In her new book, Dear Cary, the Heaven Can Wait star opens up about the end of her three-year union with the Hollywood icon and admits she has come to understand why he took psychedelic drugs when he needed to escape his life problems.
Cannon reveals she was so desperate to save the marriage she agreed to get high with her man.
She says, “I think he thought it (LSD) was a gateway to peace inside himself. With all the wealth and fame that he embraced and that embraced him, he couldn’t find it… When our marriage started to go south… he said, ‘LSD will help us’.
“That’s one of the big messages of the book. I wanted to make him happy more than anything else in life and it’s good to love someone and it’s good to try and make them happy, but if you have to go against something that’s intrinsically against your nature, that you know you shouldn’t do, in order to please someone, it’s death.”
Cannon reveals Grant first experimented with LSD after discovering his callous father had lied about the death of the movie star’s mother – when he was a child.
She tells Access Hollywood Live, “He had such a traumatic childhood, it was horrible. I work with a lot of kids on the street and I’ve heard a lot of stories about what happens when a family breaks down – but his was just horrendous. And he never really dealt with those things. He tried to. That’s the reason he tried LSD… he thought it was a gateway to God.
“Can you imagine, at 10, coming home and hearing, ‘Your mother’s at the seashore…’ ‘Well why didn’t she take me? Did I do something wrong?’ And then three months later: ‘Your mother’s dead…’
“Your father abandons you, takes a younger wife, has a baby. ‘Daddy, can I live with you?’ Cary said. ‘There’s not room for you!’ He’s 10 years old. Imagine that.
“And 20 years later, he gets a call saying, ‘I lied…’ Cary comes to London, meets with his dad and his dad says, ‘Your mother is not dead, she’s alive’.”
Grant’s father placed his young wife in an insane asylum and told his son she had died.
