Haywire

by Brooke Hayward

  In the fall of 1950, Mother and Kenneth were married. It had been a long courtship, quite long enough, we thought, having tried every trick in the book to get Kenneth to propose in front of us. In the end, our feelings about him as a stepfather were mixed. We had reservations about his ability to keep Mother in line. The problems we expected him to solve were insoluble. “She walks all over him,” Bridget used to say, sniffing. “He’s so dotty about her he never takes our part even when she’s wrong. It’s unjust.” But he was a kind man, with a gentle sense of humor and awesome reserves of patience; sometimes I couldn’t help wondering if matters wouldn’t be much worse without him around. He gave to our lives a semblance of structure and continuity if not the excitement we longed for. And there was a bizarre side to the mild-mannered, slightly stuffy Englishman the world saw: he was a crack gambler who had once supported himself handsomely by winning at chemin de fer in casinos all over the South of France and private clubs all over London. Although he’d long since kicked the habit by stringently disciplining himself to stay away from places like Le Touquet and Biarritz, there was no card game at which Kenneth did not excel. “I’ve always held better cards than anyone I know” was his modest way of putting it. As a result, Mother, who was a natural cardsharp, took up bridge, and two or three times a week invited various of their Greenwich cronies over for dinner and a cutthroat match. On those evenings, Elizabeth would really outdo herself, and we’d start hanging around the kitchen the minute the school bus dropped us off; also, with much fanfare, we’d be offered sherry before dinner and wine instead of milk, a privilege to which Bridget and Bill held their noses but of which I took full advantage. (“I can see you’re going to turn into an alcoholic someday.” Mother’s prediction was only half joking. “All the same, my theory is it’s better for you to get drunk under parental supervision than out at some wild party. Promise me one thing: if you ever have the misfortune to find yourself in a car with an inebriated beau behind the steering wheel, hop out—even if you’re in the middle of the Merritt Parkway. And don’t hitchhike home.” “What’ll I do?” “Carry a dime and call a taxi.” “In the middle of the Parkway?” “Don’t quibble.”) Also, in spite of his pudgy physique—Bridget’s nickname for him was “Uncle Barrel”—Kenneth was a champion racquets player and belonged to the Racquets Club in New York City where he could pursue a game of backgammon between matches. Good-naturedly disregarding our merciless teasing about his potbelly, he retired gigantic silver trophy upon trophy from which we drank champagne loving cups at Christmas.

  The four Wagg boys remained in England for their schooling at Sunningdale and Eton; Kenneth worked out a set of logistics that kept him in perpetual rotation between their holidays in England, his job running Horlick’s Malted Milk in Racine, Wisconsin, and his second family in Greenwich, Connecticut. This routine was not entirely to Mother’s satisfaction. She likened it to Alec Guinness’s in The Captain’s Paradise, playfully feigning jealousy about a consortium of imaginary mistresses. Eventually Kenneth gave up Horlick’s and joined a travel agency in New York City to which he commuted daily. In the summer of 1951, he fulfilled one of his fondest dreams by arranging to bring his four sons to this country for part of their holiday. The plan called for them to join us at a family camp on Squam Lake, New Hampshire. That also happened to be the summer Mother decided to build a swimming pool. Typically, she exhausted herself overseeing every inch of the construction. (“Why, when I am having a pool built, do I have to enter so fully into pool building, do I have to identify myself with every workman? Why do I have to give the whole of myself to whatever I undertake, whether it’s to you children, the house, acting, packing, reading, loving—or hating? Why, whenever someone tells me a sad story, do I suffer so much more than the sufferer? There must be a flaw in my character.”) After a few weeks of throwing herself into camp life at Squam Lake, organizing picnics, tennis matches, expeditions, games, and so on, she announced that she had to go away for a rest; she was tired of friends and children, of feeling neglected, of being cooped up without a breathing space. “All I need is a week,” she said, “of being selfish eight hours a day.” So she drove back to Greenwich alone to recuperate. A week later, fully refreshed, she was back as if nothing had happened.

  Although she had never done anything like that before, we were not, at the time, remotely unsettled by her behavior. It seemed a natural extension of the ordinary. We’d become accustomed to, charmed—when not irritated—by the way her emotions rose and fell, cyclically, like the tides. And always she was so sure of herself, so positive even about the negative, so uncompromisingly opinionated, we accepted many of her eccentricities without question. She lived by them. “It’s my nature,” she warned gaily, “to go around in high spirits most of the time and then to collapse.” A few years later, I remembered that piece of self-evaluation with a chill.

  Periodically, Mother would go through her accounts and conclude she was going bankrupt. Nothing was further from the truth, but when she’d announce she was broke and would have to go back to work, we, in turn, would commiserate out loud and smile to ourselves, knowing that she’d read a script that excited her. The first time she came out of retirement was in 1949, to make a movie, No Sad Songs for Me. Her explanation to the three of us and to Kenneth was both earnest and self-mocking: “I feel I should earn the money while I can; forget my principles, sacrifice my integrity, and go back to Hollywood. This means being a career woman—and a neglectful mother—for two years in order to get some security. This plan will be known as my two-year plan and certainly excludes marriage—much too expensive and distracting. I’m meeting Cohn, head of Columbia, on Tuesday, and think I’m about to cry. It’s sort of like goodbye forever.”

  Forever was three months in Hollywood. During the shooting of the film, Mother’s letters and phone calls exemplified what we came to recognize as constitutional extremes of temperament, more pronounced when she worked than ever before. Everyone was so kind and complimentary it frightened her: secretaries came out of their offices to say how proud they were to have her on the lot; the producer and director were wildly enthusiastic; they all seemed to have such high expectations that she wanted to crawl back into her little Greenwich home. She felt she was posing as an actress. Her acting was phony, old-fashioned, theatrical; if she continued to be as bad, they would have to replace her. One day she was wonderful, the next she stank.

  No Sad Songs for Me was the last movie Mother ever made. It was our undeniable right, we argued vociferously, to be allowed, this one time, to see her on the screen; we were old enough not to be warped by the experience and it would be our last chance. Kenneth, similarly disadvantaged, backed us up. Mother’s capitulation was based on the premise that her performance was so awful we would all be disappointed enough to discourage her from working again. Adhering to a rigid policy that she never see herself in a movie, not even in daily rushes, she waited nervously for us outside the Radio City Music Hall where No Sad Songs for Me was breaking records as the Easter attraction. We emerged dazed and shaken, unable to differentiate between our mother and the woman we had just seen die of cancer. For the next few weeks we treated her with inordinate tenderness (“Never have I known any of you to be so dear and well behaved”), and insisted that she go to the doctor for a thorough checkup.

  In 1952, again claiming she was broke—but, according to our private appraisal, just plain bitten by the bug—Mother returned to the Broadway stage after almost nine years of absence. The play was Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, brought over from London by Alfred de Liagre, her old friend and producer of The Voice of the Turtle. Never able to justify any half-measure undertaking, she “adored” the play, “adored” Terry Rattigan, “adored” Delly.

  We were far more excited than she. At last we were going to witness the revelation of her most profound secret: what she was really like as an actress. She was about to breathe life into those old press clippings that lay yellowing and collecting dust—concealed
from whom did she think?—behind the blue leather covers of the ten or so scrapbooks. We were going to have the chance to sit in a theater filled with anonymous people all paying for the privilege of sharing her with us. We would hear the applause, the oohs and ahs, the sighs, the comments, the coughs all around us; at the sound of the familiar husky voice, we would smile, titillated by the bittersweet pleasure of knowing her in a way nobody else could. We took turns cuing her with her lines; she was word perfect when she went to the first cast reading. We were not taken aback at the discovery that she was even more self-demanding as an actress than as a mother. Nor were we baffled by her protestations of hatred for what she was doing, nor by her nightly fulminations about the rehearsal, the director, the two leading men, the part, herself in it, and anybody, everybody who could not immediately rectify matters with the most constructive criticism—which to her meant telling her, line by line, scene by scene, how lousy an actress she was. It all made beautiful sense. It all added up to the intangible whatever-it-was we already knew about Mother.

  But what was amazing, stupefying, stunning was the impression we had of her on opening night. We were unprepared. We had no idea, no idea at all. She was absolutely wonderful. “I rely on you to be my harshest critics,” she’d said wistfully when we’d kissed her backstage beforehand. And she was right; Brooks Atkinson was no better equipped than we. Exposed to every nuance, every trick in her performances at home, we were primed to pick her performance on stage to pieces. But on stage all the tricks fell into place. Gestures, movements, voice inflections that might seem a shade too broad, too histrionic for the business of everyday life were totally right when mounted on a proscenium, bathed in intense light, and viewed from a distance of thirty-odd feet. We were shocked that she had ever given up—for whatever reason, even if it happened to be us—a profession at which she excelled.

  “Damn,” I growled out of the corner of my mouth at intermission, “it works better here than in life.” Bridget jabbed my ribs with her elbow. But it was true. I resented Mother for alleging that her talent was less important than the happiness of her three children. Given a choice, we would have been just as happy all these years if we could have cued her and watched her go out where she belonged.

  Afterward, I told her that. Not in her dressing room with clumps of friends and well-wishers squeezing through to congratulate her, but out on the street, past the stage door jammed with autograph seekers—through which she strode looking neither left nor right, even when they squealed, “Miss Sullavan, Miss Sullavan!” and plucked at her coat and beseeched her with their outstretched autograph books—as we accompanied her to Sardi’s or wherever the traditional celebration was held that night.

  “Mother,” I said, trying to keep pace with her, “how could you ever retire? Was it really to raise children? We don’t want that excuse hanging around our necks—you’re no housewife and we didn’t ask you to be. We were well enough taken care of—what about all those nurses and cooks and gardeners? Now we feel gypped.”

  “Gypped?” She swung around, her voice cracking with amusement.

  “Well”—I gulped, thoroughly excited by my daring—“cheated. You are Margaret Sullavan. What’s wrong with that?”

  The answer, which came later as we were driving home along the Merritt Parkway and which was revived in one form or another whenever the subject of acting came up again, was: “Most actors are basically neurotic people. Terribly, terribly unhappy. That’s one of the reasons they become actors. Nobody well adjusted would ever want to expose him or herself to a large group of strangers. Think of it. Insanity! Generally, by their very nature—that is, if they’re at all dedicated—actors do not make good parents. They’re altogether too egotistical and selfish. The better the actor—and, I hate to say it, the bigger the star—why, the more that seems to hold true. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever known one—not one!—star who was successfully able to combine a career and family life. The children usually grow up to be delinquents. That’s why”—she was addressing us from the front seat of the Nash Rambler as Kenneth drove, and her face, as she twisted in her seat, was very earnest—“I didn’t want to delude myself that I could do it either. Hold down the two jobs simultaneously. And I so much wanted to have the fun of being just a mother and nobody else. Believe me, I’ve never for one day regretted forgoing my career to spend time with the three of you. Never. It was much more important to me to be with you during your most formative years. Besides”—she yawned and smiled—“you know how I hate hard work.”

  “But,” I persisted, “you must have liked it once.”

  “Yes,” replied Mother, serious again. “When I began. It seemed very natural then. Now—I can’t explain why—my zest is gone. I suppose there’s a love-hate feeling. I do love rehearsals; at least they’re less dreary than playing the same part night after night. I used to think that acting was a kind of therapy, but now I think it creates psychological havoc. Actors become accustomed to being the center of attention, come to believe they’re special, set apart from other people. That’s dangerous and lonely. Actors suffer; look at all the instances of alcoholism, slit wrists, God knows what. As a result of which everybody else around suffers, too. Madness! And the built-in competition to be special, to be different, is deplorable. There are many fine, talented actors you’ve never heard of, while some of the most successful have no talent at all; they’re just better at getting attention. If any of you ever decides you want an acting career, I warn you I shall do everything in my power to prevent it.”

  One of the fringe benefits of The Deep Blue Sea was the routine that it imposed on Mother’s life, one that was as much a grievance to her as a godsend to us. She arose long after we’d left for school, which freed the breakfast table for reading or arguing to our hearts’ content. Then, in order to get to the theatre in time to apply her make-up, she caught the 6:25 train into New York. This facilitated illicit television viewing and two-hour phone conversations with friends. Before matinée days, she would spend Tuesday and Friday nights in the city, which was a real boon. Normal discipline broke down; Elizabeth was mostly bark and no bite.

  Another benefit was the new stature we gained socially from having a famous mother at work. Whereas before, few of our peers had had the opportunity to see her in anything (the days when first-class movies would be rerun on television were yet to come), now they could judge for themselves. Or their parents could judge for them. Besides, there was publicity to be sopped up; although Mother shunned publicity, she couldn’t completely curtail it. Life magazine came out and photographed her for an article:

  CITY CELEBRITY IN COUNTRY SETTING

  Margaret Sullavan manages with no trouble at all to lead a happy double life. Six nights a week she is a grand lady of the Broadway stage, taking curtain calls to tidal waves of applause after her great personal success in The Deep Blue Sea. Ten minutes later her other life begins. She runs out the stage door into a waiting taxi and catches the 11:25 commuters’ train for her country house near Greenwich, Connecticut. There she becomes Mrs. Kenneth Wagg (husband is in the malted milk business) and busies herself with a hundred household chores having to do with her three children, her servants, kitchen, garden and dog.…

  We were all photographed eating Virginia ham and skating on the frozen pond. And then, in the spring, when the pink dogwoods were at the height of their glory and the garden was solid tulips and daffodils, Life came back and photographed me in a strapless evening dress for an article on daughters of the stars.

  That Mother would give her blessing to this latter idea was extremely odd, but, breaking her own rules with as much verve as she kept them, she even added a touch of mascara to my lashes and powdered my nose. (“I thought you forbid us to wear make-up on penalty of death.” “Absolutely verboten; most unbecoming. Hold still and don’t bat your eyelids. You’re so lucky to have the sort of face that won’t ever need much touching up; this is an exception; don’t get any ideas. In photographs, details
can get washed out.”) Afterward, when the fashion editor offered me the strapless dress as a gift, Mother, to my further astonishment, let me keep it.

  Then, one afternoon a few weeks later, she mysteriously called me into the living room after school. “I have a surprise for you,” she said, and handed me the June 1st copy of Life. I was on the cover. “Margaret Sullavan’s 15-year-old Brooke,” read the caption. I felt as if the breath had been knocked out of me.

  “But, Mother,” I gasped, inanely scrutinizing the life-size photograph of my profile under the red-and-white Life banner, “did you know? Did you give them permission?”

  She smiled, very pleased. “I felt I owed it to you” was her answer, and she would not elaborate.

  As this occurred just before school let out and the annual summer country club dances began, I was able to derive a maximum of attention from my cover. Fellow tenth-graders were reverential; snotty juniors and seniors nodded to me in the corridors between classes. A new delegation of boys from Brunswick, older and more sophisticated, with drivers’ licenses and their own cars and a practiced way of dancing close, of kissing good night, of introducing themselves to Mother and Kenneth while everyone waited for my grand entrance down the front stairs, began materializing. “Sniffing around,” Elizabeth grunted. Bill surreptitiously took a roll of nude pictures of me skinny-dipping and sold them to Brunswick students for black-market prices. He had quite a profitable business going until Mother confiscated the negatives. And Bridget, although she never said a word, was envious; I could tell by her silence.

  Bridget, at fourteen, was becoming as impossible in her own way as I had been in mine. (Mother and I liked to think I had, by now, passed through the most acute fevers of adolescence.) Bridget’s way was quite different. Her rebellions took the form of strange fasts and silences. She hid her uneaten food in the playroom cupboards. Once when I searched there for paints, I came upon a lump of desiccated liver wrapped in paper napkins. By mentally retracing our dinner menus as far back as I was able, I reckoned the age of that petrified scrap at two months.