Haywire

by Brooke Hayward

  For Father, the installation of a complex telephone system took priority over everything else before a move could be considered. He found himself ensconced at 12928 before the telephone was installed, a drastic hardship. The Wrights had taken possession of their house a few weeks earlier and had their telephone. Father would race over first thing in the morning, afraid he might lose a possible twenty-thousand-dollar cash deal between home and Beverly Hills, make a couple of phone calls just in case, and then go to the office. Sometimes he’d appear at the Wrights in the middle of the night to make a phone call or two.

  The telephone was the source of Mother and Father’s bitterest fights. Mother hated the agency business because of the telephone; it might ring at any time—in the middle of dinner or in the middle of a badminton game, a dissertation or conversation. The phone would ring and Mother would roll her eyes heavenward, while everyone within earshot would mock-cringe or put their hands over their ears and get ready. “Flesh peddler!” she would yelp, in her own peculiar blend of Southern drawl and outraged exclamation. Then, for the benefit of her audience, she would stamp her foot half seriously, half comically, and assume a pose, arms akimbo: “Leland Hayward, I can’t stand it another minute. D’ya hear me? This is an ultimatum. I’m going to tear that damn telephone out by its roots if it rings again in the next five minutes!”

  Father was addicted to the telephone as much as Mother despised it. He never wrote a letter if he could send a wire, and never wired if he could telephone. He was happiest when he was conducting business on his office sofa with three or four telephones at hand, his head deep in a cushion at one end and his feet comfortably crossed at the other. That way, between conversations he might catch a quick nap. Everyone, even Mother, agreed on one thing: Father was the best agent in the business, even if it was a lousy business. In the early nineteen-forties, when he himself was in his early forties, he had about a hundred and fifty clients, including Mother and her two ex-husbands (Henry Fonda and William Wyler), Greta Garbo, Ernest Hemingway, Jimmy Stewart, Ginger Rogers, Edna Ferber, Gene Kelly, Fredric March, Judy Garland, Myrna Loy, Montgomery Clift, Gregory Peck, Boris Karloff, Billy Wilder, Kurt Weill, Josh Logan, Dashiell Hammett, Charles Laughton, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Helen Hayes, Herman Mankiewicz, Lillian Hellman, Fred Astaire, Gene Fowler, and on and on. Eventually, in the mid-forties, he was to sell his “stable,” as he referred to it, to MCA, and become an equally successful Broadway producer, with A Bell for Adano, State of the Union, and then Mr. Roberts, but it was as a Hollywood agent that Father became something of a legend.

  His appearance was at odds with his profession. He was a distinguished-looking man. Tall and thin (hair parted debonairly in the middle when he was younger—graying and close-cropped like grass later on, a trademark in time), with an air both haggard and elegant, he strolled in white flannels and yachting sneakers through the corridors of the major studios of a Hollywood that had never seen anything quite like him before. The prevailing notion was that agents were a breed apart, somewhat déclassé, that they all had foreign names, like the Orsatti brothers, or spoke with heavy Russian-Jewish accents and came straight from handling vaudeville acts on Broadway. Father captured Hollywood’s imagination by inventing a new style; he was an outrageous Easterner who wore linen underwear and came out on Wells Fargo. It was said that his office was the first in Beverly Hills ever furnished with antiques, and that his manner of dress, Eastern college, influenced Fred Astaire and changed Hollywood fashion. Fred was, in fact, his first client. One evening in 1927, out of a job and bored, Father was making his customary rounds of the New York nightclubs and stopped by the Trocadero to have a drink with his friend Mal Hayward (not related), the proprietor, who was in a gloomy frame of mind. Business was poor, said Mal, slumping at the table, because a new place, the Mirador, had just opened up across the street and was taking away his customers. He was so desperate, Mal groaned, that he would do anything to get his hands on a big attraction, even pay an act like the Astaires as much as four thousand dollars a week. Father went straight over to the theatre where Fred and Adele were appearing in Lady, Be Good, and talked them into a deal. They played the Trocadero for twelve weeks, and he collected his commission of four hundred dollars (“The easiest money I ever made,” he used to say wistfully) every Saturday night.

  People seeing Father for the first time would ask, astonished, “Is he an agent?” He was considered by many people, both women and men, whether in the business or not, to have been one of the most attractive people they ever knew. “Gentleman” was the word most often used to describe him. “He was a gentleman agent,” said George Cukor, “a darling man. I loved him even though he was a buccaneer. By asking such outrageous salaries for his clients, I think he was responsible for jacking up the agency business into the conglomerate empire that it is today.” “In my opinion,” said Billy Wilder (who was to direct The Spirit of St. Louis for him in 1955–56), “his enormous success in this town, beyond his being very bright and knowing it inside out, was due to the fact that the wives of the moguls were crazy about him. I do not mean to imply that he had an affair with Mrs. Goldwyn, but Mrs. Goldwyn was just crazy about him. So was Mrs. Warner. All the wives were crazy about him and kept talking about him, because he was a very attractive, handsome, dashing man. He should have been a captain in the Austro-Hungarian Army—something like that. He was certainly miscast as an agent. If I were to make a picture about an agent, a very successful agent, and my casting director brought in Leland Hayward, I would say, ‘You’re out of your mind! This is not the way an agent looks!’ That was part of his success. Just charmed the birds off the trees, the money out of the coffers, and ladies into their beds.” And super-agent Irving (“Swifty”) Lazar, in his succinct vernacular, referred to Father as a “high-class gent.” Said Swifty, “He was my idol. He had a gift for closing deals, he never had the time to dicker—he should have been called ‘Swifty’ instead of me.” (Swifty was given his nickname by Humphrey Bogart because he made three deals for Bogart in one afternoon.) “Leland was a real beauty. A prince. The best there was. You won’t see anybody like him pass this way again.…”

  In a way Father was a prince. He came from a well-to-do Nebraska family, spent his youth in Eastern prep schools and a year or so at Princeton before flunking out with a perfect record of non-passing grades. The next five years were a rebellious flurry, in which he chose to estrange himself from the interests of the rest of the family—or, at least, those of his father, Colonel William Hayward.

  Father was fond of telling us that he’d been a late starter, having drifted around the country for a couple of years as press agent for United Artists, a job that paid fifty dollars a week and was so tedious he used to pass the time away in countless, small, hot Midwestern towns by inventing elaborate stories for fan magazines about every movie star he’d ever heard of; this got him fired by United Artists, who were paying him to write stories only about United Artists movie stars. Over the next few years, he restlessly held down and was fired from fifteen or twenty such jobs as a press agent, talent scout, or general contact man in New York and Hollywood. In 1927, galvanized by the release of the first talkie and determined to have a piece of the big money that he sensed was about to be made in movies—from studios suddenly desperate to import talent from the theatre, performers trained to speak and writers who could write plays for them—Father became an agent. He dug a manuscript by a struggling writer and friend, Ben Hecht, out of his trunk, sold it to M-G-M, and used the small commission to take the train back to New York where he talked John W. Rumsey, president of the American Play Company, into letting him work there for no salary but half the commission on anything he sold. The American Play Company was a well-established literary agency, basically concerned with authors and playwrights, but Father argued eloquently that it ought to set up a new department just to handle motion pictures; it was obvious to him that there was a new demand, and that staggering wages could be secured from a Hollywood
starved for just about anyone who could read, write, or speak.

  He was already indelibly marked by the contagious enthusiasm that characterizes a great salesman; in a sense it became his credo. “If you ever want to get hold of somebody,” he would instruct us, “for God’s sake don’t beat around the bush—always ask to see who’s in charge, even if it’s the President of the United States. Don’t screw around with anyone in the middle. The middle is always a little soft.” And: “Listen, in this business, if you want to make a lot of dough—and why else would you be in this business?—you’ve got to remember one thing: there’s a direct ratio between what you’re selling and the amount of pandemonium you can stir up about it.”

  The bulk of his own agency’s business was, naturally, in motion pictures. On a quiet morning, he might call the executives of five or six studios—Warner Brothers, Columbia, Paramount, M-G-M, RKO, for instance—to tell them, excitedly, that they should check the box-office receipts and reviews of some play that had just opened in New York (having himself arranged to handle its motion-picture sale an hour before). Then, having satisfactorily charged the atmosphere with the necessary delirium, he would leave the office before they could call back, have a relaxed lunch with a client at the Brown Derby, and maybe do an hour or two of leisurely shopping. By the time he got back to the office, there would be twenty properly hysterical phone calls waiting from the studios, all bidding against one another, and Father would calmly close the deal for a record price.

  Although it was his particular style to map out deals for prodigious sums of money in a high-pitched frenzy while reclining with his feet draped over the top of his sofa, and it may actually have appeared, from time to time, that he was relaxing, there was no real slack in his routine even when he came home from the office. Father never stopped working. He was indefatigable. In this one respect, Mother and Father were similar, for all their many disagreements about a common life-style. They were both so alive, so insuperably optimistic. To watch them together was dizzying, hypnotic. One was aware of infinite potential, possibilities undreamed of—possibilities of magical endurance and energy, magical vitality. To watch them both was to strain one’s own ability to keep abreast, to tread bottomless water; finally, it was to know the real meaning of exhaustion.

  Bridget, Bill, and I did not concern ourselves with the matter of their telephone altercations; it had always been there, a constant, a family routine. We were satisfied by its predictability and sense of combativeness. Other people, their friends, were aware of it less comfortably. Our house was the perpetual headquarters for activity of any kind, riotous badminton matches or card games—hearts was a house favorite, since Mother always won—diving exhibitions in the swimming pool or roller-skating down the middle of San Vincente Boulevard, and the central participants were usually the same: Johnny Swope and Jimmy Stewart, Martha and Roger Edens, the Herman Mankiewiczes, the Wrights, and sometimes the Hank Fonda and Eddie Knopf clans from down the street. Johnny remembers that when Father came home from the office every afternoon he would gratefully rely on the buffer zone of friends to provide enough distraction for him to sneak in some phone calls. Mother also liked to have Johnny and Jimmy hang around; whenever Father went off on trips to New York, which was quite often, it was nice to be able to avail herself of the company of Hollywood’s two most eligible bachelors.

  The three of them had been close friends for years; they had started together in the University Players, a summer stock company in Falmouth, Massachusetts, which had also been the breeding ground for talent like Hank Fonda, Myron McCormack, Mildred Natwick, Kent Smith, Charles Leatherbee, Bretaigne Windust, and Josh Logan. Johnny Swope met Mother at the end of summer, 1931, when the company had ambitiously decided to extend its activities for a winter season of repertory in Baltimore. The winter before, Mother had become the first of the Players to hit the big time by landing a job as understudy to Elizabeth Love in the road company of Strictly Dishonorable and then the lead in A Modern Virgin, in which she got rave reviews although the play itself was lambasted. John Mason Brown wrote in the Post that “Miss Sullavan is in reality what the old phrase calls a ‘find.’ She has youth, beauty, charm, vivacity and intelligence. She has a bubbling sense of comedy and acts with a veteran’s poise. And she deserves a far better fate than the kind of leading part in which she made her début. Last night the evening was hers, as many other evenings should be in the future.” She rejoined the University Players when A Modern Virgin closed. The company lived in the Kernan Hotel, a run-down nineteenth-century building of which the Maryland Theatre, winter home of the aspiring young rep company, was part.

  That was the winter (1931) that Mother and Hank Fonda got married, having carried on a stormy love affair over several summers of stock. An astute Baltimore Post reporter noticed that they were on a list of people who had just taken out marriage licenses; the day before Christmas he burst in upon the startled company assembled for breakfast in the Kernan Hotel dining room, and demanded further information. Mother grabbed a piece of toast and fled from the room, protesting, “Marry Fonda! Are you mad? Just look at him! Who’d ever want to marry him?” Hank raced after her, not only to avoid the reporter but to repair his wounded vanity. Bretaigne Windust, the head of the company, parried with the explanation that Mother and Fonda mysteriously had taken out marriage licenses at least twice before: perhaps they were making a collection of them. Mother, when she later heard this, enthusiastically elaborated on his story, “Yes, yes, that’s it. We’re collecting them, one for every city we’re in together—New York, Baltimore—soon we’ll have quite an exhibit.”

  Although nobody in the company believed either of them would actually go through with it, and neither did they, Mother and Hank were married at noon on Christmas Day in the dining room of the Kernan Hotel, with the dense odor of boiled cauliflower hanging over the assembled group. After a tearful ceremony, everyone sat down to an economical combination wedding breakfast-Christmas dinner, from which Hank departed somewhat precipitously, since he was starring in the matinée of The Ghost Train. For her honeymoon celebration, Johnny Swope took Mother that afternoon to see Greta Garbo in Mata Hari. He became so engrossed he almost forgot that he had to make an entrance in the third act of The Ghost Train as a police inspector. Suddenly, with no warning, he bolted the movie house, ungallantly leaving Mother behind, and ran without stopping all the way to the theatre and up onto the stage, just in time to pick up the wrist of the corpse and pant his one line: “Hmm, bitter almonds.”

  At the end of that season, Hank and Mother set up housekeeping in Greenwich Village. Since Father was already Mother’s agent, he also took on Hank—still a struggling young unknown—as a client. Although Johnny and Father met each other then, they didn’t become close friends until 1936, when Mother and Father got married, four years after Mother and Hank parted company.

  By that time, Johnny (who at Fonda’s urging had come out to California to become an assistant director) and Jimmy Stewart were sharing a house on Evanston Street. Father lost no time getting them both interested in flying airplanes. Jimmy had a slight head start, taking his first lessons on a little asphalt strip that used to be called Mines Field and is now International Airport. The airstrip was surrounded by acres of celery and lettuce fields, and every time a plane took off or landed, the air jumped with thousands of jackrabbits.

  Father gave me, at age three, a hard lesson in both flying and philosophy that I have found difficult to forget since. For a long time I’d begged him to take me for a ride in his plane, although, having never seen one, I had no idea what a plane actually was other than a machine that flew noisily through the air.

  One afternoon he came home early from the office and announced that this was it; the big day had come. He had George Stearns bring the car to the front of the house. Almost running a temperature from excitement, I clambered in. Mother and Bridget followed. Bridget was not yet two and hadn’t been talking long; she had even less an idea than I of wh
at an airplane might be, but she had picked up some of my euphoria and for the entire car ride murmured to herself in a singsong voice, “I want to go up in an airplane, I want to go up in an airplane.” We drove for a very long time through parts of Los Angeles that I’d never seen before, flat stretches of irrigated farmland (which in a year or two would be covered with acres of sinister camouflage) and oil wells pumping—like monstrous woodpeckers, Mother said. All the while Bridget chanted, “I want to go up in an airplane,” and I sat, fermenting with ecstasy, unable to speak a word. We came at last to a hangar and an airstrip with a red windsock flapping in the breeze. Father parked the car, and the four of us walked out to the asphalt strip. It was a beautiful day, warm and clear, with a sudden strange loud hum in the air. “There!” shouted Father, gaily throwing his head back and his arms out as if to embrace the sky. “Look up, quick, look up!” Right over our heads roared a small airplane doing aerobatics. “He’s doing some stunts for you—now here comes a slow roll,” yelled Father, “and watch this, he’s starting into a loop-the-loop!”

  “Where—where?” wailed Bridget desperately, pointing in the wrong direction, as Mother knelt down and tried to turn her head up.

  “Look up, Brie, up!” called Father, his voice almost drowned out by the airplane hovering upside down over us. “Attagirl, Brooke, what d’ya think—isn’t that beautiful?” At that moment the plane slowly began to lose altitude, as if on purpose, and, gathering momentum, nose-dived into the asphalt before us. It caught fire almost on impact. I screamed with delight, thinking it was part of the show, and started after Father, who was running toward the blaze, but Mother caught me and yanked me around so I couldn’t see anything but her face.