Haywire (14 page)

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 own ability to keep abreast, to tread bottomless water; finally, it was to know the real meaning of exhaustion.

Bridget, Bill, and I did not concern ourselves with the matter of their telephone altercations; it had always been there, a constant, a family routine. We were satisfied by its predictability and sense of combativeness. Other people, their friends, were aware of it less comfortably. Our house was the perpetual headquarters for activity of any kind, riotous badminton matches or card games—hearts was a house favorite, since Mother always won—diving exhibitions in the swimming pool or roller-skating down the middle of San Vincente Boulevard, and the central participants were usually the same: Johnny Swope and Jimmy Stewart, Martha and Roger Edens, the Herman Mankiewiczes, the Wrights, and sometimes the Hank Fonda and Eddie Knopf clans from down the street. Johnny remembers that when Father came home from the office every afternoon he would gratefully rely on the buffer zone of friends to provide enough distraction for him to sneak in some phone calls. Mother also liked to have Johnny and Jimmy hang around; whenever Father went off on trips to New York, which was quite often, it was nice to be able to avail herself of the company of Hollywood’s two most eligible bachelors.

The three of them had been close friends for years; they had started together in the University Players, a summer stock company in Falmouth, Massachusetts, which had also been the breeding ground for talent like Hank Fonda, Myron McCormack, Mildred Natwick, Kent Smith, Charles Leatherbee, Bretaigne Windust, and Josh Logan. Johnny Swope met Mother at the end of summer, 1931, when the company had ambitiously decided to extend its activities for a winter season of repertory in Baltimore. The winter before, Mother had become the first of the Players to hit the big time by landing a job as understudy to Elizabeth Love in the road company of
Strictly Dishonorable
and then the lead in
A Modern Virgin
, in which she got rave reviews although the play
itself was lambasted. John Mason Brown wrote in the
Post
that “Miss Sullavan is in reality what the old phrase calls a ‘find.’ She has youth, beauty, charm, vivacity and intelligence. She has a bubbling sense of comedy and acts with a veteran’s poise. And she deserves a far better fate than the kind of leading part in which she made her début. Last night the evening was hers, as many other evenings should be in the future.” She rejoined the University Players when
A Modern Virgin
closed. The company lived in the Kernan Hotel, a run-down nineteenth-century building of which the Maryland Theatre, winter home of the aspiring young rep company, was part.

That was the winter (1931) that Mother and Hank Fonda got married, having carried on a stormy love affair over several summers of stock. An astute Baltimore
Post
reporter noticed that they were on a list of people who had just taken out marriage licenses; the day before Christmas he burst in upon the startled company assembled for breakfast in the Kernan Hotel dining room, and demanded further information. Mother grabbed a piece of toast and fled from the room, protesting, “Marry Fonda! Are you mad? Just look at him! Who’d ever want to marry him?” Hank raced after her, not only to avoid the reporter but to repair his wounded vanity. Bretaigne Windust, the head of the company, parried with the explanation that Mother and Fonda mysteriously had taken out marriage licenses at least twice before: perhaps they were making a collection of them. Mother, when she later heard this, enthusiastically elaborated on his story, “Yes, yes, that’s it. We’re collecting them, one for every city we’re in together—New York, Baltimore—soon we’ll have quite an exhibit.”

Although nobody in the company believed either of them would actually go through with it, and neither did they, Mother and Hank were married at noon on Christmas Day in the dining room of the Kernan Hotel, with the dense odor of boiled cauliflower hanging over the assembled group. After a tearful ceremony, everyone sat down to an economical combination wedding breakfast-Christmas dinner, from which Hank departed somewhat precipitously, since he was starring in the matinée of
The Ghost Train
. For her honeymoon celebration, Johnny Swope took Mother that afternoon to see Greta Garbo in
Mata Hari
. He became so engrossed he almost forgot that he had to make an entrance in the third act of
The Ghost Train
as a police inspector. Suddenly, with
no warning, he bolted the movie house, ungallantly leaving Mother behind, and ran without stopping all the way to the theatre and up onto the stage, just in time to pick up the wrist of the corpse and pant his one line: “Hmm, bitter almonds.”

At the end of that season, Hank and Mother set up housekeeping in Greenwich Village. Since Father was already Mother’s agent, he also took on Hank—still a struggling young unknown—as a client. Although Johnny and Father met each other then, they didn’t become close friends until 1936, when Mother and Father got married, four years after Mother and Hank parted company.

By that time, Johnny (who at Fonda’s urging had come out to California to become an assistant director) and Jimmy Stewart were sharing a house on Evanston Street. Father lost no time getting them both interested in flying airplanes. Jimmy had a slight head start, taking his first lessons on a little asphalt strip that used to be called Mines Field and is now International Airport. The airstrip was surrounded by acres of celery and lettuce fields, and every time a plane took off or landed, the air jumped with thousands of jackrabbits.

Father gave me, at age three, a hard lesson in both flying and philosophy that I have found difficult to forget since. For a long time I’d begged him to take me for a ride in his plane, although, having never seen one, I had no idea what a plane actually was other than a machine that flew noisily through the air.

One afternoon he came home early from the office and announced that this was it; the big day had come. He had George Stearns bring the car to the front of the house. Almost running a temperature from excitement, I clambered in. Mother and Bridget followed. Bridget was not yet two and hadn’t been talking long; she had even less an idea than I of what an airplane might be, but she had picked up some of my euphoria and for the entire car ride murmured to herself in a singsong voice, “I want to go up in an airplane, I want to go up in an airplane.” We drove for a very long time through parts of Los Angeles that I’d never seen before, flat stretches of irrigated farmland (which in a year or two would be covered with acres of sinister camouflage) and oil wells pumping—like monstrous woodpeckers, Mother said. All the while Bridget chanted, “I want to go up in an airplane,” and I sat, fermenting with ecstasy, unable to speak a word. We came at last to a hangar and an airstrip with a red windsock flapping in the breeze. Father
parked the car, and the four of us walked out to the asphalt strip. It was a beautiful day, warm and clear, with a sudden strange loud hum in the air. “There!” shouted Father, gaily throwing his head back and his arms out as if to embrace the sky. “Look up, quick, look up!” Right over our heads roared a small airplane doing aerobatics. “He’s doing some stunts for you—now here comes a slow roll,” yelled Father, “and watch this, he’s starting into a loop-the-loop!”

“Where—where?” wailed Bridget desperately, pointing in the wrong direction, as Mother knelt down and tried to turn her head up.

“Look up, Brie,
up!
” called Father, his voice almost drowned out by the airplane hovering upside down over us. “Attagirl, Brooke, what d’ya think—isn’t that beautiful?” At that moment the plane slowly began to lose altitude, as if on purpose, and, gathering momentum, nose-dived into the asphalt before us. It caught fire almost on impact. I screamed with delight, thinking it was part of the show, and started after Father, who was running toward the blaze, but Mother caught me and yanked me around so I couldn’t see anything but her face.

“Don’t look,” she kept saying over and over, but I couldn’t hear her very well, even in the silence after the engine had gone dead, because my ears were still ringing. “It’s an accident, it’s an accident.” Although I didn’t know what an accident was—at least not that kind—I didn’t dare disobey her. Bridget clutched Mother’s neck and said insistently, “I want to see an airplane, I want to see an airplane.” There was a lot of commotion behind me, people and trucks whizzing past. Father came back after a while. Mother stood up. “Leland, darling,” she said to him, “let’s go home.”

“Nope,” he replied. “I promised Brooke she could have a ride in my plane and that’s what we’re going to do. Right?”

“Right,” I said, much relieved.

“Come on, everyone,” said Father cheerfully, taking my hand and striding across the strip. “Come on, Maggie. Listen.” He stopped to make a sweeping motion in the direction of the charred wreck on the runway before pacing on. “Remember this, Brooke. You, too, Bridget, are you listening? If you’re ever in an accident that you can walk out of, no matter what kind, keep right on going as if nothing happened at all. Airplane, car, whatever—get back in
and keep going. Fall off a horse, get right back on, even if you’re scared to death. Only way. Know why? Because otherwise, about five minutes later, you’ll be even more afraid and won’t ever want to try it again. Right. Got it?” And there we were, staring up at his plane. It was called, he said with pride, a Howard, and it was a beautiful dark blue, the color and shape of some sleek underwater creature. I was so dizzy with excitement and love that he had to reach back to haul me up the steps, and then get Bridget, who had curled up into a little ball and wouldn’t let go of Mother. We all sat behind him while he put on his earphones and started the engine; a mechanic in a blue jumpsuit spun the propeller, and the plane started down the runway gathering speed. It lifted off into the air, curving around in a slow arc so that we were pressed down into our seats, and Father turned, grinning, to yell back at us, “How’d you like that?” I never wanted to come down again. Bridget spent the entire ride chanting, “I want to go up in an airplane, I want to go up in an airplane,” disregarding Mother, who would squeeze her and say, laughing, “Brie, you are in an airplane, silly. This
is
an airplane, darling.”