Haywire (2 page)
Authors: Brooke Hayward
Leland used the phrase “those crazy kids of mine” more than once in referring to Brooke and Bill. It was said with an offhand affection that masked—or tried to mask—an irritation that he couldn’t quite manage to hide. At least that was the way I heard it.
I assured him that indeed I did see them from time to time and that I didn’t really think they were crazy—maybe a touch eccentric—but after all this was the sixties in Los Angeles. Brooke was living with her second husband, Dennis Hopper, their daughter, Marin, and her two boys, Jeffrey and Willie Thomas, from a previous marriage.
What I didn’t tell Leland was that I thought Brooke was the prettiest woman I had ever met and that I seized the opportunity whenever possible to be someplace that I thought she would be so that I could watch her animated, slightly mannered body language and listen to her uncanny, musical laugh.
I had never met Brooke’s mother, the actress Margaret Sullavan, but I had seen her in films and onstage and had heard nasty rumors about her death. Nor did I ever meet her sister, Bridget, about whom the same things were being said. I didn’t really believe them because it seemed to me improbable that two such strikingly original and attractive women would have the need to depart so suddenly and leave so many broken hearts behind.
What did I know? I was an only child, had attended all-male schools, and had a mother who was a Christian Scientist.
I did, however, know Bill Hayward who, a few years later, got divorced, worked on some very successful movies, took up drinking, fast motorcycle riding, and married an ex-girlfriend of mine. It always made me feel good when I made Bill laugh because it seemed to me he was constantly floating in a sea of sorrow and struggling not to go under.
I returned to Los Angeles and waited patiently for Brooke’s marriage to break up, which it ultimately did following the legendary Karate kick that broke her nose. I felt badly about moving in—well, not
that
badly—because I liked Dennis. He had shared his knowledge and love of the contemporary art scene with me, and I knew how badly I would feel under the circumstances. But there they were—the prettiest woman I had ever seen and her unbearably cute daughter who, at two years old, had bright gold hair that Brooke had cut in an adorable Dutch bob, which Marin hated because it made her look “different.”
There was a slight problem in that I was married at the time to a very nice person. But we got around that by—as a musician friend of mine used to say: “suffering in another key.”
Brooke had been a great supporter of Dennis’s work—she was a huge fan of
Easy Rider
and insisted, in the face of some skepticism, that
The Last Movie
was a masterpiece. She was also very complimentary and helpful about whatever it was that I was working on. But I always thought that she was meant to be more than a muse.
She started to write about her family, having been encouraged by a number of friends. Along the way she faced the kind of depression—yes, the word
suicidal
comes to mind—when the going got tricky and the memories became threatening. More than once I saw her typing and crying at the same time. All her friends encouraged her to keep going, to persist when she wanted to quit, because there was a sense that she was on to something more than a slight memoir—something that would turn out to be a book filled with real language and real art.
It’s decades later now. Bill Hayward, divorced and alone, physically shattered after the terrible bike accident that we all expected, shot himself to death two years ago.
Earlier this evening I was at a party for Brooke’s daughter, Marin, whose father, Dennis, died a few days ago and will be buried tomorrow in Taos, New Mexico. I watched Marin across the room and saw her make the same gestures that I saw Brooke make a long time ago and heard her laugh a version of her mother’s laugh.
The pleasures of the past live on, mixed in all of us. So do the pains. But we can outrun them if we try.
This book is proof of that.
May 2010
his book is a personal memoir; but it is also a larger story—about carelessness and guilt, and the wreckage they can make of lives
.
My family seems to me the personification
of
these qualities. Both my parents were exceptional in ordinary ways: they were attractive, intelligent, and well educated. It was the scope and sweep of their talent and success that made them distinctive. My mother was an actress, Margaret Sullavan, and my father a theatrical producer, Leland Hayward. They were happily married for ten years, had three children in even succession (I am the oldest), and lived in California during the thirties and early forties, a golden era not only for movies but for children who, like us, grew up surrounded by its opulent trappings. When they divorced, the impact was naturally profound and ultimately disastrous—not so much for them, perhaps, as for their children, two of whom eventually did time in mental institutions
.
However, this is not primarily about my parents’ lives, except as they bore directly upon our own. It is really about their children—Bridget, Bill, and me—each of whom reacted uniquely to the haphazard slew of catastrophes, looking for a means of escape
.
Other people marry and divorce, leaving other children angry and disturbed. What distinguishes this particular story are the particular qualities of its protagonists, and the extraordinary effects they had on their children. Our lives were a series of extremes. A thanksgiving of riches was bestowed on us at birth: grace and joy and a fair share of beauty; privilege and power. Those blessings which luck had overlooked could be bought. We seemed to exist above the squalor of suffering as most people know it. We were envied. But there were also more expectations, more marriages (my mother four times, my father five), and more damage: more of us (three out of five) suffered mental breakdowns. My parents failed, as they succeeded—on a massive scale. And they left behind them a legacy, vested in their children, that put the odds against survival ineluctably high
.
he had called me late the night before
.
Looking back, I recall (or invent?) an urgency to her tone, but really all she’d said was “Can you have breakfast tomorrow?”
“Hmm. What time? Do you have the proper ingredients? English muffins? Marmalade, et cetera?” We’d never shaken the habit of testing one another.
“Of course, you spoiled brat. Come at ten; you shall have ginger marmalade from Bloomingdale’s,
fresh
orange juice I shall squeeze personally, boiled eggs—your customary five and a half minutes. And of course there will be fascinating conversation.”
“Might I have a clue?” We’d also become adept at approaching each other with oblique, occasionally fake, courtesy.
Silence, as I’d expected. Then: “Okay, do you have a good gynecologist?”
My silence. “Of course. What for?”
“Brooke, listen.” She was suddenly singing. “I have never ever been so happy in my life—I think I’m pregnant.”
“What?”
I was predictably stunned, but less by that possibility than by her confiding in me. “How the hell did you get pregnant?”
“Oh,” she said, giggling, “probably from a toilet seat.”
“Bridget. For God’s sake, have you gone mad? I mean, how can you possibly be twenty-one years old and reasonably, one hopes,
reasonably
intelligent and not have been to a—”
“Brooke, listen.” She was positively frenzied with elation. “Listen, it’s entirely possible that I want to get married, I’m so in love. Do you hear me?
Married!
”
This conversation was moving just out of my reach, like a smoke ring. All I could say was “Yes. I see what you mean about breakfast—yes, indeed. Might one ask who the expectant father is? No, never mind.”
“Ten o’clock tomorrow. What’s he like, is he nice, does he hurt?” I knew she meant the gynecologist.
“Yes, no, never mind. Actually he’s from India—nice blend of exotic and imperturbable. Forget it, go to sleep.”
“Okay, see you in the morning. Farewell.” Farewell. Nobody but Bridget ever said goodbye to me like that; all her beginnings and endings where I was concerned were unpredictable, and most of the dialogue in between was enigmatic, a foreign language to any outsider. But for my benefit she talked in her own private shorthand,
and what farewell meant was that she wanted me to button up my overcoat and take good care of myself until ten in the morning, because she would miss me in a way that would take far too much sentimental effort to express. I knew what she meant. Often I missed her while we were in the same room together.
I contemplated the phone for some time. Never had I heard her so oddly gay and forthright; as a matter of fact, we hadn’t discussed sex since adolescence. Her entire inner life was secretive and mysterious, and no one dared violate it. She sent out powerful “No Trespassing” signals and I had learned to honor them. It crossed my mind that my sister was drunk.
Still, the next morning—a warm October day in 1960—I stood outside her apartment door, nonplussed by the stack of mail and the furled
New York Times
propped up against it. The door itself was slowly getting on my nerves. It didn’t open when I rang the doorbell for the fifth or sixth time. It didn’t have a crack underneath big enough for a worthwhile view of the interior, although idiotically I’d got down on my hands and knees and looked anyway. Nor did I have a key to unlock it. Even if she
had
been drunk the night before, which was unlikely—besides, I prided myself on being able to interpret at least her external behavior—she would have been incapable of losing track of her invitation; she was a creature of infuriating compulsion, particularly in matters of time and place, always fussing about my lack of regard for either. Ever since she’d moved from her one-room, third-floor apartment (to which I had possessed a key, much used) to the comparative luxury of an apartment one floor higher with an actual separate bedroom and view (of the building across the street), I’d felt vaguely displaced and surly. For the last year, I’d thought of that little one-room apartment as mine, an irrational attachment, since I was not exactly homeless. Until a month before, I’d been living not only in a commodious house in Greenwich, Connecticut, but also, during the week, in a
pied-à-terre
on East Seventy-second Street. My marriage to Michael Thomas, art historian and budding investment banker, so blithely undertaken during undergraduate days at Vassar and Yale, had, when removed from the insular academic atmosphere of New Haven, fallen apart. We were no longer wrapped in cotton wool; I was no longer a child bride. Now that
our divorce was final, I’d moved our two small children into New York and into my own spacious apartment on Central Park West. I continued, however, to drop by Bridget’s whenever I had five minutes between modeling jobs and interviews. “Just checking out my make-up,” I’d announce breezily, or, “Gotta use your phone.” The idea of telling my sister I’d really come to see her would never have crossed my mind.
