One of my secret pleasures as I moved through college was finding myself in the sometimes dreadful but often played social game “Who are you related to?” knowing I had the actress Betsy Drake in my back pocket. Betsy was my mother’s cousin and my godfather’s sister, but more importantly she had been married to Cary Grant in the 1950s.
This was not particularly impressive to others who could list signers of the constitution, literary giants, or “A list” society types. A starlet marrying a superstar and later divorcing him may make headlines but generally does not go down in the annals of Hollywood history. While certain bonus points might be applied since Betsy did marry Grant, that great idol of men and women alike, this was not a winning hand.
Scene from “Every Girl Should Be Married”
But the story of Betsy herself, even the little I knew, did improve the odds. For one, Drake was perhaps one of Hollywood’s leading advocates of the use of LSD (legal at the time) for therapeutic purposes. In fact, it was Betsy who convinced her husband, suffering a lifetime of depression, to use the drug to kill his psychological bogey men.
Years later, Grant would praise the drug “because I never understood myself, how could I have hoped to understand anyone else? That’s why I say that now I can truly give a woman love for the first time in my life, because I can understand her.”
The LSD legacy of the 1950s in Hollywood was indeed the stuff of legends but Drake didn’t stop there. Well before it was popular or known, she helped introduce yoga, hypnosis. and eventually the use of acting as a method of psychological therapy to Southern California.
That independence of mind eventually let her escape both Hollywood and Grant, and she headed east for a masters degree at Harvard, and eventually a very private life in London.
But for the purposes of playing a silly after-dinner game, there was enough to let me drop this gem at the right time.
As adulthood set in, however, with more information about Betsy and family history, the hard realities of her life came more into focus. A mentally ill mother, a detached father, a family bankrupted by the depression, and a childhood spent in boarding schools or passed along to relatives, Betsy was not simply trying to be in vogue, she was trying to survive.
Those survival instincts and impulses allowed Drake a very long life. She died at 92, but it is hard to sense that her demons ever truly left her. Estranged from family. and living a very secluded life for most of her last thirty years, one of her closest friends, writer Martha Gellhorn, whose letters were recently published, makes it clear that Drake’s torments were still evident even late in her life.
After the death of my parents, with family history very much turning into a passion of mine, I worked my way through old photos and family films that had not been seen in decades. In one home movie, taken at Gunston Hall in Virginia where relatives had started to restore George Mason’s colonial estate in the 1920s, there is a small unidentified toddler playing in the garden. Older family members had identified the young girl as Betsy and I digitized the film to send to Drake.
Through Facebook, I reached out to one of her contacts to pass along the film to her. And in due course, I asked if Betsy might be willing to meet me the next time I was in London.
The response was predictable. In short, whatever possibilities there might have been to finally meet this remarkable woman had passed. At 89, Betsy’s life, according to the contact, was filled with accomplishing just daily “things” with no real capacity for the new in her life let alone a distant relative. I got the message.
Last week, Betsy Drake passed away in her home.
Perhaps one day a gifted screenwriter will take on the life and times of Betsy Drake. Someone who was well ahead of her time, who had lived the strange life of an intellectual in Tinseltown, and more importantly, the lifelong journey of a smart, determined woman in finding and saving herself is the real story, not just a sidebar name drop at a cocktail party.
Dave Wheelan is the founder and executive editor of the Chestertown and Talbot Spy
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Teresa Conway says
Thank you for this article. I’ve just finished the book of Martha Gellhorn’s letters and was planning to Google “Betsy Drake” after reading about their friendship, when I opened the LA Times and saw Ms. Drake’s obituary. Headlined with Cary Grant’s name, not her own! She appears to have shared Ms. Gellhorn’s desire not to be “just a footnote in someone else’s life.” I hope she had as much support in her last years as she gave the third Mrs. Hemingway in hers. So at least their famous husbands name’s have brought them to our attention, as they are both very worthy of knowing about to us today.
Sue Daniel says
Thank you for your interesting article on one of the pioneers in psychodrama in the field of children’s therapy in California. I have read other obituaries and find them all relevant to her life and will share them with our trainees, practitioners and TEP’s here in Australia. Vale Betsy Blake.