Haywire (38 page)

Peter was as singular an individual as any other Fonda. A year or so after Frances’s death, Hank married Susan Blanchard, Oscar Hammerstein’s stepdaughter. While they were honeymooning in the Virgin Islands, Peter accepted the invitation of his friend Tony Avery to spend the weekend at the family hunting lodge. Stepping out onto the roof with a sawed-off shotgun he’d found in the attic, Peter, unable to figure out how to load it, jammed the barrel against his belt buckle for leverage and the gun went off, blasting a hole through his stomach. His life was saved by a cool-headed chauffeur who drove him, unconscious, fifty miles to the nearest hospital. Peter basked in glory. Nobody else in Greenwich had ever had such an accident. In fact, he preferred to play down the accidental part and to impute dark subconscious motives to his trigger finger. (That was during the Korean War; Bill and Peter had fallen in with the Fawcett brothers, a wild crowd. The Fawcetts had substantial property nearby, which lent itself to the large-scale building of trenches and foxholes. Evil weapons were developed. Bill, who had a way with firearms, came up with a grenade that consisted of a cherry bomb dipped first in Le Page’s glue and
then rolled in BBs to give it the perfect weight for throwing long distances. Amazingly, only one of the gang sustained a major injury: Roger Fawcett, younger brother of Rocky, was accidentally shot in the eye with a BB gun.)

Eventually, the Fondas had moved from Greenwich into New York City. This had forced Peter to consider other outlets for his prodigious energy; he had taken up the trumpet and flower-arranging. It was then—across the tables in the Museum of Modern Art’s garden, where our families met for lunch—that Peter (he claimed later) had fallen secretly in love with Bridget.

That summer of 1954, however, Bridget was in Switzerland with Mother and Kenneth. Bill and I were not particularly sorry; she could be something of a tribulation. While the rest of us were able, somehow, to express ourselves, she had remained, as in childhood, aloof. Not that she
felt
superior; the reverse was true. But to me—something I would never have dreamed of telling her—she personified the best qualities in all of us. I admired her integrity, and was afraid of her. I had the feeling that she had been dropped many times and glued back together but that the cracks still showed. I wanted to set her in the sun and let her turn a golden brown like Mother. To me that golden patina meant strength. At the same time, I was relieved to be rid of the responsibility. In a way I hoped that the school in Switzerland would do the job I wasn’t up to.

At seventeen I was cockier than ever. I was also outrageously flirtatious. No man was exempt from my coquetry. Danny Selznick, a year older than I, took me to a small French bistro for escargots, and chastized me for flirting with his father. “There’s a creature,” he warned, “whose name begins with the letter ‘V,’ to which you bear a remarkable likeness.” I was charmed by the notion that he saw me as a vixen. At David O. Selznick’s annual Fourth of July party in Malibu, I set out to conquer all of Hollywood; much to Father’s concern, Richard Rodgers told him I was delectable and Cole Porter gave me a cigar.

My greatest treasure that summer was my driver’s license. For my seventeenth birthday, Father had promised me a car but weaseled out by temporarily substituting a very skimpy dress from a new Beverly Hills store named Jax. That evening I wore it to dinner—without a bra (quite shocking in those days), since it was too low-cut to accommodate one. My date was Warner LeRoy, son of Mervyn LeRoy, who was to replace John Ford as director of
Mr
.
Roberts
. Afterward, Warner took me to watch Jimmy Dean shoot the Ferris-wheel scene in his first movie,
East of Eden
. “He’s going to be the biggest young star in Hollywood,” predicted Warner, whose brand of worldliness was quite unlike that of the average Eastern preppie. But Jimmy Dean’s fate was far less interesting to me than Marlon Brando’s. I had high hopes toward Marlon Brando that summer. For one thing, he was in Los Angeles making a movie,
Guys and Dolls
, which, for another, was being directed by an old friend of the family, Joe Mankiewicz. And if that wasn’t luck enough, it just happened that I’d grown up with Joe’s niece Johanna.

With me at the wheel, Josie Mankiewicz, Jane Fonda, and Jill Schary spent the better part of July and August zooming around Los Angeles on the trail of Marlon Brando. Although my optimism never flagged, the closest we came to him was the night I took everyone downtown on the half-finished freeway to see
Viva Zapata!
in a flea-bitten movie house. I was in such a rush to get us there that I drove, whenever traffic was bad, along the sidewalks. The others wouldn’t get back in the car with me for a week.

Whenever I saw the Fondas, I was reminded of Mother, although she was nowhere around. Hank, it pleased me to observe, was as strict with Jane as Mother was with me. The quality of that strictness was identical: fervent, almost puritanical. Jane and I were given to speculation about their past romance and marriage. We liked to suppose that beneath their rectitude smoldered a still unbridled passion for each other. The idea of a renewed love affair—unconsummated, of course, on our account—did not seem as far-fetched as all that. In Greenwich, sometimes, after Hank had come to pick up Jane and Peter, he and Mother would demonstrate headstands together for what seemed to be longer than necessary. We children would eye each other reflectively: they were still madly in love! (Whether or not they were, we preferred to believe it.)

However, I never did get to Hawaii with Jane.

Hank, about to start
Mr. Roberts
for Father, was staying with his family down in Santa Monica at the old Ocean House. We were in town with Father, Nan, Kitty, and nurse, at the Bel Air Hotel. One evening, Father offered to take me to
Matador
, a documentary about bullfighting. I was obsessed with bullfighting, having read all of Hemingway; my ardor was in no way diminished by a recent introduction to Luis Miguel Dominguín, whose entire
body, I was fascinated to note—when he appeared in a brief bathing suit at the hotel pool—was covered with scars. That night, Nan was up in Monterey visiting her family. While Father finished off a business meeting in his room, Bill and I, elated at the opportunity to order Châteaubriand for two at $22.95, ate an early dinner alone in the hotel dining room. Afterward we waited for Father on the path by the lobby. It was still daylight, though about seven o’clock; people were arriving for cocktails. Father came toward us in a dark suit with a business associate on either side. Just as the three of them came abreast of us, he fell to his knees, and then slowly, like a mortally wounded elephant that didn’t belong there at all, sank to the pavement. There was pandemonium. A bellboy appeared with a huge bowl of ice; the desk clerk, the manager, guests gathered around him.

“Brooke,” he said desperately, regaining consciousness when I splashed ice water on his face, “I’m bleeding to death.”

“No, you’re not,” I said, equally desperately. I sat down on the pavement and put his head on my lap.

“Yes,” he insisted. “There’s blood on my pants. Call the doctor, not the goddamned hotel doctor—I want Dana Atchley. My telephone book—look under New York City—”

“That’s not blood, Leland,” said somebody else. “It’s just ice water.”

“I’m hemorrhaging, goddamnit,” said Father. We carried him back to his hotel suite. By the time we got there, it was evident he was right. There was more blood than I had ever seen, more blood than I thought the human body contained. The heavy sweet smell of it was everywhere; the white carpet was strewn with dark clots. Later, we burned his pants. The living room quickly filled with people; word got around fast. When I heard the ambulance siren, I went back into his room and shut the door behind me.

“Come here, Brooke,” he said, without opening his eyes. I sat on the edge of his bed, wondering how he’d known it was me. His skin was a terrible color, the same pale green as Christ’s on the cross in the middle panel of the Grünewald Altarpiece.

“Do you love me?” asked Father, still without opening his eyes.

“Yes, Father.” When I was six or seven, I’d come across the Grünewald Altarpiece in an art book, and it had scared me to think about ever since.

“That’s good,” said Father. “I love you, too. Poor little Brooke. Are you afraid I’m going to die?”

I certainly was. I didn’t see how anyone could lose that much blood that fast and live. There was no way to stop the bleeding, no way to plug him up.

“You’re not going to die, Father, I promise you. The ambulance is here. Besides, I won’t let you.” I was still invincible in those days, strong enough for both of us. The big question was whether I was strong enough not to cry. I rolled my eyes around furiously to disperse the tears, clenching my teeth with effort.

“Attagirl,” said Father. Only his lips moved, and his voice seemed to come from far away. “Well, I am. I’m afraid as hell. You must forgive me, darling.”

“What for, Father?” I asked, panicked, thinking I was about to hear his last confession. He
couldn’t
die. He wasn’t mortal like the rest of us: he was my father.

“For getting sick tonight, not taking you to that movie. The bullfight movie. What a terrible evening. I’m so sorry, darling, I know I promised you.…”

Father did almost die. He received massive transfusions every day for weeks, gallons and gallons of blood, according to Nan, who moved into the hospital with him. Then, after he began to recover, the doctors recommended that he take it easy for a while and retire. It was the work, it seemed, the pressure that made him hemorrhage. But Father got so cranky with enforced leisure, and it became so apparent that retirement would be, for him, a form of death anyway, that he was slowly allowed to resume
Mr. Roberts
. When the danger was over, Bill and I were sent home. It was almost fall, and school was about to begin.

My senior year at Madeira was splendid. I worked very hard, and took the idea of myself as a scholar very seriously. (An appealing vision of myself as a consumptive author, amongst dusty stacks of books and easels in an unheated Parisian garret, fueled my studies.) I ranked high on my college entrance exams, and was accepted by Vassar, Bennington, and Sarah Lawrence. Vassar was my first choice—or, rather, that of Miss Madeira, whose eightieth birthday we celebrated that year. Vassar was her alma mater. Father, fully recovered, came down to Washington and had tea
with Miss Madeira. This charmed her into recognizing me from then on whenever we passed each other on the Oval. I sang alto in the select glee club and was inspired, during my weekly Sunday trips into Washington, to canvass a strange heterogeneous mixture of churches, cathedrals, and temples. While passing through a brief religious fervor, I was, at last, confirmed. Embarrassingly, this meant I first had to be christened, a rite Mother had overlooked in my infancy. The confirmation took place in St. John’s Church, which met all of my requirements (the biggest rose window, the most vaulted nave, the most impressive altar in Washington), and was attended by all my friends. The high point was a fabulous breakfast in the rectory afterward, of codfish cakes and homemade baked beans made by the wife of the minister, Dr. Glenn.

“Dear Mother,” I wrote. “Being a senior is both fun and difficult—I enjoy the privileges and prestige, but on the other hand, I loathe setting an example to the rest of the school.…”

This was quite true. I cultivated an image of myself as an artistic eccentric, outside the bourgeois concerns that governed the rest of the student body. In the spring, I spent two feverish weeks between mirror and canvas painting my masterpiece, a life-size self-portrait in oil entitled “Nervous Breakdown.” I was often reduced to tears by the rigorous beauty of this creative endeavor.

I wrote, in typically florid style:

And Life was always full of drama. To a friend of Mother’s, who was my kind hostess during spring vacation in Delray, Florida, I dashed off a tortured bread-and-butter note:

Parodying the style of one of my overstuffed letters, Mother replied:

Moody and mercurial, I fell in and out of love five times. Graduation was almost upon me, as was my June début at the Greenwich Country Club Cotillion. My letters were filled now with responses to Mother’s queries about invitations, escorts, guests, dress, shoes, music: