Haywire, Brooke Hayward [the best ebook reader for android TXT] 📗

Praise for Brooke Hayward’s

“She has modeled and acted and written: she writes, in fact, marvelously. Haywire mesmerizes. May it cauterize as well.”

—The New York Times

“An incredible achievement!”

—Lauren Bacall

“One of those rare books which seem to alter your perception of things. It is specific and true in dealing with lives that might have served as models for Fitzgerald’s fiction.”

—Mike Nichols

“Brave, honest, intelligent and greatly moving.”

—Newsweek

“Engrossing, intimate, moving.… Brooke Hayward writes like an angel.”

—Cosmopolitan

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2011

Copyright © 1977, 2011 by Brooke Hayward

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1977.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Jovanna Ceccarelli: Excerpt from an interview with Margaret Sullavan and John Keating which appeared in Theatre Arts, February, 1960. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Curtis Brown Ltd. on behalf of the Estate of Ogden Nash: Unpublished poem entitled “So Red the Rose, However You Spell It.” Reprinted from a letter written to Margaret Sullavan by Ogden Nash.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and Faber & Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot.

Viking Penguin: Excerpt from Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, copyright © 1939 by Ludwig Bemelmans, renewed 1967 by Madeleine Bemelmans and Barbara Bemelmans Marciano.

All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Mrs. Phyllis Cerf Wagner: Excerpt from a syndicated column written by Bennett Cerf.

The photographs on this page, this page, this page, this page, and this page appear through the courtesy of John Swope; the photograph on this page appears through the courtesy of John Engstead.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Hayward, Brooke.

Haywire.

I. Hayward family. I. Title.

PN2287.H377H3 792’.092’2[B] 76–40989

eISBN: 978-0-307-74437-1

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

o Josie—Johanna Mankiewicz Davis

Shortly after I began exploring my past, I wanted to stop. Josie made me continue. Halfway through, she was killed. Again I stopped. Someone told me, “Do it for Josie. She believed in this. Go on.” And so I did.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Endings

2 Bridget

3 The Family

4 Mother

5 Growing Up

6 Bill

7 Father

Epilogue

For their time, memories, and love I’d like to thank Jimmy Stewart, Josh Logan, John Swope, Martha Edens, Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Nancy Keith, Diana Vreeland, Fredric and Florence March, Truman Capote, Millicent and Paul Osborn, Bill and Greta Wright, Sara Mankiewicz, Tom Mankiewicz, Bill Francisco, Peter Hunt, Charles and Ray Eames, Joseph Cotten, Hank Potter, George Cukor, Jules Stein, King Vidor, Swifty Lazar, George Axelrod, Kathleen Malley, Kenneth Wagg, my grandmother, and most of all my brother, Bill.

For holding my hand—and often forcibly placing it back on the typewriter keys—I thank Buck Henry, Curtis Harrington, Luis Sanjurjo, and Toby Rafelson.

For her fine blue pencil, Carol Janeway. And for all this and much more, my editor and publisher, Bob Gottlieb.

—BROOKE HAYWARD

BUCK HENRY

t was in the early sixties when Brooke’s father, the film and theater producer, Leland Hayward, said to me, apropos of nothing in particular, “Do you ever see those crazy kids of mine out there?” By “out there” he meant of course Los Angeles for which he had an amiable contempt. “Crazy kids” referred to his children, Brooke and Bill, who were living on the coast and married with kids of their own.

I was working for Leland as a writer/performer on the American version of the British hit That Was The Week That Was or, as it was more affectionately known: TW3. I knew Leland slightly because he and my father were friends—they were both part of a special (I thought) generation: theater-loving and, concomitantly, actress-loving New Yorkers, men’s men who worked and played hard and knew famous people like Ernest Hemingway and Bert Lahr and ate well and frequently at those bastions of post-World War II privilege: 21, Toots Shor’s, and the Stork Club; unofficial members of what was then called New York Café Society.

They also shared a love of flying and the beauty and wonder of airplanes—my father was an Air Corps officer in World War II (he loved it when maître d’s snapped their fingers and ordered “a table for the colonel”) and belonged to semisecret organizations like the QBs (Quiet Birdmen)—made up mostly of ex-military and successful businessmen who lobbied the government for the Air Corps which finally became the Air Force and who met every few months and talked about flying and got extremely drunk.

Leland produced the film The Spirit of Saint Louis, the story of Lindbergh’s famous flight in which his friend Jimmy Stewart played the lead despite being decades too old for the part.

Leland used the phrase “those crazy kids of mine” more than once in referring to Brooke and Bill. It was said with an offhand affection that masked—or tried to mask—an irritation that he couldn’t quite manage to hide. At least that was the way I heard it.

I assured him that indeed I did see them from time to time and that I didn’t really think they were crazy—maybe a touch eccentric—but after all this was the sixties in Los Angeles. Brooke was living with her second husband, Dennis Hopper, their daughter, Marin, and her two boys, Jeffrey and Willie Thomas, from a previous marriage.

What I didn’t tell Leland was that I thought Brooke was the prettiest woman I had ever met and that I seized the opportunity whenever possible to be someplace that I thought she would be so that I could watch her animated, slightly mannered body language and listen to her uncanny, musical laugh.

I had never met Brooke’s