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

Father as we all piled into a car afterward, Mother ignoring the crowd pressed against the car brandishing pens and paper, “your mother is the best actress alive today.”

“Oh, Leland, you’re just hopelessly biased,” she said, laughing. “Let’s go have a chocolate soda.” And we did.

The Voice of the Turtle was an enormous hit. Mother was under contract to stay with it for a year, so after Christmas, Father, who had business to attend to on the Coast, took us home. In those days the train trip lasted four days and three nights. Father was somewhat impatient with that particular mode of travel; he’d had his own airplane for years and, before the war introduced gas rationing, had flown it across the country hundreds of times. In his office at 444 Madison Avenue hung two brightly colored maps showing his former air routes between New York and Hollywood, which he used to fly several times a month, logging an average of seventeen or eighteen hours a trip. Before he’d married Mother in 1936 (owing to my imminent birth, which also necessitated Mother’s buying her way out of Stage Door, a play by Edna Ferber, coincidentally another of Father’s clients), Father’d been equally in love with Kate Hepburn. He claimed that at one point, with both actresses (and clients) safely separated by three thousand miles, Mother on the stage in New York and Kate making a movie in Hollywood, he would take off in his plane from New York to complete some deal in California, pause to refuel in Kansas City, and place phone calls to both coasts, one assuring Mother that the next two weeks of separation would be a living hell, and another to Kate ardently apprising her of his arrival in Los Angeles. He used to reminisce wistfully that Kate was the classiest dame he ever knew, because among other things, when he eloped with Mother, she’d sent a congratulatory telegram saying, “DEAR MAGGIE, YOU HAVE JUST MARRIED THE MOST WONDERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD. BLESSINGS, KATE.” Mother burned up the wire in a rage of jealousy.

Father’s real love, though, was flying. My first memory of him was at breakfast one morning on the brick terrace of our house in Brentwood, Los Angeles. He’d already taken up one of his planes for a pre-dawn spin before going to the office. While he drank his coffee and read the newspaper, cursing Hitler, I sat on his lap in the sun and lovingly held his ears, which were bright red and rigid with cold. “They’ll go on buzzing for the rest of the morning,” he declared. “I’ll probably go deaf from flying in an open cockpit. To tell you the truth, I’d give up the agency in a minute”—he snapped off a piece of toast—“and absolutely everything else in the world except you and Bridget if I could spend the rest of my life in an airplane. The only snag is I have to bring home the goddamn bacon.”

On his desk, in his elaborate offices on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills (which we occasionally visited with Miss Brown to observe how he brought home the bacon), were models of his favorite planes and a chrome lighter in the shape of a plane, but dominating everything else in the plush linen-and-leather-upholstered room was an immense aerial map of Thunderbird Field, an air-training center for national defense that formed the nucleus of Southwest Airways, Inc.

Father was chairman of the board of Southwest Airways. He started it with Jack Connelly, an engineering inspector for the Civil Aeronautics Authority, with capital raised from clients and friends like Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Cary Grant, Hoagy Carmichael, Gilbert Miller, and Johnny Swope (who became secretary-treasurer, as well as instructor). In the fertile Salt River Valley of Arizona, near Phoenix, against a purple backdrop of mountains, he built Thunderbird Field in 1940 with the cooperation and gratitude of the United States Army, which, understaffed at the outset of the war, was offering contracts to civilian operators who could supply flying facilities and qualified instructors to train the burgeoning ranks of their cadets. Father and Jack Connelly leaped at the chance. As a test pilot, Jack had flown the Douglas DC-3, the four-engine DC-4, and most of the large aircraft built on the Coast, and had no trouble assembling a crew of the best instructors in the business.

Thunderbird was built from the ground up in ninety days. Father, with his indomitable sense of the aesthetic, lined up Millard Sheets, a well-known Western artist, to design it. It was dazzling. Sheets laid out the entire training field in the stylized shape of a gigantic thunderbird, the Indian god of thunder, lightning, and rain, so that viewed from the air, the observation tower formed the head, the administration building the body, the barracks the wings, and the gardens the tail feathers. He eschewed traditional drab Army colors for those of the Southwest desert, the green of sage and cactus, the cream of yucca in bloom, the streaked gray browns of sand, the terra cotta of adobe, and everywhere the tomato-red insignia, a thunderbird with lightning bolts as plumage.

The organization was soon turning out Army pilots at the rate of ten thousand a year, but to handle the Army’s stepped-up program, Father moved into high gear and built Thunderbird II, which trained air cadets from mainland China through an arrangement with Chiang Kai-shek, who sent over a select group of officers from the Chinese Army. They arrived in lots of fifty by a circuitous route through Chungking and Kunming and then over the Burma Pass to evade the Japanese blockade. Father made frequent trips to Washington to pitch his cause with General Hap Arnold, and finally got not only a contract but a loan of $200,000 from the government. He put John Swope in charge of Thunderbird II, and then moved swiftly to build Falcon Field, forty miles east of Thunderbird, near Mesa, Arizona, for the training of young British pilots.