Haywire

by Brooke Hayward

  The confusion and conflicts in your hearts that led you and Bill to leave your own home for your father’s had been growing for several years, while I seemed to stand helplessly by and watch—hoping that you would see clearly some day before any real harm to yourselves resulted. If only I could have averted that final crisis three years ago—not for my sake, but for yours—then I believe that Bill would not be at Menningen’s, nor you at Riggs. But in those days you would not have believed the truth; it didn’t fit in with your resentment—that I was influenced by jealousy.

  And make no mistake about it, my darling, I was jealous—strongly, furiously—but only of your well-being—which I saw constantly threatened.

  Anyway, it’s not too late for you, that’s certain, and I still hope not too late for Bill.…

  Dearest Brie,

  Your father reports that you have agreed to discuss your finances with him if he comes up on Wednesday, and that you deny you have been unwilling to give me an accounting in the past.…

  When we made this arrangement, you were planning to become an outpatient [this was circled in red pencil by Bridget with the marginal note “Not immediately or even in the foreseeable future”], which would reduce your expenses quite a bit. You agreed to give me an accounting in February and monthly thereafter [again encircled by Bridget with the notation “Never discussed”].

  Since any form of inspection, supervision, or advice—in fact, any relationship with me—appears to be difficult for you at this time—and since I must have same in order to provide for you, I am wondering if you wouldn’t very much prefer to return to the status of ’56 and ’57—i.e., your father’s supervision [Bridget’s note: “What does that mean?”]. If you remember, I only took over because you wanted to run away to Europe; whereupon Kubie agreed with me that this could be disastrous for you, advised Riggs instead, which your father felt he couldn’t afford.…

  Dearest Brie,

  Your father’s visit to Riggs was highly successful, I gather—from everyone’s point of view. For the first time he appears to be wholeheartedly for Riggs. Because he didn’t know the place, or the doctors, he couldn’t share my respect for its policies, and I so needed his moral support—without it the responsibility was too great for me alone. Often, in these last months, I had begun to doubt my wisdom in bucking him.

  Now everything’s going to be different! Peace, Praise the Lord! And we’ll advise you about your finances.

  Kenneth returns on Monday from England after the longest six weeks I ever spent. Nothing has been accomplished on the new guest house/studio, just problems and crises all summer. Our great elm fell across the river, creating a major challenge to some 40 engineers, tree experts, city planners, etc., and a nightmare for me.

  Enclosing check and love,

  Ma

  “Brooke?” asked Father tersely. “Brooke Hayward? It’s damn decent of you to return my phone call. You’re the hardest person on earth to track down. Why don’t you ever check in with the office? Where the hell have you been for the last twenty-four hours?”

  “Oh, here and there.” I grinned in the sweltering phone booth, pleased by his familiar offensive. That was the summer I started modeling. I spent a lot of time in phone booths, with a fistful of sweaty dimes that kept slipping through my fingers and a cavernous bag that held everything a job might require: make-up, falsies, eyelashes, appointment book, shoes for all occasions—everything except a pen with which to write down the next photographer’s address. I was always ruining the sharp end of my eyebrow pencil on whatever paper was handy, mostly the pages of the Manhattan directory.

  “Guess what? It’s my lucky day. Avedon photographed me for Bazaar.”

  “About time,” rasped Father. “He’s the best. Maybe I’ll call him—take a look at the proof sheets. What did they pay you?”

  “Bazaar only pays fifteen dollars an hour for editorial work,” I said.

  “You should be paying Avedon,” said Father, pretending to be mollified. “He’ll make you look better than you ever looked before. By the way, have you any idea what’s been going on in the rest of the world today?”

  “What?” I sighed, allowing myself to fall into the trap.

  “It’s July 5th, you nincompoop,” said Father. “You’re twenty-two years old. Christ, hard to believe. I just had Kathleen Malley make a reservation at the Pavillon for eight o’clock. Big celebration. Just the two of us.”

  “Neat,” I said, surprised.

  “Not too much of that crappy eye shadow,” continued Father. “I’d like to see your real face for a change.”

  Where restaurants were concerned, Father liked the Pavillon for dinner and the Colony for lunch. Or, as an alternative, vice versa. The reason was very simple. Comfort. They made him feel at home. He had his own table in each. What had been, before he elected to have it, the worst table in the Colony—the one right by the kitchen door—became Mr. Hayward’s table. A bottle of Wild Turkey was waiting on his table whenever he came in. He never drank too much of it but he liked to see it there. For a while he toyed with the idea of having the telephone company install a direct line from his office to the table, but was finally persuaded by his great good friend and lunch companion, George Axelrod (whose play Goodbye Charlie he would produce that fall), that that was too chic. Father and George put boeuf bourguignon on the menu at the Colony. They ate there so often they got tired of the usual fare. One day, George, who had been a mess cook in the Army, asked the maître d’ to bring them whatever had been prepared for the staff’s lunch. It turned out to be beef stew, much the best beef stew they’d ever eaten, and eventually it was elevated to a position on the menu.

  At Le Pavillon, the night of my twenty-second birthday, Father was in an uncommonly jovial mood. He ordered two glasses and a bottle of champagne.

  “Here’s to you, kid.” We smiled and clinked glasses.

  “I’m flattered,” I commented. “I’ve never seen you drink champagne before.”

  “Hell,” he reminded himself after a sip or two, “the only way to drink this stuff is with good caviar.” So he ordered some of that, too. It came with a double Wild Turkey, sent over by Henri Soulé, the formidable owner of the restaurant. By now, Soulé knew Father’s preferences well.

  Father leaned back expansively. “Well, darling, hold on to your hat,” he said. “Are you old enough to keep a secret?”

  “You know better than that.” I laughed, twirling the stem of my champagne glass. Maybe he was about to give up producing to pursue his most extravagant ambition—running TWA.

  “I’ve decided to get married again,” he declared.

  “But,” I replied, stunned, “you already are.”

  “True,” said Father. “First I’ll have to get a divorce.”

  That was also the summer of the great Dominguín-Ordóñez mano a mano in Spain. My stepmother, Nan, was following it with a coterie of friends: Hemingway, Truman Capote, Harry Kurnitz. Father said he would fly there in a few days to give her the news.

  “The reason I’m telling you tonight,” he continued, “is because tomorrow Pamela is arriving here from Paris and I want you to meet her.”

  Pamela Churchill, it turned out ironically, had been introduced to him some months earlier by her good friend Nancy Hayward.

  “You know I’m not a big fan of English women,” said Father. “They all have bad teeth and talk through their noses; they’re all also amoral, as opposed to immoral—big difference—all without exception. Don’t know why that is. They all lead restricted lives until they get to be about sixteen and they start screwing anything. So Nan had a helluva time, when she went off to Main Chance for two weeks, convincing me I should be polite and escort this dame—who happened to be visiting New York, didn’t know her way around too well—to the theatre.”

  As a result of that reluctant theatre date, Pamela, who lived in Paris, was selling her fabulous apartment overlooking the Seine, giving up her staff of five, the bulk of her priceless Lou
is XV furniture, her life of incomparable culture and refinement and grace, to move to New York City on Father’s account.

  “That’s romance,” said Father.

  There was no denying that. And his description of her was quite thrilling. She sounded like a mixture of Brenda Starr and Mata Hari. “Terrific auburn hair. Wonderful complexion. One of the most accomplished charmers of the century” was Father’s summation.

  He went on to explain. Born in 1920 to Edward Kenelm Digby and the former Honorable Pamela Bruce (later Baron and Lady Digby), Pamela had, at the age of nineteen, married Randolph Churchill, from whom she’d separated after the birth of their son, Winston. Thereafter she’d presided over a legendary salon, to which all the most illustrious diplomats, military figures, politicians, and foreign correspondents of wartime London had flocked. Over the next twenty years—right up to that time—although she had not married again, she’d lived a life of some considerable comfort, given her friendships with some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, including Averell Harriman (currently her husband), Gianni Agnelli, the Baron de Rothschild, and Ali Khan. (“It cost ten thousand dollars a year just to keep her apartment in fresh flowers,” marveled Father.)

  So vivid was his account of her, so boyishly gleeful and amorous, that it upstaged the moment, a day or so later, of our actual introduction, and remained fixed in my mind as the night we met.

  Diana Vreeland, editor of Harper’s Bazaar in the fifties—in which capacity, that summer of 1959, she’d given me my start as a model—editor-in-chief of Vogue in the sixties, and now Special Consultant to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum, had been a close friend of Father’s and Pamela’s separately, long before they knew each other.

  When, in 1960, they were about to get married, she had it out with Pamela: “Pam, you’ve got to realize that he’s a terrific père de famille. Before you came into his life, these three children were there. And there are difficulties.… Are you taking this into consideration?”

  And Pamela replied, “I adore the children.”

  Diana went on, “It’s a pretty tough life, that theatre life, and if you want to sit around the hotel in New Haven and smell the cigar smoke of fifty years coming out of those carpets while he’s trying to get a show into New York, if you can stand that, Pam—What makes you think you can stand it? You’ve only spent the most beautiful time in the most beautiful places, always in fresh air.”

  But Pamela was oblivious. She answered, “I’m going to marry him because I’ve had everything in my life, but I’ve never really had a husband, and Leland is going to be my husband.”

  Just as Father liked all nursery food—puréed peas, creamed chicken, mashed potatoes, ice cream—he liked being taken care of. He loved Pamela because she took wonderful care of him. English women, far more than American women, are built-in nannies, housekeepers, gardeners—with the lightest touch in the world. Pamela had a great gift: she understood the men she loved. That was where she began and ended; it was the only life she had. No man could ever leave a woman like that. Where could he possibly go?

  Diana Vreeland:

  “Your father has always been a great romantic. I’ve known him forever and he hasn’t changed by a hair. I’ll never forget the time I first met him: 1922. Cedarhurst, Long Island, at a party. The heat of the collegiate days of ‘Saturday night at the country club.’ I’m very interested in this type, who is standing: he doesn’t speak to any of the girls, he pays no attention to anything; the party goes on; he is obviously waiting for someone, but he doesn’t kill off time with another chap or with anybody. I remember him because he was quite pale and his eyes were very avid and very searching. He was waiting. Then, in the dark—it was in the days when we wore big evening dresses—a girl comes in and she has on a navy-blue serge suit. And she has the most beautiful face I’ve seen in my life. Where she had been, why she had come at that hour, why she wasn’t dressed, I have no idea. They said hello, they went straight onto the dance floor, and they danced the rest of the evening alone. Just the two of them. That was Lola Gibbs, who became his first wife. She was very beautiful. Very unusual. The face was small and very special. Also, the fact that she had on a blue serge suit and a shirtwaist made her look very racy, as she was in no way involved with evening clothes, nor did she give a damn. Nor did Mr. Hayward give a damn. They had their own ball, their own party, and that was all.”

  It was not so very hard to believe the popular legend that Father once, unable to resolve some lovers’ quarrel with Lola on the way to Europe, jumped off the boat mid-Atlantic in despair and had to be rescued. He admitted to being not only a romantic but a man who truly preferred the company of women. Even when he most disapproved of the way I was leading my life, he still adored me, not because I was his daughter but because I was a female. I wanted him to be an archetypal father, and he couldn’t be. He knew it, too.

  He also was capable, at times, of a certain kind of cruelty. But although he could and did say savage things, his intention never was to hurt. His cruelty was unthinking, childlike. He just said what he thought was obvious; quickly and only once, because the idea of saying it over again bored him. His mind would already be on something else.

  Like most children, he tended to speak very directly. But in a Freud-oriented world, it was hard to take Father at face value, even harder as I’d grown older and more sophisticated. He’d say, “You’re acting like a goddamned fool,” and I’d think, He hates me. But he’d meant nothing more than what he’d said. It didn’t really bear decoding. “I want a darkroom” did not mean he had some buried passion for his mother. It meant he wanted a new toy from F. A. O. Schwarz, a grownup’s version of a huge electric train. Exactly like Bill and his cars. It also meant that he wanted it immediately and was prepared to go to any lengths or to any expense to procure it. He had a childlike need for instant gratification coupled with a childlike disregard for the impossible. Introduced to Loel Guinness’s private helicopter on a visit to Palm Beach, he coveted it on sight. So, undaunted by the fact he was in his mid-sixties, he took up helicopter flying, managed to pass the stringent physical requirements for getting his license, and converted part of the lawn at his house into a helicopter pad.

  “What in God’s name do you want to be an actress for?” he used to ask me when I came up to his office for a friendly visit between rounds. “For a smart girl like you—dumb, plain dumb.”

  His fingers would twirl a matchbook exasperatedly around the edge of his desk. “Awful profession. Wait a sec—don’t go away, darling, sit down. Gotta finish this phone call—” He’d slam down the receiver, punch another button. “Crummy connection—bastards cut me off.”

  He had a way of leaning back in his chair that was more ominous than if he had leaned forward. “What the hell was the point of giving you an expensive education? Colossal waste of my money, not to mention your time and brains.” He’d fix me with a stare so dark with oppression and injury that I’d swear to myself I’d never come back. Then the intercom would buzz and he’d cheer up again. And my resentment would subside while I played with the new gadgets on his desk, and looked at the silver-framed photographs on the piano, and reminded myself that naturally it was much easier for him to deal with a machine than a daughter, a daughter being synonymous with emotion, and that the more he loved me the more ferocious he was apt to become; in short, that I should be flattered.

  “Your brother, Bill,” he once announced to me on the telephone in the angriest voice I’d ever heard him use (Bill had just been returned to Menninger’s after his most famous “elopement” had landed him in jail), “is going to be worth just about a plugged nickel. That is, if he’s lucky. That bughouse is costing me a staggering sum of money—thirty thousand dollars a year after taxes; that’s really, let’s say, a hundred thousand bucks—and the little son of a bitch spends all his time there breaking out. I just finished telling him that in all fairness to his two sisters, I’m going to have to compensate by rearr
anging my will.”

  “Father,” I said, thinking it was much easier to stand up to him long distance, “we both know you don’t care about money and never have.”

  “That’s almost true,” he half shouted, “but not quite.”

  “What you mean is you care about Bill and he’s hurt you.”

  “You’re goddamned right,” agreed Father. “Look at it from my point of view. I ought to kill him.”

  Perhaps there was even a redeeming quality to his cruelty, once one got used to the idea that it camouflaged his deepest feelings. The epitome of sophistication, he was also wonderfully naïve. I’d come to think of him as a castle. He’d built a wall around himself, a superb wall. He’d built it to keep people out. Although he seemed to have a marvelously outgoing personality, he’d built it to protect something very vulnerable, the most secret part of himself. It was quite a fortress. Walls work both ways; sometimes he couldn’t get out himself. There were bottomless moats around the castle and forests of thorny brier. His drawbridge to the outer world was the telephone, and to that world he presented the image of a fast-talking, generous, charming, debonair entrepreneur.

  “The Toscanini of the telephone,” George Axelrod called him.

  One of my favorite stories about him came from Josh Logan:

  “There was a time when—before we did Mr. Roberts—I was in Cuba. I decided to take Jo Mielziner [the set designer] to a town on the south coast, Trinidad, an eighteenth-century coffee town that had died when sugar cane took over. It was very hard to get to. We drove up, and then couldn’t even reach the town by car, because we had to park on the opposite side of the river. We took off our shoes and waded across, put our shoes back on, and then started into the town, this magic town; looked like a forgotten place. There were palm trees and little, wonderful, colonial buildings painted light blue and yellow and chalky red. We were enchanted and began taking pictures. All of a sudden, a man came up to me and said in españal, said, ‘You Logan?’ I said, ‘Sí, sí.’ He said, ‘Hayward want talk—telephone.’ It was absolutely impossible. How we had been able to get there, how that phone could be there, how Leland could ever have located both it and us, I still don’t know.”