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

the way. Every house we lived in was bought because Mother happened to be driving past it at a fortuitous time, either when we were due for a move or when the house was too enchanting to pass up. Number 12928 was no exception. Greta Wright was looking for a house and Mother couldn’t resist going along. So they bought the houses across the street from each other. I had just been born and more space was needed anyway.

For Father, the installation of a complex telephone system took priority over everything else before a move could be considered. He found himself ensconced at 12928 before the telephone was installed, a drastic hardship. The Wrights had taken possession of their house a few weeks earlier and had their telephone. Father would race over first thing in the morning, afraid he might lose a possible twenty-thousand-dollar cash deal between home and Beverly Hills, make a couple of phone calls just in case, and then go to the office. Sometimes he’d appear at the Wrights in the middle of the night to make a phone call or two.

The telephone was the source of Mother and Father’s bitterest fights. Mother hated the agency business because of the telephone; it might ring at any time—in the middle of dinner or in the middle of a badminton game, a dissertation or conversation. The phone would ring and Mother would roll her eyes heavenward, while everyone within earshot would mock-cringe or put their hands over their ears and get ready. “Flesh peddler!” she would yelp, in her own peculiar blend of Southern drawl and outraged exclamation. Then, for the benefit of her audience, she would stamp her foot half seriously, half comically, and assume a pose, arms akimbo: “Leland Hayward, I can’t stand it another minute. D’ya hear me? This is an ultimatum. I’m going to tear that damn telephone out by its roots if it rings again in the next five minutes!”

Father was addicted to the telephone as much as Mother despised it. He never wrote a letter if he could send a wire, and never wired if he could telephone. He was happiest when he was conducting business on his office sofa with three or four telephones at hand, his head deep in a cushion at one end and his feet comfortably crossed at the other. That way, between conversations he might catch a quick nap. Everyone, even Mother, agreed on one thing: Father was the best agent in the business, even if it was a lousy business. In the early nineteen-forties, when he himself was in his early forties, he had about a hundred and fifty clients, including Mother and her two ex-husbands (Henry Fonda and William Wyler), Greta Garbo, Ernest Hemingway, Jimmy Stewart, Ginger Rogers, Edna Ferber, Gene Kelly, Fredric March, Judy Garland, Myrna Loy, Montgomery Clift, Gregory Peck, Boris Karloff, Billy Wilder, Kurt Weill, Josh Logan, Dashiell Hammett, Charles Laughton, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Helen Hayes, Herman Mankiewicz, Lillian Hellman, Fred Astaire, Gene Fowler, and on and on. Eventually, in the mid-forties, he was to sell his “stable,” as he referred to it, to MCA, and become an equally successful Broadway producer, with A Bell for Adano, State of the Union, and then Mr. Roberts, but it was as a Hollywood agent that Father became something of a legend.

His appearance was at odds with his profession. He was a distinguished-looking man. Tall and thin (hair parted debonairly in the middle when he was younger—graying and close-cropped like grass later on, a trademark in time), with an air both haggard and elegant, he strolled in white flannels and yachting sneakers through the corridors of the major studios of a Hollywood that had never seen anything quite like him before. The prevailing notion was that agents were a breed apart, somewhat déclassé, that they all had foreign names, like the Orsatti brothers, or spoke with heavy Russian-Jewish accents and came straight from handling vaudeville acts on Broadway. Father captured Hollywood’s imagination by inventing a new style; he was an outrageous Easterner who wore linen underwear and came out on Wells Fargo. It was said that his office was the first in Beverly Hills ever furnished with antiques, and that his manner of dress, Eastern college, influenced Fred Astaire and changed Hollywood fashion. Fred was, in fact, his first client. One evening in 1927, out of a job and bored, Father was making his customary rounds of the New York nightclubs and stopped by the Trocadero to have a drink with his friend Mal Hayward (not related), the proprietor, who was in a gloomy frame of mind. Business was poor, said Mal, slumping at the table, because a new place, the Mirador, had just opened up across the street and was taking away his customers. He was so desperate, Mal groaned, that he would do anything to get his hands on a big attraction, even pay an act like the Astaires as much as four thousand dollars a week. Father went straight over to the theatre where Fred and Adele were appearing in Lady, Be Good, and talked them into a deal. They played the Trocadero for twelve weeks, and he collected his commission of four hundred dollars (“The easiest money I ever made,” he used to say wistfully) every Saturday night.

People seeing Father for the first time would ask, astonished, “Is he an agent?” He was considered by many people, both women and men, whether in the business or not, to have been one of the most attractive people they ever knew. “Gentleman” was the word most often used to describe him. “He was a gentleman agent,” said George Cukor, “a darling man. I loved him even though he was a buccaneer. By asking such outrageous salaries for his clients, I think he was responsible for jacking up the agency business into the conglomerate empire that it is today.” “In my opinion,” said Billy Wilder (who was to direct The Spirit of St. Louis