Haywire (30 page)

Although Cornelius’s produce business suffered from the slow postwar recovery in the South, Mother remembered a pleasant,
gracious style of living: a cheerful house on Westover Street facing the park; wide porches, where, on hot summer afternoons, she entertained swarms of ardent beaus, to the vast irritation of her younger brother, Sonny (who would hover just inside the screen door and loudly stir the ice cubes in his iced-tea glass to drive them away); Sunday School at St. Andrews Church, where Cornelius was a vestryman; sewing and dancing classes; exquisite dresses stitched by the family seamstress; wonderful food; gay parties to celebrate her father’s yearly hunting expeditions, from which he returned laden down with partridges and pheasant. Cornelius had a reputation for being one of the best shots in Virginia; from him Mother inherited a passion for hunting and her treasured Parker 28-gauge shotgun—its handle marvelously engraved with game birds and animals.

Mother told us that she had become an actress by accident. Her real ambition, when she was young, was to be a dancer. From those early photographs at camp and school, it was clear she would have made a good one, whether affecting the limpid, stylized poses and Greek tunics of Isadora Duncan, or perching merrily on a tree stump in the jerkin and feathered cock hat of Peter Pan. Of all the accomplishments in her life, I only heard her boast of two: her award, one summer, as best all-round athlete at Camp Aloha (a dog-eared, gray felt letter “A,” carefully affixed to the scrapbook page with ancient Scotch tape), and her senior year at Chatham Episcopal Institute, in which she was elected president of the Student Council, voted the “most talented” girl in her class, and chosen to deliver the salutatory oration at its Commencement in 1927 (“O! so light a foot will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint”-M.B.S.).

After Chatham, she spent a year at Sullins College, Virginia, where she appeared to have excelled at every activity she undertook (not the least of which was flirting outrageously, to judge from the trail of dance cards and heartbroken letters in Volume I), and was named “most popular” girl in her class.

At the end of the year, she returned to Norfolk for her summer vacation. Suddenly life there seemed unutterably boring. Worse, the future, as projected by her traditional Southern upbringing and her parents’ expectations, could only become more respectable and stultifying. She was young; she had determination, curiosity, ambition, and talent without knowing exactly how much,
in what way, or how to measure any of those qualities against what standards. Her feet itched. Within a few months she left home and went north to stay in Boston with her half-sister, Weedie. From the Boston
Sunday Post
, May, 1929, was pasted a newspaper clipping of Mother in slacks and sneakers ebulliently executing a high kick: “High-steppers,” read the heavily penciled caption under it, “of the coming Harvard Dramatic Club show,
Close Up
, to be given this week.… Peggy Sullavan of Norfolk, Virginia …” And there, in that show, her future began.

Josh Logan, later appointed one of our four godfathers, remembers:

“I must have been twenty and she must have been eighteen. I was a student at Princeton; I went up to Harvard one weekend to see a production of the Harvard Dramatic Society and the Hasty Pudding Club. They had written a musical; they were supposed to have Radcliffe girls to dance in the chorus; but they had found a girl from Sullins College, Virginia, who was up there for some reason.”
[
As Mother explained it, “Pretending to go to secretarial school, but really taking dancing classes like mad and then trying to pay for them by selling books at the Harvard Coop.”
]
“She was one of the girls in the line.”

Another person in the cast who had nothing whatsoever to do with Harvard was Henry Fonda, who was about five years older than anybody else. He recalls:

“I was working in a repertory company in Washington, D.C., when I got a wire from a friend of mine, Bernie Hanighen, who was the president of the Harvard Dramatic Club. I used to do a little comedy character at parties, called him Little Elmer. Bernie had written Little Elmer into his musical, but he couldn’t find an undergraduate at Harvard who could play him—this show was supposed to be strictly undergraduate—so he wired me. And he had cast, among others, a girl.… She was a character even the first time I met her. This was a typical burlesque type of comedy and one of the pieces of business was: she crosses the stage while I’m going in the other direction, I do a big take, make some gesture or comment, she turns and slaps me and just keeps walking. But when this girl
slapped me, every time in rehearsal and every performance, it was a solid-rock slap—you would have thought I could only say, ‘Who is this bitch? Get her out of my sight. But it didn’t work that way, see. She intrigued me.”

Josh continues:

“And I really think that’s the first time I saw Margaret Sullavan. She was darling and she had this kind of husky, breathy, Southern voice.… I met her afterwards; Charlie [Leatherbee] took me aside; he’d invited her to be a member of the company that summer—that meant bringing her down to Falmouth, Massachusetts, to be in the University Players—as our ingénue. ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ he asked, and I said, ‘She seems wonderful, but are you sure she can do all the big jobs like that?’

“The next time I saw Peggy, as we called her, and as I called her to the very end, was when we were building our new theatre at Old Silver Beach and rehearsing the opening production, a play called
The Devil in the Cheese.
She and Hank were the main characters. About four days before opening, Bretaigne Windust, who was directing the play—and always had a handkerchief tied around his forehead for some reason—said, ‘No more rehearsals until the theatre’s finished.’ I said, ‘We haven’t learned our lines yet.’ He said, ‘We can’t put on a play without a theatre. Go on, help work on it, we’ve got to get it finished.’ So suddenly the whole company was nailing away, building scenery, installing seats: Fonda and I were way up on the grid for 72 hours putting in the counterweight system, Fonda face down most of that time, stretched out over the beams on his stomach, while I swung below him in a boatswain’s gear with a mouthful of nails trying to thread the ropes through the sheaves; Windust was everywhere, still running around with a handkerchief around his head
.

“It was a very complicated show,
The Devil in the Cheese,
one of the silliest and most difficult, and we had to have a lot of props. Just to give you an idea: the first act takes place in an old monastery on a Greek mountaintop and the only way to enter is to be hoisted up in a net from the earth below. Goldina Quigley, the part that Peggy played, is brought there by her mother and father on the pretext they are looking for Greek relics. The real
reason is to get her away from Jimmy Chard, the boy she’s fallen in love with (who eventually arrives by airplane and makes a spectacular crash landing), played by Henry Fonda. One of the monks gives Mr. Quigley an old amphora and a piece of cheese: ‘Eat this cheese and know youth,’ says the monk, so Mr. Quigley bites into the cheese, and suddenly there’s a great green flash and out of the amphora leaps the Little God Min (some ancient Egyptian deity), who offers to take Mr. Quigley on a trip through his daughter’s head. The second act takes place in Goldina’s brain and consists of all her daydreams, enacted by Peggy and Hank: first they’re on a sailboat, and while she washes dishes and drys them in a net strung out the cabin porthole, he catches a flying fish and pops it in the kettle for dinner; then they get wrecked on a desert island where they play the same scene, only this time he’s found a turtle which she pops in the supposed dinner pot, and he brings her a monkey which they train—here there’s a little time lapse and the monkey grows up into a gorilla—to take care of their baby. And so on
.

“Well, you can imagine the props we had to round up. We never had any kind of dress rehearsal. Nobody had had any sleep for four days. The audience arrived for the opening; the curtain was six feet off the ground, so people could see us desperately trying to cover these white-pine steps that were supposed to be old rocks on the side of the Greek monastery. When we finally dropped the curtain, the audience applauded. I said, ‘Windust, please go out and make a speech. Explain to them that we’re not ready; maybe they ought to go home.’ He said, ‘No, no, I’ll make a speech, but we’re going to do this show come hell or high water. I’ve brought my full-dress suit and I will not make a speech without it.’ He had to go downstairs; it took five or six minutes at least to put on a full-dress suit and white tie; when he walked out to make the speech, he still had that bloody handkerchief around his head. He made quite a speech, but the pounding of the nails was so loud the audience never heard what he said. There was such confusion, such hysteria; we were all in terror that this was going to be a failure, this, the beginning of all of our lives. Windust put on a monk’s outfit over his full-dress suit (he had to be a monk along with me), we were ready to pull the curtain up, and he said, ‘Wait a minute! We’ve got to get those lights out of the way. They’ll cover everybody.’ So the whole company came and pulled on the ropes but the ropes were twisted and the lights wouldn’t budge. So Windy said, ‘Put the
lights on the floor.’ Crash! When those lights hit, they made the biggest noise you ever heard. And the audience howled and applauded. The curtain went up
.

“Unfortunately we’d never tested the apparatus for bringing up people from the cellar; Kent Smith, who played Mr. Quigley’s butler, was supposed to be hauled up first, but the winches kept sticking and the basket that contained him started whirling at a dervish speed; it took ten minutes longer than we’d gauged to get poor Kent up high enough to be seen, so we all sang Greek chants until he finally appeared. And again the audience applauded. Now three people, the Quigley family, had to be brought up. A very old lady named Lily Jones was playing Goldina’s mother; as the basket rose from the cellar below the stage, it whirled five times as fast as before, because it was so much heavier, and Lily Jones started screaming with the highest, most bloodcurdling scream that has ever been known, like a person being throttled to death. Finally the basket, still whirling, hove into view; two or three monks grabbed it, pulled it towards the stage for a landing, and out clumped the three Quigleys
.

“This was Margaret Sullavan’s début on the professional stage. And to my dying day, I will remember the first words out of her mouth. Just as though she were in the most successful play that had ever been written and she had the most wonderful lines to say, with the most aplomb I had ever seen, she said, ‘Now don’t get hysterical, Mother, we’re here.’ And I just thought, She must be the greatest actress who ever lived, because by rights she shouldn’t be able to say anything at all. But she went right through the play, improvising with the same calm security, with everything around her going wrong, and that was just the beginning. It went wrong and went wrong [“Particularly the monkey,” Mother used to tell us, “who, in the South Sea love scene between Hank and me, peed all over my very skimpy flowered bra.” “She was absolutely magnificent,” said Hank, “nothing fazed her”]. Finally the curtain went down. I should say, from then on we lived happily ever after, because although it was a disastrous night, the people who were there formed a kind of club, the audience that had seen the opening night of
The Devil in the Cheese.

“After that, we began to put on really great shows. And Peggy became, within an instant, an accomplished actress. She went through thirty, forty, fifty shows with us over the years, playing every
kind of part, every age, mostly leading ladies or ingénues, but the extraordinary thing was she’d never really had a great deal of training. If there was ever a natural, she was it. She had, from the beginning, that magic, that indescribable quality that is just extremely rare and immediately makes a star of a person. She was a true star. She was a true original. And we were very, very lucky to have her, because in a sense she, more than anyone else, put us all on the map. The audiences in Falmouth fell madly in love with her, as later they did again in Baltimore.…”

Mother, who always thought of that period of her life as its happiest, was beginning to fall madly in love with Hank Fonda.

Hank remembers:

“My first meeting with her in Cambridge and then playing with her in
The Devil in the Cheese
added up to a kind of nightmare. But slowly through the summer it became a romance. Look, everybody loved her. She was fun-loving, fun on the beach playing games. If she found a water pistol, she was the one who squirted water on everybody. And very early it became obvious she was a brilliant actress. I don’t know what kind of experience she’d had; I don’t think any. She had presence, which is something you’re born with, you don’t acquire. You don’t learn it. People just noticed her whether she was walking in a market or on the beach or on the stage. And soon it was clear she was the talent; she played all the good parts, but the one I remember most was as Tessa in
The Constant Nymph.
She was unforgettable in that.…”

Josh continues:

“And several years later, when we did
The Constant Nymph
in Baltimore, she and Hank Fonda had to sing a little duet which was a very complicated bit of harmonizing. Peggy, who was always terrified of singing—although I don’t believe that she was as unmusical as she always pretended to be—had to sing the melody while he sang the harmony, but she would always drift into the harmony the minute she heard him and then he would dominate it. Now, Fonda had a true musical ear, except he had the strangest voice
when he sang, the same voice he has when he laughs. It was kind of like a strangled sob, as though he were weeping at the top of his voice. It was a terrible sound. Anyway, the song was called ‘Ah, Sigh Not So,’ and even with the bad singing, the two of them were so enchanting, so romantic, that everyone was moved. Through that little melody the characters they were playing were supposed to fall in love. And shortly after that, Peggy and Hank announced that they were going to be married.”