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

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I didn’t know it was going to be her last summer.

She spent it in Williamstown, Massachusetts, working as an apprentice at the Williamstown Theatre.

I spent it commuting frenetically between Greenwich and New York, where I then had a tiny room on the third floor of an old brownstone. Every day, I would race from fashion modeling to voice lessons to auditions for the fall theatre season to apartment hunting. Although New York City in the heat was practically unbearable, the more manic my schedule the better I liked it, particularly on Sundays when the whole city seemed to migrate to the country and I was left alone to read the newspapers lazily. Irene Selznick had given Father and Pamela, newly wed, her house in Bedford Village for the summer. It was about an hour from the city or twenty minutes from my house in Greenwich. I had a new car, my first convertible; driving it anywhere with the top down and a scarf around my hair was the most exhilarating experience I could think of.

Irene’s house sat on roughly fifteen acres of beautifully landscaped property; it was called Imspond to honor the combination of her initials, I.M.S. (Irene Mayer Selznick), and an enormous pond with a rowboat. I loved going to that house; it was a one-story rambling cottage, filled with fireplaces and antique country furniture, bright handwoven rugs, wonderful quilts, and deep chintz-covered sofas, always cool inside even on the hottest day, but with a warm sense of light floating through all the rooms.

Father was deeply, instinctively suspicious of country life. His abhorrence of insects—mosquitoes, in particular—and any kind of snake amounted to a phobia, which had been a source of amusement to us as children when we lived for three years in rugged rattlesnake and coyote terrain—then the wild mountains of the Doheny Estate, now the cultivated steppes of Trousdale in Beverly Hills. To my chagrin I discovered, when I was eleven or twelve and fixated on Hemingway and Africa, that although Hemingway was a close friend and client of Father’s who had many times invited him to go along on safari, Father had always declined because of the “goddamn bugs all over the place.” Also he distrusted the country because poison ivy and sumac lurked there, lying in wait for the innocent wayfarer, and houses were not generally air-conditioned like apartments in the city.

This particular summer, however, he seemed to enjoy himself. Winston, Pamela’s son by Randolph Churchill, came over from England, and Father promptly blew him to a course in flying instruction; aviation had always been one of Father’s major passions. The other, photography, he indulged day and night by taking hundreds of color photographs of Imspond from every conceivable angle, inside and out. As usual, he would have “the best color lab in the world,” Life magazine, blow them up to an extravagant sixteen by twenty inches, eventually to be edited by Bridget into a scrapbook for Irene. One Saturday I drove out for the day with my friend Jones Harris. Father intrepidly lowered himself into the rowboat with three cameras slung around his neck, and shot pictures of the receding shoreline with a zoom lens while I rowed; Jones, reclining languorously in the bow, inquired, “Leland, do you think you’re going to be able to bring this picture in for under one million three?”

Bridget called me several times from Williamstown to report on her activities and to see if I would drive up for a visit. She was having a splendid time working backstage in a hodgepodge of production exigencies; the drive up through the Berkshires was beautiful, she informed me, and she could press me into service any day of the week. As an added inducement, I would know a lot of people: Suzie Pleshette was up there doing Two for the Seesaw, and E. G. Marshall and Carrie Nye and Dick Cavett; Bill Francisco was directing two productions; and, most important, our close friend Tom Mankiewicz was his assistant director, moonlighting on the side as an actor. Tom, son of the screenwriter-director Joe Mankiewicz, had grown up with us in California, but after we had moved East in 1948 we hadn’t seen much of him again until the fall of 1959.

Tom Mankiewicz:

“I have tremendous memories of you and Bridget, two girls who were always just enough older than I was to really make a difference. I used to see you frequently but infrequently. I mean, Brooke and Bridget was like a traveling family act. When I was young, it was Brooke and Bridget coming over and Brooke and Bridget this and that. You were both uncommonly pretty and a very strange pair of girls to be running in and out of the house every odd summer or holiday or party when you were dragged over.

“I met Bridget again the fall of my freshman year, in the Green Room of the Yale Dramat with Bill Francisco. Bridget was going with Bill. She was lying down on a couch in the Green Room, very attractive dress, oddly made up—she had blue mascara on her eyes, that kind of thing—doing some sort of outré number. We both knew that we knew each other very well and we didn’t know each other at all. Bill and she were rather tense together that evening and she wanted me to go out with the two of them to have dinner. It was about six o’clock, and I said sure. More because I wanted to get close to Bill Francisco than to her: he was the director of The Dramat—it was my first year in The Dramat—and I thought he was a terrific director.

“That night I was fascinated by Bridget. I wasn’t in love with her yet; later I guess I was more in love with Bridget than I’ve been with anyone in my life. That night she seemed to me to be so incredibly real. And a little bit weird, which