Everything was settled, organized. Life was so easy, if one could learn how to compartmentalize it. Or be lucky enough to have somebody else to do it for you. The British certainly could teach us a lesson or two about survival. Survival of the fittest? Nothing seemed to apply; maybe that was the point.
Now, months later, in the early evening of October 18, 1960, as Pamela and I sat in the back of Father’s new limousine, heading east through the Park, the sun setting behind us, recollections of our previous journey together pecked at the new skin that had taken all these months to grow. As vulnerable as this protective layer was, it sufficed temporarily, I noted apathetically; not one distinctive emotion either penetrated or emerged, except curiosity, which circled lazily like a hawk in the distance. Pamela had been somehow incorporated into the cellular architecture of this skin; I was actually not at all surprised to be sitting where I was, neither resentful of nor grateful for her presence. It was a way of life, this way of death; I wondered idly how many more times it could happen; there was my father left, and my brother. All my initial rage had subsided into inactive charcoal embers; the mechanism was easy, once you got the knack of it, nothing to do with religion or God or hope or resolution. It was much more animal, just as I had suspected the last time. The trick definitely was to stop thinking altogether. At least for the time being. Focus on simple immediate pleasures like the sunset, or the superb whiskey sour that Monsen, my father’s white-haired English butler, would soon be serving, although I didn’t drink; but nothing too far into the future.
Indenting myself against the gray plush seat, I saw the three of us, my sister, brother, and I, tiger cubs, tumbling in a heap on the mossy floor of some exotic jungle, surrounded by huge fronds of foliage from a Rousseau painting …
“Poor Bill Francisco,” Pamela was saying. “Such a sweet young man.”
“Yes,” I replied, yawning, “yes, I think she wanted to marry him.”
Pamela pressed the button that raised the glass partition between us and the chauffeur. I much preferred it down.
“Darling, before we get home, I think I should tell you about her note to him—to spare your father going through it again.”
“Okay,” I agreed, wondering if Rousseau really had, as alleged, used a palette of a hundred and some-odd different greens in one painting.
As Pamela talked to me, the chain on her purse slipped back and forth through her fingers like a golden snake. “Bill arrived at her apartment around four, as they had arranged, and, not hearing her, assumed she was out. So then he looked in a folder on the desk where they used to leave notes for each other and found this—love letter, I suppose. It began, ‘Dearest Bill, You must know how deeply I love you’—or something like that—the tone was very intimate, in a way, and she kept repeating ‘I love you’ throughout—then something about how she didn’t hate him any more and didn’t want him to be troubled by the vagaries of her illness—her handwriting was becoming quite illegible by this time, sliding down the page—and it ended with ‘Be strong, be brilliant’—and her signature. You can imagine the panic he was in when he read it. He raced into the bedroom and found her looking as if she had prepared for bed last night and then just never got up this morning.” We were almost through the Seventy-ninth Street transverse; Pamela automatically reached into her purse for a compact and lipstick. “Of course, it is impossible to interpret the exact intent of the letter now.” She powdered her exquisite skin lightly; I could tell she’d been to the beauty salon that afternoon—probably Kenneth’s—because her fingernails were freshly polished, and her auburn hair, with its natural gray streak rising perfectly from her forehead, was newly shaped.
My brother, sister, and I stretched languidly and licked each other in the late sun filtering through a hundred different greens. One time, when we were very young, Mother and Father had taken a house in St. Malo, a private beach community some thirty miles north of San Diego. I was about five, Bridget three, and Bill one. The beach was very deep as it ran down to the water, and the sand always glinted with thousands of tiny gold flecks. One evening at low tide, the shore was totally covered at the water’s edge by minuscule blue and pink shells rising mysteriously out of its slick gurgling surface; they exactly mirrored the pastel colors of the sky. The three of us screamed with joy: it was the most beautiful thing we had ever seen, though no one could explain why it had happened. Every day we ran naked on the beach, until some neighbor complained about Bill’s one-year-old genitals; then Mother fashioned a primitive bikini out of elastic tape and an old handkerchief, and he resumed eating all the cigarette butts he could find in the sand. Bridget and I taught him how to lie very still in the water while it foamed around us and sometimes almost gently carried us out to sea, and how to collect only the shells with tiny holes wormed through them so that we could string them together like long leis, and how to wrap seaweed around our waists like wet hula skirts, and how to scratch pictures in the sand, quickly, between waves that would erase them the next minute. It was the summer that I learned to tie my shoes, and Father had his fortieth birthday, to his great displeasure, but that morning we were allowed to taste coffee out of his cup for the first time. Many people came and stayed—three of our four godfathers: John Swope, a photographer who was always following us around taking pictures; and Jimmy Stewart, who brought me a silver necklace that I never took off, with a turquoise-eyed thunderbird dangling from it; and Roger Edens, who arranged and produced music and was married to Martha, our only godmother, Mother’s closest friend. Roger and Jimmy played the piano and Johnny taught us this song:
Mouse, mouse, come out of your hole
And I shall give you a golden bowl.
You will sit on a tuft of hay
And I shall frighten the cat away.
Mouse, mouse, when you go to bed,
I shall give you a large loaf of bread.
You will have cheese and a plateful of rice,
’Cause I love to think of the dear little mice.
We all went around singing it endlessly. Bridget and I shared a bedroom for the first time in our lives; it was unbelievably exhilarating to lie side by side and talk to each other before going to sleep. One night, Mother stuck her head in the door and told us to stop the racket, it was bedtime; but after a safe interlude we went right on singing and giggling. The house was built around a brick patio, which she crossed again in ten minutes to say that we were being not only extremely disobedient but foolish as well, since we could be clearly heard in the living room across the courtyard where all the grownups were sitting, and if she heard one more sound, she was warning us, we would have to be spanked. Heady and reckless with excitement, we sang a chorus of “Frère Jacques” loudly in unison. Mother stormed back, yanked the Dutch door open, and switched on the light. “Leland!” she called across the darkened patio. “Come here this instant!” We had never seen her so angry; it was thrilling. Father came and stood sheepishly in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. “All right, Leland, you take Brooke and I’ll take Bridget,” she announced, marching over to Bridget’s bed. “Maggie,” Father murmured, “couldn’t we give them one more chance?” Mother was pulling down Bridget’s pajamas. “Nope,” she said firmly, and started to spank Bridget. I began to giggle; by the time Father had me across his lap, I was laughing uproariously. It was my first spanking. As his hand smacked my behind for the third or fourth time, inflicting actual pain, I felt first a sensation of surprise, then of fury, both of which turned my laughter into uncontrollable sobs. I was vaguely aware of Bridget crying in the bed next to me, and then Father picking me up and carrying me outside where he leaned against a post entwined with bougainvillaea. He held me tightly against his chest, so tightly I could hardly breathe. “Brooke,” he whispered to me, beginning to cry himself; unable to see his face clearly in the filtered light, I reached up and touched his eyes in wonder—his tears soaked my hair and mine his polo shirt. “Brooke,” he said, weeping, “I promise you something—do you know
what a promise is?—I shall never spank you again as long as I live.” He kept his word.
The next time I saw him cry he was in his old maroon silk bathrobe, and it was the evening of the day Bridget died. There were other people in the study—Josh and Nedda, George and Joan Axelrod, Bill Francisco, and Pamela—whom I had to walk past rather self-consciously in order to reach him. He was sitting in his favorite armchair, heavily, as if he never wanted to rise again. His eyes were fixed absently on the seven-o’clock news; when I came and stood between the television set and him, they glimmered like milky blue stones under shallow water. I reached down and lifted the large cut-glass tumbler of Jack Daniels from his lap, where it had sunk with both his hands clasped rigidly around it, and took a sip because my mouth was so dry.
“Come here, Brooke,” was all he said, so I sat on his lap and put my head against his, and his tears streamed down my cheeks. “Poor Bridget, poor little kid,” he murmured over and over against my face; I kept licking his tears away as they reached my lips because both my arms were tight around his neck and I didn’t want to let go. Oh, God, I thought, we used to want so badly to be grown up—all the endless games we played to evoke that miraculous state of power, Bridget and I sauntering past the hall mirror in lipstick and high heels, Bill sitting for hours in the driveway behind the steering wheel of the old Cadillac, maniacally spinning it—but given a choice of which condition was really worse, that of parent or that of child, didn’t we know, even then, that parents lost hands-down? All the time we were growing up and hating the fact that it took so long, didn’t we instinctively sense the agony that waited for us on the other side of the fence?
Monsen came in unobtrusively and announced dinner. Pamela moved over and rested her hand lightly on Father’s shoulder.
“Come, Leland, darling, we’re having your favorite—vichyssoise and chicken hash—a new recipe from the head chef at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” Father blew his nose loudly. He had very dogmatic eating habits, which we children were delighted by, never touching anything remotely tinged with color: this eliminated most vegetables except potatoes from his diet, and for that matter fruit, except for strawberries (in spite of their color and his allergy to them); as for meat, he ate only chicken, lamb chops, or steak, and no more than an arbitrary two bites from the entire serving, but he consumed with passion what we alluded to as “white food”—scrambled eggs, custard, vanilla ice cream, and the Beverly Hills Hotel chicken hash.
During the course of dinner Josh recounted, with a high degree of animation for which he was justly famous, a jumble of stories about the various enterprises in which he and Father had been jointly involved, how Father had become his agent while he, Josh, was the dialogue coach for Charles Boyer in his first English-speaking movie, The Garden of Allah, tales about their productions of Mr. Roberts and South Pacific, about Hank Fonda and Mary Martin; they were all familiar and gratifying and went well with the chicken hash.
In Father’s study, after dinner, there was the first general discussion of Bridget, and a tremendous number of phone calls were made. Bill was notified in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he was taking paratrooper training for the 82nd Airborne Division, one of the more successful schemes he had devised, along with marriage, to escape Menninger’s. Kathleen Malley, Father’s faithful secretary of thirty-one years, was on emergency duty for the evening, and all calls to the apartment had to be siphoned through her; she also had to deal with all the newspapers, which were about to go to press. While Bill Francisco sat in a daze, Pamela, Nedda, and Joan were huddled over “arrangements,” and Josh strode purposefully up and down the small room, issuing suggestions on all fronts. At one point, he stopped in the middle of the Aubusson rug, right on a basket of flowers festooned with blue ribbons, and said to Father with great intensity, “You know, Leland, she really wasn’t of this world at all—she never seemed to belong here. Even when she was a baby, I can remember thinking she was like a creature from some strange mythical forest, another planet—always with that faraway look in her eyes.”
Father nodded. “The thing that kills me,” he said, “is that I never quite knew what was going on in her head. For instance, her insane need for privacy. I mean, she never came to me and told me anything. So here I sit like a complete idiot, asking myself over and over where I went wrong, for Chrissake, what I could have done to make it easier for her. I thought we loved each other. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to any of it. The thing that breaks my heart is the feeling of absolute uselessness.”
One Sunday afternoon a few months earlier, during an interlude in the conversation at a family lunch, someone had asked where Bridget was. Father looked down the table at Pamela. “I forgot to ask you, darling, isn’t she feeling well?” Pamela looked stricken. “Oh, Leland, for heaven’s sake, you said yesterday that you were going to call her from the office. Didn’t you get through?” Father muttered at his plate, “Oh, hell, I must have forgotten to tell Malley to ask her. Why didn’t you remind me?” “What a pity,” sighed Grandsarah, Father’s mother (named Grandsarah by Bill), who lived in California and was visiting for a few weeks. “Maybe she’ll be able to come by some other afternoon.”
“Yes,” Josh was saying now, “yes” kneading the lower half of his face thoughtfully. “And she was so vulnerable. Whenever I think of Bridget, I think of that white skin, and those lost eyes and that air of belonging in another world, so elusive, so skinny and fragile.”
It flashed through my mind that I would never see Bridget again. The worst part was unraveling the word never. I would never be able to touch her, hug her, laugh with her in front of the objects of our evil coded gossip, use her hairbrush (first pulling out strands of her long blond hair), sometimes spend days before her birthday searching through the city for the only nightgowns she would wear (flannel, with long sleeves and small flowers), never see her again as she was the last time, just a few days ago—sitting cross-legged on a scrapbook to make the freshly glued photographs inside stick, her long arms and legs jutting out everywhere and her pale hair spilling over her face, which looked up at me quizzically as she rested it on one hand, as if she intended to stay in that position forever. “There’s a sale on Kleenex and toilet paper at Bloomingdale’s in a few days.” She grinned at me knowingly; we would be into a lot more than paper goods. “Don’t forget”—as I closed the door behind me—“to call.”
I had found out that the coroner had roughly estimated the time of her death at around noon that day. Or perhaps a little later. So that meant, all things being equal, that I probably had heard a sound in her bedroom at ten o’clock that morning as I stood impatiently tapping my foot in the hall outside the door. And that, in turn, meant—this was suddenly startlingly apparent—that if I’d had a duplicate key to her apartment, or at least pursued my instinct to get one from the superintendent (Why hadn’t I? Was it haste or irritation or inane hypersensitivity about intrusion? I couldn’t remember any more), I, Brooke—I would never be able to forget this—almost literally would have held in the palm of my hand the singular and now irretrievable opportunity to save my sister’s life.
ancy (“Slim” Hayward) Keith:
“She was quite different from anybody I’ve ever known. She really was a beauty, almost transparent, both physically and spiritually. There was an aura about her, a glisten and glow to her look and to her manner. I used to say to her, ‘When you’ve grown up and when you have mascara on, you know, those big long eyelashes black instead of white, and when you grow into yourself, you’re going to be the most beautiful human being anyone’s ever seen. So just bide your time. You’re going to be the swan of all time.’ ”
Jane Fonda:
“I remember vividly the last thing she said to me. I was coming back with her on a train from New Haven; I hadn’t seen her for quite a long time, because I’d been away to school and she’d been institutionalized, but this was within a year of her death. I was then studying with Lee [Strasberg] and she was living in th
e apartment where she eventually died.
“I was asking her questions about Biggs, and she said to me, ‘The hardest part of all is coming out and having to deal with other people’s problems; it’s all I can do, it absorbs all of my energy just to keep myself together—and when I’m out in the world, it’s slightly more than I can bear.’ She was like someone who’d had shock treatment. Talking to her was like talking to someone through gauze, through heavy filters. There was the same attempt to reveal only the minimum that has to be revealed at a particular time: don’t open those floodgates; don’t let very much out; be as calm as you can; don’t rock the boat. What that says is you must do away with anything unique or unusual about yourself or you won’t survive.
“And then we went to her apartment, which absolutely shocked me because it was so conventional. I had an enormous sadness when I was there with her, because it was as if somehow she’d sold out. I couldn’t believe that Bridget collected antiques. She had become terribly concerned about porcelain or the right kind of glass; it was reflected in her apartment and the way she decorated it. Somewhere along the way, Bridget was trying to fit into a mold that had nothing to do with her. Her spirit had nowhere else to go.”
• • •
I didn’t know it was going to be her last summer.
She spent it in Williamstown, Massachusetts, working as an apprentice at the Williamstown Theatre.
I spent it commuting frenetically between Greenwich and New York, where I then had a tiny room on the third floor of an old brownstone. Every day, I would race from fashion modeling to voice lessons to auditions for the fall theatre season to apartment hunting. Although New York City in the heat was practically unbearable, the more manic my schedule the better I liked it, particularly on Sundays when the whole city seemed to migrate to the country and I was left alone to read the newspapers lazily. Irene Selznick had given Father and Pamela, newly wed, her house in Bedford Village for the summer. It was about an hour from the city or twenty minutes from my house in Greenwich. I had a new car, my first convertible; driving it anywhere with the top down and a scarf around my hair was the most exhilarating experience I could think of.
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