Haywire Read online

  Irene’s house sat on roughly fifteen acres of beautifully landscaped property; it was called Imspond to honor the combination of her initials, I.M.S. (Irene Mayer Selznick), and an enormous pond with a rowboat. I loved going to that house; it was a one-story rambling cottage, filled with fireplaces and antique country furniture, bright handwoven rugs, wonderful quilts, and deep chintz-covered sofas, always cool inside even on the hottest day, but with a warm sense of light floating through all the rooms.

  Father was deeply, instinctively suspicious of country life. His abhorrence of insects—mosquitoes, in particular—and any kind of snake amounted to a phobia, which had been a source of amusement to us as children when we lived for three years in rugged rattlesnake and coyote terrain—then the wild mountains of the Doheny Estate, now the cultivated steppes of Trousdale in Beverly Hills. To my chagrin I discovered, when I was eleven or twelve and fixated on Hemingway and Africa, that although Hemingway was a close friend and client of Father’s who had many times invited him to go along on safari, Father had always declined because of the “goddamn bugs all over the place.” Also he distrusted the country because poison ivy and sumac lurked there, lying in wait for the innocent wayfarer, and houses were not generally air-conditioned like apartments in the city.

  This particular summer, however, he seemed to enjoy himself. Winston, Pamela’s son by Randolph Churchill, came over from England, and Father promptly blew him to a course in flying instruction; aviation had always been one of Father’s major passions. The other, photography, he indulged day and night by taking hundreds of color photographs of Imspond from every conceivable angle, inside and out. As usual, he would have “the best color lab in the world,” Life magazine, blow them up to an extravagant sixteen by twenty inches, eventually to be edited by Bridget into a scrapbook for Irene. One Saturday I drove out for the day with my friend Jones Harris. Father intrepidly lowered himself into the rowboat with three cameras slung around his neck, and shot pictures of the receding shoreline with a zoom lens while I rowed; Jones, reclining languorously in the bow, inquired, “Leland, do you think you’re going to be able to bring this picture in for under one million three?”

  Bridget called me several times from Williamstown to report on her activities and to see if I would drive up for a visit. She was having a splendid time working backstage in a hodgepodge of production exigencies; the drive up through the Berkshires was beautiful, she informed me, and she could press me into service any day of the week. As an added inducement, I would know a lot of people: Suzie Pleshette was up there doing Two for the Seesaw, and E. G. Marshall and Carrie Nye and Dick Cavett; Bill Francisco was directing two productions; and, most important, our close friend Tom Mankiewicz was his assistant director, moonlighting on the side as an actor. Tom, son of the screenwriter-director Joe Mankiewicz, had grown up with us in California, but after we had moved East in 1948 we hadn’t seen much of him again until the fall of 1959.

  Tom Mankiewicz:

  “I have tremendous memories of you and Bridget, two girls who were always just enough older than I was to really make a difference. I used to see you frequently but infrequently. I mean, Brooke and Bridget was like a traveling family act. When I was young, it was Brooke and Bridget coming over and Brooke and Bridget this and that. You were both uncommonly pretty and a very strange pair of girls to be running in and out of the house every odd summer or holiday or party when you were dragged over.

  “I met Bridget again the fall of my freshman year, in the Green Room of the Yale Dramat with Bill Francisco. Bridget was going with Bill. She was lying down on a couch in the Green Room, very attractive dress, oddly made up—she had blue mascara on her eyes, that kind of thing—doing some sort of outré number. We both knew that we knew each other very well and we didn’t know each other at all. Bill and she were rather tense together that evening and she wanted me to go out with the two of them to have dinner. It was about six o’clock, and I said sure. More because I wanted to get close to Bill Francisco than to her: he was the director of The Dramat—it was my first year in The Dramat—and I thought he was a terrific director.

  “That night I was fascinated by Bridget. I wasn’t in love with her yet; later I guess I was more in love with Bridget than I’ve been with anyone in my life. That night she seemed to me to be so incredibly real. And a little bit weird, which I loved. I had no idea she had been to Riggs; I had no idea that there was any trouble at all. I was just entranced by her.”

  The fall of 1959 was marked by a number of important events in our family.

  I had entered Lee Strasberg’s acting classes after an interview with him, in which, having asked me some cursory questions about my previous acting experience (none) and who my favorite actors or actresses were (Olivier, Brando, and so on), he told me that I could start immediately. As it was almost impossible to get into his classes, and I knew several people who had waited for years before a space opened up, I summoned up the courage to ask him why he was prepared to expedite the procedure in my case. He replied unhesitatingly that it was due to my mother’s prominence as an actress and my father’s as a producer. I boldly told him that I didn’t want to be accepted by him as a student for that reason. He sighed and smoothed his fine white hair with both hands, then turned on me a dazzling smile. “It has nothing to do with favoritism, darling,” he said. “Your mother and father are very talented. You might inherit the talent, see? The odds are that you will prove to be more gifted as an actress than most other people with experience that I interview. And your lack of experience is a blessing—it means that you have had no bad habits yet to unlearn, no preconceived ideas about how to act. I consider myself lucky to have you in my classes, darling. You will start on Monday morning.”

  When I related this conversation to Mother, to my surprise she agreed with him, but she may have been somewhat distracted by just having signed to act in what would be her last play, Sweet Love Remember’d, by Ruth Goetz. It was impossible for any of us to determine exactly why Mother ever signed for any play, since she always swore that she hated acting, and most of all the star system. At the same time, she was passionate about the theatre and much preferred it to movies, which she considered stultifying. Often her excuse for doing a play was that she needed the money, but in this case her explanation was that a ladder had fallen on her head the day she read the script.

  Bridget, after two years of therapy at Austin Riggs, took a one-room apartment at 135 East Fifty-fourth Street, and commuted up to Stockbridge once or twice a month. Occasionally she would come to Greenwich to visit Mother and Kenneth; they were living in a charming house that overlooked the Byram River, with two vicious swans, an incontinent starling, an Abyssinian cat that devoured its own litters, and a crippled German shepherd. For the first time in four years, Bridget and I saw a great deal of each other. I would stop by her apartment every day; she would appear unannounced at my house in Greenwich on her way down from Riggs, and roll around on the floor with her two small nephews. She had fallen in love with Bill Francisco. I met him several times and liked him very much.

  Bill Francisco:

  “I met Bridget when I was in Stockbridge directing and stage-managing at that little playhouse, going back and forth between there and Williamstown. That fall, 1959, I found an excuse to write her—about getting new glasses or something. I got a lovely letter back saying, ‘If you really value my opinion, please call when you’re in New York.’

  “Initially she was very afraid of my meeting you because she felt you were the pretty one, and that everybody who met you would fall in love with you; also you were active in the theatre and I was trying to be active in the theatre and there would be a great rapport there.”

  • • •

  Tom Mankiewicz:

  “I saw more of her and Bill. Bill took me on as assistant director. He was very talented. He was in his early thirties then, and blessed or cursed with a tremendously attractive face and manner. And he cared about her. Whatever weaknesses or
deficiencies Bill had, hers were double. At least she felt that hers were double. And so, when she became hung up on him, he was in a strange sort of catbird seat—was this girl really going to shrivel and die without him? I mean, she was beautifully bred out of great show-business stock, out of Maggie by Leland, she was incredibly sensitive, marvelous, bright in her own way, an ethereal kind of lady who was, also, skittish and Bambi-like and who could immediately turn off or become upset or depressed. I think Bill felt more comfortable with her because she was moodier than he was.”

  Also that fall, my eighteen-year-old brother, Bill, decided to get married. He was majoring in math at the University of Kansas, and living in a small bachelor apartment in Topeka. Still wet behind the ears from a two-year stint in Menninger’s, he flew East with his bride-to-be, Marilla Nelson, to announce his plans to Mother and Kenneth. It was the first time Bill had been in Greenwich since the autumn of 1955, precisely four years earlier, when he and Bridget had left home to live with Father. Not surprisingly, things were slightly strained between mother and prodigal son. However, Mother and Kenneth were pleased with the liaison; not only did they like Marilla, who bore a striking resemblance to Bridget in coloring and build, but also they had become somewhat disillusioned by Menninger’s, and in this one instance their feelings dovetailed with Father’s. He was fed up with shouldering the gigantic expense. The next spring, when Bill had decided to join the Army as a paratrooper, everyone envisioned the venture as an effective means of tying off any remnants of the umbilical cord that (they thought) might bind him to Topeka and the immediate environs of Menninger’s.

  An engagement party was arranged by Marilla’s sister in Topeka, and Mother made plans to fly to it just before she went into rehearsals for Sweet Love Remember’d.

  Bridget, who hadn’t seen Bill for two and a half years, suddenly professed a desire to go, too. At this point her relationship with Mother was going through one of its cycles of severe stress. She had refused to come out to the house to see Bill and Marilla, basically because she was angry at Mother and her anger at Mother inevitably manifested itself in periods of withdrawal. Nobody knew better than Mother how extremely effective this punishment was, she by her own example having instructed all of us in its subtleties for years. Bridget’s was a classic case of the pupil outdistancing the master. By now her acquired skills far surpassed Mother’s and, more than skills, had become involuntary and chronic, even pathological, reflex actions. As the oldest of the three of us, I had, upon reaching adolescence, taken great pride in also being the most rebellious. I saw myself as a pioneer, a pathfinder repeatedly beating my head against the barrier of Mother’s authority. I, too, had become well versed in the art of psychological warfare as she taught it, but to me it had never seemed more than one of her numerous idiosyncrasies, a dreadful game whose rules I knew even when I was being too stubborn to play. The first rule was that Mother, in a state of wrath, almost never raised her voice: she lowered it drastically until it was a distant murmur. Second: the more I attempted to make contact, to explain, to argue, the more remote her voice and demeanor became. Third: I would be sent to my room with instructions not to reappear except for meals until I could apologize. (It was a challenge to see how long I could go without breaking, particularly after I saw Lives of a Bengal Lancer, with Gary Cooper suffering the torture of lighted bamboo sticks under his fingernails. Once I proudly lasted a week, but it was excruciating.) Fourth: when I joined the rest of the family at dinner, Mother would behave as if I were invisible, never once looking at me or addressing me. And so on. After dinner, if I tried to kiss her good night, she would turn her cheek away, and since she was a fine actress, she knew how to make her silences as eloquent as words. Bridget and Bill watched with demure interest; much later I was to wonder if these scenes didn’t have more effect on them than on me. Usually after a few days I would crack and make my way downstairs for the apology scene. Mother expected a proper apology with real conviction; otherwise I was sent back and we would continue the ordeal until she was satisfied. I became adept at bursting, melodramatically, into tears at the right moment; then she would hug me and miraculously turn back into my familiar cheerful mother. Bridget and Bill would observe this ritual with angelic expressions on their faces, Bridget with a beatific smile (“You little bitch,” I would mutter at her under my breath so Mother couldn’t hear; Bridget would lower her eyes and smile even more mysteriously, incandescently), but I don’t remember their ever having to go through this experience themselves, so they must have learned the lesson by observing me. Perhaps by not having actually to act out these psychodramas, they absorbed their impact in a more serious way than I. In any case, Bridget, in her own adolescence, would become irritatingly silent for days on end rather than face a good fight.

  Now Mother and Kenneth grew concerned about the possibility that if Bridget attended Bill’s engagement party the festivity of the occasion might be marred by a further incident in the current internecine strife between Bridget and Mother. Kenneth hastily sent Bridget a letter. It said that he forbade her to go to the party because her behavior to Mother, of late, had been outrageous and inhuman, and what was barely excusable when she was sixteen was now intolerable at twenty; that he would subordinate his own feelings if Bill might be unhappy at her not being there, but that since she hadn’t gone a step out of her way to see her own brother on his visit, it was dubious that he would be disappointed if she postponed hers. It said that any arguments she might muster to defend herself would be hogwash and that she would have to learn someday that she could not continue to pursue a course of selfishly taking more and more without giving anything back. It said that she had forfeited all the deep love and respect he, Kenneth, had for her, that although one of the happiest features of his marriage to Mother nine years earlier had been the advent into his life of two entrancing little girls, Bridget had gone to great lengths to ruin that pleasure. It concluded with the information that he was sending the letter behind Mother’s back and would only tell her after it had been mailed.

  I was changing my clothes in Bridget’s apartment when the mail came that day. She read the letter, handed it to me wordlessly, went to the closet, and packed a suitcase. I went downstairs with her and followed her along the street for a while but she refused to speak to me. I went on to a class at Lee Strasberg’s; she checked back into Austen Riggs in a severe depression.

  Kenneth was a kind Englishman of considerable equanimity. He seldom lost his temper. When he did, he recovered quickly. Bridget did not. In December, while Mother was in rehearsals, Kenneth sent several letters to Bridget at Riggs.

  In the first one he apologized for the prolonged unhappiness caused by his previous letter, and begged her to take his tantrum in her stride, as she must know how solid the foundation of his love for her really was. He explained that, in the past, Mother had always stopped him from expressing his flashes of temper but this time, to his present regret, he had eluded her. He implored Bridget to surmount the wall that had arisen between herself and Mother, and assured her there were many doors in it that Mother would crawl through if she knew Bridget would be waiting on the other side.

  In the second, he enclosed a torn piece of yellow legal paper penciled in Mother’s familiar scribble, which he’d rescued from the wastebasket:

  My darling Bridget

  I want you to know about my love for you. It is the most completely unselfish emotion I have ever known. It is forever, and needs nothing in return. I know, after these five years, that if you never write me or see me again, my love will continue just as strong and constant. So please, my darling, stop worrying about what you have or haven’t done to me—the snag, of course, is that my judgment falls far short of my love—and I

  The writing stopped there. Bridget did not respond, and was still at Riggs when Mother died two weeks later on New Year’s Day, 1960.

  Tom Mankiewicz:

  “I saw more and more of Bridget. She’d come to New Haven, stay at the Ta
ft for three or four days during final rehearsals; the week of the play she would be there every day. Everybody liked her—all the people in The Dramat who would normally hate the director’s girl friend.

  “We got to be really close. We knew a lot of people in common; we hadn’t seen each other in a while and it was like catching up on our lives. It was during that time that I saw the chinks in her armor which made me love her more; naturally, when you’re eighteen, you think you’re on top of the world and can take care of anybody. I had no idea there was any kind of mental disease, if you could call it that, or withdrawal, or whatever. She didn’t talk about it at all. I would say: gee, I’m sorry that you seem to be upset about this or that or so on, and she would talk about herself and her life, always, in the beginning, skirting the fact that she had been in Riggs. She didn’t trust people a great deal and she was not an extrovert. If she thought she liked you, you could talk to her night after night, but it would only be after a certain number of nights that she would really start to tell you something about herself. She would test you, telling you the way she thought about things that perhaps frightened her; but she never opened herself up until she was really sure of you, and that took a long time. I found her an immensely private person who could count on the fingers of one hand the people that she would open up to. There were so damn few she was willing to let in, for whatever reason. You could sit and scream and beg Bridget to tell you what the matter was, and no matter how much she loved you, she wouldn’t tell you unless she felt like telling you, and that was that.”