LOS ANGELES, Calif. --

Dyan Cannon is speaking out about her marriage to Cary Grant, including claims that the late actor used LSD as a way to cope with his childhood pain and relationship problems.

“I wanted it to be a helpful book, a hopeful book, an inspirational book. Something that would help people,” Dyan, who was married to the Hollywood legend from 1965 to 1968, said on Monday’s Access Hollywood Live.

“I don’t rag on him. It’s not a vendetta,” she said of her new book, “Dear Cary: My Life with Cary Grant,” available now in bookstores.

Dyan, who was Cary’s fourth wife, claims a rough childhood, which included estrangement from his father and also being told his mother had died when she was actually alive, led to the actor using drugs.

“He had such a traumatic childhood. It was horrible… his was just horrendous and he never really dealt with those things,” she told Billy Bush and Kit Hoover. “He tried to, that’s the reason he tried LSD. It wasn’t for a… party. He thought it was a gateway to God, he really did. I think he thought it was a gateway to peace inside himself and I think with all the wealth and fame he embraced and that embraced him, he couldn’t find it, he couldn’t land on it.”

Dyan said her marriage to the actor, who was 33 years her senior, eventually began to unravel and Cary attempted to ease their problems with drugs.

“When our marriage started to go south – and we had a beautiful daughter – he told me many times that I was the only woman he trusted enough to have a child with,” she explained. “He said, ‘LSD will help us,’… 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 make them happy, but if you have to go against something that is intrinsically against your nature, that you know you shouldn’t do in order to please someone, it’s death.”

Despite their short marriage and relationship woes, Dyan fondly looks back on her time with the actor, referring to him as “delicious.”

“I’ve never known romance like that,” she told Billy and Kit. “He was as close to perfect as it gets, but he had stuff to work through like we all do. And what we tend to do, is that we tend to make gods out of people… he was a yummy, awesome, delicious human being.”

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