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

said, ‘That’s news; I guess I’ve got to try to make her happy.’ So I made an effort. In order to get along, I said, ‘What are you doing for dinner tonight?’ And she said, ‘Nothing.’ And we had a dinner date, which was simply for the purpose of having her look good in the picture, and, well, we got along very nicely eating dinner. So, we had another date. Then I kissed her, and we began to like each other. Of course there were a few little obstacles: one night we were shooting a scene with her; she looked towards the camera and stopped acting. I said, ‘Cut.’ I didn’t know what the heck she was staring at. Behind the camera was Jed Harris. He was a big successful producer on Broadway at the time, very influential. I had heard she and Jed were together in New York, but now we were already planning to get married. He’d heard about it; they were supposedly engaged, which I didn’t know. Anyway, there he was. Out of the blue. Stood there. Like Svengali. And in those days flying out from New York was something. And he made her very nervous, but I think she was fascinated by him. He had a kind of hold on her. I think she desperately wanted to get away from him. For what reason I don’t know. I think trying to get away from Jed Harris contributed to the fact that she married me. The morning we went to Yuma, Arizona—there he was again. She said, ‘Let me talk to him alone.’ I waited in the hotel lobby. I didn’t know: is she going to come now or isn’t she? A long time went by, half an hour; it seemed like forever. Down she came and said, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ He was supposed to be a very persuasive fellow, but he didn’t make it that day. So off we went. And it was a miserable wedding. Jeez. Awful. My lawyer had arranged it. I chartered this airplane, and flew to Arizona. We went to this justice of the peace; he stood there in a robe and slippers and said, ‘All right, here, get together’—the radio was going all this time—and he married us. Then he said, ‘Excuse me,’ and went into the bedroom where his wife was still in bed and she signed the thing. Anyway we went straight back to the airport and the pilot said, ‘Where do we go—Reno?’ It was a good suggestion. After that wedding we should have gone straight up there. This was Sunday morning. Sunday night we were back and Monday we had to go on the set. And everybody was astonished. Here we had been fighting like cats and dogs and the next thing you know we’re married. I was crazy about her.”

As Bridget and I pored over the yellowing photographs and trophies of Mother’s youth, we realized how surprisingly uninformed we were about that, too. Sometimes, looking amused, she had told us stories about herself, mostly disparaging. In all her schools and camps she’d always been undersized, the shortest and skinniest and the last to develop (“Why, I was eighteen and had given up hope for good that I would ever have a female figure—when overnight—let that be a lesson to you”), for which she compensated with her cherished tomboyishness and athletic prowess. She told us how she was, from the beginning, so stubborn (or, at least, so spoiled) that she refused to be weaned from her bottle until she was five. Then, on a sightseeing tour of Mount Vernon, as she leaned dreamily on the velvet ropes that partitioned George Washington’s bedroom off from the public, she yawned for a second, and the ubiquitous bottle of milk dangling by its nipple from her mouth crashed to the floor, rolled across the priceless rug, and disappeared under Washington’s bed.

Her memories of childhood were tinged with ambiguity: deep pride about her Southern ancestry and customs, offset by a rebelliousness against that pride, as if any feeling so ingrained must also be pompous. Mother had hair-trigger reflexes about pomposity, particularly in herself, and never allowed it to go by without a few lighthearted jabs.

Although she scoffed at what she considered to be her family’s overzealous obeisance to its lineage, she gave me her own middle name, inherited from her great-grandmother Priscilla Brooke Fleet Smith, wife of James Smith, State Senator, lawyer, and master of Smithfield plantation. (“You were doomed to have that name whether you were a girl or boy,” she used to tell me, “if for no other reason than it’s a good strong name that can’t be abbreviated or tampered with.”) A congratulatory letter written to Mother by her older half-sister, Lewise, at the time of my birth referred to her ambivalence and was, unwittingly, a perfect example of what caused it: “Dearest Peggy … I can hardly wait to see the baby. Leland said she was beautiful and Mother tells me you are going to name her Brooke. Mother also wrote me that you had asked about the family genealogy for possible names; so I immediately set to work to copy the old Smith and Fleet genealogies for you.… I have also in my possession a beautiful photo-static copy of a chart which traces our ancestry directly back through the Smith and Throckmorton lines to the early kings of France and England.…” (“Oh, my God, so what?” Mother would exclaim irreverently when confronted with this sort of information pertaining to her forebears. “Pugh. Who really gives a damn? Virginians. That’s the best and the worst about them, their awful pride.”)

We barely knew her parents. We saw them only once: they came to California for a few weeks while she was in England. Afterward we didn’t feel we knew them any better. Mother’s descriptions of them had never enabled us to form any clear image of what to expect—other than a thick syrupy drawl, which, as she warned us,