Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

could be used until dress rehearsal, and Mother had to handle seventy-two props. The dress rehearsal was a shambles.

Mother informed the producer, Felix Jackson, that it was out of the question for the show to go on the air twenty-four hours later in such scandalous condition. He agreed diplomatically, but assured her everything would be straightened out by the next day. Mother said this would be impossible. She said she definitely would not do the show. She changed quickly into her street clothes, said goodbye to her theatre maid, and told her not to come tomorrow. As she left, she shook hands with Felix Jackson and told him the same thing.

Nobody, least of all Kenneth, took her seriously. Over dinner, he chided her for being sadistic and ruining Felix Jackson’s sleep. Mother replied that she was being deadly serious. Kenneth pointed out that C.B.S. or Westinghouse would sue her if she walked out: they could hardly allow her to set such a precedent. She was, after all, not the best arbiter of either her own performance or the show as a whole, and what about the rest of the cast? Mother’s answer was that AFTRA (the union) would see to it the other members of the cast were paid; she herself didn’t care if she was sued, since actresses shouldn’t be treated so shabbily. As a matter of fact, C.B.S. wouldn’t dare sue her; they knew they were in the wrong.

The next morning Kenneth went to work without waking her. He assumed a night’s sleep would restore her good humor.

He was mistaken. The final run-through had been called for 3:00 p.m. She did not show up at the studio. By 3:30, he was back in their apartment. He found a note telling him she anticipated that he’d return to convince her to change her mind. She was taking the car and driving off somewhere, she wasn’t sure where exactly, but not to worry, she’d call him the next day; by the way, she was borrowing his book.

It was impossible to track her down. There was chaos. By 7:30 that night, the story was out and the press started calling. Mother, meanwhile, spent the night in a country motel. She was having breakfast at a counter the next morning when she heard a radio announcement that the missing actress, Margaret Sullavan, had still not been located. Disguising her voice and brushing back her bangs, she fled the coffee shop. She drove deep into the country, along the most inconspicuous back roads, until she reached the Osborns’ house near Brookfield. Finding the house locked, she broke a pane of glass in the French doors and let herself in. Then she called her apartment on Riverside Drive. Paul Osborn answered the phone.

“Paul?” she asked.

“Maggie, where the hell are you?” he said.

“In your study,” she answered.

“What are you talking about? You can’t be,” he replied.

“I am,” she said.

“Hold on!” he exclaimed, and took a cab over to his apartment on Ninetieth and Park Avenue, but she wasn’t there so he raced back across town and picked up the receiver where he’d left it.

“In the study?” he asked.

“In the country,” she answered.

“Oh,” he said lamely, and put Millicent on. Millicent asked if they could drive out to see her. Mother said they could on one condition: that they promise not to discuss the matter with her. They promised.

When they got to the house, they found that she’d stuffed the icebox with groceries and was treating the whole thing as a lark. Her plan was to hole up there for a week or two. Millicent persuaded her to call Kenneth. Kenneth drove out. He showed her the newspaper reports and convinced her that she should talk to her lawyer, Bill Fitelson, because there was some real question of a lawsuit. Gradually, as she realized the extent of the furor, she began to brood. While Kenneth was talking to her alone in the downstairs guest room, Millicent heard the sound of whimpering. She walked in and found Mother under the bed, huddled up in a fetal position. Kenneth was trying to get her out. The more authoritative his tone of voice, the farther under she crawled. Millicent took him aside and urged him to speak gently, to let her stay there until she came out of her own accord.

By the weekend, she was in a serious depression. Kenneth again sought the advice of Dr. Kubie. At his suggestion, Mother agreed to spend some time at the Austen Riggs Foundation, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Austen Riggs is a private mental hospital, one of the few “open” hospitals of its kind in the country. Its patients are all in some form of therapy but, depending on the individual situation, free to leave the premises as they wish or to live away from them altogether as outpatients.

Mother remained there for two and a half months. She grew to love it. When she left, right after Christmas, she put the Clapboard Ridge Road house on the market and auctioned off all its contents—the furniture, the silver, the china, the paintings that had taken twenty-odd years to accumulate. The time had come, she said, to make a clean sweep.

I breathed a sigh of relief. The worst had come and gone.

In the spring, a month or so after Easter, Father telephoned me. Would I, he asked cryptically, come into New York City to check out my brother Bill? Like that very minute? He was in a small private hospital, Regent.…

Bill was lying in bed, all doped up. He smiled at me idiotically. Suddenly I realized how much I’d missed him.

“Listen, you jerk,” I said. “Why did the nurse frisk me at the door before she let me come into your room? Are you an armed suspect? She felt me up and down—searched my purse, held my gum wrappers up to the light—”

Bill laughed. “Razor blades,” he said. “Possibility of suicide.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Yes,” said Bill. “Yes. That’s not on my agenda yet. But I’m extremely