Haywire (34 page)

Shortly after we moved to Greenwich, a heavy crate was delivered to our house with a lot of hoopla. In it was a gift from Father: one of the first television sets on the market. From the moment of its arrival, Mother treated it like an unwelcome intruder and strictly curtailed our watching to no more than three programs a week, one for each of us. We began to look forward to the evenings when she went out to dinner; the minute she left the house we’d disobediently race for the set and, feeling giddy and light-headed, stay up way past bedtime watching the black-and-white cowboy movies that were heavily featured in the pioneer days of TV. As time went by, programming became more sophisticated and Elizabeth joined our clandestine nocturnal huddle. Occasionally, thinking she heard car wheels on the gravel driveway, she’d spring up and look out the window. “Just another five minutes,” she’d say brusquely, and settle down for another hour. Best of all were the two weeks every spring when Mother went down to the Bahamas or the Virgin Islands to get some sun. She never understood why we didn’t mind her being away. “My darlings,” she’d apologize, “I hate leaving you like this—like a rat deserting a sinking ship. Will you be able to manage without me?” We’d extend her our sweetest long-suffering smiles and assure her that we’d make do somehow; off she’d go, down to the balmy coral-flecked beaches where she loved to sunbathe nude, and we, left
behind, would blithely plump up our pillows in front of the television set. One night, Elizabeth, Bridget, and I stayed up until two o’clock watching
The Dead Don’t Die
, a vampire movie that so profoundly terrified all of us that we went to bed in my room with crucifixes around our necks, our arms crossed over our chests as we lay rigidly staring up at the ceiling.

For all its shortcomings, television did link us to the rest of the world. When it came to covering events of consequence (Current Events, as the biweekly mandatory course at the Academy was called), television became a kind of animated newspaper. Although Mother herself was not a devotee of baseball, she tolerated—from a distance—our annual involvement with the World Series, then dominated by the New York Yankees and the great Joe DiMaggio. And even she had to admit, when it came to the first televised presidential campaign—Dwight D. Eisenhower versus Adlai Stevenson—that television wasn’t all bad. I never thought I’d see Mother firmly entrenched in front of Father’s “folly,” as it was referred to, but all during the McCarthy hearings, she ordered lunch and dinner served in the playroom, to which she’d banned the accursed television set. That was quite a time. We children were treated to the privilege of observing Mother’s rage, at its most imaginatively expressed, directed not at us but at the flickering images of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Vice-President Richard Nixon, and counsel Roy Cohn.

Meanwhile, Father was busying himself with a truly Machiavellian scheme. He’d determined to acquire a large fortune one way or another. So it was that Maisie Plant Hayward, the Colonel’s widow, re-entered our lives. Father, as her stepson, was her most logical heir. After all, she had no other living family. Once or twice a year, we children, innocent and fresh-faced (so Father convinced himself for this purpose), were called on to remind Maisie of his existence. And at her signal we would collect for afternoon tea at the Fifth Avenue mansion.

Maisie had reduced her living quarters to a section of the top floor: an incredible domed conservatory where the elevator arrived, a sitting room, bedroom, bathroom, which I remember chiefly for its black onyx bathtub standing on four solid-gold claw feet, and Agnes’s room. (Agnes was Maisie’s faithful personal maid.)

More interesting by far than the obligatory visit and tea (vanilla ice cream for Father and us) was the rest of the house. The servants’ quarters in the basement particularly caught my
fancy; the servants’ dining-room table was always set for twelve, with twelve half-grapefruits topped by maraschino cherries.

“Twelve!” I would invariably gasp. “Twelve people to take care of one!”

“Goddamn barmaid,” was Father’s stock reply.

A ballroom took up one of the six floors. It stretched clear from Fifth Avenue on one side to Madison Avenue on the other. We found it incomprehensible that Maisie had holed herself up in three or four of the least amusing rooms of her domain—along with an odd assortment of card tables on which to display an even odder assortment of pillboxes and jigsaw puzzles.

“Father,” I’d whisper after a while, placing one hand delicately over my favorite ruby-studded box when Maisie wasn’t looking, “do you
really
think she’d notice if this disappeared?”

“Yes I do. She probably counts them every morning.”

I never dared ask her if she’d leave it to me when she died. She wasn’t like Grandsarah at all. Afterward in the checker cab on the way down Fifth Avenue, Father would stretch with relief.

“Got it all sewed up this time,” he’d say. “You kids were a tremendous help. Can’t stand to go there by myself.”

But when, several years later, Maisie did die, Father’s hope died with her. She didn’t leave him a cent. Her vast fortune went to charity and Agnes.

In the fall of 1950, Mother and Kenneth were married. It had been a long courtship, quite long enough, we thought, having tried every trick in the book to get Kenneth to propose in front of us. In the end, our feelings about him as a stepfather were mixed. We had reservations about his ability to keep Mother in line. The problems we expected him to solve were insoluble. “She walks all over him,” Bridget used to say, sniffing. “He’s so dotty about her he never takes our part even when she’s wrong. It’s unjust.” But he was a kind man, with a gentle sense of humor and awesome reserves of patience; sometimes I couldn’t help wondering if matters wouldn’t be much worse without him around. He gave to our lives a semblance of structure and continuity if not the excitement we longed for. And there was a bizarre side to the mild-mannered, slightly stuffy Englishman the world saw: he was a crack gambler who had once supported himself handsomely by winning at chemin de fer in casinos all over the South of France and private
clubs all over London. Although he’d long since kicked the habit by stringently disciplining himself to stay away from places like Le Touquet and Biarritz, there was no card game at which Kenneth did not excel. “I’ve always held better cards than anyone I know” was his modest way of putting it. As a result, Mother, who was a natural cardsharp, took up bridge, and two or three times a week invited various of their Greenwich cronies over for dinner and a cutthroat match. On those evenings, Elizabeth would really outdo herself, and we’d start hanging around the kitchen the minute the school bus dropped us off; also, with much fanfare, we’d be offered sherry before dinner and wine instead of milk, a privilege to which Bridget and Bill held their noses but of which I took full advantage. (“I can see you’re going to turn into an alcoholic someday.” Mother’s prediction was only half joking. “All the same, my theory is it’s better for you to get drunk under parental supervision than out at some wild party. Promise me one thing: if you ever have the misfortune to find yourself in a car with an inebriated beau behind the steering wheel, hop out—even if you’re in the middle of the Merritt Parkway. And don’t hitchhike home.” “What’ll I do?” “Carry a dime and call a taxi.” “In the middle of the Parkway?” “Don’t quibble.”) Also, in spite of his pudgy physique—Bridget’s nickname for him was “Uncle Barrel”—Kenneth was a champion racquets player and belonged to the Racquets Club in New York City where he could pursue a game of backgammon between matches. Good-naturedly disregarding our merciless teasing about his potbelly, he retired gigantic silver trophy upon trophy from which we drank champagne loving cups at Christmas.

The four Wagg boys remained in England for their schooling at Sunningdale and Eton; Kenneth worked out a set of logistics that kept him in perpetual rotation between their holidays in England, his job running Horlick’s Malted Milk in Racine, Wisconsin, and his second family in Greenwich, Connecticut. This routine was not entirely to Mother’s satisfaction. She likened it to Alec Guinness’s in
The Captain’s Paradise
, playfully feigning jealousy about a consortium of imaginary mistresses. Eventually Kenneth gave up Horlick’s and joined a travel agency in New York City to which he commuted daily. In the summer of 1951, he fulfilled one of his fondest dreams by arranging to bring his four sons to this country for part of their holiday. The plan called for them to join us at a family camp on Squam Lake, New Hampshire.
That also happened to be the summer Mother decided to build a swimming pool. Typically, she exhausted herself overseeing every inch of the construction. (“Why, when I am having a pool built, do I have to enter so fully into pool building, do I have to identify myself with every workman? Why do I have to give the whole of myself to whatever I undertake, whether it’s to you children, the house, acting, packing, reading, loving—or hating? Why, whenever someone tells me a sad story, do I suffer so much more than the sufferer? There must be a flaw in my character.”) After a few weeks of throwing herself into camp life at Squam Lake, organizing picnics, tennis matches, expeditions, games, and so on, she announced that she had to go away for a rest; she was tired of friends and children, of feeling neglected, of being cooped up without a breathing space. “All I need is a week,” she said, “of being selfish eight hours a day.” So she drove back to Greenwich alone to recuperate. A week later, fully refreshed, she was back as if nothing had happened.

Although she had never done anything like that before, we were not, at the time, remotely unsettled by her behavior. It seemed a natural extension of the ordinary. We’d become accustomed to, charmed—when not irritated—by the way her emotions rose and fell, cyclically, like the tides. And always she was so sure of herself, so
positive
even about the negative, so uncompromisingly opinionated, we accepted many of her eccentricities without question. She lived by them. “It’s my nature,” she warned gaily, “to go around in high spirits most of the time and then to collapse.” A few years later, I remembered that piece of self-evaluation with a chill.

Periodically, Mother would go through her accounts and conclude she was going bankrupt. Nothing was further from the truth, but when she’d announce she was broke and would have to go back to work, we, in turn, would commiserate out loud and smile to ourselves, knowing that she’d read a script that excited her. The first time she came out of retirement was in 1949, to make a movie,
No Sad Songs for Me
. Her explanation to the three of us and to Kenneth was both earnest and self-mocking: “I feel I should earn the money while I can; forget my principles, sacrifice my integrity, and go back to Hollywood. This means being a career woman—and a neglectful mother—for two years in order to get some security. This plan will be known as my two-year plan and
certainly excludes marriage—much too expensive and distracting. I’m meeting Cohn, head of Columbia, on Tuesday, and think I’m about to cry. It’s sort of like goodbye forever.”

Forever was three months in Hollywood. During the shooting of the film, Mother’s letters and phone calls exemplified what we came to recognize as constitutional extremes of temperament, more pronounced when she worked than ever before. Everyone was so kind and complimentary it frightened her: secretaries came out of their offices to say how proud they were to have her on the lot; the producer and director were wildly enthusiastic; they all seemed to have such high expectations that she wanted to crawl back into her little Greenwich home. She felt she was posing as an actress. Her acting was phony, old-fashioned, theatrical; if she continued to be as bad, they would have to replace her. One day she was wonderful, the next she stank.

No Sad Songs for Me
was the last movie Mother ever made. It was our undeniable right, we argued vociferously, to be allowed, this one time, to see her on the screen; we were old enough not to be warped by the experience and it would be our last chance. Kenneth, similarly disadvantaged, backed us up. Mother’s capitulation was based on the premise that her performance was so awful we would all be disappointed enough to discourage her from working again. Adhering to a rigid policy that she never see herself in a movie, not even in daily rushes, she waited nervously for us outside the Radio City Music Hall where No
Sad Songs for Me
was breaking records as the Easter attraction. We emerged dazed and shaken, unable to differentiate between our mother and the woman we had just seen die of cancer. For the next few weeks we treated her with inordinate tenderness (“Never have I known any of you to be so dear and well behaved”), and insisted that she go to the doctor for a thorough checkup.

In 1952, again claiming she was broke—but, according to our private appraisal, just plain bitten by the bug—Mother returned to the Broadway stage after almost nine years of absence. The play was Terence Rattigan’s
The Deep Blue Sea
, brought over from London by Alfred de Liagre, her old friend and producer of
The Voice of the Turtle
. Never able to justify any half-measure undertaking, she “adored” the play, “adored” Terry Rattigan, “adored” Delly.

We were far more excited than she. At last we were going to witness the revelation of her most profound secret: what she was
really like as an actress. She was about to breathe life into those old press clippings that lay yellowing and collecting dust—concealed from whom did she think?—behind the blue leather covers of the ten or so scrapbooks. We were going to have the chance to sit in a theater filled with anonymous people all paying for the privilege of sharing her with us. We would hear the applause, the oohs and ahs, the sighs, the comments, the coughs all around us; at the sound of the familiar husky voice, we would smile, titillated by the bittersweet pleasure of knowing her in a way nobody else could. We took turns cuing her with her lines; she was word perfect when she went to the first cast reading. We were not taken aback at the discovery that she was even more self-demanding as an actress than as a mother. Nor were we baffled by her protestations of hatred for what she was doing, nor by her nightly fulminations about the rehearsal, the director, the two leading men, the part, herself in it, and anybody, everybody who could not immediately rectify matters with the most constructive criticism—which to her meant telling her, line by line, scene by scene, how lousy an actress she was. It all made beautiful sense. It all added up to the intangible whatever-it-was we already knew about Mother.