Haywire (44 page)

As a result of that reluctant theatre date, Pamela, who lived in Paris, was selling her fabulous apartment overlooking the Seine, giving up her staff of five, the bulk of her priceless Louis XV furniture, her life of incomparable culture and refinement and grace, to move to New York City on Father’s account.

“That’s romance,” said Father.

There was no denying that. And his description of her was quite thrilling. She sounded like a mixture of Brenda Starr and Mata Hari. “Terrific auburn hair. Wonderful complexion. One of the most accomplished charmers of the century” was Father’s summation.

He went on to explain. Born in 1920 to Edward Kenelm Digby and the former Honorable Pamela Bruce (later Baron and Lady Digby), Pamela had, at the age of nineteen, married Randolph Churchill, from whom she’d separated after the birth of
their son, Winston. Thereafter she’d presided over a legendary salon, to which all the most illustrious diplomats, military figures, politicians, and foreign correspondents of wartime London had flocked. Over the next twenty years—right up to that time—although she had not married again, she’d lived a life of some considerable comfort, given her friendships with some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, including Averell Harriman (currently her husband), Gianni Agnelli, the Baron de Rothschild, and Ali Khan. (“It cost ten thousand dollars a year just to keep her apartment in fresh flowers,” marveled Father.)

So vivid was his account of her, so boyishly gleeful and amorous, that it upstaged the moment, a day or so later, of our actual introduction, and remained fixed in my mind as the night we met.

Diana Vreeland, editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
in the fifties—in which capacity, that summer of 1959, she’d given me my start as a model—editor-in-chief of
Vogue
in the sixties, and now Special Consultant to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum, had been a close friend of Father’s and Pamela’s separately, long before they knew each other.

When, in 1960, they were about to get married, she had it out with Pamela: “Pam, you’ve got to realize that he’s a terrific
père de famille
. Before you came into his life, these three children were there. And there are difficulties.… Are you taking this into consideration?”

And Pamela replied, “I adore the children.”

Diana went on, “It’s a pretty tough life, that theatre life, and if you want to sit around the hotel in New Haven and smell the cigar smoke of fifty years coming out of those carpets while he’s trying to get a show into New York, if you can stand that, Pam—What makes you think you can stand it? You’ve only spent the most beautiful time in the most beautiful places, always in fresh air.”

But Pamela was oblivious. She answered, “I’m going to marry him because I’ve had everything in my life, but I’ve never really had a husband, and Leland is going to be my husband.”

Just as Father liked all nursery food—puréed peas, creamed chicken, mashed potatoes, ice cream—he liked being taken care of. He loved Pamela because she took wonderful care of him. English women, far more than American women, are built-in nannies,
housekeepers, gardeners—with the lightest touch in the world. Pamela had a great gift: she understood the men she loved. That was where she began and ended; it was the only life she had. No man could ever leave a woman like that. Where could he possibly go?

“Your father has always been a great romantic. I’ve known him forever and he hasn’t changed by a hair. I’ll never forget the time I first met him: 1922. Cedarhurst, Long Island, at a party. The heat of the collegiate days of ‘Saturday night at the country club.’ I’m very interested in this type, who is standing: he doesn’t speak to any of the girls, he pays no attention to anything; the party goes on; he is obviously waiting for someone, but he doesn’t kill off time with another chap or with anybody. I remember him because he was quite pale and his eyes were very avid and very searching. He was waiting. Then, in the dark—it was in the days when we wore big evening dresses—a girl comes in and she has on a navy-blue serge suit. And she has the most beautiful face I’ve seen in my life. Where she had been, why she had come at that hour, why she wasn’t dressed, I have no idea. They said hello, they went straight onto the dance floor, and they danced the rest of the evening alone. Just the two of them. That was Lola Gibbs, who became his first wife. She was very beautiful. Very unusual. The face was small and very special. Also, the fact that she had on a blue serge suit and a shirtwaist made her look very racy, as she was in no way involved with evening clothes, nor did she give a damn. Nor did Mr. Hayward give a damn. They had their own ball, their own party, and that was all.”

It was not so very hard to believe the popular legend that Father once, unable to resolve some lovers’ quarrel with Lola on the way to Europe, jumped off the boat mid-Atlantic in despair and had to be rescued. He admitted to being not only a romantic but a man who truly preferred the company of women. Even when he most disapproved of the way I was leading my life, he still adored me, not because I was his daughter but because I was a female. I wanted him to be an archetypal father, and he couldn’t be. He knew it, too.

He also was capable, at times, of a certain kind of cruelty. But although he could and did say savage things, his intention
never was to hurt. His cruelty was unthinking, childlike. He just said what he thought was obvious; quickly and only once, because the idea of saying it over again bored him. His mind would already be on something else.

Like most children, he tended to speak very directly. But in a Freud-oriented world, it was hard to take Father at face value, even harder as I’d grown older and more sophisticated. He’d say, “You’re acting like a goddamned fool,” and I’d think, He hates me. But he’d meant nothing more than what he’d said. It didn’t really bear decoding. “I want a darkroom” did not mean he had some buried passion for his mother. It meant he wanted a new toy from F. A. O. Schwarz, a grownup’s version of a huge electric train. Exactly like Bill and his cars. It also meant that he wanted it immediately and was prepared to go to any lengths or to any expense to procure it. He had a childlike need for instant gratification coupled with a childlike disregard for the impossible. Introduced to Loel Guinness’s private helicopter on a visit to Palm Beach, he coveted it on sight. So, undaunted by the fact he was in his mid-sixties, he took up helicopter flying, managed to pass the stringent physical requirements for getting his license, and converted part of the lawn at his house into a helicopter pad.

“What in God’s name do you want to be an actress for?” he used to ask me when I came up to his office for a friendly visit between rounds. “For a smart girl like you—dumb, plain dumb.”

His fingers would twirl a matchbook exasperatedly around the edge of his desk. “Awful profession. Wait a sec—don’t go away, darling, sit down. Gotta finish this phone call—” He’d slam down the receiver, punch another button. “Crummy connection—bastards cut me off.”

He had a way of leaning back in his chair that was more ominous than if he had leaned forward. “What the hell was the point of giving you an expensive education? Colossal waste of my money, not to mention your time and brains.” He’d fix me with a stare so dark with oppression and injury that I’d swear to myself I’d never come back. Then the intercom would buzz and he’d cheer up again. And my resentment would subside while I played with the new gadgets on his desk, and looked at the silver-framed photographs on the piano, and reminded myself that naturally it was much easier for him to deal with a machine than a daughter, a daughter being synonymous with emotion, and that the more he
loved me the more ferocious he was apt to become; in short, that I should be flattered.

“Your brother, Bill,” he once announced to me on the telephone in the angriest voice I’d ever heard him use (Bill had just been returned to Menninger’s after his most famous “elopement” had landed him in jail), “is going to be worth just about a plugged nickel. That is, if he’s lucky. That bughouse is costing me a staggering sum of money—thirty thousand dollars a year after taxes; that’s really, let’s say, a hundred thousand bucks—and the little son of a bitch spends all his time there breaking out. I just finished telling him that in all fairness to his two sisters, I’m going to have to compensate by rearranging my will.”

“Father,” I said, thinking it was much easier to stand up to him long distance, “we both know you don’t care about money and never have.”

“That’s almost true,” he half shouted, “but not quite.”

“What you mean is you care about Bill and he’s hurt you.”

“You’re goddamned right,” agreed Father. “Look at it from my point of view. I ought to kill him.”

Perhaps there was even a redeeming quality to his cruelty, once one got used to the idea that it camouflaged his deepest feelings. The epitome of sophistication, he was also wonderfully naïve. I’d come to think of him as a castle. He’d built a wall around himself, a superb wall. He’d built it to keep people out. Although he seemed to have a marvelously outgoing personality, he’d built it to protect something very vulnerable, the most secret part of himself. It was quite a fortress. Walls work both ways; sometimes he couldn’t get out himself. There were bottomless moats around the castle and forests of thorny brier. His drawbridge to the outer world was the telephone, and to that world he presented the image of a fast-talking, generous, charming, debonair entrepreneur.

“The Toscanini of the telephone,” George Axelrod called him.

One of my favorite stories about him came from Josh Logan:

“There was a time when—before we did
Mr. Roberts—
I was in Cuba. I decided to take Jo Mielziner
[
the set designer
]
to a town on the south coast, Trinidad, an eighteenth-century coffee town that had died when sugar cane took over. It was very hard to get to. We drove up, and then couldn’t even reach the town by car, because
we had to park on the opposite side of the river. We took off our shoes and waded across, put our shoes back on, and then started into the town, this magic town; looked like a forgotten place. There were palm trees and little, wonderful, colonial buildings painted light blue and yellow and chalky red. We were enchanted and began taking pictures. All of a sudden, a man came up to me and said in españal, said, ‘You Logan?’ I said, ‘Sí, sí.’ He said, ‘Hayward want talk—telephone.’ It was absolutely impossible. How we had been able to get there, how that phone could be there, how Leland could ever have located both it and us, I still don’t know.”

To me, that was more than a story, it was Father. Whatever else happened in my life, I was confident that he could and would find me. I knew that if I was lost in the darkest part of Africa, a telephone would materialize, with Father at the other end, instructing me how to get home.

That summer, the summer of my twenty-second birthday, was important to me for many reasons. (I tended to measure my life by its summers, perhaps because I was born in one.) I felt, for the first time in four years, a sense of resolution not only about my future but about my family. Although Bridget and Bill were still hospitalized, I was hopeful about them, too. I couldn’t help wanting to believe that the fever which seemed to have gripped us all had broken. It had been such a long time; we were at our weariest.

I was living in Greenwich not far from Mother and Kenneth. I had two children, Jeff and Willie, who were two and one. Nothing in her life gave Mother more pleasure. She adored them and they adored her. She, who had always been wonderful with small children, who had even, in the last few years, given serious consideration to the idea of adopting a baby—who still dreamed of someday raising a chimpanzee—now had two grandsons at her permanent disposal. It was a fresh start.

Early in July, Kenneth left for England to see his children. He was gone for six weeks. That was when the mighty elm tree at the edge of the river inexplicably uprooted itself and toppled into the water. The property was daily overrun by municipal engineers who couldn’t determine how to remove it. Mother went into mourning. She said she was reminded of the death of a family
patriarch. In the middle of this confusion, she read a play—
Sweet Love Remember
’
d
—and decided to do it. In the last interview she ever gave, to John Keating of
Theatre Arts
, she gave as good a reason why as any:

“I loathe acting,” she said, when the subject of her erratic commitment to her trade came up. “I loathe what it does to my life. It cancels it out; you cannot live while you are working. You are a person completely surrounded by unbreachable walls.”

K
EATING
: “But isn’t that just during the rehearsal period and the hellish weeks of tryouts when you are trying to live your way into a part? Doesn’t life resume again after you have settled down for a run?”

“No.” The answer was definite. “Being in a long run is the hardest work in the world. I loathe it. When you have been playing the same role for months, saying the same words and repeating the same actions on the same cues, night after night, you find yourself replying to a speech almost before its over, putting the glass on the table a step before you should. There is nothing more difficult than keeping a performance fresh. In
The Voice of the Turtle
, which was the most perfect little play about nothing, I found myself hating it after we had been running a while. I was appalled when I recognized what I was feeling. Here is this enchanting thing, I said to myself, and I loathe it. Terrible.

“One day a ladder fell on my head. I was bruised and bleeding from every pore; I made no sense for a whole day. That was the day I read the play. And I knew I would do it; I wanted to do it. After I got over my wounds, I was afraid to read it again. I don’t know whether I was afraid because I felt I would like it just as much the second time and feel compelled to do it, or because I feared I might
not
like it as much. But I did read it and I knew I would have to say yes. This is a play about good people—I mean people you have respect for. And it is a very affirmative play. It proves that marriage can be a very good thing, building up each person, not that terrible possessive business. And with this play, every time I read it, it makes me want to do something nice, loving, for my husband. I think it will have that effect on others.”