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

JOHNNIE AND DOROTHY. I HOPE YOU LIKE YOUR WEDDING. LOVE BROOKE AND BRIE AND BILL.” It was a very small wedding on a glorious July day, late in the afternoon. Our shadows fell in a procession on the wide lawn as we stood in a semicircle under the gnarled olive tree, banked with pots of flowers. Bridget and I were flower girls. Jimmy, who was stationed at the Air Force base in Albuquerque, flew in to double as best man and piano player of the wedding march: he ticked off the wedding march inside the house and then ran back out just in time to be best man.

Halfway through the ceremony, Bridget and I were jarred out of the trance into which the occasion’s solemnity had beguiled us by Bill tweaking our eyelet lace pinafores and whispering confidentially, “I have to go to the bathroom, I have to go to the bathroom.” Bridget scornfully snatched her skirt away and I pondered the petals in my basket, but his complaint became rapidly more desperate and audible.

“Ssh,” said Bridget in disgust. “Sssh.”

Bill closed his eyes dreamily and began to chant, “I have to go to the bathroom, I have to go to the bathroom—”

Bridget flapped her sharp elbow at him and hissed, “Ssssh!”

“Ow,” said Bill, then began wetting his pants slowly while he continued to sing, at the top of his high-pitched voice, “I have to go to the bathroom, I have to go to the bathroom,” throughout the remainder of the mercifully short ceremony until he was carried off by our nurse Emily.

While pouring the champagne afterward, Otto, our German butler, informed Johnny that he was taking lessons in photography and would consider it an honor to be permitted to shoot the official wedding pictures. Johnny turned over his camera (which, of course, he’d brought along) and posed with Dorothy in the doorway. Shortly after that, Elsa and Otto were arrested as German spies and we found out that Otto had been enrolled in a photography school for less than patriotic purposes, but Johnny said he couldn’t have been very good at his second trade because his photographs were so terrible.

• • •

Birthday parties were events of great consequence in Hollywood, and even though Mother deplored everything in or about Hollywood—keeping aloof from its social functions and disdaining its tribal customs, particularly as they related to stardom—she relented when it came to our birthday parties. Possibly one of the reasons for this was that after she took us out of school we so seldom saw other children except those of her friends on weekends. In no other way did Mother conform to the prevailing behavior of the Hollywood star, since she never had any great ambition to be a star at all. It wasn’t a glamorous career and its by-products that she really wanted, but a family, and I suspect that in the matter of birthday parties she felt obligated, more for the sake of her children than herself, to overcome her disapproval of the life around her.

At a typical Hollywood party, there would be twenty to thirty children (at ours, Johanna Mankiewicz and her cousins Tom and Chris, Danny Selznick, Jane and Peter Fonda, the Scharys—Jill, Joy, and Jeb—Maria Cooper, Christina Crawford, and Jonathan Knopf were the hard-core regulars), each with his or her own governess. When we all sat down to eat, there would be an attentive line-up of white uniforms packed in close formation behind us. A ritual, even competitive air infused all these parties, from the entertainment (magicians or clowns, caravans of ponies or elephants transported by truck for gracious rides around the ancestral lawns) to the menu (creamed chicken in a ring of rice garnished with peas, ice cream molded in a myriad of shapes and flavors-frozen animals in nests of green cotton candy were de rigueur at our house—and the birthday cakes themselves, angel food, swagged and flounced with boiled frosting like hoop skirts under white ball gowns). Joan Crawford’s daughter Christina was the most envied party hostess because invariably she offered the longest program: not only puppet shows before supper and more and better favors piled up at each place setting but movies afterward; besides, her wardrobe was the fanciest—layers and layers of petticoats under dotted swiss or organdy, sashed at the waist with plump bows and lace-trimmed at the neck to set off her dainty yellow curls.

The Hayward parties were the most boisterous, largely because The Barn seemed to inspire a lack of decorum. Our guests would arrive with their governesses and parents (the latter would soon disappear into The Other House for a quiet drink), laden with presents and attired in crisp frocks or shorts with knee socks; curtsies would be made (by all the girls except Bridget and me) and shy greetings exchanged, and then pandemonium would rage. In front of The Barn was an enclosed play yard, stocked with jungle gyms, swings, rings, and slides, and within fifteen minutes not a dress would be clean or a knee unskinned. Covered with grass stains, the panting guests would assemble at the vast trestle table. There—under the stern jurisdiction of Emily (in her one good dress), who, arms crossed, eyed the entire company like a stage manager faced with a tricky production number—trouble began in earnest. By the time the creamed chicken was served, Jane Fonda and I usually would be throwing paper snappers across the table at each other; oblivious to Emily’s barked admonitions, we would swiftly move on to the peas and rice, packing them into mushy little balls—stained with brilliant vegetable dye from the favors—which we hurled at anyone who hadn’t already joined in, until we achieved total participation. At my fifth birthday party, I fell passionately in love with Tarquin Olivier, seated on my left, because he led off with a round of piercing battle cries in an English accent.

Tarquin, two years older than I, was the son of Jill Esmond and Laurence Olivier. Evacuated from London during