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

mother, the actress Margaret Sullavan, but I had seen her in films and onstage and had heard nasty rumors about her death. Nor did I ever meet her sister, Bridget, about whom the same things were being said. I didn’t really believe them because it seemed to me improbable that two such strikingly original and attractive women would have the need to depart so suddenly and leave so many broken hearts behind.

What did I know? I was an only child, had attended all-male schools, and had a mother who was a Christian Scientist.

I did, however, know Bill Hayward who, a few years later, got divorced, worked on some very successful movies, took up drinking, fast motorcycle riding, and married an ex-girlfriend of mine. It always made me feel good when I made Bill laugh because it seemed to me he was constantly floating in a sea of sorrow and struggling not to go under.

I returned to Los Angeles and waited patiently for Brooke’s marriage to break up, which it ultimately did following the legendary Karate kick that broke her nose. I felt badly about moving in—well, not that badly—because I liked Dennis. He had shared his knowledge and love of the contemporary art scene with me, and I knew how badly I would feel under the circumstances. But there they were—the prettiest woman I had ever seen and her unbearably cute daughter who, at two years old, had bright gold hair that Brooke had cut in an adorable Dutch bob, which Marin hated because it made her look “different.”

There was a slight problem in that I was married at the time to a very nice person. But we got around that by—as a musician friend of mine used to say: “suffering in another key.”

Brooke had been a great supporter of Dennis’s work—she was a huge fan of Easy Rider and insisted, in the face of some skepticism, that The Last Movie was a masterpiece. She was also very complimentary and helpful about whatever it was that I was working on. But I always thought that she was meant to be more than a muse.

She started to write about her family, having been encouraged by a number of friends. Along the way she faced the kind of depression—yes, the word suicidal comes to mind—when the going got tricky and the memories became threatening. More than once I saw her typing and crying at the same time. All her friends encouraged her to keep going, to persist when she wanted to quit, because there was a sense that she was on to something more than a slight memoir—something that would turn out to be a book filled with real language and real art.

It’s decades later now. Bill Hayward, divorced and alone, physically shattered after the terrible bike accident that we all expected, shot himself to death two years ago.

Earlier this evening I was at a party for Brooke’s daughter, Marin, whose father, Dennis, died a few days ago and will be buried tomorrow in Taos, New Mexico. I watched Marin across the room and saw her make the same gestures that I saw Brooke make a long time ago and heard her laugh a version of her mother’s laugh.

The pleasures of the past live on, mixed in all of us. So do the pains. But we can outrun them if we try.

This book is proof of that.

May 2010

his book is a personal memoir; but it is also a larger story—about carelessness and guilt, and the wreckage they can make of lives.

My family seems to me the personification of these qualities. Both my parents were exceptional in ordinary ways: they were attractive, intelligent, and well educated. It was the scope and sweep of their talent and success that made them distinctive. My mother was an actress, Margaret Sullavan, and my father a theatrical producer, Leland Hayward. They were happily married for ten years, had three children in even succession (I am the oldest), and lived in California during the thirties and early forties, a golden era not only for movies but for children who, like us, grew up surrounded by its opulent trappings. When they divorced, the impact was naturally profound and ultimately disastrous—not so much for them, perhaps, as for their children, two of whom eventually did time in mental institutions.

However, this is not primarily about my parents’ lives, except as they bore directly upon our own. It is really about their children—Bridget, Bill, and me—each of whom reacted uniquely to the haphazard slew of catastrophes, looking for a means of escape.

Other people marry and divorce, leaving other children angry and disturbed. What distinguishes this particular story are the particular qualities of its protagonists, and the extraordinary effects they had on their children. Our lives were a series of extremes. A thanksgiving of riches was bestowed on us at birth: grace and joy and a fair share of beauty; privilege and power. Those blessings which luck had overlooked could be bought. We seemed to exist above the squalor of suffering as most people know it. We were envied. But there were also more expectations, more marriages (my mother four times, my father five), and more damage: more of us (three out of five) suffered mental breakdowns. My parents failed, as they succeeded—on a massive scale. And they left behind them a legacy, vested in their children, that put the odds against survival ineluctably high.

he had called me late the night before.

Looking back, I recall (or invent?) an urgency to her tone, but really all she’d said was “Can you have breakfast tomorrow?”

“Hmm. What time? Do you have the proper ingredients? English muffins? Marmalade, et cetera?” We’d never shaken the habit of testing one another.

“Of course, you spoiled brat. Come at ten; you shall have ginger marmalade from Bloomingdale’s, fresh orange juice I shall squeeze personally, boiled eggs—your customary five and a half minutes. And of course there will be fascinating conversation.”

“Might I have