LONDON — 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.
Drake, whose grandfather helped build the landmark Drake and Blackstone hotels in Chicago, had a life of glittering highs and shattering lows. She spent her earliest years in Paris, where her American expatriate parents embraced the roar of the Roaring Twenties.
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.
She won a movie studio contract in 1946 but grew so bored that she feigned mental illness to break the arrangement.
Grant — 19 years her senior, twice divorced and one of the world’s most debonair and captivating movie stars — was struck by Drake’s charm and low-voiced allure. By chance, they met aboard the Queen Mary and they shared an intense shipboard attraction.
She and Grant married on Christmas Day 1949, with industrialist Howard Hughes as best man. She cooked Grant’s meals and greeted him at breakfast each day with a poem.
But later Grant became infatuated with Loren while filming in Spain. A visit by Drake did not go well. And on her return trip, the Andrea Dorea collided with another ship off Nantucket on July 25, 1956. Dozens were killed, and Drake lost more than $200,000 of jewelry and a manuscript for a novel.
She and Grant used LSD — then legal — to deal with their marital issues.
