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

“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” I said.

“A werewolf or vampire in disguise?” Bill’s voice rose hopefully.

“If so,” replied Mother, “he doesn’t stand a chance. Two can play that game. I’ll have my revenge. Thirty years from now, I’ll return to haunt him when he least expects it. He’ll be sitting, one night, on his broad bottom beside his bucktoothed wife—the woman for whom he callously left me, that terrible winter so long ago in New York—having a cup of tea in front of his sooty coal grate, when my youthful ghost shall slowly rise from the embers like a Phoenix and twine itself around his body.”

“You don’t have to wait thirty years for your revenge,” Bridget said, snickering. “I have an idea. Guess what happened last night. Brooke grew bosoms. They’re not very big yet, but we can soon send her over to England to seduce one of Kenneth’s sons.”

“Brooke, darling, bosoms!” exclaimed Mother. (I looked down at my flat chest self-consciously.) “Oh, how exciting! Can’t you tell them to wait until I get home before they get any bigger? I feel as if I’m missing everything.”

“You’d better hurry,” remarked Bridget. “Soon they’ll be popping the buttons off her—”

“Shut up, Brie.” I glowered at her. “Mind your own p’s and q’s. They’re my bosoms and if they go to England it won’t be because of Kenneth’s sons.”

“You wouldn’t sacrifice them on behalf of darling Mother?” asked Bridget mischievously. “Don’t worry, Mother,” she reported back into the telephone receiver. “Emily says they’re just baby fat. Tee-hee.”

While Mother was gone, Bridget and I made an amazing discovery. One afternoon, puttering around the library for something to read, we cracked open a block of ten large matching blue leather-bound books arranged in chronological order (Volume I, and so on). Compared to the sets of gold-embossed first editions surrounding them, they were drab and academic, so we’d never bothered with them before. After a few seconds of idly leafing through them, we looked at each other, shocked.

“Brooke,” whispered Bridget, although there was no one else in the room, “do you realize what these are?”

Indeed I did. Carefully pasted inside, punctuated by Mother’s comments in her own handwriting, smiling up at us from page after page, almost bigger than life, was every photograph—whether personal or publicity—that had ever been taken of her. And not only photographs, but magazine covers, press releases; every review, interview, or article that had ever been written about her; every note, letter, telegram from anyone who had ever mattered to her; every single memento that pertained to both her personal and her professional lives since the days when she was a child in Norfolk, Virginia.

Bridget and I were overwhelmed, not only by our good fortune, but by the sheer bulk and content of the material, and most of all by the idea that Mother, always so offhand about any aspect of her life, had painstakingly, over a long period of time, amassed all tangible records of it into half a shelf of scrapbooks. Why? we wondered. For whom? Herself to pore over when she was old and gray? What was this intriguing new paradox? We’d thought we’d known them all.

We found, however, that we knew very little. It was a long afternoon. By the time we finished with Volume X, dazed but exhilarated, we had acquired our first real sense of the high regard in which Mother, as an actress, was widely held, and not only that, but how long and tenaciously she had worked for it. Also, we finally knew what it meant to be a movie star. And we were thrilled to discover that there were facets to her personal life that we’d never dreamed of, such as her marriage, after Hank Fonda but before Father, to Willie Wyler.

“Look.” Bridget nudged me excitedly and pointed to an old London clipping that read:

MARGARET (“ONLY YESTERDAY”) SULLAVAN

passed through our little village the other week, accompanied by Husband Bill Wyler (he directs Margaret’s pictures). Because it was a honeymoon trip, the couple made their London agents promise that they would not be asked to see interviewers.… Margaret and Bill were married during the making of The Good Fairy (now at the Empire). It was a rather unusual courtship. Star and director wrangled continuously during the earlier scenes of the picture. One evening at six o’clock Bill told Margaret that she would have to work that evening. “Oh, no, I don’t,” said Margaret. “I have a date for the fights.” (Fights are fashionable in film society.) She stamped off the set. A little while later Bill followed her into her dressing room and said: “I’m sorry. I should have told you earlier. We won’t work.” Margaret flared. “Now you’ve made it worse. I’ve just called and broken the date!” A few evenings later Bill took Margaret home from work, but they didn’t go home. Instead they drove to the aerodrome, flew to Arizona, and got married.…

“Imagine!” exulted Bridget. “She sneaked in another marriage on us. Wonder why she never told us. Shall we ask her?”

“No,” I answered, considering. “Since she’s never mentioned it before, she’ll get suspicious.”

“You’re right,” said Bridget. “Otherwise we’ll never get to see the scrapbooks again.” For, having stumbled upon such a treasure, we had no intention of relinquishing it.

Many years later, William Wyler told me:

“The Good Fairy was one of the first important films I was making at Universal. Maggie was a star and I was a very young apprentice director just starting, so for me it was quite a step to direct her. One day I looked at the rushes and Maggie didn’t look good. I said to the cameraman, ‘What’s the matter, you’re not photographing her well.’ He said, ‘Well, you two had a fight the day we shot that.’ So I said, ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ He said, ‘Well, when she’s happy she looks pretty, when she’s upset she doesn’t!’ I