A Wild Surmise

What It Was Like the Night Cary Grant Died

92 What It Was Like the Night Cary Grant Died Cary Grant was dying all that time we took to talk about romance and what little chance there is to see on screen even the evening we spent, talk and turn of events, how everything went this way for the dyke singer and that way for the queer star, and what a funny type we are, so normal in our taste for bliss, but then there’s the way we kiss, unseemly on the screen to see so much between two women, the queen card played upon the queen. And Cary Grant was dying until dawn the night we carried on and on about romance, the chances in a glance, the votes we cast for whom we’ve asked into our hearts’ open beds. What was it Dietrich said? No more talkative alive than dead, that one, and who’s to blame for her closed case, the gorgeous face that couldn’t change its straight facade. It would have been too odd to see a woman in a pair of pants begin her dapper dandy dance. An audience would have died from it—the fragile pair, the dalliance, the slicked-back hair. 93 The King of Romance drifted off from Iowa and Hollywood the night he was to say what it was like for him. The night he died, that night we came away from talking until dawn about the scenes and sounds that don’t go on the screen in living color of what’s between a woman lover and her lover. ...