“Margaret Sullavan is far too intelligent not to understand the value of cooperation. She is rather carefree and independent by nature, but she does not lack self-discipline in her work. All during the weeks of production, she arrived on the sets nearly an hour ahead of time, and even on the days when certain scenes not requiring her presence were shot, she preferred to come to the studio and sit for hours quietly watching the work of the other players, in order to correlate it to her own.
“Between sequences I frequently observed her, high up in the rafters with the electricians, discussing the lighting of the next scenes. She was interested in everything concerning the picture, and though she is firm in her conviction of how she interprets a part, she never refuses to listen to another’s point of view if she feels something constructive is being offered. Much of this bosh about her being ‘high hat’ is merely the result of her not conforming to Hollywood’s prescribed formulas for the conduct of its celebrities. She doesn’t happen to care about dashing from party to party, or putting on an act after the cameras have ceased grinding.…”
After So Red the Rose came a comedy, The Moon’s Our Home, the most important fact about which, to Bridget and me, was that Mother starred in it with Henry Fonda. This reunion was celebrated by more than the usual number of stills of them together, both looking achingly beautiful.
Margaret Sullavan’s leading man in her new Paramount picture, The Moon’s Our Home, is none other than her ex-husband Henry Fonda. And in the story she falls desperately in love with him, marries him, becomes estranged from him, and is re-united with him at the end.
Hollywood gossips wondered whether acting together in these circumstances would embarrass Margaret and Mr. Fonda, but they took it as being all in a day’s work.…
However, many years later, Hank told me:
“While we were on location, the romance sort of bloomed again. When we got back, we talked about marrying again, even looked at property to build a home on. And then, suddenly, it was off. I wouldn’t be able to explain what it was about the combination of the two of us that didn’t work. I guess it was our temperaments. We must have been ill-fated lovers.…”
Then came Three Comrades, for which Mother received a 1939 Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, the New York Film Critics’ Award, and a telegram from Father:
CONTRARY TO GENERAL LEGEND LOCAL PAPER FILLED WITH STALE NEWS. FOR INSTANCE THIS MORNING EVERYBODY SCREAMING YOU ARE SUPERBLY GREAT ACTRESS. WHAT KIND OF NEWS DO THEY THINK THAT IS? HOPE YOU’RE MISSING ME—GUESS WHO.
Also, in 1939, Bridget made her entrance:
DAUGHTER BORN TO MARGARET SULLAVAN—Stork Brings Second Child to Screen Star in Hospital Here.…
By 1941, she’d made So Ends Our Night, with Fredric March; Back Street, with Charles Boyer; The Shopworn Angel, with Jimmy Stewart (directed by Hank Potter and produced by Joseph Mankiewicz); The Mortal Storm, with Jimmy Stewart; and Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, again with Jimmy Stewart.
From their four-time collaboration, Jimmy Stewart remembers:
“Humor. She had great humor. It wasn’t mechanical with her. It was a part of her. This was one of the things that made her great. When you’d play a scene with her, you were never quite sure, although she was always letter perfect in her lines, what was going to happen. She had you just a little bit off guard and also the director. I’ve always called what your mother would do planned improvisation—she could do just moments that would hit you, maybe a look or a line or two, but they would hit like flashes or earthquakes; everybody’d sort of feel it at the same time. It’s a very rare thing. Your mother hated talk. Lots of times your mother said, ‘We’re all talking too much, we don’t need all this talk.’ She would never sit down and discuss a scene. Lubitsch would say, ‘Now we’ll do it,’ and your mother would say, ‘Yes, all right, let’s do it.’
“The longest number of takes I ever did in the movies was forty-eight takes with your mother in The Shop Around the Corner. We were in a little restaurant and I had a line: ‘I will come out on the street and I will roll my trousers up to my knees.’ For some reason I couldn’t say the line. Your mother was furious. She said, ‘This is absolutely ridiculous.’ There I was, standing with my trousers rolled up to the knee, very conscious of my skinny legs, and I said, ‘I don’t want to act today; get a fellow with decent legs and just show them.’ Your mother said, ‘Then I absolutely refuse to be in the picture.’ So we did more takes.”
• • •
Finally, as Colonel Hayward commemorated the event in the last square of his needlepoint alphabet, arrived The Boy Named Bill.
Mother made only two movies after 1941: Appointment with Love, with Charles Boyer, and Cry Havoc. Then she retired “permanently” from the screen, because, according to one publication of the time, she said:
“I have three children. I wish to dedicate myself to them. The best service that mothers can render their country in these wartimes is to take care of their children. I am doing that.”
I sighed. We had come, practically, to the end. There was a whole book designated for The Voice of the Turtle, but we knew all about that.
The question of possession, of ownership, was, I mused, troublesome. To whom did Mother belong: herself, us, or her public? In any case, did it make a difference? She must have thought so or else she wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to keep her public and her private lives separate. But how much mileage was that deception good for? Once she’d deliberately become a public figure, how could she go on being one without being one?
“She made a mistake,” I said aloud. Bridget was putting the books back so that their bindings lined up with the edge of the dust marks on the shelves.
“More than one,” replied Bridget, smiling impishly.
“No,” I said. “Seriously. She made a bad choice back when she was eighteen. She should have become an English teacher instead. Or a camp counselor.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Bridget. “If that was true, you wouldn’t be here.” Bridget’s logic could be breathtakingly righteous.
“I know,” I said. “But she should have gone back to Virginia all the same. She’ll never be happy. Just wait and see.”
Millicent Osborn:
“There was one very sad thing: at the time of the last play she did—the one she died in—while she was in rehearsal, she came here to dinner. We were alone and she was gay and charming; we were having a perfectly lovely time talking about all kinds of things, and suddenly she took me into my bedroom and she said, ‘Millicent, I can’t go on and I can’t get out.’ And I had such a sense of horror—there was something in the way she said it that implied more than the play. Because then I took her by the shoulders, and I held her, and I said, ‘You must go on.’ And I didn’t mean the play. But there was that crazy confusion, that ambiguity.…”
Johnny Swope:
“I’ll never forget a remark your father made. We all went to a World Series game together, September, 1949. We were sitting at the table having lunch, the five of us: you and Bridget, Leland and Slim and I. And Leland looked at me and said—now at this time you were twelve and Bridget was ten—he said: ‘You know, Johnny, these girls have reached the age when I can really enjoy them. I can take them to the theatre without having to take them to the bathroom or having to feed them; I don’t have to hold their skirts up when they go to the potty and I don’t have to tell them how or what to eat.’ It was such a funny remark to make in front of you—as if he were rejecting the first twelve years of your life.”
One sleepless night when I was thirteen or fourteen, following the exchange of some punishment or other on Mother’s part for some provocation or other on mine, I finally accepted the idea that being a parent might be worse than being a child. Maybe Mother had bitten off more than she could chew. If I reversed our positions, as she was always adjuring me to do, I had to agree that I was impossible. “What would you do if you were me?” she’d query, at the end of her patience.
I had no idea. It was one thing when we were adorable three-year-olds in starched organdy pinafores; quite another when we were erupting into puberty and chaos. “I loathe having to be a policewoman all the time,” complained Mother. “Nag, nag, nag.” (Then shut up and leave me alone, I’d think. From my point of view, it was she who was impossible, not I. The predicament was that I had a different point of view for every occasion.) “If you think it’s fun to play God—” I didn’t think it was fun. I overflowed with sympathy for her. What folly to perpetuate the human race; I, for one, would not make the same mistake. No children for me; no blood on my hands. I didn’t want to live through this torture again.
The next morning, combing out my pin curls, I cheered up at the sight of myself in the mirror; was charming to everyone at breakfast, ate three helpings of sausages, got an A-minus on my English test, made left halfback on the field hockey team, spent the afternoon recess learning dirty jokes in the eighth-grade coat-room, scavenged twelve cents from my friends after school for a vanilla burnt-almond Good Humor, and managed to have at least six hours of happiness. My adolescence was a total delirium.
During the nineteen-fifties, Greenwich, Connecticut, was, on the surface, an ideal place to be a teen-ager. It lay on the Long Island Sound, not quite a suburb of New York City, but an easy thirty-five-minute commute from it by either car or train. Greenwich was a wealthy community that prided itself on maintaining the appearance of a small town. An expensive version of a small town, to be sure, with spacious maple-lined streets radiating out from the core of its township—a single shopping street, Greenwich Avenue, where, in classical tradition, were located the post office, the drugstore, the five-and-ten-cent store, and any other unobtrusive businesses that did not challenge the community’s complacent air of self-preservation. As for the maple-lined streets, they eased quickly away from the typical New England houses near the center of town toward the real heart of Greenwich: its vast country estates, which grew vaster with each passing mile. All the intersections along the way were delineated by signposts set in large triangles of evenly clipped hedges. (Sometimes when Mother went out to dinner, Bill and I would encamp in the middle of the triangle where our road, Clapboard Ridge, joined the main artery of North Street, and would spend the evening shooting our BB guns through its protective hedges at the rear tires of passing cars, hardly able to contain our pleasure when we hit our target and the car swerved toward the ditch opposite.) That was Greenwich, with businesses small, properties large and valuable, zoning laws tough, and with enough clout from its citizens—many of them heads of giant corporate interests in New York City—to keep it that way.
No wrong side of the tracks, no slums, robberies, rapes, or murders—although I can vaguely recall one fatal car accident after a big private débutante party that sobered everyone up enough to question, for a while, the advisability of serving alcoholic beverages at those ritual summer galas. For where its social life was concerned, Greenwich was no small town at all; it was tremendous.
We moved there in the fall of 1948. Mother had decided to civilize us. The time had come to give priority to the serious matters of education, culture, and social structure, none of which was provided by Brookfield or California. But Greenwich had a slew of excellent private schools (Greenwich Academy, Brunswick, Greenwich Country Day, Rosemary Hall, et cetera), a slew of churches (Christ Church, Round Hill Community Church, et cetera), and access to all the cultural advantages of New York City. It also had a multitude of exclusive clubs (the Greenwich Country Club, the Round Hill Club, the Field Club, the Indian Harbor Yacht Club, the Belle Haven Beach Club), which was one aspect of life there that Mother found reprehensible. Despite our eventual importunings for her to join one (like the parents of all our friends), she drew the line and steadfastly refused. “I’m not a joiner,” she’d say, “and anyway, I don’t believe in that kind of nouveau-riche snobbism.”
She also had grave misgivings about the bigotry in Greenwich; there were no Jews. I’d never heard the word “Jew” until we moved to Greenwich. One afternoon we were all drinking iced tea on the flagstone terrace when a friend of mine idly quoted her mother as being greatly relieved that the owners of such-and-such a house had held out against the irresistible bid of a rich New York Jewish couple who’d driven out three times to look at it—supposedly very prominent, too, but you know how that is: let one in, then another, and suddenly property values—Whereupon Mother exploded. It was one of the only two times I ever saw her really lose her temper (the other was when I punched Bridget in the nose for breaking one of my china horses), and I was extremely impressed. She sprang to her feet, her face purple with emotion. “There is one thing I will not tolerate—not in my house, not from anyone, not ever!—and that is discrimination of any kind, particularly anti-Semitism.” She pounded one fist in the other hand for emphasis. “The finest, most brilliant people I know are Jews, my closest friends are Jews!” She paced agitatedly back and forth, superstitiously avoiding the cracks in the flagstone, delivering herself of a long impassioned lecture that not only detailed the entire history of the Jewish race, its accomplishments and persecutions, but also lamented the incalculable loss—cultural, intellectual, and scientific—that the rest of civilization would have suffered without it. Inflamed by her oratory, we felt a terrible collective shame at not being Jewish ourselves. “I find the only prejudice worth having,” she concluded vehemently, “is against people who are prejudiced.” Further to dramatize her point and to remedy what she saw as her personal neglect of our religious training, she thereafter, instead of sending us each Sunday morning to Sunday School, read the Old Testament to us, starting with Genesis (and ending halfway-through Ezra, when her interest in the sessions lagged as much as ours).
We were pleased that she’d backtracked about Sunday School. Unbeknownst to her, we’d been playing hooky from it for ages. All our friends went to Christ Church, with its sanctimonius stone walls and rose window. But Mother had held out for the Round Hill Community Church, because it was a Spartan Calvinist structure, not a stained-glass window in the place, and the rector, Dr. Prince, wore sensible steel-rimmed glasses. We were not inspired by it. There was no pious ceremony, no incense or cushioned prayer stools, no Eucharistic chants, no dark shivering mystery. Mother thought all of that was baloney. Every Sunday she’d drive us away from the center of town and Christ Church, where our friends prepared for their first communion in virginal white dresses, toward the country and Round Hill Community Church with its simple wooden spire. She’d drop us off with twenty-five cents apiece for the collection plate, and come back for us an hour later, little realizing that we’d spent the hour playing hopscotch on the deserted country roads with our quarters as “loggers.”
Not only were there no Jews in Greenwich, before our family there were, with one exception, no movie stars either. That exception was a miracle. The Fondas had preceded us there by a few months; Hank was starring in the huge success Mr. Roberts, produced by Father, and with a long run ahead of him, he had brought his family from California to live in Greenwich for much the same reasons as Mother. Our first day of school—into which we awkwardly arrived at midterm, feeling more than the usual trepidation because we hadn’t been to school for years—was saved by the sight of Jane and Peter Fonda. The ironic coincidence that brought us all together once again in an unlikely town on a coast three thousand miles from home, the thrilling nuances of our parents’ ongoing personal and professional relationships, the old feeling that we belonged together tribally by some predestined ordinance endowed the five of us with a permanent sense of complicity. And more: through each other’s eyes we saw and knew everything there was to see or know; we were superhuman.
On our property, at the bottom of a grassy hill, was a lake overhung by two giant willows, beautiful trees that tolerated the five of us perfectly. We would all somersault madly down the hill head over heels until we were nauseated, giggling and shrieking “Wahoo!” and grabbing handfuls of willow branches t
o swing ourselves way out over the lake. Frog-hunting in the rowboat was one of our major pastimes. Another was putting on plays for our own private amusement. We would spend hours rehearsing them. Nobody else ever saw a performance. Peter, who liked to cackle evilly and drape himself in blankets, always played the villain; his most treasured role was that of an old miser counting his money. Bill had a running part as Peter’s sidekick, Jane as the hero, and Bridget as the ingénue; I was the director, also in charge of production.
In the sixth grade, Jane and I were kicked out of the Brownies. It was a scandal; nothing like it had ever before occurred in that chapter of the Girl Scouts. We went on strike and refused to attend meetings with the rest of our classmates, preferring any other form of recreation, even sitting alone in our classroom. There, surrounded by empty desks and half-erased blackboards, we devised a continuing fantasy about our illustrious careers, when we attained the magical age of eighteen, as co-madames of a high-class brothel fronted by a Chinese laundry, which fastidiously laundered the shirts of our customers while they dallied in the spectacular setting we’d provided behind the squalid façade. In every princely suite would be a fountain splashing with wine, and for every patron four or five of the most singularly exquisite girls ever seen by the human eye: highly educated (often highly born) and expert in all arts including sexual; multilingual, multiracial, hand-picked by us on yearly trips to all corners of the world. They would drape themselves across the opulently cushioned beds (the only furniture) or patter across the Moorish tiles with noble step, bearing exotic drugs, ointments for massage, salvers of sublime culinary delights, ivory lutes or lyres: whatever the occasion—and it went without saying, a clientele worthy of our establishment—demanded.
We went to the Greenwich Academy, a private school for girls in an august brick building on Maple Avenue. We wore uniforms: in spring, formless green shifts; in winter, ghastly orange lisle stockings, crepe-soled oxblood shoes with flaps over the laces, green wool suits, and tan shirts sturdily tacked down with men’s green ties.
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