Haywire (29 page)

“But remember you promised to take us all to England this summer.”

“By then it will be too late,” she growled. “I’ll have forgotten all about him. I’ve already given him fair warning—I’ll be just fine for a week or two; then the letdown will set in. He’s promised to help me by writing long letters, pages and pages every day, until they bore me; that will be somewhere in the next couple of months—April, let’s say, for good measure. Then he can start tapering them off until we’re reduced to postcards once a year.”

“I’ll bet he’s got some secret old girl friend in London,” suggested Bridget provocatively. “Maybe he leads a double life. The English are meant to be good at that.”

“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” I said.

“A werewolf or vampire in disguise?” Bill’s voice rose hopefully.

“If so,” replied Mother, “he doesn’t stand a chance. Two can play that game. I’ll have my revenge. Thirty years from now, I’ll return to haunt him when he least expects it. He’ll be sitting, one night, on his broad bottom beside his bucktoothed wife—the woman for whom he callously left me, that terrible winter so long ago in New York—having a cup of tea in front of his sooty coal grate, when my youthful ghost shall slowly rise from the embers like a Phoenix and twine itself around his body.”

“You don’t have to wait thirty years for your revenge,” Bridget said, snickering. “I have an idea. Guess what happened last night. Brooke grew bosoms. They’re not very big yet, but we can soon send her over to England to seduce one of Kenneth’s sons.”

“Brooke, darling, bosoms!” exclaimed Mother. (I looked down at my flat chest self-consciously.) “Oh, how exciting! Can’t you tell them to wait until I get home before they get any bigger? I feel as if I’m missing everything.”

“You’d better hurry,” remarked Bridget. “Soon they’ll be popping the buttons off her—”

“Shut up, Brie.” I glowered at her. “Mind your own p’s and q’s. They’re my bosoms and if they go to England it won’t be because of Kenneth’s sons.”

“You wouldn’t sacrifice them on behalf of darling Mother?” asked Bridget mischievously. “Don’t worry, Mother,” she reported back into the telephone receiver. “Emily says they’re just baby fat. Tee-hee.”

While Mother was gone, Bridget and I made an amazing discovery. One afternoon, puttering around the library for something to read, we cracked open a block of ten large matching blue leather-bound books arranged in chronological order (Volume I, and so on). Compared to the sets of gold-embossed first editions surrounding them, they were drab and academic, so we’d never bothered with them before. After a few seconds of idly leafing through them, we looked at each other, shocked.

“Brooke,” whispered Bridget, although there was no one else in the room, “do you realize what these are?”

Indeed I did. Carefully pasted inside, punctuated by Mother’s comments in her own handwriting, smiling up at us from page after page, almost bigger than life, was every photograph—
whether personal or publicity—that had ever been taken of her. And not only photographs, but magazine covers, press releases; every review, interview, or article that had ever been written about her; every note, letter, telegram from anyone who had ever mattered to her; every single memento that pertained to both her personal and her professional lives since the days when she was a child in Norfolk, Virginia.

Bridget and I were overwhelmed, not only by our good fortune, but by the sheer bulk and content of the material, and most of all by the idea that Mother, always so offhand about any aspect of her life, had painstakingly, over a long period of time, amassed all tangible records of it into half a shelf of scrapbooks. Why? we wondered. For whom? Herself to pore over when she was old and gray? What was this intriguing new paradox? We’d thought we’d known them all.

We found, however, that we knew very little. It was a long afternoon. By the time we finished with Volume X, dazed but exhilarated, we had acquired our first real sense of the high regard in which Mother, as an actress, was widely held, and not only that, but how long and tenaciously she had worked for it. Also, we finally knew what it meant to be a movie star. And we were thrilled to discover that there were facets to her personal life that we’d never dreamed of, such as her marriage, after Hank Fonda but before Father, to Willie Wyler.

“Look.” Bridget nudged me excitedly and pointed to an old London clipping that read:

MARGARET (“ONLY YESTERDAY”) SULLAVAN

passed through our little village the other week, accompanied by Husband Bill Wyler (he directs Margaret’s pictures). Because it was a honeymoon trip, the couple made their London agents promise that they would not be asked to see interviewers.… Margaret and Bill were married during the making of
The Good Fairy
(now at the Empire). It was a rather unusual courtship. Star and director wrangled continuously during the earlier scenes of the picture. One evening at six o’clock Bill told Margaret that she would have to work that evening. “Oh, no, I don’t,” said Margaret. “I have a date for the fights.” (Fights are fashionable in film society.) She stamped off the set. A little while later Bill followed her into her dressing room and said: “I’m sorry. I should have told you earlier. We won’t work.” Margaret flared. “Now
you’ve made it worse. I’ve just called and broken the date!” A few evenings later Bill took Margaret home from work, but they didn’t go home. Instead they drove to the aerodrome, flew to Arizona, and got married.…

“Imagine!” exulted Bridget. “She sneaked in another marriage on us. Wonder why she never told us. Shall we ask her?”

“No,” I answered, considering. “Since she’s never mentioned it before, she’ll get suspicious.”

“You’re right,” said Bridget. “Otherwise we’ll never get to see the scrapbooks again.” For, having stumbled upon such a treasure, we had no intention of relinquishing it.

Many years later, William Wyler told me:

“
The Good Fairy
was one of the first important films I was making at Universal. Maggie was a star and I was a very young apprentice director just starting, so for me it was quite a step to direct her. One day I looked at the rushes and Maggie didn’t look good. I said to the cameraman, ‘What’s the matter, you’re not photographing her well.’ He said, ‘Well, you two had a fight the day we shot that.’ So I said, ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ He said, ‘Well, when she’s happy she looks pretty, when she’s upset she doesn’t!’ I said, ‘That’s news; I guess I’ve got to try to make her happy.’ So I made an effort. In order to get along, I said, ‘What are you doing for dinner tonight?’ And she said, ‘Nothing.’ And we had a dinner date, which was simply for the purpose of having her look good in the picture, and, well, we got along very nicely eating dinner. So, we had another date. Then I kissed her, and we began to like each other. Of course there were a few little obstacles: one night we were shooting a scene with her; she looked towards the camera and stopped acting. I said, ‘Cut.’ I didn’t know what the heck she was staring at. Behind the camera was Jed Harris. He was a big successful producer on Broadway at the time, very influential. I had heard she and Jed were together in New York, but now we were already planning to get married. He’d heard about it; they were supposedly engaged, which I didn’t know. Anyway, there he was. Out of the blue. Stood there. Like Svengali. And in those days flying out from New York was something. And he made her very nervous, but I think she was fascinated by him. He had a kind of hold on her. I think she desperately wanted to get away from him. For what reason
I don’t know. I think trying to get away from Jed Harris contributed to the fact that she married me. The morning we went to Yuma, Arizona—there he was again. She said, ‘Let me talk to him alone.’ I waited in the hotel lobby. I didn’t know: is she going to come now or isn’t she? A long time went by, half an hour; it seemed like forever. Down she came and said, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ He was supposed to be a very persuasive fellow, but he didn’t make it that day. So off we went. And it was a miserable wedding. Jeez. Awful. My lawyer had arranged it. I chartered this airplane, and flew to Arizona. We went to this justice of the peace; he stood there in a robe and slippers and said, ‘All right, here, get together’—the radio was going all this time—and he married us. Then he said, ‘Excuse me,’ and went into the bedroom where his wife was still in bed and she signed the thing. Anyway we went straight back to the airport and the pilot said, ‘Where do we go—Reno?’ It was a good suggestion. After that wedding we should have gone straight up there. This was Sunday morning. Sunday night we were back and Monday we had to go on the set. And everybody was astonished. Here we had been fighting like cats and dogs and the next thing you know we’re married. I was crazy about her.”

As Bridget and I pored over the yellowing photographs and trophies of Mother’s youth, we realized how surprisingly uninformed we were about that, too. Sometimes, looking amused, she had told us stories about herself, mostly disparaging. In all her schools and camps she’d always been undersized, the shortest and skinniest and the last to develop (“Why, I was eighteen and had given up hope for good that I would ever have a female figure—when overnight—let that be a lesson to you”), for which she compensated with her cherished tomboyishness and athletic prowess. She told us how she was, from the beginning, so stubborn (or, at least, so spoiled) that she refused to be weaned from her bottle until she was five. Then, on a sightseeing tour of Mount Vernon, as she leaned dreamily on the velvet ropes that partitioned George Washington’s bedroom off from the public, she yawned for a second, and the ubiquitous bottle of milk dangling by its nipple from her mouth crashed to the floor, rolled across the priceless rug, and disappeared under Washington’s bed.

Her memories of childhood were tinged with ambiguity:
deep pride about her Southern ancestry and customs, offset by a rebelliousness against that pride, as if any feeling so ingrained must also be pompous. Mother had hair-trigger reflexes about pomposity, particularly in herself, and never allowed it to go by without a few lighthearted jabs.

Although she scoffed at what she considered to be her family’s overzealous obeisance to its lineage, she gave me her own middle name, inherited from her great-grandmother Priscilla Brooke Fleet Smith, wife of James Smith, State Senator, lawyer, and master of Smithfield plantation. (“You were doomed to have that name whether you were a girl or boy,” she used to tell me, “if for no other reason than it’s a good strong name that can’t be abbreviated or tampered with.”) A congratulatory letter written to Mother by her older half-sister, Lewise, at the time of my birth referred to her ambivalence and was, unwittingly, a perfect example of what caused it: “Dearest Peggy … I can hardly wait to see the baby. Leland said she was beautiful and Mother tells me you are going to name her Brooke. Mother also wrote me that you had asked about the family genealogy for possible names; so I immediately set to work to copy the old Smith and Fleet genealogies for you.… I have also in my possession a beautiful photo-static copy of a chart which traces our ancestry directly back through the Smith and Throckmorton lines to the early kings of France and England.…” (“Oh, my God, so what?” Mother would exclaim irreverently when confronted with this sort of information pertaining to her forebears. “Pugh. Who really gives a damn? Virginians. That’s the best and the worst about them, their awful pride.”)

We barely knew her parents. We saw them only once: they came to California for a few weeks while she was in England. Afterward we didn’t feel we knew them any better. Mother’s descriptions of them had never enabled us to form any clear image of what to expect—other than a thick syrupy drawl, which, as she warned us, would render almost incomprehensible everything they said. So in her absence we were unable to perceive them at all. Perhaps we needed her as an interpreter in more ways than one; this time she must have shied away from the role, and we must have known it unconsciously. There was nothing in the world at which Mother more excelled, in our eyes, than creating, with her own special blend of words and gestures and anecdotes, unforgettably
vivid portraits of people. But she never attempted to portray her parents for us, and, picking up our cue from her, we never showed any particular curiosity about them. This lack of interest prevailed even when they were finally sitting right under our very own olive tree, strangers from Virginia, explaining to us why olives didn’t taste like olives until they were pickled in brine like roe herring and spiced beef.

Cornelius Sullavan was spry and gay, and his wife, Garland, was plump and charming. Both were shorter than average; that seemed, at the time of their visit, to be the only respect in which Mother (who was five feet two) took after either of them.

Six months later, when Bridget and I came across photographs of Garland, aged twenty, taken in the mid-eighteen-nineties, we could see a passing facial resemblance to Mother, although we couldn’t tell about much else, since Garland’s loose hair—actually a full two thirds of her height—fell around her like a dark mantle, concealing most of her wedding dress, which swept, in turn, to the floor. She was so tiny that the actual dress, with its lovely satin panels interspersed with handmade lace and its long narrow sleeves (which she handed down to Mother, who kept it carefully guarded in a carton of tissue paper in the hope that one day Bridget or I would wear it), had an eighteen-inch waist. Consequently it made only one quasi-successful appearance on either of us; that was when Bridget was fourteen and at her skinniest. For the sake of a single fast Polaroid shot, Mother and I spent an hour cramming her into a waist cincher and forcibly buttoning hundreds of tiny satin buttons—mercifully leaving an inch here or there undone so that she could breathe—before she screamed that she would explode all over the house like goose liver if we didn’t loosen her bonds instantly.

Garland’s first marriage left her a widow after three months, since her young husband, Lewis Gregory Winston, contracted typhoid and never lived to see their daughter, Lewise. Seven years later, Garland married Cornelius Hancock Sullavan and moved to Norfolk, Virginia. In 1909, Mother, christened Margaret Brooke (and known to her family and friends as “Peggy,” a nickname she loathed and changed to “Maggie” when she was twenty-one), was born.