“Okay, I had a crush on Dad. Okay, more than a little crush on Dad,” Jennifer Grant, 45, writes in her warm memoir, Good Stuff: A Reminiscence of My Father, Cary Grant, which Alfred A. Knopf is publishing May 3. “My other real crushes were Donny Osmond and Jean-Paul Belmondo.”
But it was Cary Grant who picked up young Jennifer at school, who read to her, taught her life lessons and saved every photo, souvenir and scrap of paper that the two of them shared for the 20 years he was in her life. He died, at 82, in 1986.
Those mementos and Jennifer’s memories of them form the crux of her book, which is dedicated to her mother, the actress Dyan Cannon. (Cannon and Grant, who was married five times and divorced four, were wed from 1965 to 1969.)
“Something in me has always felt that my parents came together to make me. Vanity? Perhaps,” writes Jennifer. She says that although Grant and Cannon loved each other, both were far too headstrong to remain together, something they both must have known in advance.
While Jennifer concedes that George Clooney possesses a touch of her father’s magic, some readers may find her book short on star gossip. Cary retired and disassociated himself from the screen in 1966, age 62, to spend his remaining years with his one and only child.
What it is long on are tales of growing up privileged in Beverly Hills, Malibu and other enclaves of the rich and renowned. She also recalls playing board games with Princess Stephanie in Monaco and shares Howard Hughes’s advice to her father on how to pack for a trip. (Take only two suits – one to wear and one to send out to be cleaned, he said.)
Originally posted here:
Cary Grant’s Daughter Pens Memoir of Her Legendary Father