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

for him in 1955–56), “his enormous success in this town, beyond his being very bright and knowing it inside out, was due to the fact that the wives of the moguls were crazy about him. I do not mean to imply that he had an affair with Mrs. Goldwyn, but Mrs. Goldwyn was just crazy about him. So was Mrs. Warner. All the wives were crazy about him and kept talking about him, because he was a very attractive, handsome, dashing man. He should have been a captain in the Austro-Hungarian Army—something like that. He was certainly miscast as an agent. If I were to make a picture about an agent, a very successful agent, and my casting director brought in Leland Hayward, I would say, ‘You’re out of your mind! This is not the way an agent looks!’ That was part of his success. Just charmed the birds off the trees, the money out of the coffers, and ladies into their beds.” And super-agent Irving (“Swifty”) Lazar, in his succinct vernacular, referred to Father as a “high-class gent.” Said Swifty, “He was my idol. He had a gift for closing deals, he never had the time to dicker—he should have been called ‘Swifty’ instead of me.” (Swifty was given his nickname by Humphrey Bogart because he made three deals for Bogart in one afternoon.) “Leland was a real beauty. A prince. The best there was. You won’t see anybody like him pass this way again.…”

In a way Father was a prince. He came from a well-to-do Nebraska family, spent his youth in Eastern prep schools and a year or so at Princeton before flunking out with a perfect record of non-passing grades. The next five years were a rebellious flurry, in which he chose to estrange himself from the interests of the rest of the family—or, at least, those of his father, Colonel William Hayward.

Father was fond of telling us that he’d been a late starter, having drifted around the country for a couple of years as press agent for United Artists, a job that paid fifty dollars a week and was so tedious he used to pass the time away in countless, small, hot Midwestern towns by inventing elaborate stories for fan magazines about every movie star he’d ever heard of; this got him fired by United Artists, who were paying him to write stories only about United Artists movie stars. Over the next few years, he restlessly held down and was fired from fifteen or twenty such jobs as a press agent, talent scout, or general contact man in New York and Hollywood. In 1927, galvanized by the release of the first talkie and determined to have a piece of the big money that he sensed was about to be made in movies—from studios suddenly desperate to import talent from the theatre, performers trained to speak and writers who could write plays for them—Father became an agent. He dug a manuscript by a struggling writer and friend, Ben Hecht, out of his trunk, sold it to M-G-M, and used the small commission to take the train back to New York where he talked John W. Rumsey, president of the American Play Company, into letting him work there for no salary but half the commission on anything he sold. The American Play Company was a well-established literary agency, basically concerned with authors and playwrights, but Father argued eloquently that it ought to set up a new department just to handle motion pictures; it was obvious to him that there was a new demand, and that staggering wages could be secured from a Hollywood starved for just about anyone who could read, write, or speak.

He was already indelibly marked by the contagious enthusiasm that characterizes a great salesman; in a sense it became his credo. “If you ever want to get hold of somebody,” he would instruct us, “for God’s sake don’t beat around the bush—always ask to see who’s in charge, even if it’s the President of the United States. Don’t screw around with anyone in the middle. The middle is always a little soft.” And: “Listen, in this business, if you want to make a lot of dough—and why else would you be in this business?—you’ve got to remember one thing: there’s a direct ratio between what you’re selling and the amount of pandemonium you can stir up about it.”

The bulk of his own agency’s business was, naturally, in motion pictures. On a quiet morning, he might call the executives of five or six studios—Warner Brothers, Columbia, Paramount, M-G-M, RKO, for instance—to tell them, excitedly, that they should check the box-office receipts and reviews of some play that had just opened in New York (having himself arranged to handle its motion-picture sale an hour before). Then, having satisfactorily charged the atmosphere with the necessary delirium, he would leave the office before they could call back, have a relaxed lunch with a client at the Brown Derby, and maybe do an hour or two of leisurely shopping. By the time he got back to the office, there would be twenty properly hysterical phone calls waiting from the studios, all bidding against one another, and Father would calmly close the deal for a record price.

Although it was his particular style to map out deals for prodigious sums of money in a high-pitched frenzy while reclining with his feet draped over the top of his sofa, and it may actually have appeared, from time to time, that he was relaxing, there was no real slack in his routine even when he came home from the office. Father never stopped working. He was indefatigable. In this one respect, Mother and Father were similar, for all their many disagreements about a common life-style. They were both so alive, so insuperably optimistic. To watch them together was dizzying, hypnotic. One was aware of infinite potential, possibilities undreamed of—possibilities of magical endurance and energy, magical vitality. To watch them both was to strain one’s