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

I loved. I had no idea she had been to Riggs; I had no idea that there was any trouble at all. I was just entranced by her.”

The fall of 1959 was marked by a number of important events in our family.

I had entered Lee Strasberg’s acting classes after an interview with him, in which, having asked me some cursory questions about my previous acting experience (none) and who my favorite actors or actresses were (Olivier, Brando, and so on), he told me that I could start immediately. As it was almost impossible to get into his classes, and I knew several people who had waited for years before a space opened up, I summoned up the courage to ask him why he was prepared to expedite the procedure in my case. He replied unhesitatingly that it was due to my mother’s prominence as an actress and my father’s as a producer. I boldly told him that I didn’t want to be accepted by him as a student for that reason. He sighed and smoothed his fine white hair with both hands, then turned on me a dazzling smile. “It has nothing to do with favoritism, darling,” he said. “Your mother and father are very talented. You might inherit the talent, see? The odds are that you will prove to be more gifted as an actress than most other people with experience that I interview. And your lack of experience is a blessing—it means that you have had no bad habits yet to unlearn, no preconceived ideas about how to act. I consider myself lucky to have you in my classes, darling. You will start on Monday morning.”

When I related this conversation to Mother, to my surprise she agreed with him, but she may have been somewhat distracted by just having signed to act in what would be her last play, Sweet Love Remember’d, by Ruth Goetz. It was impossible for any of us to determine exactly why Mother ever signed for any play, since she always swore that she hated acting, and most of all the star system. At the same time, she was passionate about the theatre and much preferred it to movies, which she considered stultifying. Often her excuse for doing a play was that she needed the money, but in this case her explanation was that a ladder had fallen on her head the day she read the script.

Bridget, after two years of therapy at Austin Riggs, took a one-room apartment at 135 East Fifty-fourth Street, and commuted up to Stockbridge once or twice a month. Occasionally she would come to Greenwich to visit Mother and Kenneth; they were living in a charming house that overlooked the Byram River, with two vicious swans, an incontinent starling, an Abyssinian cat that devoured its own litters, and a crippled German shepherd. For the first time in four years, Bridget and I saw a great deal of each other. I would stop by her apartment every day; she would appear unannounced at my house in Greenwich on her way down from Riggs, and roll around on the floor with her two small nephews. She had fallen in love with Bill Francisco. I met him several times and liked him very much.

Bill Francisco:

“I met Bridget when I was in Stockbridge directing and stage-managing at that little playhouse, going back and forth between there and Williamstown. That fall, 1959, I found an excuse to write her—about getting new glasses or something. I got a lovely letter back saying, ‘If you really value my opinion, please call when you’re in New York.’

“Initially she was very afraid of my meeting you because she felt you were the pretty one, and that everybody who met you would fall in love with you; also you were active in the theatre and I was trying to be active in the theatre and there would be a great rapport there.”

• • •

Tom Mankiewicz:

“I saw more of her and Bill. Bill took me on as assistant director. He was very talented. He was in his early thirties then, and blessed or cursed with a tremendously attractive face and manner. And he cared about her. Whatever weaknesses or deficiencies Bill had, hers were double. At least she felt that hers were double. And so, when she became hung up on him, he was in a strange sort of catbird seat—was this girl really going to shrivel and die without him? I mean, she was beautifully bred out of great show-business stock, out of Maggie by Leland, she was incredibly sensitive, marvelous, bright in her own way, an ethereal kind of lady who was, also, skittish and Bambi-like and who could immediately turn off or become upset or depressed. I think Bill felt more comfortable with her because she was moodier than he was.”

Also that fall, my eighteen-year-old brother, Bill, decided to get married. He was majoring in math at the University of Kansas, and living in a small bachelor apartment in Topeka. Still wet behind the ears from a two-year stint in Menninger’s, he flew East with his bride-to-be, Marilla Nelson, to announce his plans to Mother and Kenneth. It was the first time Bill had been in Greenwich since the autumn of 1955, precisely four years earlier, when he and Bridget had left home to live with Father. Not surprisingly, things were slightly strained between mother and prodigal son. However, Mother and Kenneth were pleased with the liaison; not only did they like Marilla, who bore a striking resemblance to Bridget in coloring and build, but also they had become somewhat disillusioned by Menninger’s, and in this one instance their feelings dovetailed with Father’s. He was fed up with shouldering the gigantic expense. The next spring, when Bill had decided to join the Army as a paratrooper, everyone envisioned the venture as an effective means of tying off any remnants of the umbilical cord that (they thought) might bind him to Topeka and the