ACTRESS SHARED LIFE, LSD WITH CARY GRANT
Writer starred in films with movie legend and took up causes to help others
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.
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 U.S. expatriate parents embraced the roar of the Roaring ’20s.
The stock market plunge of 1929 ended the frivolity and their marriage, and 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 theatre school in Washington and found work in New York as a Conover model and Broadway understudy.
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 a captivating movie star — saw the play and was struck by Drake’s charm and low-voiced allure. By chance, they met aboard the Queen Mary on a trip to New York and 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 romantic pursuit of a bachelor pediatrician. New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther called her “foxily amusing.”
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) with Grant. Rejecting a lavish buildup, she pulled back from her career to focus on her home life.
She and Grant had married on Christmas Day 1949, with industrialist Howard Hughes as best man. In 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.
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.
Grant became infatuated with co-star Loren and proposed to her. A visit to the set by Drake did not go well, but events took an ever more dramatic turn when she boarded the doomed Andrea Doria on her way back to the United States.
The ship, which had more than 1,700 passengers and crew, collided with the ocean liner Stockholm on July 25, 1956, amid heavy fog off Nantucket, Mass. Dozens were killed. Drake, who lost more than US$200,000 worth of jewelry and a manuscript for a novel, was uninjured. Grant stayed in Spain.
Drake made a handful more movies, including the comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), in which she played Tony Randall’s fiancée. She wrote an early script for Houseboat (1958), a romantic comedy she hoped would be a vehicle for her and Grant. In a humiliating twist, the script was reworked, and she was replaced by Loren.
The Grants separated but remained on companionable terms.
Searching for understanding of her troubled childhood and marriage, Drake began seeing a Hollywood therapist who administered LSD, a drug that was then legal.
Grant also called on the therapist, initially out of concern about the revelations his wife might make and their potential impact on his cultivated image. Born in England as Archibald Leach, he had escaped a childhood of desperate poverty, with an alcoholic father and a mother who had been institutionalized.
He savoured the LSD-driven therapy sessions and promoted the treatment in major magazines.
He and Drake eventually divorced.
Betsy Gordon Drake was born near Paris on Sept. 11, 1923. In the 1960s, she deepened her interest in mental health issues and joined the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute as a director of psychodrama therapy, in which patients act out their pent-up feelings.
Drake eventually settled in England and formed a tight social circle with friends including writer Martha Gellhorn and painter Bernard Perlin. Survivors include a brother, Carlos Drake of York, Pa.
Grant spoke admiringly of Drake, telling the Times in 1973, “Betsy was a delightful comedienne, but I don’t think that Hollywood was ever really her milieu. She wanted to help humanity, to help others help themselves.”