Haywire Read online

  Praise for Brooke Hayward’s

  “She has modeled and acted and written: she writes, in fact, marvelously. Haywire mesmerizes. May it cauterize as well.”

  —The New York Times

  “An incredible achievement!”

  —Lauren Bacall

  “One of those rare books which seem to alter your perception of things. It is specific and true in dealing with lives that might have served as models for Fitzgerald’s fiction.”

  —Mike Nichols

  “Brave, honest, intelligent and greatly moving.”

  —Newsweek

  “Engrossing, intimate, moving.… Brooke Hayward writes like an angel.”

  —Cosmopolitan

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2011

  Copyright © 1977, 2011 by Brooke Hayward

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1977.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Jovanna Ceccarelli: Excerpt from an interview with Margaret Sullavan and John Keating which appeared in Theatre Arts, February, 1960. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Curtis Brown Ltd. on behalf of the Estate of Ogden Nash: Unpublished poem entitled “So Red the Rose, However You Spell It.” Reprinted from a letter written to Margaret Sullavan by Ogden Nash.

  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and Faber & Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot.

  Viking Penguin: Excerpt from Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, copyright © 1939 by Ludwig Bemelmans, renewed 1967 by Madeleine Bemelmans and Barbara Bemelmans Marciano.

  All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Mrs. Phyllis Cerf Wagner: Excerpt from a syndicated column written by Bennett Cerf.

  The photographs on this page, this page, this page, this page, and this page appear through the courtesy of John Swope; the photograph on this page appears through the courtesy of John Engstead.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Hayward, Brooke.

  Haywire.

  I. Hayward family. I. Title.

  PN2287.H377H3 792’.092’2[B] 76–40989

  eISBN: 978-0-307-74437-1

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  o Josie—Johanna Mankiewicz Davis

  Shortly after I began exploring my past, I wanted to stop. Josie made me continue. Halfway through, she was killed. Again I stopped. Someone told me, “Do it for Josie. She believed in this. Go on.” And so I did.

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1 Endings

  2 Bridget

  3 The Family

  4 Mother

  5 Growing Up

  6 Bill

  7 Father

  Epilogue

  For their time, memories, and love I’d like to thank Jimmy Stewart, Josh Logan, John Swope, Martha Edens, Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Nancy Keith, Diana Vreeland, Fredric and Florence March, Truman Capote, Millicent and Paul Osborn, Bill and Greta Wright, Sara Mankiewicz, Tom Mankiewicz, Bill Francisco, Peter Hunt, Charles and Ray Eames, Joseph Cotten, Hank Potter, George Cukor, Jules Stein, King Vidor, Swifty Lazar, George Axelrod, Kathleen Malley, Kenneth Wagg, my grandmother, and most of all my brother, Bill.

  For holding my hand—and often forcibly placing it back on the typewriter keys—I thank Buck Henry, Curtis Harrington, Luis Sanjurjo, and Toby Rafelson.

  For her fine blue pencil, Carol Janeway. And for all this and much more, my editor and publisher, Bob Gottlieb.

  —BROOKE HAYWARD

  BUCK HENRY

  t was in the early sixties when Brooke’s father, the film and theater producer, Leland Hayward, said to me, apropos of nothing in particular, “Do you ever see those crazy kids of mine out there?” By “out there” he meant of course Los Angeles for which he had an amiable contempt. “Crazy kids” referred to his children, Brooke and Bill, who were living on the coast and married with kids of their own.

  I was working for Leland as a writer/performer on the American version of the British hit That Was The Week That Was or, as it was more affectionately known: TW3. I knew Leland slightly because he and my father were friends—they were both part of a special (I thought) generation: theater-loving and, concomitantly, actress-loving New Yorkers, men’s men who worked and played hard and knew famous people like Ernest Hemingway and Bert Lahr and ate well and frequently at those bastions of post-World War II privilege: 21, Toots Shor’s, and the Stork Club; unofficial members of what was then called New York Café Society.

  They also shared a love of flying and the beauty and wonder of airplanes—my father was an Air Corps officer in World War II (he loved it when maître d’s snapped their fingers and ordered “a table for the colonel”) and belonged to semisecret organizations like the QBs (Quiet Birdmen)—made up mostly of ex-military and successful businessmen who lobbied the government for the Air Corps which finally became the Air Force and who met every few months and talked about flying and got extremely drunk.

  Leland produced the film The Spirit of Saint Louis, the story of Lindbergh’s famous flight in which his friend Jimmy Stewart played the lead despite being decades too old for the part.

  Leland used the phrase “those crazy kids of mine” more than once in referring to Brooke and Bill. It was said with an offhand affection that masked—or tried to mask—an irritation that he couldn’t quite manage to hide. At least that was the way I heard it.

  I assured him that indeed I did see them from time to time and that I didn’t really think they were crazy—maybe a touch eccentric—but after all this was the sixties in Los Angeles. Brooke was living with her second husband, Dennis Hopper, their daughter, Marin, and her two boys, Jeffrey and Willie Thomas, from a previous marriage.

  What I didn’t tell Leland was that I thought Brooke was the prettiest woman I had ever met and that I seized the opportunity whenever possible to be someplace that I thought she would be so that I could watch her animated, slightly mannered body language and listen to her uncanny, musical laugh.

  I had never met Brooke’s mother, the actress Margaret Sullavan, but I had seen her in films and onstage and had heard nasty rumors about her death. Nor did I ever meet her sister, Bridget, about whom the same things were being said. I didn’t really believe them because it seemed to me improbable that two such strikingly original and attractive women would have the need to depart so suddenly and leave so many broken hearts behind.

  What did I know? I was an only child, had attended all-male schools, and had a mother who was a Christian Scientist.

  I did, however, know Bill Hayward who, a few years later, got divorced, worked on some very successful movies, took up drinking, fast motorcycle riding, and married an ex-girlfriend of mine. It always made me feel good when I made Bill laugh because it seemed to me he was constantly floating in a sea of sorrow and struggling not to go under.

  I returned to Los Angeles and waited patiently for Brooke’s marriage to break up, which it ultimately did following the legendary Karate kick that broke her nose. I felt badly about moving in—well, not that badly—because I liked Dennis. He had shared his knowledge and love of the conte
mporary art scene with me, and I knew how badly I would feel under the circumstances. But there they were—the prettiest woman I had ever seen and her unbearably cute daughter who, at two years old, had bright gold hair that Brooke had cut in an adorable Dutch bob, which Marin hated because it made her look “different.”

  There was a slight problem in that I was married at the time to a very nice person. But we got around that by—as a musician friend of mine used to say: “suffering in another key.”

  Brooke had been a great supporter of Dennis’s work—she was a huge fan of Easy Rider and insisted, in the face of some skepticism, that The Last Movie was a masterpiece. She was also very complimentary and helpful about whatever it was that I was working on. But I always thought that she was meant to be more than a muse.

  She started to write about her family, having been encouraged by a number of friends. Along the way she faced the kind of depression—yes, the word suicidal comes to mind—when the going got tricky and the memories became threatening. More than once I saw her typing and crying at the same time. All her friends encouraged her to keep going, to persist when she wanted to quit, because there was a sense that she was on to something more than a slight memoir—something that would turn out to be a book filled with real language and real art.

  It’s decades later now. Bill Hayward, divorced and alone, physically shattered after the terrible bike accident that we all expected, shot himself to death two years ago.

  Earlier this evening I was at a party for Brooke’s daughter, Marin, whose father, Dennis, died a few days ago and will be buried tomorrow in Taos, New Mexico. I watched Marin across the room and saw her make the same gestures that I saw Brooke make a long time ago and heard her laugh a version of her mother’s laugh.

  The pleasures of the past live on, mixed in all of us. So do the pains. But we can outrun them if we try.

  This book is proof of that.

  May 2010

  his book is a personal memoir; but it is also a larger story—about carelessness and guilt, and the wreckage they can make of lives.

  My family seems to me the personification of these qualities. Both my parents were exceptional in ordinary ways: they were attractive, intelligent, and well educated. It was the scope and sweep of their talent and success that made them distinctive. My mother was an actress, Margaret Sullavan, and my father a theatrical producer, Leland Hayward. They were happily married for ten years, had three children in even succession (I am the oldest), and lived in California during the thirties and early forties, a golden era not only for movies but for children who, like us, grew up surrounded by its opulent trappings. When they divorced, the impact was naturally profound and ultimately disastrous—not so much for them, perhaps, as for their children, two of whom eventually did time in mental institutions.

  However, this is not primarily about my parents’ lives, except as they bore directly upon our own. It is really about their children—Bridget, Bill, and me—each of whom reacted uniquely to the haphazard slew of catastrophes, looking for a means of escape.

  Other people marry and divorce, leaving other children angry and disturbed. What distinguishes this particular story are the particular qualities of its protagonists, and the extraordinary effects they had on their children. Our lives were a series of extremes. A thanksgiving of riches was bestowed on us at birth: grace and joy and a fair share of beauty; privilege and power. Those blessings which luck had overlooked could be bought. We seemed to exist above the squalor of suffering as most people know it. We were envied. But there were also more expectations, more marriages (my mother four times, my father five), and more damage: more of us (three out of five) suffered mental breakdowns. My parents failed, as they succeeded—on a massive scale. And they left behind them a legacy, vested in their children, that put the odds against survival ineluctably high.

  he had called me late the night before.

  Looking back, I recall (or invent?) an urgency to her tone, but really all she’d said was “Can you have breakfast tomorrow?”

  “Hmm. What time? Do you have the proper ingredients? English muffins? Marmalade, et cetera?” We’d never shaken the habit of testing one another.

  “Of course, you spoiled brat. Come at ten; you shall have ginger marmalade from Bloomingdale’s, fresh orange juice I shall squeeze personally, boiled eggs—your customary five and a half minutes. And of course there will be fascinating conversation.”

  “Might I have a clue?” We’d also become adept at approaching each other with oblique, occasionally fake, courtesy.

  Silence, as I’d expected. Then: “Okay, do you have a good gynecologist?”

  My silence. “Of course. What for?”

  “Brooke, listen.” She was suddenly singing. “I have never ever been so happy in my life—I think I’m pregnant.”

  “What?” I was predictably stunned, but less by that possibility than by her confiding in me. “How the hell did you get pregnant?”

  “Oh,” she said, giggling, “probably from a toilet seat.”

  “Bridget. For God’s sake, have you gone mad? I mean, how can you possibly be twenty-one years old and reasonably, one hopes, reasonably intelligent and not have been to a—”

  “Brooke, listen.” She was positively frenzied with elation. “Listen, it’s entirely possible that I want to get married, I’m so in love. Do you hear me? Married!”

  This conversation was moving just out of my reach, like a smoke ring. All I could say was “Yes. I see what you mean about breakfast—yes, indeed. Might one ask who the expectant father is? No, never mind.”

  “Ten o’clock tomorrow. What’s he like, is he nice, does he hurt?” I knew she meant the gynecologist.

  “Yes, no, never mind. Actually he’s from India—nice blend of exotic and imperturbable. Forget it, go to sleep.”

  “Okay, see you in the morning. Farewell.” Farewell. Nobody but Bridget ever said goodbye to me like that; all her beginnings and endings where I was concerned were unpredictable, and most of the dialogue in between was enigmatic, a foreign language to any outsider. But for my benefit she talked in her own private shorthand, and what farewell meant was that she wanted me to button up my overcoat and take good care of myself until ten in the morning, because she would miss me in a way that would take far too much sentimental effort to express. I knew what she meant. Often I missed her while we were in the same room together.

  I contemplated the phone for some time. Never had I heard her so oddly gay and forthright; as a matter of fact, we hadn’t discussed sex since adolescence. Her entire inner life was secretive and mysterious, and no one dared violate it. She sent out powerful “No Trespassing” signals and I had learned to honor them. It crossed my mind that my sister was drunk.

  Still, the next morning—a warm October day in 1960—I stood outside her apartment door, nonplussed by the stack of mail and the furled New York Times propped up against it. The door itself was slowly getting on my nerves. It didn’t open when I rang the doorbell for the fifth or sixth time. It didn’t have a crack underneath big enough for a worthwhile view of the interior, although idiotically I’d got down on my hands and knees and looked anyway. Nor did I have a key to unlock it. Even if she had been drunk the night before, which was unlikely—besides, I prided myself on being able to interpret at least her external behavior—she would have been incapable of losing track of her invitation; she was a creature of infuriating compulsion, particularly in matters of time and place, always fussing about my lack of regard for either. Ever since she’d moved from her one-room, third-floor apartment (to which I had possessed a key, much used) to the comparative luxury of an apartment one floor higher with an actual separate bedroom and view (of the building across the street), I’d felt vaguely displaced and surly. For the last year, I’d thought of that little one-room apartment as mine, an irrational attachment, since I was not exactly homeless. Until a month before, I’d been living not only in a commodious house in Greenwich, Connecticut, but also, during
the week, in a pied-à-terre on East Seventy-second Street. My marriage to Michael Thomas, art historian and budding investment banker, so blithely undertaken during undergraduate days at Vassar and Yale, had, when removed from the insular academic atmosphere of New Haven, fallen apart. We were no longer wrapped in cotton wool; I was no longer a child bride. Now that our divorce was final, I’d moved our two small children into New York and into my own spacious apartment on Central Park West. I continued, however, to drop by Bridget’s whenever I had five minutes between modeling jobs and interviews. “Just checking out my make-up,” I’d announce breezily, or, “Gotta use your phone.” The idea of telling my sister I’d really come to see her would never have crossed my mind.

  Her new quarters did have certain advantages: twice the closet space for her warehouses of clothes and shoes, and a fully mirrored bathroom, very handy for looking at oneself from all angles while sitting on the cosmetics-crammed counter and conversing with Bridget submerged in the tub as she tested some new bubble bath. But I had never acquired the same proprietary feelings about this setup. It just didn’t have the smell and cozy inconvenience of the old. And now I cursed myself for neglecting to collect the duplicate key she’d had made for me weeks ago. Becoming more and more exasperated with both of us, I rang fiercely four times in a row. Actually I felt like kicking the door. Then I thought I heard a sound from where the bedroom ought to be. Of course, it was possible that she might still be asleep. Or, more interesting, asleep with an as yet undisclosed lover. But wouldn’t she have left a characteristically humorous note to that effect, right where the bills from Con Ed and Jax were now lying? I began to punch the doorbell to the rhythm of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” During countless enforced afternoon naps when we were young, we’d invented out of boredom what we thought was this highly original game, whereby we would take turns tapping out an unidentified song with our fingernails on the wooden headboards of our twin beds; the object was to determine who was better at guessing it or tapping it, or even choosing it if it was particularly esoteric. We both became fairly skillful, but this time the old signal got no response. I decided that the noise inside was either imagined or my stomach growling. Fresh orange juice and an English muffin with crisp bacon at Stark’s around the corner on Lexington became increasingly crucial. I scribbled her a note and went on down in the elevator, trying to feel philosophical about the whole wasted half-hour. Clearly some matter of extreme urgency was to blame. At this very moment she was certainly racing back to meet me, caught between subways, or maybe, wonder of wonders, even springing for a cab.