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

speech without it.’ He had to go downstairs; it took five or six minutes at least to put on a full-dress suit and white tie; when he walked out to make the speech, he still had that bloody handkerchief around his head. He made quite a speech, but the pounding of the nails was so loud the audience never heard what he said. There was such confusion, such hysteria; we were all in terror that this was going to be a failure, this, the beginning of all of our lives. Windust put on a monk’s outfit over his full-dress suit (he had to be a monk along with me), we were ready to pull the curtain up, and he said, ‘Wait a minute! We’ve got to get those lights out of the way. They’ll cover everybody.’ So the whole company came and pulled on the ropes but the ropes were twisted and the lights wouldn’t budge. So Windy said, ‘Put the lights on the floor.’ Crash! When those lights hit, they made the biggest noise you ever heard. And the audience howled and applauded. The curtain went up.

“Unfortunately we’d never tested the apparatus for bringing up people from the cellar; Kent Smith, who played Mr. Quigley’s butler, was supposed to be hauled up first, but the winches kept sticking and the basket that contained him started whirling at a dervish speed; it took ten minutes longer than we’d gauged to get poor Kent up high enough to be seen, so we all sang Greek chants until he finally appeared. And again the audience applauded. Now three people, the Quigley family, had to be brought up. A very old lady named Lily Jones was playing Goldina’s mother; as the basket rose from the cellar below the stage, it whirled five times as fast as before, because it was so much heavier, and Lily Jones started screaming with the highest, most bloodcurdling scream that has ever been known, like a person being throttled to death. Finally the basket, still whirling, hove into view; two or three monks grabbed it, pulled it towards the stage for a landing, and out clumped the three Quigleys.

“This was Margaret Sullavan’s début on the professional stage. And to my dying day, I will remember the first words out of her mouth. Just as though she were in the most successful play that had ever been written and she had the most wonderful lines to say, with the most aplomb I had ever seen, she said, ‘Now don’t get hysterical, Mother, we’re here.’ And I just thought, She must be the greatest actress who ever lived, because by rights she shouldn’t be able to say anything at all. But she went right through the play, improvising with the same calm security, with everything around her going wrong, and that was just the beginning. It went wrong and went wrong [“Particularly the monkey,” Mother used to tell us, “who, in the South Sea love scene between Hank and me, peed all over my very skimpy flowered bra.” “She was absolutely magnificent,” said Hank, “nothing fazed her”]. Finally the curtain went down. I should say, from then on we lived happily ever after, because although it was a disastrous night, the people who were there formed a kind of club, the audience that had seen the opening night of The Devil in the Cheese.

“After that, we began to put on really great shows. And Peggy became, within an instant, an accomplished actress. She went through thirty, forty, fifty shows with us over the years, playing every kind of part, every age, mostly leading ladies or ingénues, but the extraordinary thing was she’d never really had a great deal of training. If there was ever a natural, she was it. She had, from the beginning, that magic, that indescribable quality that is just extremely rare and immediately makes a star of a person. She was a true star. She was a true original. And we were very, very lucky to have her, because in a sense she, more than anyone else, put us all on the map. The audiences in Falmouth fell madly in love with her, as later they did again in Baltimore.…”

Mother, who always thought of that period of her life as its happiest, was beginning to fall madly in love with Hank Fonda.

Hank remembers:

“My first meeting with her in Cambridge and then playing with her in The Devil in the Cheese added up to a kind of nightmare. But slowly through the summer it became a romance. Look, everybody loved her. She was fun-loving, fun on the beach playing games. If she found a water pistol, she was the one who squirted water on everybody. And very early it became obvious she was a brilliant actress. I don’t know what kind of experience she’d had; I don’t think any. She had presence, which is something you’re born with, you don’t acquire. You don’t learn it. People just noticed her whether she was walking in a market or on the beach or on the stage. And soon it was clear she was the talent; she played all the good parts, but the one I remember most was as Tessa in The Constant Nymph. She was unforgettable in that.…”

Josh continues:

“And several years later, when we did The Constant Nymph in Baltimore, she and Hank Fonda had to sing a little duet which was a very complicated bit of harmonizing. Peggy, who was always terrified of singing—although I don’t believe that she was as unmusical as she always pretended to be—had to sing the melody while he sang the harmony, but she would always drift into the harmony the minute she heard him and then he would dominate it. Now, Fonda had a true musical ear, except he had the strangest voice when he sang, the same voice he has when he laughs. It was kind of like a strangled sob, as though he were weeping at the top of