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

screen sensation, Margaret Sullavan. Here’s the only interview she has granted since her smash hit in Only Yesterday.… I had already been warned that this littlest rebel hated Hollywood … “They call this picture Only Yesterday, but it’s insane!” she exclaimed. “We’ve been on it for almost four months now and I’ve had exactly one day’s vacation—and that I spent in jail for smoking a cigarette in a forest region.” As she sat opposite me in a pair of blue slacks, looking for all the world like Huck Finn’s younger sister, it was hard to realize that this pert infant was a brilliant actress, who in her very first screen effort was being “supported” by such luminaries as John Boles and Billie Burke. Orchidaceous. Glamorous. Sextacular. None of the usual Hollywood labels catalogue her. In a land of carbons, she is as original as the “a” in the spelling of her last name.…

Her second film was Little Man, What Now? The third, The Good Fairy, was the setting for that short-lived marriage with Willie Wyler. Next Time We Love, with Jimmy Stewart (“HOLLYWOOD’S NEW LEADING MAN”), was next. It was the first of their four films together.

According to a movie magazine of the time:

When there was trouble finding a leading man to cast opposite her in Next Time We Love, Peggy went to the casting director and said, “Why not test Jimmy Stewart?”

“Jimmy Stewart?” He scratched his head. “Who’s he?”

Peggy (that’s what Jimmy calls her) became quite indignant. “Haven’t you seen Jimmy Stewart in pictures yet?” she exclaimed incredulously. “Well, he’s a great actor from the New York stage. He’s had years of experience and he recently came out to Hollywood, where they’ve been trying him out in small parts first. Did you see Rose Marie?” Somehow Peggy made that bit in Rose Marie sound quite wonderful.…

After making the picture, Mother returned to Broadway to appear in Edna Ferber’s Stage Door. I particularly liked the idea that, on my account, the run of the play was imperiled.

Louella Parsons:

STAGE STAR REPORTED “EXPECTING”—MARGARET SULLAVAN’S HUSBAND DROPS HINT ON COAST

Margaret Sullavan is going to have a baby! At least we hear a strong rumor that says so. Her husband, Leland Hayward, has just been in town and the proud father-to-be just couldn’t keep from dropping a hint. Margaret will leave the Stage Door company in a short time to prepare for the blessed event. The baby will cause a lot of upsets in plans, for Universal would like Margaret to have made another Universal picture, and soon.

Following my birth, Mother made three films, the first of which, So Red the Rose, was a Civil War drama that presaged Gone With the Wind. King Vidor directed. Recently he told me:

“I was just thrilled with her. I think I would have done any picture if she was going to be in it; I wouldn’t have even read the script.…

“She’d taken up motorcycle riding while she was married to Willie Wyler, and she rode her motorcycle to work every day. Blue jeans were not the ‘in’ thing then, but that’s what she usually wore. She was playing a Southern belle, and of course all the dresses of the period had full skirts and petticoats; so when she had close-ups, she’d come onto the set with her hair all done and her blue jeans on. It was hilarious.”

About Hollywood rumors that she was difficult and willful, E. B. Griffiths, who had been her director on Next Time We Love, had another perspective:

“Margaret Sullavan is far too intelligent not to understand the value of cooperation. She is rather carefree and independent by nature, but she does not lack self-discipline in her work. All during the weeks of production, she arrived on the sets nearly an hour ahead of time, and even on the days when certain scenes not requiring her presence were shot, she preferred to come to the studio and sit for hours quietly watching the work of the other players, in order to correlate it to her own.

“Between sequences I frequently observed her, high up in the rafters with the electricians, discussing the lighting of the next scenes. She was interested in everything concerning the picture, and though she is firm in her conviction of how she interprets a part, she never refuses to listen to another’s point of view if she feels something constructive is being offered. Much of this bosh about her being ‘high hat’ is merely the result of her not conforming to Hollywood’s prescribed formulas for the conduct of its celebrities. She doesn’t happen to care about dashing from party to party, or putting on an act after the cameras have ceased grinding.…”

After So Red the Rose came a comedy, The Moon’s Our Home, the most important fact about which, to Bridget and me, was that Mother starred in it with Henry Fonda. This reunion was celebrated by more than the usual number of stills of them together, both looking achingly beautiful.

Margaret Sullavan’s leading man in her new Paramount picture, The Moon’s Our Home, is none other than her ex-husband Henry Fonda. And in the story she falls desperately in love with him, marries him, becomes estranged from him, and is re-united with him at the end.

Hollywood gossips wondered whether acting together in these circumstances would embarrass Margaret and Mr. Fonda, but they took it as being all in a day’s work.…

However, many years later, Hank told me:

“While we were on location, the romance sort of bloomed again. When we got back, we talked about marrying again, even looked at property to build a home on. And then, suddenly, it was off. I wouldn’t be able to explain what it was about the combination of the two of us that didn’t work. I guess it was our temperaments. We must have been ill-fated lovers.…”

Then came Three Comrades, for which Mother received a 1939 Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, the New York Film Critics’ Award, and a telegram from Father:

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