, even in the evening. Also, the coat can be worn with grey flannels at the seashore or in the country, and the trousers used separately with a sport shirt and moccasins, or a pair of those heavy-soled white canvas shoes that are popular with young college men.
Poplin or seersucker suits are the mark of no special social class or income group, but are worn by all. And, providing he is well-mannered, a young man wearing such a suit can confidently approach the other fellow's girl, secure in knowing that his way of dress is no deterrent.
A cardigan coat sweater of lightweight wool and conservative color is a useful investment. It can be worn without a coat on many occasions, and has the advantage of being easily slipped on without those arm-raising contortions and the need to re-comb your hair.
How do I feel about ties? If I had only one to choose, then I think a black foulard, not too wide nor too narrow, is best, as it's acceptable with most clothes. An expensive tie is not a luxury—the wrinkles fall out quicker and the knot will hold better. Personally, I wear ties of small, conservative pattern and color.
Shoes? I've already mentioned that good shoes look better and last longer. If a man must limit himself to only one pair of shoes for city wear, then they should be black. If two, then a brown pair of darkest chocolate color are useful with almost all suits and, if he has no moccasins, even with grey flannels. The moccasin type of shoe is, to me, almost essential and especially convenient when traveling, since they can be easily slipped off in the airplane or car.
If your pocket handkerchief is monogrammed, don't wear it carefully folded to show the monogram peeking above your breast-pocket. That's somehow ostentatious.
Shirts should usually be white for the evening, but, in the city's grime, it's practical and permissible to wear a light blue or conservatively striped shirt during the day. The type of collar should suit the contours of the neck and face. As a younger man, I tried wearing a flared, too-high collar that, although modish amongst those I regarded as the sophisticates of that day, looked ridiculous on my 17 1/2- inch neck. Luckily, after the embarrassment of viewing myself from almost every angle on screen, that mistake was soon rectified. Button-cuffed shirts are simplest to manage, but if you wear cuff links, as I do, don't, I beg you, wear those huge examples of badly designed, cheap modern jewelry. They, too, are not only ostentatious, but heavy and a menace to the enamel on your car and your girl friend's eye.
Learn to dispense with accessories that don't perform a necessary function. I use belts, for example, only with blue jeans, which I wear when riding, and content myself with side loops, that can be tightened at the waistband, on business suits.
A tip about trousers. Trouser cuffs seem to me unnecessary, and are apt to catch lint and dust. However, whether you prefer cuffs or not, ask the tailor to sew a strip of cloth of the same material, or a tape of similar color, on the inside at the bottom of the trouser leg where it rubs the heel of the shoe. It will keep your trouser-bottoms from fraying.
Do I have any special do's and don't's about clothes? I can't think of and rules about clothes, since there really aren't any, but I suggest you buy trees to conform to the shape of your shoes, and keep your coats on curved hangers.
Take care of your clothes, keep them clean and in good repair. I suggest you avoid using heavily scented cologne or soaps. When I meet a man I like him to smell like a man, or not to smell at all; certainly he shouldn't smell like a woman. Do see that your socks stay up. Nothing can spoil an otherwise well-groomed effect like sagging socks. Don't stuff your pockets with heavy articles and bulging wallets filled with seldom-used cards. They ruin not only the neatness of your appearance but the actual tailoring of your suit.
Don't be a snob about the way you dress. Snobbery is only a point in time. Be tolerant and helpful to the other fellow—he is yourself yesterday.
Don't overbuy. When you contemplate an article, judge whether or not it harmonizes with items you already own. Again, avoid exaggeration of current fashions. It's best to be inconspicuous. But inconspicuous does not mean dull. Extreme dullness can be conspicuous in itself. Just do the best you can.
Come to think of it, who knows how anything becomes bad or good taste? Who decides a standard of esthetics? If it's the majority, then how is it the minority are the ones considered well dressed? Everything is only exactly what it is. If a man wears the kind of clothes that please him, then, providing they're clean and don't shock society, morals, and little children, what is the difference as long as that man is happy?
Any other thoughts on clothes?
Yes. Somewhere I read that Harvard's Professor Archibald MacLeish was asked by a student about to graduate into our highly competitive world what advice he could give him. Professor MacLeish's answer was, "Wear your Sunday suit every day." The inference, of course, being that the suit would give the young man such confidence in seeking positions that he would eventually own many Sunday suits, for any and alldays.
Splendid advice even by itself, but it's probable that the professor meant not only his Sunday or best suit, but also his Sunday or best smile, disposition, and behavior—knowing that each begets the other. So wear, not only your clothes, but yourself, well, with confidence. Confidence, too, is in the middle of the road, being neither aggressiveness nor timidity. Pride of new knowledge—including knowledge of clothes—continually adds to self-confidence.
Drake
aboard the Ile de France as she arrived with over 700 other survivors
picked up by the French liner after the crash of the ocean liner Andrea
Doria in July 1956. (AP)
"Archie Leach"
