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

feel at home. He had his own table in each. What had been, before he elected to have it, the worst table in the Colony—the one right by the kitchen door—became Mr. Hayward’s table. A bottle of Wild Turkey was waiting on his table whenever he came in. He never drank too much of it but he liked to see it there. For a while he toyed with the idea of having the telephone company install a direct line from his office to the table, but was finally persuaded by his great good friend and lunch companion, George Axelrod (whose play Goodbye Charlie he would produce that fall), that that was too chic. Father and George put boeuf bourguignon on the menu at the Colony. They ate there so often they got tired of the usual fare. One day, George, who had been a mess cook in the Army, asked the maître d’ to bring them whatever had been prepared for the staff’s lunch. It turned out to be beef stew, much the best beef stew they’d ever eaten, and eventually it was elevated to a position on the menu.

At Le Pavillon, the night of my twenty-second birthday, Father was in an uncommonly jovial mood. He ordered two glasses and a bottle of champagne.

“Here’s to you, kid.” We smiled and clinked glasses.

“I’m flattered,” I commented. “I’ve never seen you drink champagne before.”

“Hell,” he reminded himself after a sip or two, “the only way to drink this stuff is with good caviar.” So he ordered some of that, too. It came with a double Wild Turkey, sent over by Henri Soulé, the formidable owner of the restaurant. By now, Soulé knew Father’s preferences well.

Father leaned back expansively. “Well, darling, hold on to your hat,” he said. “Are you old enough to keep a secret?”

“You know better than that.” I laughed, twirling the stem of my champagne glass. Maybe he was about to give up producing to pursue his most extravagant ambition—running TWA.

“I’ve decided to get married again,” he declared.

“But,” I replied, stunned, “you already are.”

“True,” said Father. “First I’ll have to get a divorce.”

That was also the summer of the great Dominguín-Ordóñez mano a mano in Spain. My stepmother, Nan, was following it with a coterie of friends: Hemingway, Truman Capote, Harry Kurnitz. Father said he would fly there in a few days to give her the news.

“The reason I’m telling you tonight,” he continued, “is because tomorrow Pamela is arriving here from Paris and I want you to meet her.”

Pamela Churchill, it turned out ironically, had been introduced to him some months earlier by her good friend Nancy Hayward.

“You know I’m not a big fan of English women,” said Father. “They all have bad teeth and talk through their noses; they’re all also amoral, as opposed to immoral—big difference—all without exception. Don’t know why that is. They all lead restricted lives until they get to be about sixteen and they start screwing anything. So Nan had a helluva time, when she went off to Main Chance for two weeks, convincing me I should be polite and escort this dame—who happened to be visiting New York, didn’t know her way around too well—to the theatre.”

As a result of that reluctant theatre date, Pamela, who lived in Paris, was selling her fabulous apartment overlooking the Seine, giving up her staff of five, the bulk of her priceless Louis XV furniture, her life of incomparable culture and refinement and grace, to move to New York City on Father’s account.

“That’s romance,” said Father.

There was no denying that. And his description of her was quite thrilling. She sounded like a mixture of Brenda Starr and Mata Hari. “Terrific auburn hair. Wonderful complexion. One of the most accomplished charmers of the century” was Father’s summation.

He went on to explain. Born in 1920 to Edward Kenelm Digby and the former Honorable Pamela Bruce (later Baron and Lady Digby), Pamela had, at the age of nineteen, married Randolph Churchill, from whom she’d separated after the birth of their son, Winston. Thereafter she’d presided over a legendary salon, to which all the most illustrious diplomats, military figures, politicians, and foreign correspondents of wartime London had flocked. Over the next twenty years—right up to that time—although she had not married again, she’d lived a life of some considerable comfort, given her friendships with some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, including Averell Harriman (currently her husband), Gianni Agnelli, the Baron de Rothschild, and Ali Khan. (“It cost ten thousand dollars a year just to keep her apartment in fresh flowers,” marveled Father.)

So vivid was his account of her, so boyishly gleeful and amorous, that it upstaged the moment, a day or so later, of our actual introduction, and remained fixed in my mind as the night we met.

Diana Vreeland, editor of Harper’s Bazaar in the fifties—in which capacity, that summer of 1959, she’d given me my start as a model—editor-in-chief of Vogue in the sixties, and now Special Consultant to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum, had been a close friend of Father’s and Pamela’s separately, long before they knew each other.

When, in 1960, they were about to get married, she had it out with Pamela: “Pam, you’ve got to realize that he’s a terrific père de famille. Before you came into his life, these three children were there. And there are difficulties.… Are you taking this into consideration?”

And Pamela replied, “I adore the children.”

Diana went on, “It’s a pretty tough life, that theatre life, and if you want to sit around the hotel in New Haven and smell the cigar smoke of fifty years coming out of those carpets while he’s trying to get a show into New York, if you can stand that, Pam—What makes you think you can stand it? You’ve only spent the most beautiful time in the most beautiful places, always in fresh air.”

But Pamela was oblivious. She answered, “I’m going to marry him because I’ve had everything in my life, but