Haywire (17 page)

“I won’t forget, I won’t forget, you darling children. You tickle me, you really do. You’re almost as darling as your father was when he was little.”

We pestered her for stories about Father when he was a little boy, unable to conceive of such a time. “It’s a long way back to make my poor old brain go,” Grandsarah would say, with a laugh, sitting in her plum-colored armchair with her slender ankles crossed on a footstool. Then she would shake her head and look down at her lap. “Things were easier then, more fun.”

“Oh, come on, Grandsarah,
please.
” She wavered, we pressed, awed by the history she embodied. She was born November 7, 1882, in Nebraska City, Nebraska. “It was just a little bit of
a town, where nothing much ever happened, just a little country town with one packing house and a few thousand people, farmland all around for miles.” Her mother was Eloise Coe and her father Franklin P. Ireland, a lawyer from Newburyport, Massachusetts. We would lean against her chair, trying to imagine what it was like to grow up in a time and world with scant electricity and no cars at all. In good weather the Irelands harnessed their team of matched bay horses, Claude and Cora, to a trap; in winter Claude and Cora pulled the sleigh. For her fifteenth birthday, Grandsarah was given her own horse and trap, and thought she would faint from excitement. The only paved road in Nebraska City was Main Street, which was laid in brick along the ten or twelve blocks of its shopping and business district. The horse-drawn fire engine was the great attraction in town—“nothing else to get excited about.” There was no place to swim except the Missouri River and that was too dangerous. The weather was “hotter’n hell” in summer and subzero in winter. In the daytime Grandsarah wore checked gingham dresses with petticoats and drawers and in the evening she wore organdies with puffed sleeves. (Bridget and I nodded approval.) Although she had no brothers or sisters, she was never lonely. There were parties and dances everywhere, all the time. The Irelands often covered their twenty-foot fishpond with oak planks, waxed them, and danced.

Grandsarah went to boarding school but never finished the last year because she was beginning to fall in love with Will Hayward, the son of Monroe Leland Hayward, U.S. Senator from Nebraska. Grandsarah first met Will when she was sixteen and he was twenty-one, a dashing young graduate from the University of Nebraska where he had starred on the baseball and football teams and was president of his class of ’97. When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, Will exhibited signs of the adventurous streak that was to underscore his life, and promptly gave up his new law practice in Nebraska City and volunteered for service. He was placed in command of the 2nd Nebraska Infantry as captain and, after serving through the war and the Philippine insurrection, was mustered out in 1901 as a colonel.

Grandsarah thought he was irresistible, with blue eyes and a dimple in his chin: “The best-looking man I ever saw—always took good care of himself, played football night and day.” After divesting herself of another beau, she married him in March, 1901, when
she was eighteen. The wedding created an uproar in the Ireland family, who thought she was much too young, but her father stormed and wept to no avail. The Haywards were a clan of Baptists as diehard as the Irelands were Episcopalian; a compromise was reached, according to Grandsarah’s directive, in which she and Will were married by a Baptist minister (“I didn’t care who
did
it”) in an Episcopalian ceremony (“not as boring”). They moved into a two-story house that Will had had built for her, and right after they were married, he brought home the first car in Nebraska City, a Locomobile. On September 13, 1902, she gave birth to Father. He was much adored, being an only child, and his nurse from infancy, Mary Coots, stayed on with Grandsarah for the next thirty years just to keep an eye on him.

Will Hayward, in 1901, became Nebraska’s youngest county judge. A newspaper account of the period said, “He was an ardent bowler and paid for a telephone booth at the bowling alley so when someone wanted a marriage license he could be called to the courthouse.” He ran for the State Congress in 1910 and was defeated. Grandsarah used to say he never got over it. To mend his broken heart, they went on a trip around the world. With Father in tow, they traveled by boat from San Francisco to Japan and China, making their way back through Europe. Although Father was only eight years old, he had persistent memories of the journey, highlighted by his various illnesses in every country they passed through.

When they returned to the United States, the Haywards, accelerated by a new sense of discovery, moved to New York City. Grandfather joined the law firm of Wing & Russell, and Grandsarah took ballroom ice-skating lessons every day in Central Park. Father went to school at Horace Mann. Still, despite the lure of pretty shops and a bracing social climate, life wasn’t moving quickly enough. In 1911, Grandsarah went back to Omaha, Nebraska, and divorced Will Hayward. (“I just got bored with him and he was probably as bored with me.”) Her family and friends were scandalized; divorce was immoral and totally improper. Grandsarah, high-spirited as always, married a very wealthy man, Shepherd Schermerhorn, the vice-president of the United Fruit Company. They lived at 375 Park Avenue and traveled to South America every winter. Father, allegedly hating them all, went to a series of boarding schools—Garden City, Pomfret, and finally Hotchkiss, from which he graduated.

Grandfather, meanwhile, distinguished himself as a lawyer and soldier. Appointed Assistant District Attorney under Charles S. Whitman, then District Attorney, he ran Mr. Whitman’s successful campaign for Governor of New York in 1914. He went to Albany as Governor Whitman’s counsel and became Public Service Commissioner of New York in 1915, a position he resigned in 1918 to devote all of his time to the black 369th Infantry Regiment of Harlem, which he recruited, trained, and then commanded. The 369th was among the first fighting units to land in France; it served at the front under fire for 191 days, the longest period of fighting endured by any unit of the American Expeditionary Force. Highly regarded by the French, the regiment was sometimes used as shock troops because of its striking power. It was cited for valor and, after the Armistice, became the first Allied unit to enter Germany. Grandfather, known to his men as Colonel “Fighting Bill” Hayward, received the Croix de Guerre, and was made an officer of the Legion of Honor.

In 1919 he married Maisie Manwaring Plant. At this point, if Father was listening, he’d interject scathingly, “That barmaid,” because Maisie was first married to Mr. Manwaring, who managed a restaurant in a small town near New London, Connecticut, where Maisie helped him by waiting on tables until she caught the eye of the old and fabulously wealthy Commodore Morton Plant. In what many people considered an act of pure calculation, she ran off with him and had her son’s name changed to Plant, then sat back and inherited Mort’s vast fortune when he died shortly afterward. There was no doubt, though, that old Mort was crazy about her, Grandsarah would say, because he traded his house at Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue (the site of the present store) to Cartier’s in exchange for a string of pearls that they’d tracked down—after an extraordinary worldwide search—to match, perfectly, one he’d already given her.

After Grandfather married Maisie, they lived in her stone mansion, a palatial structure that took up the entire block at Eighty-sixth and Fifth Avenue and that featured both a boiserie room, which had been the Duke of Wellington’s study, and a Fragonard room, which was eventually given to the Metropolitan Museum. Father had ambiguous feelings about the whole setup and wildly resented the difference in the way he and his stepbrother, Philip Plant, much the same age, were treated. Phil Plant was outrageously pampered by his mother. She put at his disposal
unlimited sums of money to squander on every facet of his budding playboy career; when Father, however, once lost a two-hundred-dollar bet,
his
father, a stern disciplinarian, refused to lend him the money and taught him to pay his gambling debts by selling every possession, every piece of clothing he owned, except for a couple of clean shirts. “Even my cuff links,” growled Father; “it was a helluva lesson. I never, to this day, have ever been able to gamble again, not even on the stock market.” Father did develop a kind of sympathetic regard for his stepbrother. “Phil Plant was really awfully damn nice to me, although he was a strange man—once bit off a man’s ear in a bar fight. And he used to take his mother—all decked out in million-dollar paste copies of her million-dollar jewels; she always kept the originals in a safe-deposit box and never took them out except to look at them, too scared to go out in the real McCoy, goddamn stingy barmaid—he used to take her out dancing all night.” In 1925, Phil eloped to Paris with Constance Bennett; before their divorce in 1929 and her subsequent marriage to the Marquis de la Falaise, she disappeared to Switzerland for a while and returned with a child who she claimed was Phil’s, and, as such, the heir to his fortune. A famous paternity suit resulted, and after Phil’s death there was a protracted court battle in which Maisie claimed that Peter Bennett Plant was really an English child, adopted by Phil out of gallantry well after his and Constance’s divorce proceedings had been initiated. Years later the case was settled out of court, financially to Maisie’s satisfaction.

Grandfather was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York by President Harding in 1921, and later became the senior partner in the law firm of Hayward, Jones, Nutt & Murray. With his relish for politics, he became chairman of the State Republican Convention in 1920 and a delegate to the National Convention in 1924. Also in 1924 he ran, unsuccessfully, against Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., for the Republican nomination for Governor of New York. Still, there was another side to his nature, an old ache, a wildness and lust for adventure, never quite satisfied by the perimeters of civilization. At times, when it seemed to him that his life was becoming too sedentary, too socially refined, he would be afflicted by migraine headaches so prolonged and agonizing, Father said, he would pound his head against the walls of his room to ease the pain. Big-game hunting became his favorite avocation; he took Phil Plant on several expeditions to East and
Central Africa, returning with those many trophies for the Museum of Natural History, and captured live polar bears for the Bronx Zoo in an exploration trip to the Arctic.

When Father flunked out of Princeton in 1920, after his first year, his father—to whom he referred thereafter as “the Colonel”—stopped his allowance and got him a job as a reporter, at twenty-five dollars a week, on the New York
Sun
. The
Sun
soon fired him, and Father, disgruntled, went up to Princeton and talked the dean into reinstating him. Several months later he left college again, to marry Lola Gibbs, a legendary Texas beauty who was considered to be that season’s loveliest débutante; it was said that a moan of disappointment crescendoed through New York’s débutante ranks when their most desirable bachelor defected to her. True to the precepts of Fitzgeraldian romance, Father and Lola were divorced after two years and remarried after seven, doubling the length of the experience to four years the second time around. Two years after that, in 1936, Father married Mother.

Grandsarah stayed married to Shep Schermerhorn for about ten years (“I never could stand a man for more than that”), divorced him, and in 1924 married his closest friend, Lindsley Tappin, who died in 1941. “Well, thank goodness,” she’d say, clapping her hands together as if slamming a book shut, “that takes care of that. I’m all talked out, children, talked out of everything, even my wineglasses and scruffy trinkets. I’d give anything to see the three of you go to work on Maisie.” She’d place her feet carefully side by side on the pink-and-black Victorian rug and push herself up out of her armchair to put her arms around Father. “Just crazy about him—never loved anyone as much in my life.”

“Absolutely true,” Father would agree complacently as she rocked him back and forth. “I don’t think Mother’s ever said a cross word to me.”

“Oh, Leland, how could I? How could I? Such a darling boy—almost as good-looking as his father. I was never very stern with him—probably should have been, but I couldn’t help it. Always talked to him like a brother.” She’d squeeze him and laugh some more with such gusto we’d all join in. “Now, children, it’s time to pick some fruit for you to take home. Let’s go see what’s ripe before the birds get it all.”

My grandmother would put on her straw hat with cherries all around the brim, and take the three of us, each fighting for one
of her hands, out into the dying sunlight. We’d jump up and down beneath the trees, hurling ourselves against branches that glowed with strange sweet fruit—overripe persimmons and pomegranates already beginning to crack. And while the seeds trickled down our chins, staining them like blood, she, laughing her wonderful laugh, filled our paper bags until we could hardly lift them. It seemed, for those few minutes, that whatever had been eluding us all day had fallen into our sticky outstretched hands like the fruit itself.

Father produced his first play,
A Bell for Adano
, in the fall of 1944. Although his interest in the theatre was longstanding, it was said that his move away from the agency toward production was a capitulation to Mother, to her dogmatic insistence that the agency business was beneath him.

Several times that year, Bridget, Bill, and I crossed the country on the Super Chief to visit Mother, who was under contract to stay with
“The Turtle”
until December. Whenever we returned, we wrote her hundreds of letters on every conceivable kind of stationery in handwriting that changed every week under Miss Brown’s tutelage. “Dear Mother, I love you. Bill is playing. Love, Bridget.” “Dear Mother, I am going to play the wedding march when someone is married. Love, Brooke.” “Dear Mother, I love you, I can read. I can play the piano. I have a loose tooth. Love, Bridget.” “Dear Mother, I miss you. One of my upper teeth is coming in now. It feels funny. Bridget is eating fast now, Bill is eating a little faster too. Oh I want a little kitty. Love, Brooke.” Bill sent pages of odd scribbles and Father sent notes on his blue
Memo from Leland Hayward
paper, in a scrawl so large there were only three or four words to a page, “Darling—Enclosed are some exhibits from your children—love letters, rare paintings + expressions of Bridget’s soul—Also my heart, my love, my every thought, my desires—Living without you is horrible. Each month I love you more and the whole world less—You’re everything there is in life to me. Without you it is pointless and silly—I wish we had been born + always lived together—I did not have lunch with Garbo today—Leland.” And in anticipation of a trip to Europe planned for the two months’ vacation she had that summer, he dispatched a message that took up three full pages of Western Union paper: