Haywire (22 page)

“The most honest-to-God revolting idea you’ve ever had, Maggie,” we could hear Father protesting from the next room where he, Mother, and Emily were in a huddle.

“Children!” announced Mother breezily. “I have an idea for an experiment. Although your father pretends he doesn’t approve at all, he’s willing to give it a try.…” The idea sounded intriguing. We would all go together down to the chicken coop, and watch Mother take a lesson from Andrew Tomashek in how to chop off a chicken’s head. Andrew performed this chore every Saturday morning in order to provide us with chicken for Sunday dinner, and once we saw how simple and perfunctory it was, just a chore like any other—and if even Mother could do it—it would prove to us that there was nothing so terrible about the sight of blood, or death, for that matter, when it was a question of necessity.

So we all trooped down the dirt path to the chicken coop. We had about three hundred chickens, so the coop was sizable; there were nesting houses and a shade tree in the middle, and under the tree a broad flat stump, bloodstained and scarred with old hatchet marks. It was a warm morning; while Mother was explaining to us the highlights of what we were about to see, such as the chicken flapping around the enclosure for a minute or two after its head had been chopped off, and how not to worry because even though it was really dead, its nervous system, interestingly enough, continued to twitch involuntarily for a little while just like a worm’s or a snake’s, Father shuddered and began to perspire. I stared at the pasture beyond the coop, intent on the long grass shining as a light wind moved through it and wondering if it wouldn’t be more fun to go farther on down the dirt path to the swimming pool, which would be lovely and cold, freezing, since it was fed by natural springs (water so pure we could drink it right out of the ground, and so icy it made our foreheads ache), which also fed the brook running through the pasture just below.

“Maggie,” I heard Father saying, “I’m really lousy at these things, no help at all—I’ll stand outside the coop and wait.”

“Me, too,” I said, grabbing his hand.

“Come on, you two, don’t be fainthearted,” called Mother, concentrating on how to hold the axe and taking a few practice strokes at the stump under Andrew’s direction. Father and I walked around the side of the coop and stood in the pasture. Father leaned down and picked a thick blade of grass, which he stretched out tight between his thumbs and pressed against his lips to blow on; it made a strange buzzing whistle. I hooked my fingers through the chicken wire with my back to the action, listening
vaguely to the sounds of chickens squawking as Andrew chased them around and of Father blowing on his blade of grass; if I squinted, I could just see—or imagine—against the pale shimmer of the lower pasture, the wide loops of the brook meandering along.…

“Brooke, Leland,” called Mother, “come here—Bridget and Bill will set a good example for you. Look how brave they’re being.” I glanced back; Bridget, Bill, and Emily were grouped around the stump; Andrew had a chicken expertly pinned down on it, and Mother had raised the axe.

“Don’t look,” said Father without turning around. “Think about something wonderful. Vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce—Christ, I can’t stand the sight of blood, I can’t stand the sight of suffering, I hate pain. Look at that big bird out there, what do you think it is? A hawk? Beautiful the way it catches the wind. God, I wish, I wish I still had my airplane—” Behind us there was the loud thump of the axe, chickens squawking, Bridget and Bill squealing. I looked back again. The body of Mother’s chicken was flopping all over the coop, headless, with fountains of blood spurting out.

“Oh, no,” I said, stuffing my head against Father’s stomach.

“Let’s walk up to the house,” said Father, shaking his head.

“But Mother will get mad at us,” I wailed.

“She already is,” answered Father, pulling me along. “Your mother is a remarkable woman, the bravest person I know, and I happen to be the most squeamish. That’s that. Your mother can’t understand squeamishness at all, and she can’t tolerate what she can’t understand. If she wants to call me a coward, I can’t argue with her—she’s a hundred percent correct. One drop of blood and I almost faint. Christ Almighty, when I hemorrhaged, couldn’t stop bleeding, I thought I would die from fear long before I bled to death.” He smiled down at me. “Cheer up. You take after me, so at least we can keep each other company—we’ll be in hot water together at the lunch table, kid.”

That was the first time I had a glimmering of insight into the difference between Mother and Father; up to then I had seen them as counterparts of the same person, Mother and Father, with diametrically opposed points of view, perhaps, but the same identity. It was also the first time I had to make a choice between them, but while disobeying Mother or in any way allowing myself
to fall short of her expectations was a terrifying position to put myself in, I wasn’t sure there was a choice after all. (Which was worse, my watching her kill a chicken or her anger at my not watching her kill a chicken?) I was very grateful that I had Father, who was much bigger and smarter than I, to express myself for me.

Shortly after this, Mother decided to compromise and divide her time between Connecticut and California. In order to keep up with Father, who had refused to totally sacrifice his business in Los Angeles, she bought another house in Beverly Hills as a base of operations and kept the farm as a backup residence. As willful as she sometimes appeared to be, Mother was capable of acute introspection; she was a harsh self-critic, far harder on herself than on anyone else, always the first to blame herself for any problems that arose. At times she kept diaries in which, along with animated descriptions of daily events, could be found stern remonstrances regarding her own behavior if it fell below some invisible standard she’d set for herself. In a memo to herself during her pregnancy with Bill five years earlier, she wrote:

I am guilty of growing old, losing my sense of fun and humor. I take my responsibilities too seriously. I’ve become smug, both with Leland and the children. So I must read this every day because I need to be reminded that I’m becoming a tyrant. From now on, I must make myself have fun with Brooke and Bridget and to hell with discipline. Brooke is sensitive and shy and I have frightened her and cowed her. Leland loves his airplane and his friends and I have taken his pleasure in them away. I am really going to restore them, and find Brooke’s confidence again.

Honest to God.

“I can see him just as if he was standing right here and trying to sell me a bill of goods on something. I can see his smile, his drive, his conviction. He always had that radiant effervescent smile—rarely ever saw him when his face wasn’t shining—ready to tell you something or sell you something
.

“I would have hated to have been trying to convince a client
to come with us [MCA] if Leland was trying to get him for his organization. Then we bought his agency—this was in 1944—and his clients turned out to be our most important clients. As a matter of fact, when I look back even today at the list of clients he represented, the lists we got at that time, it’s bewildering. He overshadowed everybody in the business. Even our list was secondary to his. I was just flabbergasted to think that he had so many important people—not only performers, but writers and directors—he had the best cross-section of artists in the whole field. He was by far the outstanding man in the entire agency field in California, but he was never quite satisfied with himself. He was always reaching for something further. I was perhaps perfectly happy to be the top agent in town, but he not only wanted to be an agent, he wanted to be a creator and he wanted to be a producer and he didn’t want to stick to any one thing even though he was a success in it
.

“I remember at one time when he was married to your mother and you were all out in the country, she insisted that he could not have any telephone calls. And he just couldn’t stand it. It was too much for his blood, so he used to go to the drugstore or country store, maybe half a mile away, and call up the office to find out what was going on. The theatrical world and the agency world was his world. It was his life. I was amused by your mother’s attempts to keep Leland in line. I think if she hadn’t done that she still would have been married to him until he died.”

“He could sell the proverbial snowball to an Eskimo. He didn’t show any interest in me until he saw me in
New Faces.
Then, when he did, it was typical of him that he took over. The summer of 1933 I was playing summer stock at the Westchester Playhouse in Mount Kisco—your mother momentarily gave up Hollywood to come back and play in
Coquette
with me, Kent Smith, Myron McCormack, Mildred Natwick, Josh, and Josh’s sister Mary Lee. It was one of the all-time summer theatre triumphs
.

“In the middle of that summer at Mount Kisco, I got a wire from your father, asking me to come to California. I wired him ‘No.’ I wasn’t interested in films; I still hadn’t hit New York the way I wanted to. He wired me back—I’ll never forget it—one of those
telegrams that just went on for page after page, clipped together at the top—all the reasons why I was an idiot, and why I should come. I wired him back with the one word ‘No.’ Then he got me on the telephone. I hadn’t been home to Omaha for a long time, so I’d taken a week off and flown home for a visit. Somehow your dad knew that’s where I was. Your persuasive father. He said, ‘It won’t cost you anything. I’ll pay for your goddamned airplane fare and your hotel. You’ll meet some people and it’ll be easy for you to make a decision. Don’t be an idiot.’

“So I wound up flying out to California. He met me at the airport. It was terribly hot, in the middle of August; I remember that I had on a seersucker suit, which was wilting on me. He took me to a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I went in to shower and shave and clean up; when I came back out again, he was in the front room with Walter Wanger. I’d never heard of him before. He had no idea who I was either, or whether I was any good. We sat there, and within half an hour or so I was shaking his hand on a deal your father had sold him. He had dragged Walter Wanger over, and I don’t know what he’d said, but I was shaking hands on a deal for one thousand dollars a week. And it was my deal: I could go back to my beloved theatre in the winter and come out the next summer to do two pictures for one thousand dollars a week. I went down in the elevator with your dad and out on the sidewalk in front of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, still in shock. I turned to your dad and said, ‘There’s something fishy.’ I just couldn’t believe it. And he laughed and laughed. That’s how I got here.”

“He used to insult the heads of studios while settling one haunch on their desk corners. ‘Sam,’ he would say, ‘why don’t you stop cheating the public and do a good picture instead of just talking about it? Now, I have a writer …’ Or, ‘Harry, stop convincing people you’re ignorant. I know you’ve got more sense than they give you credit for, and I’ve been explaining that to Garbo, but she doesn’t believe me. Why don’t you put her in a picture that—Hold it! I’ve got just the one for you!’ ”

• • •

The new house was in the mountains above Beverly Hills on a wild tract of ranchland belonging to the Doheny family. It was at the end of a rutted dirt road called Cherokee Lane (now a four-lane highway). In those days (1946), as far as the eye could see there was nothing but mountains covered with scrub oak and sagebrush and occasionally a plume of white yucca; off to the west was a perfect view all the way to the ocean, and on a clear day we could see Catalina Island.

The land rose from the dirt road up to the house in a series of deep terraces defined by brick retaining walls and paths: on the first level was a row of pepper trees beside the garage, then up some brick stairs was a tangerine and grapefruit grove where the path split into two further sets of stairs, which continued on, circling a steep flowering slope as they went, and passing on the right a guest house and on the left a sunken garden planted with gardenias and roses. At the top, set well back by lawns and olive trees and a wide brick terrace with a spectacular view, was the house with its back to the mountain that rose behind it. It was a small, unpretentious, one-story house; Mother spent some time remodeling and enlarging it before we could move in. She said she bought it just for its privacy and location—total wilderness with Beverly Hills five minutes away. The inside of the house, when she finished, was arresting: this was a period in which she and Father avidly collected paintings by Miró, Soutine, Picasso, Dufy, Vuillard, Bonnard, and Mondrian, and Mother thought it would be a good idea to complement them with a bold modern background. The living room had a cathedral ceiling, which slanted up to a peak; one side was painted pale chartreuse and the other lavender, to give the illusion, said Mother, that half the ceiling was perpetually shadowing the other half. Over the fireplace hung a rather somber monochromatic Grant Wood, my favorite painting, in which wheat-covered hills rolled to the horizon like waves, accentuated by the path of an unseen reaper exactly following the contour of the land. The fireplace underneath was Mother’s pièce de résistance, a cavernous slash of color that immediately caught the eye; its entire inside was painted a fiery reddish orange, as if it were incessantly ablaze. The dining-room walls were irregularly striped with tumbling pink watermelon slices, a motif carried through to its ultimate conclusion with the dining table: a twelve-foot-long rectangle of thick plate glass supported by two huge, green, egg-shaped
pedestals, custom-designed to resemble upended watermelons from which slices had been carved vertically—big pink slices, sprinkled with black seeds—that reappeared horizontally as bases under the pedestals.