Haywire (23 page)

While we were still in Connecticut and Father was in California readying the house for our arrival, he wrote me,

Typically, the feature of the house that Mother most loved, its rugged isolation, was the very one that Father found most disagreeable. Given an opportunity to purchase, for a minimal sum of money, all the acres and acres of surrounding land known as the Doheny Estate, he turned it down without hesitation, not wanting to believe that such rough terrain would ever be worth anything; fifteen years later he cursed himself for not having the foresight to
know that, owing to sheer greed and the improved land development techniques that kept pace with it—Beverly Hills real estate being in particular demand—the Doheny Estate mountains would be hacked into ziggurats, graded and filled and studded with expensive houses on view lots, and promoted into the most valuable real estate in Los Angeles.

In those days the sky belonged to patrols of turkey buzzards circling it leisurely, the hills swarmed with jackrabbits and deer, and at night packs of coyotes gathered on our lawn to howl at the moon. To Father’s horror, the ground was infested with snakes, both rattlesnakes and their natural enemies, kingsnakes, a differentiation in species that interested him not at all. Since no fewer than two rattlesnakes a week were seen around the house, Bridget, Bill, and I weren’t allowed to wander out alone until we were given lessons in how to kill them if necessary and how, if we were bitten, to use the emergency anti-venom kit stashed in a kitchen cupboard. Father, for all his alleged queasiness, devised his own method of dispatching rattlesnakes, one that at least allowed him to preserve some distance from his victims both alive and dead: observing that the dirt road, which acted as a powerful conductor for solar heat, was the most likely spot for snakes to congregate, he would, regularly, hop in the car and pick them off with it, grimly bouncing in and out of gullies, slamming the car into reverse to back over any he’d missed, and sometimes, as they scattered before him, chasing them up and down the dirt road for hours.

For Bridget, Bill, and me, the years 1946 and 1947 were spent in a mishmash of educational systems, depending on whichever appealed to Mother’s mood of the moment. Bridget and I went to Westlake, a private school for girls in Beverly Hills, until Mother concluded that it was too snobbish—we had been singled out by several older students as being the children of a movie star, and that distinction was somehow more insidious in Beverly Hills than in Connecticut. Then, for a period, we went back to public school, joined by Bill, who was at last old enough and delighted not to be left behind every morning: the Warner Avenue School had a reputation for being “progressive,” and Mother had an unlimited capacity to be enchanted by anything new. Her love affair with progressive education ended as soon as she discovered that the beautiful handwriting Miss Brown had laboriously tried to inculcate in us for years wasn’t taught at the Warner Avenue School
until fourth-grade level, and that not only were our classmates still back in the dark ages
printing
their names at a snail’s pace, but also they had yet to find out what long division meant.

After that, it was back to the good old days of Miss Brown, and Miss Brown alone. Once again she came to the house and tutored us every morning from nine to twelve. Three afternoons a week, now that we were older and presumably needed supplementary companionship, we were picked up by the Tocaloma Girls’ and Boys’ Club station wagons and taken off, with a group of our peers, to the Santa Monica Ice-Skating Rink or the Rocking Horse Stables, or, on Saturdays, to amusements farther afield like Knott’s Berry Farm.

It never occurred to us that this was an unusual arrangement, since any other to which we might have compared it was equally unusual. Even so, it would have been unthinkable to argue; we were brought up on the premise that to argue with one’s parents was fundamentally bad manners and bad manners were intolerable. (“I will forgive you anything you ever do if you do it with good manners,” Father would say, handing us Munro Leaf’s book
Manners Can Be Fun
. “Except tell a lie,” expostulated Mother.) And, manners notwithstanding, it would have been hopeless to argue with Mother, because whatever she said was dogma. We had learned that the fine art of wheedling, effectively practiced by our friends on their parents, was a waste of time with Mother. It was fruitless to try the time-honored plea, “But everyone else we know gets to …” because that, to Mother, was the most unpardonable excuse of all, showing a singular lack of individuality. “It couldn’t matter less to me what everyone else you know is allowed to do,” she would say, trying to be patient. “That is certainly no criterion of right or wrong, only of their parents’ taste, which is not necessarily something I have to or want to emulate. I have a responsibility to you and that is to teach you a set of values which is good and strong enough not to be influenced by—corrupted by—anyone else’s, no matter how attractive theirs may seem to be. You have to learn to think for yourselves.”

She meant it. There was no getting around her if she disapproved of something. Comic books were barred from the house under penalty of death, she said, because they were strictly for the mentally retarded, as were radio programs; if we felt the need for entertainment, we could read, instead of comics, books—any books
we wanted, which meant that by the time we were nine or ten we had run out of our own and were rifling through Mother and Father’s library. There were no extenuating circumstances whatsoever for the presence in the house of Coca-Cola or candy, the pure embodiment of tooth decay; Mother was always able to point to this policy with justifiable pride, since as a result of it, none of us ever had a single cavity and, furthermore, never developed the trace of a sweet tooth.

We did not miss school at all, nor did we feel particularly deprived of playmates; we had each other, and as additional companions Danny and Diane Snodmuller, the children of the Dohenys’ caretaker, who lived across the road in a shack behind the heavy wire fencing that marked one corner of the property line. We were fascinated by everything to do with Danny and Diane: they were twins, they were poor, they were adventurous, they never had to take baths, they were a perfect age for us (halfway between Bridget and me), they taught us how to do cartwheels, they slept in a real tree house, and they had stacks of comics. Mother, of course, did not know about the last, or she would not have encouraged us to spend so much time over at their house. Danny and Diane were wonderful. They had to go to public school every morning, so we would walk with them down to where the dirt road ran into Coldwater Canyon, just to get in a game of tag before either the bus arrived for them or Miss Brown for us.

Afternoons if the weather was good, we’d put on our cowboy boots and set off in a tight band to roam the sagebrush-covered hills, sometimes aimlessly, sometimes on the trail of scorpions and lizards and flowering cactus. Danny and Bill practiced peeing at distant objects and became proficient at hitting anything within a radius of ten or twelve feet, while Bridget, Diane, and I watched enviously and tramped around looking for nice scorching rocks, which made especially satisfactory targets because they sizzled and steamed like dry ice when the urine hit them.

From the very beginning, Bridget kept herself slightly aloof from our unruly activities. She was not a tomboy and made no bones about it. She had neither the stamina for these excursions nor any interest in the typically rough games the rest of us liked to play at that age, where we chose sides and were pitted against each other for a rowdy chase sequence of cowboys-and-Indians or pirates. She would join us because we would coax or shame her into it,
when she would really have been much more comfortable playing with her dolls or drawing a picture or reading. Bridget always seemed content to be alone, but this was partly because she felt so ill at ease with the alternative; whenever the three of us expanded into a larger group, it became an unfamiliar, disorderly, and threatening competition with which she couldn’t cope. Yet she didn’t want to be left out, either; there was a conspiratorial element that attracted her, and nowhere was this element as apparent as in our friendship with Jane and Peter Fonda.

The Fondas went back forever in time as we knew it, and were to go forward forever in time to come. Our families were united in the most abstract but intricately woven pattern. The Haywards and the Fondas: our mother had been married to their father and, after they had divorced, almost remarried him; our father was their father’s agent and eventually, with
Mr. Roberts
, his producer. It seemed we had been born into a conspiracy and had no choice except to carry on. Brooke, Jane, Bridget, Peter, Bill. We graduated very nicely in age, all of us together. The spread was perfect. When Jane and I were nine, Bridget was seven, Peter was six, and Bill was five. Not only were we a conspiracy but an extended family, perhaps by accident, perhaps by design. Who knew? We talked about it among ourselves, but certainly our parents never discussed it with us and I can’t remember how or when we discovered that once upon a time, before any of us had been thought of, our mother and their father had been married and very much in love. We had all grown up half a block away from each other in Brentwood, and had simultaneously moved away, we to our farmhouse in Connecticut and the Fondas to an enormous piece of property up on Tigertail Road. Bridget, Bill, and I were often taken there to play; our station wagon would pull up the long dirt driveway, we’d all pour out, and the five of us would go absolutely crazy.

Although Jane and I as the oldest were the ringleaders in most of our capers, it was Peter who, casting around madly for a way to make a contribution, first stumbled on the idea of smoking. He staged his corruption scene well, looking forward to an
occasion
, the next time we all got together. Bridget, Bill, and I were driven over after school one day; Peter was waiting for us expectantly out by the gas pump that the Fondas had installed to fuel their tractor. He was sitting under an umbrella in his red wagon
with a display of cigarette butts he’d been assembling from ashtrays around the house, and a supply of paper Stork Club cigarette holders he’d filched from his mother. We were all sitting around smoking and coughing—with Peter in a state of glory, about to conclude his lesson by showing us how, if we punched holes in the butts, they would burn up and we wouldn’t have to drag as much—when his mother’s masseuse caught sight of us and rushed back into the house to report us. “Mrs. Fonda, all the children are smoking!” That was the end of it. Jane and Peter were punished by having to chain-smoke a full pack of Pall Malls each until they retched (Jane, being more clever than Peter, pretended to get sick right away, but Peter held out and kept smoking until he actually got sick and vomited), and, as usual in these matters, the Haywards were banished from Fonda territory for weeks.

The Fonda territory was nine acres of farmland that Hank had built up from scratch: redwood fences, compost heaps, a chicken coop, a stable, a tennis court, a pool, and lovingly planted trees—oak trees, beech trees, fruit trees, and behind the pool, his real pride and joy, pine trees, with special retaining walls constructed around them to hold in the water that was needed to soak the arid ground. Hank used to stand and water them for hours in the hope that someday they would grow big enough to surround the house.

There was a big open field up in back—the North 40, Hank called it—where Bill and Peter used to have rock fights. One of them would position himself in a trench and the other in the log cabin that Hank had built as a playhouse, and with a characteristic lack of antagonism, they would chuck rocks and pieces of brick at each other, using ashcan tops as shields. One time, incited by Jane and me, the five of us hid behind the pine trees and methodically threw rocks, pine cones, clods of earth, anything we could find at every car that passed us on the road until finally we hit one. Its enraged owner got out and chased us across the field, but we were too nimble for him—all except Peter, who was nabbed in a clump of beeches, whereupon Jane and I, overflowing with adrenalin and bravado, wheeled around and went back for him, screaming at the man to let go of him that minute. Frances Fonda made an appearance, and the Haywards were sent home fast.

Another time Bill and Peter, out of idle curiosity, struck a match and set fire to the dry grass in the North 40. Pleased with
the results, they settled down to see how quickly the blaze would spread, which was so much faster than they had anticipated that they had to jump up, scamper down to the tennis court for some empty tennis-ball cans, race over to the pool to fill them with water, and then dash back up to the fire. By that time it was raging out of control, so the fire department had to be called; before the afternoon was over, one fireman had been bitten by a rattlesnake and the whole North 40 burned up.