One of the reasons I moved to California for a few years was that I thought I should make more movies. No less than Cary Grant told me I was crazy.
I got to know Cary at a few parties. He was as charming, droll, and debonair—well, as Cary Grant. He saw one of my paintings, South of France, when I showed it to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and told me he wanted to buy it; he wouldn’t take it as a gift. I was so proud when he hung it in his home in Hollywood Hills.
Cary and I were talking once, and I told him a little about my work life. He had retired from movies in the late 1960s, in part to spend more time with his young daughter, Jennifer, whom he cherished. But he also began to make occasional stage appearances around the country where he would show film clips and take questions from adoring audiences.
I told him how I’d have to fly across the country sometimes to do six shows in five days; it could take a toll. All the miles, all the hours, the exhaustion. Yes, I guess I was complaining. But Cary saw it differently.
Venice in ’03
“Tony, what you do is so beautiful,” he said. “You can go out and meet people. Let me tell you, making movies is boring. You sit around for hours while somebody changes a lightbulb. You wait around all day in your trailer just to say three or four lines. It’s lonely. It’s dull. Stay with your music, Tony. You’re so lucky to work, live, and to be able to see and talk to people. It’s a blessing.”
I suppose I already knew that. But when Cary Grant tells you something, it makes an impression. He influenced my decision to focus on live performances, where I can see the public, hear them, and not be isolated from them. It’s why I still love to perform and tour more than sixty years later.
Cary, by the way, was preparing to go onstage at the Adler Theatre in Davenport, Iowa, for one of his shows in 1986 when he suffered the stroke that ended his life at the age of eighty-two. I remember people saying that they’d expected him to bid good-bye to this earth in Hollywood, Cannes, or Monaco—but Iowa?
Then I remembered how much he had told me he loved audiences. I think backstage in a theater in Iowa was probably just fine with Cary Grant.
Winter in Clio