Haywire (37 page)

Bridget and I loved to browse through her closets, and Bill loved to bask in her attentions. “Have some more pepper, Billy,” she’d say, with a chuckle, watching him grind black pepper over his smoked salmon until there was no pink visible. “You’re a man after my own heart. No bland diets for you and me. Load everything up with spice—that’s what life should be about.”

We also had a stepsister, Kitty, Nan’s daughter by Howard Hawks. Kitty was a pretty child, about nine years younger than I. She adored Father and, for a while, changed her name to Kitty Hayward. Although we were very fond of Kitty, we envied her the life we would have liked: a beautiful, chic, smart, funny, doting mother married to, of all people, our father. By comparison we felt unlucky, and we couldn’t help making comparisons. Father’s extravagance was legendary. He lived like a prince, and loved every minute of it.

“Leland’s always had a compulsion to live beyond his
means,” Mother once remarked caustically when we returned, flushed with pleasure and weighted down with gifts, from his house in Manhasset, Long Island. “If his income were a million dollars a year, he’d spend a million and a half.” That may have been somewhat exaggerated, but we thought it was glorious.

“That’s his affair,” Bridget mumbled under her breath.

“Not entirely,” retorted Mother, better able to hear some mumbles than others. “It’s my affair when he sends you home with expensive cameras that would take you weeks around here to save up for, weeks of washing the car and mowing the lawn—when Leland casually hands you a twenty-dollar bill that represents a month of hard-earned allowance. It’s really quite unfair, because—I realize he doesn’t see you very often and it’s perfectly natural for him to want to be very generous when he does, but—his generosity undermines the values that it’s my responsibility to teach you. I would like to be able to be so cavalier—much more fun, I assure you. But I don’t want you brought up with the impression that money is that simple to come by. Or that it can buy a good life. Or that it can buy—” She paused emphatically.

“What?” we answered, our hearts beginning to race with knowledge of what she was going to say next, and the fear of it.

“Love.”

“Oh, Mother,” I blurted. “He’s not trying to
buy
our love—he knows we already love him.”

“I’m not implying you don’t,” said Mother, a look of hurt outrage crossing her face (which reinforced my resolution never again to mention the word “love” as it applied to Father). “That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m saying that by overindulging you on the
rare
occasions when you see him, Leland is—unintentionally, I’m sure—inviting you to correlate
money
and
love
. Very irresponsible of him. You’re too young and impressionable to understand that love
can’t
be rewarded by a two-hundred-dollar camera that you admired on his bureau this morning—and of which, incidentally, he happens to have twelve more. Don’t look so guilty, darlings; it’s not
your
fault. You can’t help it if you come to that conclusion.”

“Here we go again,” said Bridget, her eyes fixed on the braided rug at her feet.

“
I
didn’t come to that conclusion;
you
did.” I shook my head and, ignoring Mother’s protests, stalked grandly upstairs to
my room. Maybe Father
was
just trying to make up for lost time, for affection he didn’t know how to bestow on us any other way. If so, did it really make a difference? What counted was that he loved us, not whether he did so wisely or well.

So when Mother, at last believing we were old enough to handle the disparity in their life-styles, arranged for that prolonged visit with Father in Bermuda, ironically her fears were borne out. Bridget and I began to play one parent against the other. Father had the advantage. Not only were the novelty and glamour of the experience in his favor, but also the timing. We were just at the age where we dared to abandon our usual caution. We wanted to have an effect, even if it took the form of sabotage. Our pettiest gripes about Mother were aired. We found Father to be a sympathetic listener. We liked the feeling that he was in collusion with us, that although he could do little to remedy our problems, he understood them better than anyone. “God, I wish my hands weren’t tied,” he’d commiserate. Also Nan, with her coziness and flair, became more attractive to us than ever. The idea that we had another family to fall back on, should we alienate the old everyday one, gave us a sense of confidence. And even if I didn’t see Father as having anything but a backup position in our lives, I think Bridget did. From that moment on, her dissatisfaction with life in Greenwich was total.

For the next two years, however, the potential explosion of Bridget’s unhappiness was delayed because of the distance between Gstaad and Greenwich. Bill was safely tucked away at Lawrenceville, and I at Madeira. And that fall Mother went into rehearsals for
Sabrina Fair
.

In
“Sabrina,”
audiences were asked to believe that Mother, then forty-four years old, was a twenty-three-year-old girl. Not surprisingly, they did. Even at close range, Mother radiated the illusion that she was blessed with eternal youth. According to Bennett Cerf in his
Saturday Review
column:

Playwright [Samuel] Taylor describes Sabrina as a “vibrant beautiful young lady in her early twenties” and persuading Maggie Sullavan,
born (according to
Who’s Who
) in 1909, to accept the role required a bit of doing. “I’m too old to play Sabrina,” she wailed. Director Hank Potter was inclined to agree. Taylor did not. The day of decision was a scorcher last July. Taylor and Potter journeyed up to Maggie’s Connecticut house for a final powwow. They found her at the pool in a very fetching and abbreviated bathing suit, with her two daughters aged sixteen and fourteen. Sceptic Potter looked hard at the trio and asked quite seriously, “Which of you three is Maggie?” She signed for the part of Sabrina there and then.

I, the greatest skeptic of all, came up on the train from Madeira to see for my own eyes. She was flawless in the play, and not a day over twenty. I sat in the second row defying her to betray her age by a mannerism, an inflection, and she did not. It was the most extraordinary illusion I have ever seen. Yet, strangely, her grace and charm and youth were
real
. Her performance was distinguished by one ingredient Mother claimed no respectable performance could ever be without: honesty. And she could be merciless in her expectations, whether of herself or of any other actor.

In spite of the anguish with which she regarded her profession, Mother, when actually working, was fiercely dedicated to it. Joseph Cotten, who played the male lead in
“Sabrina,”
was amazed by the way, one night, she was able to assimilate thirty-odd changes into her performance. Hank Potter, the director, remembers quite vividly:

“It was even more remarkable than that. What happened was that she had allowed that little wistful (trademark) note to color far too many lines in
‘Sabrina.’
I spoke to her about it when I went round at half-hour one night. I did not want to confuse things by being too specific just before a performance, but I told her to try and keep it in the back of her head when she played that night. She told me I was a lousy director, never gave her anything specific. No one had ever made that particular accusation to me before, and so I got out my notes and showed her about fifty detailed instances where this was happening. So she got mad at me and asked me how I dared upset the applecart just before the performance. She went out on the stage, gave a brilliant performance, and made the necessary changes in every single case, without touching in any way her customary reading of any line that had not been noted. I don’t think anyone else, before or since, could have done it.”

• ••

She could also be dedicated in her loyalty to fellow workers and friends. During tryouts in Philadelphia the play wasn’t going too well.

“It had begun to disintegrate, get out of control. Hank Potter was working so hard with Sam Taylor, the author, that he was neglecting the play on the stage a little bit. Everybody decided that Hank better go down to the Labrador retriever trials near Baltimore for a little rest. Bob Sherwood came down from the Playwrights Company; he was very good for morale but not much better as a director for this particular play. It was going right down the drain. They were fiddling around, looking for another director. And Maggie told me that Hank Potter had been fired on his last play
(Point of No Return)
by Leland, that his recent history in theatre had been a series of flops; she was of the opinion that if he was dismissed from this one, his career in the theatre would probably be over. She didn’t think he deserved that and she wasn’t going to be responsible for it. She made it clear that if Hank was fired she wouldn’t open with the play in New York. They brought up Equity and Maggie said, ‘Do whatever you want, kick me out, but I’ll be damned if I’ll be responsible for Hank Potter’s being buried as a director.’ So they brought him back, and everything turned out all right. All he’d needed was a change of scenery.”

Mother claimed that
“Sabrina”
was one of the happiest theatrical experiences of her career. Out of it came many lasting friendships: Joe and Lenore Cotten, Cathleen Nesbitt, Sam and Suzanne Taylor. But her conflict about wanting to work and not wanting to work was greater than ever. Millicent Osborn told me:

“Before she and Leland were divorced, she went to this analyst in California and after she’d been going there for a while, she came to me and said, ‘You know all that nonsense I’ve been talking about—how I hate being recognized and how I hate the theatre and how I hate acting?’ And I said, ‘yes,’ and she said, ‘Well, I’ve discovered I love it.’ And I said, ‘How did you discover that?’ And she said
,
‘Through my analysis.’ Maggie maintained that she didn’t mind the acting, as such, but she hated having to take a bow, she hated the audience rapport, she wanted to go on and presumably act in a vacuum—which of course was not true. She was deluding herself, because the very essence of acting is that you have an audience.”

“I think that Maggie was so conflicted about being famous that she was unable to see herself as a public person. Consequently she used this idiot ruse of pretending she wasn’t who she was. Yet at the same time she had a very distinctive outward appearance, which she made no attempt to disguise. She both liked the adulation and hated it. Subconsciously she wanted it and she hated herself for wanting it, so she pretended she didn’t want it at all. I don’t think that’s an uncommon trait in actors, but in Maggie it was terrifically magnified.”

“Maggie was not a cruel person and yet she was capable of cruelty. One time, Paul and Maggie and I were having lunch at the Lafayette. The poor old chef came out—a little Frenchman with a high white hat; he walked over to the table where we sat and handed me an autograph book, and I said, ‘No, this is Miss Sullavan.’ He didn’t speak any English, and Maggie confused hell out of him by insisting that I was Miss Sullavan. And in order to stop that, I finally signed it.”

When the summer of 1954 came around, Mother agreed to let Bill and me spend it with Father in Los Angeles while she visited Bridget in Europe. We were thrilled. One of the reasons for letting us go was that Jane and Peter Fonda would be there with Hank; Father was making
Mr. Roberts
into a movie. Locations were to be shot in Hawaii, so Jane and I began making plans for our invasion of the beaches of Waikiki. Jane was also in boarding school, Emma Willard, and much more sophisticated than I. Everything about the Fondas’ lives seemed “more” than ours. Jane and Peter’s mother, Frances, had committed suicide; this, while
tragic, was provocative. Mother had entered into endless discussions with Mrs. Seymour, their grandmother, about whether or not to tell the children the truth. Newspapers and magazine subscriptions had been canceled lest Jane and Peter stumble on some reference disclosing the real cause of their mother’s death. They had been informed that Frances had died of heart failure. The entire student body at the Greenwich Academy was warned at assembly by Miss Campbell that it was to respect that story for an indefinite period of time. How Mrs. Seymour managed to keep the facts from Jane and Peter as long as she did was surprising. Some months later, during art class, Jane and I were leafing through a movie magazine under the pottery table, and we came upon a biographical digest of the stars, alphabetically listed. I flipped the page but not quickly enough. Jane turned it back and silently read the truth. Afterward she did not say a word about it to me, nor did I dare to bring it up. Now, at sixteen, she had passed through the most awkward stages of adolescence unscathed. Her skin was perfect, her face and figure beautiful, her personality original. She was, of all my friends, Mother’s favorite. “Jane has remarkable character for one so young,” Mother used to say. “She’s incapable of telling a lie.” (Since I was all too capable, this observation was artfully designed to strike terror into my heart, which it did.)