Haywire (13 page)

For the party, Father reluctantly agreed to wear the saddle shoes as well as an odd assortment of apparel that I laid out on the bed, including a white handkerchief with a Christmas tree Miss Mullens had helped me embroider.

Mother’s taste was Spartan in comparison to Father’s. She was always happiest in baggy old pants or shorts, barefoot or in sandals, but that day she exchanged her beloved gabardine shorts (“my uniform” she called them, and was still wearing the same pair sixteen years later) for a long dress of gay patchwork squares, designed by Adrian, in which she dashed about testing various seating arrangements. Bridget and I were speechless with admiration. Never had two people been more beautiful than Mother and Father. From time to time Mother would exclaim that she would never give another big party; then she would grab Father and whirl in his arms across the grass, her dress and his saddle shoes flashing among the tables on the lawn, to a waltz that only they could hear.

Suddenly, there was a small “combo” playing real music and hundreds of people strolling in the late-afternoon sun. Bridget and I flitted from one person to another in our pajamas and pink-eyed
rabbit slippers, drunk with people and music. Every grownup we knew was there, our entire world; even Jimmy Stewart came home on leave, in his strange uniform. People clustered around him, congratulating him on having just been made a lieutenant; he had got an early draft number, the first or second pulled out of the hat, and gone into the Air Corps as an instructor up at Mather Field. He said everybody up there was leery of him, didn’t know what to do with him, and wanted to make him a morale officer, which made him sick to his stomach. He kept on bitching about it to Father and Father bitched to Ken McNaughton, an Air Force general who had been instrumental in helping him establish Thunderbird. From then on, Jimmy was on his way: first he went to Albuquerque and flew bombers, then to four-engine school and up to Boise, Idaho, where he ended up with his own combat crew. Once he got into flying, he said, it was all right, and once we got into the war and he was sent overseas to England, everybody was in the same boat and nobody paid any more attention to him. There were lots of Air Force officers, like Ken McNaughton and Hap Arnold at the party, in a tight group around Jimmy. Bridget and I wriggled our way through their legs so that we could try on his hat and listen to what they were saying: what a wonderful soldier he was, and a great patriot and a great aviator and a great Air Corps man. Hoagy Carmichael had our upright piano carried up the stairs of The Barn to the balcony, where he sang and pounded away while everyone danced; when he got tired, Hank Potter took over on the piano and Dinah Shore sang for three hours. All night we lay in The Other House and listened to the music and wished we were grown up, too.

We lived at 12928 Evanston Street for the first seven years of my life. Although I was able to recall in detail what Mother wore on my first birthday, Bridget’s arrival, in 1939, when I was one and a half, always drew a blank. Father and Mother used to tell us that when they brought her home from the hospital and up to the nursery for my inspection, I gathered my forces for a long instant, reached murderously into the bassinet, and pinched her with all my strength, then, for the next six months, did not speak to either Mother or Father or allow them to touch me. Father said pensively he would follow me through the garden and try to take my hand, but I would snatch it away without saying a word. After a lot of sulking, I rejoined the family.

Bridget was a sensational baby. She had almost white hair
and double-jointed hands like Mother; she could stick her fingers out so that they would all remain straight until the last joint, which she would crook without bending the rest of the joints along the way. When she learned to play the piano, the tips of her otherwise horizontal fingers were bent at right angles to the keyboard; watching her play the piano was something like watching the Chico Marx routine with trick fingers, in which he’d point at a piano key and shoot it, touching it as he shot. As a baby, she would lie grinning from ear to ear in her crib, one foot through the bars, while our dog sat on the outside licking her toes. Her hair was so white it didn’t look quite real, nor did her complexion, which was so fair I always supposed—or wished—I could see through the transparent layers of skin and blood vessels and muscle to the center of her being. Bridget’s eyes were bluer even than Father’s, the color of irises before they’ve been open very long to the sun-cornflowers, said Mother, and called her “my little white mouse,” but I called her Brie, because I couldn’t pronounce Bridget, and that became her name to us. Nobody else in the family had ever had hair that color. “Oh, Bridget,” people would say to make conversation when she was learning to talk, “where in the world did you get that hair?” She would fix them with a long solemn look of her blue eyes; then her mouth would turn up at the corners. “God,” she would answer, “God.” She was light-boned, easy to pick up, and so delicate I used to worry that wind might blow her over; the bluish tinge just below the surface of her skin gave the illusion that she was just slightly bruised.

“She was an original,” said Bill Wright. “There was a fey quality of Irish fairy tales about her. You were a pretty baby, Brooke, much prettier than she was, but she had a strange quality—she had Maggie squared or cubed in her.”

We used to see Bill and Greta Wright practically every day. Either they’d come over for a swim or we’d skip across the street to see if we could tempt their dogs to bark at us. Next to their house was a vacant lot, which we turned into a communal vegetable garden; we supplied the manpower in the person of George Stearns, our cigar-smoking chauffeur, and Bill Wright supplied the water from his nearby hose. For days, Bridget and I followed George and his cigar through the rows of corn, copying every move, examining handfuls of corn silk, poking at dusty summer squashes, and squealing when he picked the first ripe watermelon, which he
held dramatically above his head and dropped on a sharp rock so that red pulp splattered all over us and we licked it off each other. George lived in an apartment over our garage. Elsa and Otto, the German cook and butler, lived there, too. Father used to say that Elsa was a bum cook but he could never part with her because she could make two things better than anybody else: scrambled eggs and flower arrangements. Otto’s moment of glory came every Halloween when he disappeared to engineer his gigantic pumpkin extravaganzas, meticulously decorated with contrasting faces of prunes and popcorn, corn from the garden and its silk (for hair), gourds, and sprays of asters and chrysanthemums.

We had many nurses over the years, but the only two we ever cared about were the first and the last: Miss Mullens, who came when Bridget was born, and Emily Buck, who came when I was five and stayed for six years. Miss Mullens toilet-trained us on an antique china potty, kept under the bed. She wore a starched white uniform and white polished shoes, but Emily refused to wear anything but baggy old blue jeans (except on her day off, when she wore a plaid cotton dress that smelled of Clorox).

Mother loved house-hunting. She would go house-hunting at the drop of a hat. Any excuse would do. On the way to the hospital in acute labor the morning I was born, she begged Father and Martha Edens (our godmother) to stop the car because she saw a “For Sale” sign somewhere along the way. Every house we lived in was bought because Mother happened to be driving past it at a fortuitous time, either when we were due for a move or when the house was too enchanting to pass up. Number 12928 was no exception. Greta Wright was looking for a house and Mother couldn’t resist going along. So they bought the houses across the street from each other. I had just been born and more space was needed anyway.

For Father, the installation of a complex telephone system took priority over everything else before a move could be considered. He found himself ensconced at 12928 before the telephone was installed, a drastic hardship. The Wrights had taken possession of their house a few weeks earlier and had their telephone. Father would race over first thing in the morning, afraid he might lose a possible twenty-thousand-dollar cash deal between home and Beverly Hills, make a couple of phone calls just in case, and then go to the office. Sometimes he’d appear at the Wrights in the middle of the night to make a phone call or two.

The telephone was the source of Mother and Father’s bitterest fights. Mother hated the agency business because of the telephone; it might ring at any time—in the middle of dinner or in the middle of a badminton game, a dissertation or conversation. The phone would ring and Mother would roll her eyes heavenward, while everyone within earshot would mock-cringe or put their hands over their ears and get ready. “Flesh peddler!” she would yelp, in her own peculiar blend of Southern drawl and outraged exclamation. Then, for the benefit of her audience, she would stamp her foot half seriously, half comically, and assume a pose, arms akimbo: “Leland Hayward, I can’t
stand
it another minute. D’ya hear me? This is an ultimatum. I’m going to tear that damn telephone out by its
roots
if it rings again in the next five minutes!”

Father was addicted to the telephone as much as Mother despised it. He never wrote a letter if he could send a wire, and never wired if he could telephone. He was happiest when he was conducting business on his office sofa with three or four telephones at hand, his head deep in a cushion at one end and his feet comfortably crossed at the other. That way, between conversations he might catch a quick nap. Everyone, even Mother, agreed on one thing: Father was the best agent in the business, even if it was a lousy business. In the early nineteen-forties, when he himself was in his early forties, he had about a hundred and fifty clients, including Mother and her two ex-husbands (Henry Fonda and William Wyler), Greta Garbo, Ernest Hemingway, Jimmy Stewart, Ginger Rogers, Edna Ferber, Gene Kelly, Fredric March, Judy Garland, Myrna Loy, Montgomery Clift, Gregory Peck, Boris Karloff, Billy Wilder, Kurt Weill, Josh Logan, Dashiell Hammett, Charles Laughton, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Helen Hayes, Herman Mankiewicz, Lillian Hellman, Fred Astaire, Gene Fowler, and on and on. Eventually, in the mid-forties, he was to sell his “stable,” as he referred to it, to MCA, and become an equally successful Broadway producer, with
A Bell for Adano, State of the Union
, and then
Mr. Roberts
, but it was as a Hollywood agent that Father became something of a legend.

His appearance was at odds with his profession. He was a distinguished-looking man. Tall and thin (hair parted debonairly in the middle when he was younger—graying and close-cropped like grass later on, a trademark in time), with an air both haggard and elegant, he strolled in white flannels and yachting sneakers through
the corridors of the major studios of a Hollywood that had never seen anything quite like him before. The prevailing notion was that agents were a breed apart, somewhat déclassé, that they all had foreign names, like the Orsatti brothers, or spoke with heavy Russian-Jewish accents and came straight from handling vaudeville acts on Broadway. Father captured Hollywood’s imagination by inventing a new style; he was an outrageous Easterner who wore linen underwear and came out on Wells Fargo. It was said that his office was the first in Beverly Hills ever furnished with antiques, and that his manner of dress, Eastern college, influenced Fred Astaire and changed Hollywood fashion. Fred was, in fact, his first client. One evening in 1927, out of a job and bored, Father was making his customary rounds of the New York nightclubs and stopped by the Trocadero to have a drink with his friend Mal Hayward (not related), the proprietor, who was in a gloomy frame of mind. Business was poor, said Mal, slumping at the table, because a new place, the Mirador, had just opened up across the street and was taking away his customers. He was so desperate, Mal groaned, that he would do anything to get his hands on a big attraction, even pay an act like the Astaires as much as four thousand dollars a week. Father went straight over to the theatre where Fred and Adele were appearing in
Lady, Be Good
, and talked them into a deal. They played the Trocadero for twelve weeks, and he collected his commission of four hundred dollars (“The easiest money I ever made,” he used to say wistfully) every Saturday night.

People seeing Father for the first time would ask, astonished, “Is
he
an
agent?
” He was considered by many people, both women and men, whether in the business or not, to have been one of the most attractive people they ever knew. “Gentleman” was the word most often used to describe him. “He was a gentleman agent,” said George Cukor, “a darling man. I loved him even though he was a buccaneer. By asking such outrageous salaries for his clients, I think he was responsible for jacking up the agency business into the conglomerate empire that it is today.” “In my opinion,” said Billy Wilder (who was to direct
The Spirit of St. Louis
for him in 1955–56), “his enormous success in this town, beyond his being very bright and knowing it inside out, was due to the fact that the wives of the moguls were crazy about him. I do not mean to imply that he had an affair with Mrs. Goldwyn, but Mrs. Goldwyn was
just crazy about him. So was Mrs. Warner.
All
the wives were crazy about him and kept talking about him, because he was a very attractive, handsome, dashing man. He should have been a captain in the Austro-Hungarian Army—something like that. He was certainly miscast as an agent. If I were to make a picture about an agent, a very successful agent, and my casting director brought in Leland Hayward, I would say, ‘You’re out of your mind! This is not the way an agent looks!’ That was part of his success. Just charmed the birds off the trees, the money out of the coffers, and ladies into their beds.” And super-agent Irving (“Swifty”) Lazar, in his succinct vernacular, referred to Father as a “high-class gent.” Said Swifty, “He was my idol. He had a gift for closing deals, he never had the time to dicker—
he
should have been called ‘Swifty’ instead of me.” (Swifty was given his nickname by Humphrey Bogart because he made three deals for Bogart in one afternoon.) “Leland was a real beauty. A prince. The best there was. You won’t see anybody like him pass this way again.…”