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

Grandfather, known to his men as Colonel “Fighting Bill” Hayward, received the Croix de Guerre, and was made an officer of the Legion of Honor.

In 1919 he married Maisie Manwaring Plant. At this point, if Father was listening, he’d interject scathingly, “That barmaid,” because Maisie was first married to Mr. Manwaring, who managed a restaurant in a small town near New London, Connecticut, where Maisie helped him by waiting on tables until she caught the eye of the old and fabulously wealthy Commodore Morton Plant. In what many people considered an act of pure calculation, she ran off with him and had her son’s name changed to Plant, then sat back and inherited Mort’s vast fortune when he died shortly afterward. There was no doubt, though, that old Mort was crazy about her, Grandsarah would say, because he traded his house at Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue (the site of the present store) to Cartier’s in exchange for a string of pearls that they’d tracked down—after an extraordinary worldwide search—to match, perfectly, one he’d already given her.

After Grandfather married Maisie, they lived in her stone mansion, a palatial structure that took up the entire block at Eighty-sixth and Fifth Avenue and that featured both a boiserie room, which had been the Duke of Wellington’s study, and a Fragonard room, which was eventually given to the Metropolitan Museum. Father had ambiguous feelings about the whole setup and wildly resented the difference in the way he and his stepbrother, Philip Plant, much the same age, were treated. Phil Plant was outrageously pampered by his mother. She put at his disposal unlimited sums of money to squander on every facet of his budding playboy career; when Father, however, once lost a two-hundred-dollar bet, his father, a stern disciplinarian, refused to lend him the money and taught him to pay his gambling debts by selling every possession, every piece of clothing he owned, except for a couple of clean shirts. “Even my cuff links,” growled Father; “it was a helluva lesson. I never, to this day, have ever been able to gamble again, not even on the stock market.” Father did develop a kind of sympathetic regard for his stepbrother. “Phil Plant was really awfully damn nice to me, although he was a strange man—once bit off a man’s ear in a bar fight. And he used to take his mother—all decked out in million-dollar paste copies of her million-dollar jewels; she always kept the originals in a safe-deposit box and never took them out except to look at them, too scared to go out in the real McCoy, goddamn stingy barmaid—he used to take her out dancing all night.” In 1925, Phil eloped to Paris with Constance Bennett; before their divorce in 1929 and her subsequent marriage to the Marquis de la Falaise, she disappeared to Switzerland for a while and returned with a child who she claimed was Phil’s, and, as such, the heir to his fortune. A famous paternity suit resulted, and after Phil’s death there was a protracted court battle in which Maisie claimed that Peter Bennett Plant was really an English child, adopted by Phil out of gallantry well after his and Constance’s divorce proceedings had been initiated. Years later the case was settled out of court, financially to Maisie’s satisfaction.

Grandfather was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York by President Harding in 1921, and later became the senior partner in the law firm of Hayward, Jones, Nutt & Murray. With his relish for politics, he became chairman of the State Republican Convention in 1920 and a delegate to the National Convention in 1924. Also in 1924 he ran, unsuccessfully, against Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., for the Republican nomination for Governor of New York. Still, there was another side to his nature, an old ache, a wildness and lust for adventure, never quite satisfied by the perimeters of civilization. At times, when it seemed to him that his life was becoming too sedentary, too socially refined, he would be afflicted by migraine headaches so prolonged and agonizing, Father said, he would pound his head against the walls of his room to ease the pain. Big-game hunting became his favorite avocation; he took Phil Plant on several expeditions to East and Central Africa, returning with those many trophies for the Museum of Natural History, and captured live polar bears for the Bronx Zoo in an exploration trip to the Arctic.

When Father flunked out of Princeton in 1920, after his first year, his father—to whom he referred thereafter as “the Colonel”—stopped his allowance and got him a job as a reporter, at twenty-five dollars a week, on the New York Sun. The Sun soon fired him, and Father, disgruntled, went up to Princeton and talked the dean into reinstating him. Several months later he left college again, to marry Lola Gibbs, a legendary Texas beauty who was considered to be that season’s loveliest débutante; it was said that a moan of disappointment crescendoed through New York’s débutante ranks when their most desirable bachelor defected to her. True to the precepts of Fitzgeraldian romance, Father and Lola were divorced after two years and remarried after seven, doubling the length of the experience to four years the second time around. Two years after that, in 1936, Father married Mother.

Grandsarah stayed married to Shep Schermerhorn for about ten years (“I never could stand a man for more than that”), divorced him, and in 1924 married his closest friend, Lindsley Tappin, who died in 1941. “Well, thank goodness,” she’d say, clapping her hands together as if slamming a book shut, “that takes care of that. I’m all talked out, children, talked out of everything, even my wineglasses and scruffy trinkets. I’d give anything to see the three of you go to work on Maisie.” She’d place her feet carefully side by side on the pink-and-black Victorian rug and push herself up out of her armchair to put her arms around Father. “Just crazy