In 1919 he married Maisie Manwaring Plant. At this point, if Father was listening, he’d interject scathingly, “That barmaid,” because Maisie was first married to Mr. Manwaring, who managed a restaurant in a small town near New London, Connecticut, where Maisie helped him by waiting on tables until she caught the eye of the old and fabulously wealthy Commodore Morton Plant. In what many people considered an act of pure calculation, she ran off with him and had her son’s name changed to Plant, then sat back and inherited Mort’s vast fortune when he died shortly afterward. There was no doubt, though, that old Mort was crazy about her, Grandsarah would say, because he traded his house at Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue (the site of the present store) to Cartier’s in exchange for a string of pearls that they’d tracked down—after an extraordinary worldwide search—to match, perfectly, one he’d already given her.
After Grandfather married Maisie, they lived in her stone mansion, a palatial structure that took up the entire block at Eighty-sixth and Fifth Avenue and that featured both a boiserie room, which had been the Duke of Wellington’s study, and a Fragonard room, which was eventually given to the Metropolitan Museum. Father had ambiguous feelings about the whole setup and wildly resented the difference in the way he and his stepbrother, Philip Plant, much the same age, were treated. Phil Plant was outrageously pampered by his mother. She put at his disposal unlimited sums of money to squander on every facet of his budding playboy career; when Father, however, once lost a two-hundred-dollar bet, his father, a stern disciplinarian, refused to lend him the money and taught him to pay his gambling debts by selling every possession, every piece of clothing he owned, except for a couple of clean shirts. “Even my cuff links,” growled Father; “it was a helluva lesson. I never, to this day, have ever been able to gamble again, not even on the stock market.” Father did develop a kind of sympathetic regard for his stepbrother. “Phil Plant was really awfully damn nice to me, although he was a strange man—once bit off a man’s ear in a bar fight. And he used to take his mother—all decked out in million-dollar paste copies of her million-dollar jewels; she always kept the originals in a safe-deposit box and never took them out except to look at them, too scared to go out in the real McCoy, goddamn stingy barmaid—he used to take her out dancing all night.” In 1925, Phil eloped to Paris with Constance Bennett; before their divorce in 1929 and her subsequent marriage to the Marquis de la Falaise, she disappeared to Switzerland for a while and returned with a child who she claimed was Phil’s, and, as such, the heir to his fortune. A famous paternity suit resulted, and after Phil’s death there was a protracted court battle in which Maisie claimed that Peter Bennett Plant was really an English child, adopted by Phil out of gallantry well after his and Constance’s divorce proceedings had been initiated. Years later the case was settled out of court, financially to Maisie’s satisfaction.
Grandfather was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York by President Harding in 1921, and later became the senior partner in the law firm of Hayward, Jones, Nutt & Murray. With his relish for politics, he became chairman of the State Republican Convention in 1920 and a delegate to the National Convention in 1924. Also in 1924 he ran, unsuccessfully, against Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., for the Republican nomination for Governor of New York. Still, there was another side to his nature, an old ache, a wildness and lust for adventure, never quite satisfied by the perimeters of civilization. At times, when it seemed to him that his life was becoming too sedentary, too socially refined, he would be afflicted by migraine headaches so prolonged and agonizing, Father said, he would pound his head against the walls of his room to ease the pain. Big-game hunting became his favorite avocation; he took Phil Plant on several expeditions to East and Central Africa, returning with those many trophies for the Museum of Natural History, and captured live polar bears for the Bronx Zoo in an exploration trip to the Arctic.
When Father flunked out of Princeton in 1920, after his first year, his father—to whom he referred thereafter as “the Colonel”—stopped his allowance and got him a job as a reporter, at twenty-five dollars a week, on the New York Sun. The Sun soon fired him, and Father, disgruntled, went up to Princeton and talked the dean into reinstating him. Several months later he left college again, to marry Lola Gibbs, a legendary Texas beauty who was considered to be that season’s loveliest débutante; it was said that a moan of disappointment crescendoed through New York’s débutante ranks when their most desirable bachelor defected to her. True to the precepts of Fitzgeraldian romance, Father and Lola were divorced after two years and remarried after seven, doubling the length of the experience to four years the second time around. Two years after that, in 1936, Father married Mother.
Grandsarah stayed married to Shep Schermerhorn for about ten years (“I never could stand a man for more than that”), divorced him, and in 1924 married his closest friend, Lindsley Tappin, who died in 1941. “Well, thank goodness,” she’d say, clapping her hands together as if slamming a book shut, “that takes care of that. I’m all talked out, children, talked out of everything, even my wineglasses and scruffy trinkets. I’d give anything to see the three of you go to work on Maisie.” She’d place her feet carefully side by side on the pink-and-black Victorian rug and push herself up out of her armchair to put her arms around Father. “Just crazy about him—never loved anyone as much in my life.”
“Absolutely true,” Father would agree complacently as she rocked him back and forth. “I don’t think Mother’s ever said a cross word to me.”
“Oh, Leland, how could I? How could I? Such a darling boy—almost as good-looking as his father. I was never very stern with him—probably should have been, but I couldn’t help it. Always talked to him like a brother.” She’d squeeze him and laugh some more with such gusto we’d all join in. “Now, children, it’s time to pick some fruit for you to take home. Let’s go see what’s ripe before the birds get it all.”
My grandmother would put on her straw hat with cherries all around the brim, and take the three of us, each fighting for one of her hands, out into the dying sunlight. We’d jump up and down beneath the trees, hurling ourselves against branches that glowed with strange sweet fruit—overripe persimmons and pomegranates already beginning to crack. And while the seeds trickled down our chins, staining them like blood, she, laughing her wonderful laugh, filled our paper bags until we could hardly lift them. It seemed, for those few minutes, that whatever had been eluding us all day had fallen into our sticky outstretched hands like the fruit itself.
Father produced his first play, A Bell for Adano, in the fall of 1944. Although his interest in the theatre was longstanding, it was said that his move away from the agency toward production was a capitulation to Mother, to her dogmatic insistence that the agency business was beneath him.
Several times that year, Bridget, Bill, and I crossed the country on the Super Chief to visit Mother, who was under contract to stay with “The Turtle” until December. Whenever we returned, we wrote her hundreds of letters on every conceivable kind of stationery in handwriting that changed every week under Miss Brown’s tutelage. “Dear Mother, I love you. Bill is playing. Love, Bridget.” “Dear Mother, I am going to play the wedding march when someone is married. Love, Brooke.” “Dear Mother, I love you, I can read. I can play the piano. I have a loose tooth. Love, Bridget.” “Dear Mother, I miss you. One of my upper teeth is coming in now. It feels funny. Bridget is eating fast now, Bill is eating a little faster too. Oh I want a little kitty. Love, Brooke.” Bill sent pages of odd scribbles and Father sent notes on his blue Memo from Leland Hayward paper, in a scrawl so large there were only three or four words to a page, “Darling—Enclosed are some exhibits from your children—love letters, rare paintings + expressions of Bridget’s soul—Also my heart, my love, my every thought, my desires—Living without you is horrible. Each month I love you more and the whole world less—You’re everything there is in life to me. Without you it is pointless and silly—I wish we had been born + alway
s lived together—I did not have lunch with Garbo today—Leland.” And in anticipation of a trip to Europe planned for the two months’ vacation she had that summer, he dispatched a message that took up three full pages of Western Union paper:
MAGGIE DARLING AM CALLING YOU LATER BUT WANTED YOU TO GET THIS FIRST. I HAVENT GOT THE ASTAIRE CONTRACTS YET AND WONT HAVE THEM BEFORE THE MORNING. I WANT TO MAKE A DEAL WITH YOU AND I GIVE YOU MY SACRED WORD OF HONOR I WILL KEEP IT ON BROOKE AND BRIDGETS HEAD OR ANYTHING YOU WANT. I WANT YOU TO LEAVE TOMORROW AFTERNOON AND COME HOME, STAY HERE AND WE CAN GO AWAY FOR THE WEEKEND ANYWHERE YOU LIKE AND LEAVE HERE MONDAY OR TUESDAY AFTERNOON FOR NEW YORK AND SAIL NEXT SATURDAY, LEAVING YOUR TRUNK AND MINE IN NEW YORK. AM BUYING THE TICKETS FOR NEXT SATURDAY NOW SO HAVE TO GO. I KNOW THIS IS UNREASONABLE AND AWFUL BUT IF I WERE TO LEAVE TOMORROW NIGHT IT WOULD BE REALLY CATASTROPHIC. I JUST CANT TELL YOU HOW AWFUL IT WOULD BE AND WHAT IT WOULD DO. I COULD LEAVE HERE BY THE END OF THE WEEK AND BY THE END OF THE WEEK I MEAN FRIDAY OR SATURDAY BUT I HATE BEING HERE ALL ALONE AND AM GOING CRAZY BEING HERE ALL ALONE. BESIDES THAT I THINK YOU OUGHT TO SEE YOUR CHILDREN AS BROOKE IS REALLY GETTING OUT OF HAND ABOUT YOU. IF YOU WANTED ME TO AND DIDNT WANT TO COME ALL THE WAY BACK HERE I WOULD BRING BROOKE ON TO NEW YORK BUT WHAT I WOULD REALLY LIKE MOST OF ALL WOULD BE TO HAVE YOU COME BACK TOMORROW AND I GIVE YOU MY SACRED WORD OF HONOR AGAIN THAT WE CAN LEAVE HERE MONDAY OR TUESDAY AFTERNOON AND SAIL NEXT SATURDAY. IF YOU WILL DO THIS FOR ME I GIVE YOU ANOTHER SACRED WORD OF HONOR, I WILL DO ANYTHING YOU ASK OF ME ANY TIME NO MATTER HOW UNREASONABLE. IF YOU WONT, I WILL BE ON IN TIME TO SAIL THIS SATURDAY BUT IT WILL BE REALLY AWFUL THE THINGS IT WILL DO. ALL MY LOVE LELAND.
(Father often wired people to warn them he was about to call or called them to warn them he was about to wire them. He liked to spend his dinner at Chasen’s or “21,” depending on which city he was in, calling or wiring people from his special table with a telephone at hand. One night he put in a call to his client Dashiell Hammett, who was three thousand miles away. “Dash,” he said tersely, “I sent you a letter this morning. You’ll get it sometime tomorrow.” “Is that all?” asked Hammett. “That’s all. It explains itself,” answered Father and went back to his lamb chops.)
Mother sent us back long letters, almost conversations. To Bridget, on her fifth birthday, she wrote, “My darling Bridget, It’s Sunday and I’m sitting all by myself in my new apartment trying to guess what you and Brooke and Bill and Father are doing. And feeling very sad because in four days it will be February 10, a very important day for you and me—and I won’t be there to share it with you. Five years ago I was getting pretty tired of waiting for you to make your appearance into this world—you were very late in coming—and of course Father and I were terribly excited and curious—would you be a boy? What would you look like? And what should we name you? My darling Bridget, I hope you have a wonderful birthday—and I hope we don’t ever have to spend another one apart. Get right up this minute and give Brooke and Bill and Father kisses for me—I love you all so—If I were there I could give you five smacks on the fanny and one to grow on. I love you, Mother.”
In the fall of that year, three momentous events took place almost simultaneously: Father left us to go East for rehearsals of A Bell for Adano, Grandfather died of cancer, and Mother, unilaterally deciding the time had come to leave California, bought a farm in Connecticut.
She wrote us, “Darlings, I’m so excited about your teeth coming in, Brooke, and about yours going out, Bridget! Do you think I’ll be able to recognize you when I come home in two months now? Bill, don’t knock any of yours out.
“Grandfather’s funeral was very beautiful. It looked like this.” (She drew a diagram of his coffin, draped with the American flag, with two big crosses of lilies at its head and a wreath from his soldiers at its foot.) “A large choir sang hymns, and then everyone joined in ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee.’ Then before the pallbearers took the casket out, about fifty of his old colored soldiers marched out ahead, some of them crying because they’d lost such a good friend. Father and I didn’t cry because we were so happy that the Colonel was peaceful and quiet now after so many long months of suffering and misery. In the last World War—27 years ago—he organized all the colored troops and took them to France to fight. They were very brave and adored your grandfather. And he would have been very touched to see how many came to say goodbye to him. He was a fine honest brave man and you can be very proud of him. He was of you.
“As far back as last Christmas we knew he had a terrible disease and would have to die. So you see even Maisie is not too unhappy about it. She has known for a long time that the sooner it happened the better it would be for the Colonel. Maisie has a magnificent marble mausoleum in the country. Her son, Philip, is in it—and now the Colonel will be there too.” (According to Father, Maisie wheedled him into arranging all the details of the funeral—which he envisioned, according to his view of the Colonel’s character, as having a military austerity and dignity—then ordered, on her own initiative, a six-thousand-dollar bronze casket, “the most expensive casket in New York,” while he argued that all the Colonel would have wanted was a simple pine coffin. But what Father resented was that afterward, she, one of the richest women in New York City, had the bill sent to him.)
On weekends, Mother and Father sometimes stayed with Paul Osborn (the playwright who had adapted A Bell for Adano for the stage) and his wife, Millicent, at their house in Connecticut about two hours outside of New York City. One Sunday, they all piled into the car for a drive through the New England countryside. It was late September, just before the rolling hills ripened into mounds of gold. On a narrow road two miles outside the little town of Brookfield, Mother exclaimed, “Stop the car!” She pointed through the maple trees at an old farmhouse. “That’s exactly the house I’ve always wanted. Let’s go ask if it’s for sale.”
With typical impatience, she ignored the loud outcry of objections from the others—it was Sunday; there was no “For Sale” sign; she couldn’t just pick a house at random, for God’s sake; it would be rude, not to mention embarrassing, to barge in on the owner—and blithely strode across the grass to ring the front doorbell. A few minutes later, she returned triumphant. Not only was the owner, Mrs. Elroy Curtis, charmed by her unexpected guest but amazed at her well-timed arrival; by coincidence the house was going on the market in a week.
“Darlings!” Mother wrote us. “What do you think of this place Father and I found in the country, not far from the Osborns’? Instead of one red barn it has three! And it has a brook, and it’s not far from a river where we can fish, and apple trees, and a small swimming pool and chicken houses, and a couple of cows and a few sheep, and woods and a wonderful great attic where you can play, and a nice school not too far away.…”
Shortly after that, A Bell for Adano went into rehearsal. Mother was beginning to count performances until her run with “The Turtle” ended. “Darlings—Leland still hasn’t arrived—it’s Sunday afternoon and he was due to fly in this morning—but you know he’s like a mosquito the way he hops around. I can never get my finger on him before he’s somewhere else again. I’m very lonesome all by myself here—Forty-eight more performances—six more weeks!!! Bless your hearts—I love you, each one of you so much—and miss you much more than you can ever know—and you can’t know until you grow up and have to be separated from your children—Mother.”
During out-of-town tryouts of “Adano” Father, who disliked writing real letters himself and customarily dictated all his correspondence to a secretary, sent us a rare example of his penmanship. “Darling children—Mother and I are in the country today at the new house. It is cold and there is snow on the ground. Agnes the cow and the sheep want to stay inside out of the cold air. Agnes makes wonderful milk and cream so thick you can’t pour it. I have been away in a place called Boston—which is a beautiful city. In about another week I am going to another city called Baltimore which I love very much. The reason is because before Mother an
d I were married she was working there and I used to go there to see her all the time and we had wonderful fun together. We used to eat codfish cakes all the time. We will be leaving for home in a little over four weeks now and are both so excited we can hardly wait. I think Christmas is coming soon, too. I love you all a great deal. So does Mother and we both send you millions of kisses—Father.”
“Oh, my darlings,” scribbled Mother hastily, “four more performances—and I have never been so excited in my life.… I think when I see you, my three wonderful grown-up children, I shall just sit down and bawl like a baby. You’ve never seen me cry, well I have a small tear in my eye right now thinking about you. This will be my last letter; did you know Father’s produced a play and that it’s a terrific smash hit—which means that so many people want to see it that there are not enough tickets? It’s a very fine play about our soldiers who go into conquered lands and try to teach the people a good way of life. You can all go see it next spring. I love you all so much that it makes me want to cry. That’s a silly way to show how happy I am, isn’t it? Just think, we’ll all be together again—forever and ever—Ten kisses apiece on my favorite spots—God bless you! Mother.”
With A Bell for Adano, Father became an overnight success as a Broadway producer. But all Bridget, Bill, and I knew was that it was Christmas and Mother and Father had finally come home.
It was our last Christmas at Evanston Street. Not a single detail of the usual preparations escaped Mother’s unwavering sense of tradition. Out came the antique German crèche, and on the mantel knelt a flock of carved angels with gold-leaf wings and halos like Fra Angelico paintings; thousands of Christmas cards were wedged around all the books in the library, solidly covering them. In The Barn, a thirty-foot fir tree, like an apparition from the Nutcracker Suite, rose dramatically to the ceiling. As usual, it was so high the top branches had to be decorated precariously from the balcony, and it took everyone who passed by, working in shifts, several days to trim. Bridget and I, in angel costumes, flitted around the mountain of packages that slowly began to compete in height with the tree; whenever Emily’s back was turned, Bill, coached by us, tried to scale his way to the top where all new shipments were consigned. Most of the presents were sent, it was explained, by complete strangers, fans of Mother’s who had probably seen our names in movie magazines. “Horrifying!” exclaimed Mother. “I’ll let you open them all on Christmas Day—that part’s the most fun anyway. Then Emily will store them all away for a rainy day.” From previous experience we knew that “rainy day” was another way of saying that the entire mountain would be hauled off in a truck to a children’s hospital after the holidays. (Mother had one longstanding fan who kept track of all kinds of dates, and on Bridget’s fourth birthday sent her a diamond brooch, allegedly a valuable family heirloom; for once, Mother was at a loss.)
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