Haywire (12 page)

“Oh, Leland, you’re just hopelessly biased,” she said, laughing. “Let’s go have a chocolate soda.” And we did.

The Voice of the Turtle
was an enormous hit. Mother was under contract to stay with it for a year, so after Christmas, Father, who had business to attend to on the Coast, took us home. In those days the train trip lasted four days and three nights. Father was somewhat impatient with that particular mode of travel; he’d had his own airplane for years and, before the war introduced gas rationing, had flown it across the country hundreds of times. In his office at 444 Madison Avenue hung two brightly colored maps showing his former air routes between New York and Hollywood, which he used to fly several times a month, logging an average of seventeen or eighteen hours a trip. Before he’d married Mother in 1936 (owing to my imminent birth, which also necessitated Mother’s buying her way out of
Stage Door
, a play by Edna Ferber, coincidentally another of Father’s clients), Father’d been equally in love with Kate Hepburn. He claimed that at one point, with both actresses (and clients) safely separated by three thousand miles, Mother on the stage in New York and Kate making a movie in Hollywood, he would take off in his plane from New York to
complete some deal in California, pause to refuel in Kansas City, and place phone calls to both coasts, one assuring Mother that the next two weeks of separation would be a living hell, and another to Kate ardently apprising her of his arrival in Los Angeles. He used to reminisce wistfully that Kate was the classiest dame he ever knew, because among other things, when he eloped with Mother, she’d sent a congratulatory telegram saying, “
DEAR MAGGIE, YOU HAVE JUST MARRIED THE MOST WONDERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD. BLESSINGS, KATE
.” Mother burned up the wire in a rage of jealousy.

Father’s real love, though, was flying. My first memory of him was at breakfast one morning on the brick terrace of our house in Brentwood, Los Angeles. He’d already taken up one of his planes for a pre-dawn spin before going to the office. While he drank his coffee and read the newspaper, cursing Hitler, I sat on his lap in the sun and lovingly held his ears, which were bright red and rigid with cold. “They’ll go on buzzing for the rest of the morning,” he declared. “I’ll probably go deaf from flying in an open cockpit. To tell you the truth, I’d give up the agency in a minute”—he snapped off a piece of toast—“and absolutely everything else in the world except you and Bridget if I could spend the rest of my life in an airplane. The only snag is I have to bring home the goddamn bacon.”

On his desk, in his elaborate offices on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills (which we occasionally visited with Miss Brown to observe how he brought home the bacon), were models of his favorite planes and a chrome lighter in the shape of a plane, but dominating everything else in the plush linen-and-leather-upholstered room was an immense aerial map of Thunderbird Field, an air-training center for national defense that formed the nucleus of Southwest Airways, Inc.

Father was chairman of the board of Southwest Airways. He started it with Jack Connelly, an engineering inspector for the Civil Aeronautics Authority, with capital raised from clients and friends like Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Cary Grant, Hoagy Carmichael, Gilbert Miller, and Johnny Swope (who became secretary-treasurer, as well as instructor). In the fertile Salt River Valley of Arizona, near Phoenix, against a purple backdrop of mountains, he built Thunderbird Field in 1940 with the cooperation and gratitude of the United States Army, which, understaffed at the outset of the war, was offering contracts to civilian operators who could
supply flying facilities and qualified instructors to train the burgeoning ranks of their cadets. Father and Jack Connelly leaped at the chance. As a test pilot, Jack had flown the Douglas DC-3, the four-engine DC-4, and most of the large aircraft built on the Coast, and had no trouble assembling a crew of the best instructors in the business.

Thunderbird was built from the ground up in ninety days. Father, with his indomitable sense of the aesthetic, lined up Millard Sheets, a well-known Western artist, to design it. It was dazzling. Sheets laid out the entire training field in the stylized shape of a gigantic thunderbird, the Indian god of thunder, lightning, and rain, so that viewed from the air, the observation tower formed the head, the administration building the body, the barracks the wings, and the gardens the tail feathers. He eschewed traditional drab Army colors for those of the Southwest desert, the green of sage and cactus, the cream of yucca in bloom, the streaked gray browns of sand, the terra cotta of adobe, and everywhere the tomato-red insignia, a thunderbird with lightning bolts as plumage.

The organization was soon turning out Army pilots at the rate of ten thousand a year, but to handle the Army’s stepped-up program, Father moved into high gear and built Thunderbird II, which trained air cadets from mainland China through an arrangement with Chiang Kai-shek, who sent over a select group of officers from the Chinese Army. They arrived in lots of fifty by a circuitous route through Chungking and Kunming and then over the Burma Pass to evade the Japanese blockade. Father made frequent trips to Washington to pitch his cause with General Hap Arnold, and finally got not only a contract but a loan of $200,000 from the government. He put John Swope in charge of Thunderbird II, and then moved swiftly to build Falcon Field, forty miles east of Thunderbird, near Mesa, Arizona, for the training of young British pilots. By the time the novices had completed their twenty weeks of training, they were able to swoop out of a pitch-black sky and make a blackout landing in their big North American AT-6’s on a field lit only by a couple of small flare pots. John Swope said the Chinese were the smartest and most disciplined of all, and that although language was their greatest barrier, they understood instruction easily and took to the air as if it were second nature.

Although this De Mille-like enterprise lost money at the start and Father and Jack were deeply in debt by 1941 (“Over a
million dollars,” said Father nonchalantly; “don’t tell your mother or she’ll shoot me”), they next augmented the operation with a large repair depot to overhaul engines and training planes. Then, looking to the future, Father maneuvered an Army contract to haul high-priority military cargo over a censored Pacific Coast route, a scheme that resulted in the expansion of Southwest Airways, Inc., into Pacific Airlines, eventually bought by Howard Hughes.

Mother entered into the spirit of the whole venture with characteristic gusto by taking flying lessons and getting her solo license. In 1940, Father was spending so much time in Arizona that she went on a vigorous house-hunting expedition in New Mexico. Always having hated pretentiousness of any kind, with a singular revulsion for life in Hollywood, she passed up all available grand haciendas (sprawling behind their high walls from Taos to Santa Fe) for a spare adobe bungalow on Rio Grande Boulevard in the little country town of Albuquerque, because it had a view of the Sandia Mountains through the cottonwoods in the back yard.

Before Bill was born, Bridget and I were flown there many times with our nurse, Miss Mullens; in those days, commercial airplanes had berths, and we would take off from Los Angeles in the middle of the night, lulled to sleep by the roar of the engines. William Wyler, the film director, who had been briefly married to Mother in 1934 (and was also another of Father’s clients), happened to be on one of these flights with us, and persuaded Miss Mullens to let him borrow Bridget and me for the landing; he emerged from the plane and descended the staircase with one of us on each shoulder, while Mother and Father stood gaping at the bottom.

The first thing Bridget ever said was “Father’s in Albu-quer-que,” and the first movie she and I saw, at ages one and three, was in Albuquerque’s single movie theatre on a warm desert evening while we were waiting with Mother and Father for the train to Santa Fe. The movie was
King Kong
, which Mother thought we’d enjoy because of the gorilla element. However, Bridget began to scream halfway through the underwater chase sequence, not having yet recovered from her recent chimpanzee trauma, so that Mother and Father, white-faced, rushed us out of the theatre and over to the train station platform. We all sat on a bench under the stars while Father pointed out the constellations he flew by at night and Mother, who claimed to be tone deaf, sang us the only two songs
she knew until the train came: “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag” (and smile! smile! smile!) and our all-time favorite:

To celebrate the graduation of the first Thunderbird cadets, Mother and Father gave a tremendous party at our home in Brentwood. Brentwood was then mostly fields of avocado trees. We lived at 12928 Evanston Street, a block down from Jimmy Stewart and Johnny Swope, resolute bachelors who shared a rented house, and half a block away from the Fondas. Across the street lived the screenwriter Bill Wright, his wife, Greta—blond hair wrapped in braids around her head, Bavarian peasant dresses nipped in by laces at the waist, and a fascinating, deep German-accented voice—and their two majestic German shepherds, Sergeant and Major, for whom we had great respect.

Number 12928 was a simple white colonial, set well back from the street; its most luxurious features, which persuaded Mother to buy the house, were the splendid drooping pepper and acacia trees that lined the driveway and spilled their red berries and white blossoms on the gravel. Towering over everything along the street were giant deodora pines, under which Bridget and I once found a hummingbird caught in a carpet of needles, its iridescent blue-green feathers reflecting the sun in such a way that we thought it was a rare creature from the sea miraculously beached on the shores of our garden.

Just before Bill was born in 1941, Mother and Father decided to build an addition onto the original house to accommodate the new arrival. We called it The Barn, and that’s just what it was: a red barn, attached to the main house by an open breezeway, into which we children were moved with our nurse. It was a two-story building, designed with single-minded practicality. The downstairs, left as one great room roughly sixty by eighty feet, boasted a floor that was parqueted in redwood blocks to withstand our tricycles and roller skates, and a long trestle table with benches at which we ate and had our morning lessons with Miss Brown. Two overstuffed denim-covered sofas flanked, at one end of the room, an
enormous fireplace and mantelpiece that held my doll collection. The phonograph and a small rocking chair (in which Bill would sit and rock for hours at a time while recovering from a serious mastoid operation when he was barely a year old, one side of his head shorn of its golden curls, to Mother’s sorrow) were at the other. An upstairs balcony ran around three sides of the house, so that we could lean against its pine railings and look down on the entire room below us, or out at the play yard and the Victory garden beyond through the panes of the vast picture window along the fourth side. There were four bedrooms and a sewing room that opened onto the balcony, each with checked gingham curtains and bedspreads individually colored (mine had green, Bridget’s yellow, Bill’s red, the nurse’s blue) and doors painted to match. The upstairs bathroom was about twenty feet long and had three sinks and toilets of gradated heights and a tub big enough to hold all three of us comfortably at the same time. Our meals were prepared downstairs in a kitchen with an oilcloth-covered table, in the center of which stood a detestable bottle of cod-liver oil. By the front door was a coat closet in which Bridget and I periodically locked Bill, with the threat that he would be devoured by a wolf concealed in the dark behind the coats and galoshes. Bridget and I, discovering that Bill was much more fun to dress up than our dolls, secretly renamed him Mary and trained him, under duress, to curtsy. (Curtsying was an enviable social grace outlawed by Mother, who brought us up to shake hands in a forthright way in spite of the fact that all her friends’ daughters with whom we played curtsied gracefully in their plumped-up organdies and shiny black Mary Janes.) One day, she brought Ginger Rogers (
exhausted
, Mother said, with the soles of her feet raw and
bleeding
from rehearsing some dance routine with Fred Astaire) over to The Barn to meet us. Bridget and I proudly produced Bill, his glorious curls restored, in a white challis dress sprigged with roses, outgrown by me and then Bridget. “How do you do,” he lisped to Ginger, curtsying faultlessly as he had been rehearsed under dreadful threats about the hall closet; “my name is Mary.” Mother let out a squawk of horror. Bridget and I were forbidden ever to dress him up again and the wolf was banished from the hall closet.

The Barn was pre-empted for the Thunderbird graduation party, and Bridget, Bill, and I had to spend that night in The Other House, as it was referred to. The preparations went on for
days, with specially made homespun tablecloths and napkins and pillows, and pots of red geraniums and pink petunias all over the place. The festivities started in the afternoon and went on until dawn the next morning. Father allowed me to pick out what he was going to wear. His closets were as wonderful to me as the Arabian Nights; he had overseen their construction along an entire wall of his upstairs study, with particular attention to shoe racks and drawers for shirts and handkerchiefs. Father was a born collector. He had at least three hundred pairs of shoes, which rose in neat rows to the ceiling out of my sight. Of all these, he wore only six or seven pairs in rotation, he told me once when I begged him to dress for dinner in a pair of dapper white-and-tan saddle shoes that had caught my fancy. He also had a spectacular collection of shirts, and would never travel anywhere even for a week without thirty or forty of them. But it was his handkerchief collection that was really wondrous, housed in three huge drawers according to size and color. Bridget and I used to throw off our bathrobes whenever Father was dressing to go out to dinner, and wind each other up in our favorite handkerchiefs like saris, then dance madly around the study while Father shaved and splashed bay rum all over himself and us.