Haywire (11 page)

“Of course her phobia about your father and business—that was the stumbling block for them. She would go crazy on the subject of the telephone when he came home. She wanted him to be a husband and father, and any interruption—no matter who the client was—the more important, the more outrageously she behaved. Terrible, and you know Leland was not a husband and a father. He was never cut out for that role. I mean, this was a man-about-town, a bon vivant, a gay, carefree, marvelous guy, with big ideas of finance and involvement in business, and suddenly she wants him to come home at 5:30 and sit down and play with the children or everybody go on a picnic or do something that was so foreign to him—he hadn’t been raised that way himself. But it was a gay house, even when he was miserable, and she had him raising vegetables on Evanston Street; he became absolutely domesticated. He loved it for a while, or he tried to convince himself that he did. That was what she wanted. Then the summer in St. Malo; she was very happy, very content. She would have liked to have him there constantly; he would come Friday and stay until Tuesday, something like that. He made compromises even though there was nothing for him to do and he was not what you call a beach fellow
.

“And he did it for a number of years, with exceptions; you know, he insisted on the telephone thing and that was the subject of very serious quarreling. And everybody talked to her about it—David
[Selznick]
and Herman—for God’s sake, Maggie, they told her, this is a guy with enormous interests and you’ve got to let him go on. No, she wouldn’t hear of it. It wasn’t her idea of a home.”

I never saw my mother sign an autograph.

In December, 1943, when I was six, Bridget, Bill, and I left Los Angeles on the Super Chief for our first trip to New York. It was wartime, before easy commercial air travel. In the next few years, we came to know all the porters on the Sante Fe Railroad very well.

Mother had just opened in
The Voice of the Turtle
, the first play she had agreed to do in seven years. Bridget, Bill, and I hadn’t seen her since she had gone East for rehearsals in late September. We had never been separated from her; we had some hazy knowledge that she was a movie star but we didn’t know what that was, although once when I was four, and considered old enough, Father had taken me to the set of
Cry Havoc
, and I’d been frightened by parachutes and dead bodies hanging from the trees, and concluded that Mother had an exciting occasional job.

While dressing for dinner one night a week before she was due to leave Los Angeles for rehearsals, she had found Father unconscious on the bathroom floor. An ambulance had come to the house and taken him to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where, we were told the next morning, he had almost died from internal hemorrhaging. Exploratory surgery was performed for bleeding ulcers, but none was discovered, nor was any cause for what had happened. By the time Bridget and I were allowed to go to the hospital to see him, Mother had left for New York, in a state of frenzy, unable to change rehearsal dates.

Our expectations about the hospital were shaped by Father’s many bedtime readings of
Madeline
having her appendix out: “Madeline soon ate and drank. On the bed there was a crank, and a crack on the ceiling had the habit of sometimes looking like a rabbit.” Father was eating custard, which Bridget regarded suspiciously; he informed us that Dave Chasen, not the doctor, had saved his life by squeezing ten pounds of raw sirloin, daily, into one large glass of blood and sending it over from his restaurant (in spite of the fact that it was wartime and even Chasen’s supplies were rationed). He also announced, scornfully, that the doctor had ordered him to quit smoking, drinking, and working so hard—an impossible combination. During his stay in the hospital, Father,
out of boredom, grew a dashing mustache. He came home for Halloween and after a few weeks went to New York for Mother’s opening. We were left with our nurse, Miss Mullens, and our tutor, Miss Brown.

Miss Brown was asked to take the three of us to New York for Christmas. She was a young, serious, dark-haired woman with glasses, and handwriting that we admired and tried to emulate. Miss Brown had become an honorary member of our family. She made it unnecessary for us to go to school, entirely to Mother’s satisfaction. Mother had paid a dutiful visit to my kindergarten class at Brentwood Town and Country the previous year and, sitting discreetly in the rear, had become chagrined when she discovered that the class was learning to count with lima beans and that the teacher’s control of English grammar had lapsed, unforgivably, as she had admonished us not to play tag and “those kind of games” in the classroom. Bill was still too young to go to school, but Mother, theorizing that the entire California school system was inadequate, took Bridget and me out the next day and we never returned. After that, Miss Brown came to our house every morning at nine o’clock, and sat with us at the long dining-room table where we learned to read and write and do arithmetic until noon. Miss Brown banished the standard reading primers from our education; instead, we cut our teeth on the most beautiful books she and Mother could find, such as
Tanglewood Tales
and
Sinbad the Sailor
, which were illustrated by Edmund Dulac, and on Father’s choice, Eugene Field’s
Poems of Childhood
, which was illustrated by Maxfield Parrish and contained some of Father’s favorite poems. Father never tired of reading us “The Dinkey-Bird” (goes singing in the amfalula tree), “The Duel” (The gingham dog and the calico cat), “The Fly-Away Horse” (Oh, a wonderful horse is the Fly-Away Horse), and “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” (one night, sailed off in a wooden shoe—sailed on a river of crystal light …). My entire concept of what the world looked like and what life promised was shaped by the sensuous textures and sinuous lines of Dulac’s fantasies, the exotic blues and purples and thick-lipped heavy-lidded sentinels of slender youths that populated Maxfield Parrish’s visions. Bridget and I learned to read quickly and voraciously.

The Super Chief was a beautiful train. It had a parlor car with a huge curved sun window at the far end and lots of card
tables with waiters in white jackets hovering nearby. Bridget and I appropriated the upper berths in our compartment: it was a good way to travel. We liked the nights best when the train became pure sound and motion and we lay on our berths staring out through little curtained windows at the invisible black countryside.

In Chicago we changed to the Twentieth Century Limited. During the layover in Chicago, we were whisked off by Mother’s younger brother Sonny, who had started a law practice there. He gave us our first bath in three days and lunch at the Pump Room.

We fell in love with New York City at once. It was a city of firsts for us. When we got off the train, our very first snow was falling. Mother and Father took us on their laps in a horse-drawn carriage through Central Park and we stuck out our tongues, laughing, and caught snowflakes; we felt them tingle and dissolve. There was a pair of turtledoves in a huge white cage in the apartment at the Hotel Pierre, and “
The Turtle
’s” author-director and producer, respectively, John Van Druten and Delly (Alfred de Liagre), waiting for us with an enormous bowl of our first caviar. Mother ecstatically spooned it onto slivers of toast and then into our mouths, and we obediently reveled in it, rolling it around our mouths and popping the tiny eggs like salty little grapes against our palates, even asking for more. Mother was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin: we would willingly have followed her anywhere, and a great deal of our pleasure must have derived from hers.

She took us to the Central Park Zoo our second morning, and in the afternoon to her real passion, the Bronx Zoo, thereby setting a pattern that never varied in the cities we visited over the years: a prompt, mandatory visit with the animals. She would spend hours talking to the keepers in the monkey house of any zoo in any city of any country she happened to be in, submerging herself in all available data pertaining to chimpanzees. Mother had long schemed about adopting a baby chimpanzee into our family. With that end in mind, when I was three and Bridget a year old (before Bill had been born and perhaps despairing that he ever would be), she had Roger Edens and Father bring us out to the M-G-M zoo on the back lot one afternoon after our naps. We were all dressed up in our coats and very excited, especially when we caught sight of Mother at a distance in an elegant black dress with a white picture hat, and a young chimpanzee cradled in each arm. We all rushed toward one another, but when Bridget, who got to her first,
reached up to hug her, the two chimps, seized by jealousy, let go of Mother’s neck and attacked Bridget with a vengeance. She had to be taken off, screaming and covered with tooth marks, to the hospital to be bandaged. This incident put a crimp in Mother’s adoption plans, much to Father’s relief. (The only animals Father could tolerate were seals, preferably seal acts at circuses observed from a safe distance, although occasionally we could wheedle him into accompanying us to the Central Park Zoo if we arranged it for feeding time.)

We went for the first time to the Museum of Natural History, where I shivered at the sight of the huge blue whale floating over my head in the main hall and the vast rooms inhabited by dinosaur skeletons, the first fleshless bones I’d ever seen. While we were standing with noses pressed against the glass behind which lay a tawny African landscape with its appropriate spiral-horned eland and tufted gnu (shot and donated by Grandfather Hayward), a young black woman tapped Mother gently on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, Miss Sullavan, can I please have your autograph?”

Mother mumbled something and shook her head. We clutched possessively at her coat, amazed that a stranger would know our mother’s name. The young woman repeated her question a little more plaintively.

Mother drew herself up and regarded the intruder with a cold eye. “I beg your pardon,” she said crisply, “but I think you have the wrong person. I am not Miss Sullavan.”

The stranger was now as confused as we. “
Margaret
Sullavan,” she said, thrusting forth a piece of paper and pencil, but Mother was already moving away.

“Come along, children,” she said, “and we’ll have a quick look at the mummies, which you will love.”

“But, Mother,” we exploded on the way down the marble stairs, “
aren’t
you Margaret Sullavan?”

“Yes, that is my professional name,” she answered, but before she could say anything else, we pounced on her with glee, clamoring all together, “But then you’ve told a lie, Mother, why did you tell such a terrible lie to such a nice lady? You don’t let
us
tell lies! She looked so sad when you said that—why didn’t you want her to know who you are?”

Mother sighed and waited for us to stop. “You see,” she said
patiently and with slow emphasis on every word, so that she would never have to say it again, and she never did, “there are a lot of people in the world who think if they get the signature—autograph, it’s called—of someone who is famous down on a piece of paper—sometimes even
collect
these signatures in books—that that will somehow make them more important. Well, I feel sorry for them because they think they can have some part of
me
by having me write my name for them, but that doesn’t mean I approve of it, and besides, I certainly don’t want to be famous or looked at when I walk down the street or take you children to a museum.” Here she gathered us in her arms as we were about to come to the mummies and spoke with such intensity that we felt swept up and purified by some glorious hurricane: “I think people who try to intrude on other people’s privacy or personal life in any way—and you children are my personal life—I think those people are rude and silly. Now, look—look!” she exclaimed, her eyes widening with excitement and her low magical voice stretching until it seemed it might snap and carry us with it, so that we sighted down her outstretched hand, with its crimson enameled nails glistening like Fabergé charms, at the room that danced before us and at the gold-inscribed sarcophagi tilted so that we could see their stained linen-wrapped contents.

One cold night, Father took me to the Morosco to see Mother in
The Voice of the Turtle
. Mother disapproved vociferously, but Father had his way. “Your mother is the best actress in the world—I ought to know, for God’s sake—after all, I’ve been her agent for eleven years.” And when Mother protested: “Come on, Maggie, let her sit backstage, can’t possibly hurt her; for God’s sake, she may never see you in anything as good again.” And so I sat backstage in the wings in my pajamas and bathrobe and saw my first play. Mother took me with her to her dressing room whenever she came offstage to change; I was enthralled watching her apply layers of mascara to her lashes and lipstick out beyond the natural lines of her own mouth (“My mouth is just a straight line, the horror of all Hollywood make-up men, and so is my crooked tooth and my mole and high forehead and lousy chin”), and move swiftly from one change to another without a superfluous motion or sound, while her maid slipped one dress over her head and removed another, leaving her hair and make-up unruffled. At the end of intermission, the stage manager would knock—“Two more
minutes, Miss Sullavan”—and Mother would grab her pink swan’s-down powder puff, dab her nose with a last fillip, and snatch my hand, whispering, “Come, darling, hurry, hurry or they’ll
murder
me!” and we would race to the wings where I would plop down in my chair and Mother would just keep on going as Sally Middleton. During one change, as she slid into a silvery dress, she admonished me breathlessly, “Now, don’t be horrified by this next scene; everybody thought this play was very immoral when they first read it, because of this scene, but remember it’s only make-believe. I close my eyes and pretend I’m somebody else, and so must you, but don’t forget I’m
really
your mother and it’s your father I
really
love, and you and Bridget and Bill.” But the audience and even I gasped audibly when, at the end of the second act, Elliott Nugent took a pair of pliers from the kitchen drawer because the zipper had stuck on her silver dress, and, wrenching it as hard as he could, stepped back as the dress fell to Mother’s feet, leaving her standing in nothing but a slip as the curtain came down. “Your mother,” reiterated Father as we all piled into a car afterward, Mother ignoring the crowd pressed against the car brandishing pens and paper, “your mother is the best actress alive today.”