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

own ability to keep abreast, to tread bottomless water; finally, it was to know the real meaning of exhaustion.

Bridget, Bill, and I did not concern ourselves with the matter of their telephone altercations; it had always been there, a constant, a family routine. We were satisfied by its predictability and sense of combativeness. Other people, their friends, were aware of it less comfortably. Our house was the perpetual headquarters for activity of any kind, riotous badminton matches or card games—hearts was a house favorite, since Mother always won—diving exhibitions in the swimming pool or roller-skating down the middle of San Vincente Boulevard, and the central participants were usually the same: Johnny Swope and Jimmy Stewart, Martha and Roger Edens, the Herman Mankiewiczes, the Wrights, and sometimes the Hank Fonda and Eddie Knopf clans from down the street. Johnny remembers that when Father came home from the office every afternoon he would gratefully rely on the buffer zone of friends to provide enough distraction for him to sneak in some phone calls. Mother also liked to have Johnny and Jimmy hang around; whenever Father went off on trips to New York, which was quite often, it was nice to be able to avail herself of the company of Hollywood’s two most eligible bachelors.

The three of them had been close friends for years; they had started together in the University Players, a summer stock company in Falmouth, Massachusetts, which had also been the breeding ground for talent like Hank Fonda, Myron McCormack, Mildred Natwick, Kent Smith, Charles Leatherbee, Bretaigne Windust, and Josh Logan. Johnny Swope met Mother at the end of summer, 1931, when the company had ambitiously decided to extend its activities for a winter season of repertory in Baltimore. The winter before, Mother had become the first of the Players to hit the big time by landing a job as understudy to Elizabeth Love in the road company of Strictly Dishonorable and then the lead in A Modern Virgin, in which she got rave reviews although the play itself was lambasted. John Mason Brown wrote in the Post that “Miss Sullavan is in reality what the old phrase calls a ‘find.’ She has youth, beauty, charm, vivacity and intelligence. She has a bubbling sense of comedy and acts with a veteran’s poise. And she deserves a far better fate than the kind of leading part in which she made her début. Last night the evening was hers, as many other evenings should be in the future.” She rejoined the University Players when A Modern Virgin closed. The company lived in the Kernan Hotel, a run-down nineteenth-century building of which the Maryland Theatre, winter home of the aspiring young rep company, was part.

That was the winter (1931) that Mother and Hank Fonda got married, having carried on a stormy love affair over several summers of stock. An astute Baltimore Post reporter noticed that they were on a list of people who had just taken out marriage licenses; the day before Christmas he burst in upon the startled company assembled for breakfast in the Kernan Hotel dining room, and demanded further information. Mother grabbed a piece of toast and fled from the room, protesting, “Marry Fonda! Are you mad? Just look at him! Who’d ever want to marry him?” Hank raced after her, not only to avoid the reporter but to repair his wounded vanity. Bretaigne Windust, the head of the company, parried with the explanation that Mother and Fonda mysteriously had taken out marriage licenses at least twice before: perhaps they were making a collection of them. Mother, when she later heard this, enthusiastically elaborated on his story, “Yes, yes, that’s it. We’re collecting them, one for every city we’re in together—New York, Baltimore—soon we’ll have quite an exhibit.”

Although nobody in the company believed either of them would actually go through with it, and neither did they, Mother and Hank were married at noon on Christmas Day in the dining room of the Kernan Hotel, with the dense odor of boiled cauliflower hanging over the assembled group. After a tearful ceremony, everyone sat down to an economical combination wedding breakfast-Christmas dinner, from which Hank departed somewhat precipitously, since he was starring in the matinée of The Ghost Train. For her honeymoon celebration, Johnny Swope took Mother that afternoon to see Greta Garbo in Mata Hari. He became so engrossed he almost forgot that he had to make an entrance in the third act of The Ghost Train as a police inspector. Suddenly, with no warning, he bolted the movie house, ungallantly leaving Mother behind, and ran without stopping all the way to the theatre and up onto the stage, just in time to pick up the wrist of the corpse and pant his one line: “Hmm, bitter almonds.”

At the end of that season, Hank and Mother set up housekeeping in Greenwich Village. Since Father was already Mother’s agent, he also took on Hank—still a struggling young unknown—as a client. Although Johnny and Father met each other then, they didn’t become close friends until 1936, when Mother and Father got married, four years after Mother and Hank parted company.

By that time, Johnny (who at Fonda’s urging had come out to California to become an assistant director) and Jimmy Stewart were sharing a house on Evanston Street. Father lost no time getting them both interested in flying airplanes. Jimmy had a slight head start, taking his first lessons on a little asphalt strip that used to be called Mines Field and is now International Airport. The airstrip was surrounded by acres of celery and lettuce fields, and every time a plane took off or landed, the air jumped with thousands of jackrabbits.

Father gave me, at age three, a hard lesson in both flying and philosophy that I have found difficult to forget since. For a long time I’d begged him to take me for a ride in his plane, although, having never seen one, I had no idea what a plane actually was