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

valley of the shadow of death,” I repeated after him mentally, trying to imagine what it looked like and whether I would be afraid.

Afterward, Father, Bill, and I had to go out first. As we passed, Father paused for a fraction of a second and looked at Tom Mankiewicz, who was sitting by the aisle. Tears were streaming down Tom’s face. Father put his hand on Tom’s shoulder and walked on. And we went out into the rain.

There was a reception at Father and Pamela’s apartment afterward. The dining-room table was laden with an elegant buffet. I chose a place to sit—in the hallway on a small bench, and never moved—then Josie Mankiewicz came and sat beside me for a while, and Bill Francisco, and my brother, Bill, with Manila. There were a great many people but the only person I remember talking to was Tom. The last time either of us had seen each other or Bridget, we had all been together. I told him I would never go to another funeral.

Tom:

“I remember at the reception you said to me, ‘I’m the daughter of a father who’s been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I’m twenty-three and divorced with two kids.’ I said, ‘Brooke, either you’ve got to open the window right now’—we were on the tenth floor—‘either you’ve got to open the window right now and jump out, or say, “I’m going to live,” because you’re right, it’s the worst family history that anybody ever had, and either you jump out the window or you live.’ ”

ara Mankiewicz (Herman’s widow):

“She had a very romantic concept of motherhood and marriage—incurable romantic, she was—and very much involved with it. Then her career started to be an interruption to her, to her duties and home; Herman used to accuse her of lying about it—that she was just crazy for her career—and she couldn’t convince him that it didn’t matter to her a bit. She liked the money and she was glad to make it, but she really regarded it as an imposition. She would have preferred to stay home and be strictly a mother and go to the market and go on picnics.

“Of course her phobia about your father and business—that was the stumbling block for them. She would go crazy on the subject of the telephone when he came home. She wanted him to be a husband and father, and any interruption—no matter who the client was—the more important, the more outrageously she behaved. Terrible, and you know Leland was not a husband and a father. He was never cut out for that role. I mean, this was a man-about-town, a bon vivant, a gay, carefree, marvelous guy, with big ideas of finance and involvement in business, and suddenly she wants him to come home at 5:30 and sit down and play with the children or everybody go on a picnic or do something that was so foreign to him—he hadn’t been raised that way himself. But it was a gay house, even when he was miserable, and she had him raising vegetables on Evanston Street; he became absolutely domesticated. He loved it for a while, or he tried to convince himself that he did. That was what she wanted. Then the summer in St. Malo; she was very happy, very content. She would have liked to have him there constantly; he would come Friday and stay until Tuesday, something like that. He made compromises even though there was nothing for him to do and he was not what you call a beach fellow.

“And he did it for a number of years, with exceptions; you know, he insisted on the telephone thing and that was the subject of very serious quarreling. And everybody talked to her about it—David [Selznick] and Herman—for God’s sake, Maggie, they told her, this is a guy with enormous interests and you’ve got to let him go on. No, she wouldn’t hear of it. It wasn’t her idea of a home.”

I never saw my mother sign an autograph.

In December, 1943, when I was six, Bridget, Bill, and I left Los Angeles on the Super Chief for our first trip to New York. It was wartime, before easy commercial air travel. In the next few years, we came to know all the porters on the Sante Fe Railroad very well.

Mother had just opened in The Voice of the Turtle, the first play she had agreed to do in seven years. Bridget, Bill, and I hadn’t seen her since she had gone East for rehearsals in late September. We had never been separated from her; we had some hazy knowledge that she was a movie star but we didn’t know what that was, although once when I was four, and considered old enough, Father had taken me to the set of Cry Havoc, and I’d been frightened by parachutes and dead bodies hanging from the trees, and concluded that Mother had an exciting occasional job.

While dressing for dinner one night a week before she was due to leave Los Angeles for rehearsals, she had found Father unconscious on the bathroom floor. An ambulance had come to the house and taken him to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where, we were told the next morning, he had almost died from internal hemorrhaging. Exploratory surgery was performed for bleeding ulcers, but none was discovered, nor was any cause for what had happened. By the time Bridget and I were allowed to go to the hospital to see him, Mother had left for New York, in a state of frenzy, unable to change rehearsal dates.

Our expectations about the hospital were shaped by Father’s many bedtime readings of Madeline having her appendix out: “Madeline soon ate and drank. On the bed there was a crank, and a crack on the ceiling had the habit of sometimes looking like a rabbit.” Father