Coming
Diving Deep
& Going by James Buckley
Mimi deGruy, in her Montecito living room, with one of only three precious former 12-ounce Styrofoam cups reduced in size by descending 8,000 feet below the surface of the ocean in the mini-sub Alvin, mid-Pacific ridge off the Galapagos Islands
M
ary Armstrong (Mimi) deGruy’s late husband, Mike deGruy, was not only a three-time Emmy-award-winner, but he was also recipient of an armload of other awards (4 BAFTAs, 4 Cine Golden Eagles, et cetera) for his underwater and nature cinematography. Mike died in a helicopter accident in Australia on February 3, 2012, and the day Mimi learned of her husband’s death remains as vivid today as yesterday’s sunset. Mike was in Australia preparing the groundwork for director Jim Cameron’s (director of Terminator and Titanic) descent to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, some 36,000+ feet down, when the accident occurred. There had been only one successful manned descent to this depth ever, and that was, curiously enough, when Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard reached the bottom in the U.S. Navy-owned bathyscaphe Trieste in January 1960! A month and a half after Mike deGruy’s death, Cameron touched down in the mini-submersible Deepsea Challenger on March 26, 2012. Mimi says her heart begins to pound erratically whenever she recalls the events of that day. “It happened during the Santa Barbara Film Festival,” she recounts as we sit in the living room of her Montecito home on a warm Sunday afternoon. Before learning of Mike’s death, she had a premonition. “I was driving on 101 and had this moment of total panic,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘What is this?’ Then calm returned and I told myself that ‘Everything would be okay.’ “I drove up my driveway, the dogs were there, the lights were on, and I thought, ‘I’ll be fine.’ Max [their son] wasn’t home,” Mimi continues, “and [daughter] Frances was staying at a friend’s house.” Max and Frances are the deGruys’ two children; Max is now 23 and a development coordinator for the Santa Barbara Film Festival; Frances, 19, is a student at Tulane in Louisiana, not far from where her 17 – 24 November 2016
father was born. A half-hour later, the phone rang and it was the Australian producer saying there had been an accident. She thought, Mike had been hurt diving. She imagined he’d been “bent” and started figuring out how quickly she could get to Australia. But then, she was told that the helicopter had crashed, caught fire, and that there had been no survivors. The person on the other end of the line told her to write down everything she was being told, that if she didn’t, she wouldn’t believe that it happened. “I wrote it down on a piece of paper,” she says, “and then I went outside and kinda lost it. I wandered in circles, thinking ‘Did this really happen?’ I couldn’t remember where my daughter was. I wandered in the dream time...” She was in shock. She says she couldn’t even go into the Santa Barbara office she shared with Mike. “I’d hand things across the French door and tell them I was sorry but that I just couldn’t go in there. It was like a phobia.” Three months went by before she got up the courage to go back in. When she did, she began to watch all the footage they’d both taken over the years. The two had been working on three or four projects at the time. “It was comforting on one level,” she says, “and on another level it was excruciating,” because it made her realize how much had been lost with his death, and the great things they had planned to do together would never be. “The here and now is all that matters,” she says, somewhat ruefully. “One thing Mike did do before he left for Australia,” Mimi adds, “was to put his favorite sequences together on a timeline. That left me with all his favorite work, pulled by him. Also, it gave him a chance to look at the trajectory of his own life, and he felt good about it. There were times he wasn’t
COMING & GOING Page 164
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