Haywire (52 page)

In the middle of the night in the spring of 2008, I received phone calls from both Larry Hagman and Peter Fonda telling me Bill had shot himself in the chest in his mobile home.

We decided he should be cremated. Larry gave a memorial service
on top of his mountain overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Among the guests were the Uglies who brought a cannon that they set up below the house. At the end of the service, the Uglies shot Bill’s ashes out of the cannon down the mountain, toward the Pacific.

After
Haywire
was published in 1977, I had returned to New York. What a pleasure after sixteen years in Los Angeles! In 1981 I bought a loft on Nineteenth Street and Fifth Avenue—an extremely unusual thing to do in those days—and was asked to write an article about it for
House and Garden
. Thus began a new career: many years of writing many articles for many magazines.

I was also under contract with Knopf to write a book about Los Angeles and the art world of the 1960s, but my ex, Dennis Hopper, threatened to sue me if I did. The best First Amendment lawyer in New York City at the time took me to lunch and explained that such a book, if honestly written, would have a catastrophic effect on Dennis’s career and I would lose the suit. Needless to say that book has never been written.

Then in 1985 I married Peter Duchin whom I had known since the fifties when he was at Yale and after whose dad, Eddy, I named my pet squirrel (Mr. Duchin) in 1943; we separated in 2008.

From time to time the distant past does creep up on me and I wonder why I started
Haywire
in the first place. In 1973 I was thirty-six years old and I had written nothing since a children’s book at the age of twelve, which my mother would not allow to be published. Living in Los Angeles, I became very involved with the Daniel Ellsberg trial.
The New York Times
sent a reporter, Martin Arnold, to cover it, and sitting next to each other everyday in the L.A. courtroom, we became friends. One night at dinner he asked me about my life, and after I described my childhood, his response was, “Write it. It’s a book.” I stuttered that that was an insane idea—I wasn’t a writer. Marty replied, “Let me be the judge of that. Write three pages beginning with your sister’s death, and I’ll tell you if you should continue.”

So I did and he did. But that was the easy part. It took me another three years to complete—and then only with the help of two other friends (Marty had gone back to New York) who were also good writers: Johanna Mankiewicz (who was killed by a taxi in 1974) and Buck Henry, who made me continue for her sake. Buck took over editing
the last part before I turned it in to Bob Gottlieb (the publisher and my editor at Knopf). I remember Buck saying, “Look at all these tenses! When I write a screenplay, thank God I only have to deal with
one
tense—the present!”

Bless you, Buck, and of course, Bob Gottlieb, who confided to me when we finished, “Damn good. Let’s hope someone out there reads it.”

—Brooke Hayward,
May 2010