Shortly after this, Mother decided to compromise and divide her time between Connecticut and California. In order to keep up with Father, who had refused to totally sacrifice his business in Los Angeles, she bought another house in Beverly Hills as a base of operations and kept the farm as a backup residence. As willful as she sometimes appeared to be, Mother was capable of acute introspection; she was a harsh self-critic, far harder on herself than on anyone else, always the first to blame herself for any problems that arose. At times she kept diaries in which, along with animated descriptions of daily events, could be found stern remonstrances regarding her own behavior if it fell below some invisible standard she’d set for herself. In a memo to herself during her pregnancy with Bill five years earlier, she wrote:
I am guilty of growing old, losing my sense of fun and humor. I take my responsibilities too seriously. I’ve become smug, both with Leland and the children. So I must read this every day because I need to be reminded that I’m becoming a tyrant. From now on, I must make myself have fun with Brooke and Bridget and to hell with discipline. Brooke is sensitive and shy and I have frightened her and cowed her. Leland loves his airplane and his friends and I have taken his pleasure in them away. I am really going to restore them, and find Brooke’s confidence again.
Honest to God.
Jules Stein, founder of MCA:
“I can see him just as if he was standing right here and trying to sell me a bill of goods on something. I can see his smile, his drive, his conviction. He always had that radiant effervescent smile—rarely ever saw him when his face wasn’t shining—ready to tell you something or sell you something.
“I would have hated to have been trying to convince a client to come with us [MCA] if Leland was trying to get him for his organization. Then we bought his agency—this was in 1944—and his clients turned out to be our most important clients. As a matter of fact, when I look back even today at the list of clients he represented, the lists we got at that time, it’s bewildering. He overshadowed everybody in the business. Even our list was secondary to his. I was just flabbergasted to think that he had so many important people—not only performers, but writers and directors—he had the best cross-section of artists in the whole field. He was by far the outstanding man in the entire agency field in California, but he was never quite satisfied with himself. He was always reaching for something further. I was perhaps perfectly happy to be the top agent in town, but he not only wanted to be an agent, he wanted to be a creator and he wanted to be a producer and he didn’t want to stick to any one thing even though he was a success in it.
“I remember at one time when he was married to your mother and you were all out in the country, she insisted that he could not have any telephone calls. And he just couldn’t stand it. It was too much for his blood, so he used to go to the drugstore or country store, maybe half a mile away, and call up the office to find out what was going on. The theatrical world and the agency world was his world. It was his life. I was amused by your mother’s attempts to keep Leland in line. I think if she hadn’t done that she still would have been married to him until he died.”
Henry Fonda:
“He could sell the proverbial snowball to an Eskimo. He didn’t show any interest in me until he saw me in New Faces. Then, when he did, it was typical of him that he took over. The summer of 1933 I was playing summer stock at the Westchester Playhouse in Mount Kisco—your mother momentarily gave up Hollywood to come back and play in Coquette with me, Kent Smith, Myron McCormack, Mildred Natwick, Josh, and Josh’s sister Mary Lee. It was one of the all-time summer theatre triumphs.
“In the middle of that summer at Mount Kisco, I got a wire from your father, asking me to come to California. I wired him ‘No.’ I wasn’t interested in films; I still hadn’t hit New York the way I wanted to. He wired me back—I’ll never forget it—one of those telegrams that just went on for page after page, clipped together at the top—all the reasons why I was an idiot, and why I should come. I wired him back with the one word ‘No.’ Then he got me on the telephone. I hadn’t been home to Omaha for a long time, so I’d taken a week off and flown home for a visit. Somehow your dad knew that’s where I was. Your persuasive father. He said, ‘It won’t cost you anything. I’ll pay for your goddamned airplane fare and your hotel. You’ll meet some people and it’ll be easy for you to make a decision. Don’t be an idiot.’
“So I wound up flying out to California. He met me at the airport. It was terribly hot, in the middle of August; I remember that I had on a seersucker suit, which was wilting on me. He took me to a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I went in to shower and shave and clean up; when I came back out again, he was in the front room with Walter Wanger. I’d never heard of him before. He had no idea who I was either, or whether I was any good. We sat there, and within half an hour or so I was shaking his hand on a deal your father had sold him. He had dragged Walter Wanger over, and I don’t know what he’d said, but I was shaking hands on a deal for one thousand dollars a week. And it was my deal: I could go back to my beloved theatre in the winter and come out the next summer to do two pictures for one thousand dollars a week. I went down in the elevator with your dad and out on the sidewalk in front of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, still in shock. I turned to your dad and said, ‘There’s something fishy.’ I just couldn’t believe it. And he laughed and laughed. That’s how I got here.”
Josh Logan:
“He used to insult the heads of studios while settling one haunch on their desk corners. ‘Sam,’ he would say, ‘why don’t you stop cheating the public and do a good picture instead of just talking about it? Now, I have a writer …’ Or, ‘Harry, stop convincing people you’re ignorant. I know you’ve got more sense than they give you credit for, and I’ve been explaining that to Garbo, but she doesn’t believe me. Why don’t you put her in a picture that—Hold it! I’ve got just the one for you!’ ”
• • •
The new house was in the mountains above Beverly Hills on a wild tract of ranchland belonging to the Doheny family. It was at the end of a rutted dirt road called Cherokee Lane (now a four-lane highway). In those days (1946), as far as the eye could see there was nothing but mountains covered with scrub oak and sagebrush and occasionally a plume of white yucca; off to the west was a perfect view all the way to the ocean, and on a clear day we could see Catalina Island.
The land rose from the dirt road up to the house in a series of deep terraces defined by brick retaining walls and paths: on the first level was a row of pepper trees beside the garage, then up some brick stairs was a tangerine and grapefruit grove where the path split into two further sets of stairs, which continued on, circling a steep flowering slope as they went, and passing on the right a guest house and on the left a sunken garden planted with gardenias and roses. At the top, set well back by lawns and olive trees and a wide brick terrace with a spectacular view, was the house with its back to the mountain that rose behind it. It was a small, unpretentious, one-story house; Mother spent some time remodeling and enlarging it before we could move in. She said she bought it just for its privacy and location—total wilderness with Beverly Hills five minutes away. The inside of the house, when she finished, was arresting: this was a period in which she and Father avidly collected paintings by Miró, Soutine, Picasso, Dufy, Vuillard, Bonnard, and Mondrian, and Mother thought it would be a good idea to complement them with a bold modern background. The living room had a cathedral ceiling, which slanted up to a peak; one side was painted pale chartreuse and the other lavender, to give the illusion, said Mother, that half the ceiling was perpetually shadowing the other half. Over the fireplace hung a rather somber monochromatic Grant Wood, my favorite painting, in which wheat-covered hills rolled to the horizon like waves, accentuated by the path of an unseen reaper exactly following the contour of the land. The fireplace underneath was Mother’s pièce de résistance, a cavernous slash of color that immediately caught the eye; its entire inside was painted a fiery reddish o
range, as if it were incessantly ablaze. The dining-room walls were irregularly striped with tumbling pink watermelon slices, a motif carried through to its ultimate conclusion with the dining table: a twelve-foot-long rectangle of thick plate glass supported by two huge, green, egg-shaped pedestals, custom-designed to resemble upended watermelons from which slices had been carved vertically—big pink slices, sprinkled with black seeds—that reappeared horizontally as bases under the pedestals.
While we were still in Connecticut and Father was in California readying the house for our arrival, he wrote me,
Darling Brooke:
I am writing you a special, all by yourself letter because the poem you sent me was wonderful.
Our new cook seems very good. I told her that she had to cook wonderful food for my family so they would stay out here with me.
I am doing all kinds of things to the house to get it nice for you. The curtains are being cleaned, the rugs are being cleaned, and tell your mother I just got her fifty pounds of sugar and soap.
Do you remember the plants in the dining room? Well, they have all grown so much that you can’t see out of the dining-room window. Pretty soon, they’ll climb all over the room. Your mother likes everything to look like a jungle, but nevertheless, this morning I got hold of Kay, the Japanese gardener, and told him he had to clean it out enough so we could see through the window. Do you remember the book of Ludwig Bemelmans’ about the old lady in Africa with the airplane? Well, the dining room looks a good deal like that.
You don’t miss me half as much as I miss you, so hurry up home.
Much love,
Your Father
Typically, the feature of the house that Mother most loved, its rugged isolation, was the very one that Father found most disagreeable. Given an opportunity to purchase, for a minimal sum of money, all the acres and acres of surrounding land known as the Doheny Estate, he turned it down without hesitation, not wanting to believe that such rough terrain would ever be worth anything; fifteen years later he cursed himself for not having the foresight to know that, owing to sheer greed and the improved land development techniques that kept pace with it—Beverly Hills real estate being in particular demand—the Doheny Estate mountains would be hacked into ziggurats, graded and filled and studded with expensive houses on view lots, and promoted into the most valuable real estate in Los Angeles.
In those days the sky belonged to patrols of turkey buzzards circling it leisurely, the hills swarmed with jackrabbits and deer, and at night packs of coyotes gathered on our lawn to howl at the moon. To Father’s horror, the ground was infested with snakes, both rattlesnakes and their natural enemies, kingsnakes, a differentiation in species that interested him not at all. Since no fewer than two rattlesnakes a week were seen around the house, Bridget, Bill, and I weren’t allowed to wander out alone until we were given lessons in how to kill them if necessary and how, if we were bitten, to use the emergency anti-venom kit stashed in a kitchen cupboard. Father, for all his alleged queasiness, devised his own method of dispatching rattlesnakes, one that at least allowed him to preserve some distance from his victims both alive and dead: observing that the dirt road, which acted as a powerful conductor for solar heat, was the most likely spot for snakes to congregate, he would, regularly, hop in the car and pick them off with it, grimly bouncing in and out of gullies, slamming the car into reverse to back over any he’d missed, and sometimes, as they scattered before him, chasing them up and down the dirt road for hours.
For Bridget, Bill, and me, the years 1946 and 1947 were spent in a mishmash of educational systems, depending on whichever appealed to Mother’s mood of the moment. Bridget and I went to Westlake, a private school for girls in Beverly Hills, until Mother concluded that it was too snobbish—we had been singled out by several older students as being the children of a movie star, and that distinction was somehow more insidious in Beverly Hills than in Connecticut. Then, for a period, we went back to public school, joined by Bill, who was at last old enough and delighted not to be left behind every morning: the Warner Avenue School had a reputation for being “progressive,” and Mother had an unlimited capacity to be enchanted by anything new. Her love affair with progressive education ended as soon as she discovered that the beautiful handwriting Miss Brown had laboriously tried to inculcate in us for years wasn’t taught at the Warner Avenue School until fourth-grade level, and that not only were our classmates still back in the dark ages printing their names at a snail’s pace, but also they had yet to find out what long division meant.
After that, it was back to the good old days of Miss Brown, and Miss Brown alone. Once again she came to the house and tutored us every morning from nine to twelve. Three afternoons a week, now that we were older and presumably needed supplementary companionship, we were picked up by the Tocaloma Girls’ and Boys’ Club station wagons and taken off, with a group of our peers, to the Santa Monica Ice-Skating Rink or the Rocking Horse Stables, or, on Saturdays, to amusements farther afield like Knott’s Berry Farm.
It never occurred to us that this was an unusual arrangement, since any other to which we might have compared it was equally unusual. Even so, it would have been unthinkable to argue; we were brought up on the premise that to argue with one’s parents was fundamentally bad manners and bad manners were intolerable. (“I will forgive you anything you ever do if you do it with good manners,” Father would say, handing us Munro Leaf’s book Manners Can Be Fun. “Except tell a lie,” expostulated Mother.) And, manners notwithstanding, it would have been hopeless to argue with Mother, because whatever she said was dogma. We had learned that the fine art of wheedling, effectively practiced by our friends on their parents, was a waste of time with Mother. It was fruitless to try the time-honored plea, “But everyone else we know gets to …” because that, to Mother, was the most unpardonable excuse of all, showing a singular lack of individuality. “It couldn’t matter less to me what everyone else you know is allowed to do,” she would say, trying to be patient. “That is certainly no criterion of right or wrong, only of their parents’ taste, which is not necessarily something I have to or want to emulate. I have a responsibility to you and that is to teach you a set of values which is good and strong enough not to be influenced by—corrupted by—anyone else’s, no matter how attractive theirs may seem to be. You have to learn to think for yourselves.”
She meant it. There was no getting around her if she disapproved of something. Comic books were barred from the house under penalty of death, she said, because they were strictly for the mentally retarded, as were radio programs; if we felt the need for entertainment, we could read, instead of comics, books—any books we wanted, which meant that by the time we were nine or ten we had run out of our own and were rifling through Mother and Father’s library. There were no extenuating circumstances whatsoever for the presence in the house of Coca-Cola or candy, the pure embodiment of tooth decay; Mother was always able to point to this policy with justifiable pride, since as a result of it, none of us ever had a single cavity and, furthermore, never developed the trace of a sweet tooth.
We did not miss school at all, nor did we feel particularly deprived of playmates; we had each other, and as additional companions Danny and Diane Snodmuller, the children of the Dohenys’ caretaker, who lived across the road in a shack behind the heavy wire fencing that marked one corner of the property line. We were fascinated by everything to do with Danny and Diane: they were twins, they were poor, they were adventurous, they never had to take baths, they were a perfect age for us (halfway between Bridget and me), they taught us how to do cartwheels, they slept in a real tree house, and they had stacks of comics. Mother, of course, did not know about the last, or she would not have encouraged us to spend so much time over at their house. Danny and Diane were wonderful. They had to go to public school every morning, so we would walk with them down to where the dirt road ran into Coldwater Canyon, just to get in a game of tag before either the bus arrived for them or Miss Brown for us.
From the very beginning, Bridget kept herself slightly aloof from our unruly activities. She was not a tomboy and made no bones about it. She had neither the stamina for these excursions nor any interest in the typically rough games the rest of us liked to play at that age, where we chose sides and were pitted against each other for a rowdy chase sequence of cowboys-and-Indians or pirates. She would join us because we would coax or shame her into it, when she would really have been much more comfortable playing with her dolls or drawing a picture or reading. Bridget always seemed content to be alone, but this was partly because she felt so ill at ease with the alternative; whenever the three of us expanded into a larger group, it became an unfamiliar, disorderly, and threatening competition with which she couldn’t cope. Yet she didn’t want to be left out, either; there was a conspiratorial element that attracted her, and nowhere was this element as apparent as in our friendship with Jane and Peter Fonda.
Haywire Page 17