Haywire (43 page)

The shame and the fear she felt about her seizures were as old as history itself. The very word “epilepsy” comes from the Greek word meaning “to be seized.” Martin Luther called it the “demon disease.” The supernatural interpretation of seizures is centuries old. And over the centuries, the casting out of the responsible devils took many forms. In Christ’s time, people spat on epileptics as a precaution against being possessed themselves; from this custom arose the name “morbus insputatus” or “the spitting disease.” In the Middle Ages, openings were sawed in the skulls of those suffering from unbearable headaches or convulsive seizures to let the evil spirits escape. Not until the eighteenth century did leading European physicians abandon a belief in demon possession. In many parts of the earth, men still continue to treat seizures by exorcism. And even now, when the image of the demon as an evil force is no longer valid, the most civilized and educated man still fears being rendered unconscious by something that seems irrational and uncontrollable.

With Bridget, we knew that after a seizure the length of time it took for her to return to normal was commensurate with
the length of time she’d been out—which could be a matter of minutes or days. If, say, she passed out for half an hour, it might be six hours before she was herself again. We also knew that before one, she was given a warning that manifested itself by feelings of mental confusion or stupor, nausea and dizziness. During the time she was unconscious, her pulse rate was drastically lowered and her respiration slowed; muscular rigidity set in; her body became cold; all the symptoms of catatonia were present. Catatonia, or catalepsy, is a syndrome most often seen in schizophrenia, so Dr. Brenman asked that Bridget not be subjected to situations which might cause severe emotional agitation. On several occasions, therefore, when plans had been made for Bridget to drive down to Greenwich, Dr. Brenman telephoned Mother and canceled the visit; she suggested that Bridget might be in no state, at that moment, to risk any further emotional disturbance.

These calls from Dr. Brenman left Mother depressed. She correctly interpreted them to mean that Bridget didn’t want to see her. The implication that Bridget’s seizures could be triggered by the vagaries of her relationship with her mother was a terrifying one. Dr. Brenman, positioned between Bridget and the outside world as a kind of intermediary, became, at these times, the object of Mother’s frustrated rage. Dr. Brenman religiously adhered to the sacred principle of the doctor-patient relationship and refused to reveal any of Bridget’s most intimate confidences. While Mother, on the one hand, expressed her endorsement of this principle, she was, on the other, subconsciously threatened by it. It placed her in competition for her daughter’s soul. As much as she truly believed in the process of psychoanalytic therapy, there were moments when she now came to doubt its efficacy. Maybe it was all a futile stab in the dark. Always haunted by the specter of failure—failure as a mother, and therefore as a human being—she began to alternate between periods of high elation and quiet but grave despair.

Her letters to Bridget reflected these swings even more precisely than her spoken expression of them.

“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.”