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

GENERAL LEGEND LOCAL PAPER FILLED WITH STALE NEWS. FOR INSTANCE THIS MORNING EVERYBODY SCREAMING YOU ARE SUPERBLY GREAT ACTRESS. WHAT KIND OF NEWS DO THEY THINK THAT IS? HOPE YOU’RE MISSING ME—GUESS WHO.

Also, in 1939, Bridget made her entrance:

DAUGHTER BORN TO MARGARET SULLAVAN—Stork Brings Second Child to Screen Star in Hospital Here.…

By 1941, she’d made So Ends Our Night, with Fredric March; Back Street, with Charles Boyer; The Shopworn Angel, with Jimmy Stewart (directed by Hank Potter and produced by Joseph Mankiewicz); The Mortal Storm, with Jimmy Stewart; and Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, again with Jimmy Stewart.

From their four-time collaboration, Jimmy Stewart remembers:

“Humor. She had great humor. It wasn’t mechanical with her. It was a part of her. This was one of the things that made her great. When you’d play a scene with her, you were never quite sure, although she was always letter perfect in her lines, what was going to happen. She had you just a little bit off guard and also the director. I’ve always called what your mother would do planned improvisation—she could do just moments that would hit you, maybe a look or a line or two, but they would hit like flashes or earthquakes; everybody’d sort of feel it at the same time. It’s a very rare thing. Your mother hated talk. Lots of times your mother said, ‘We’re all talking too much, we don’t need all this talk.’ She would never sit down and discuss a scene. Lubitsch would say, ‘Now we’ll do it,’ and your mother would say, ‘Yes, all right, let’s do it.’

“The longest number of takes I ever did in the movies was forty-eight takes with your mother in The Shop Around the Corner. We were in a little restaurant and I had a line: ‘I will come out on the street and I will roll my trousers up to my knees.’ For some reason I couldn’t say the line. Your mother was furious. She said, ‘This is absolutely ridiculous.’ There I was, standing with my trousers rolled up to the knee, very conscious of my skinny legs, and I said, ‘I don’t want to act today; get a fellow with decent legs and just show them.’ Your mother said, ‘Then I absolutely refuse to be in the picture.’ So we did more takes.”

• • •

Finally, as Colonel Hayward commemorated the event in the last square of his needlepoint alphabet, arrived The Boy Named Bill.

Mother made only two movies after 1941: Appointment with Love, with Charles Boyer, and Cry Havoc. Then she retired “permanently” from the screen, because, according to one publication of the time, she said:

“I have three children. I wish to dedicate myself to them. The best service that mothers can render their country in these wartimes is to take care of their children. I am doing that.”

I sighed. We had come, practically, to the end. There was a whole book designated for The Voice of the Turtle, but we knew all about that.

The question of possession, of ownership, was, I mused, troublesome. To whom did Mother belong: herself, us, or her public? In any case, did it make a difference? She must have thought so or else she wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to keep her public and her private lives separate. But how much mileage was that deception good for? Once she’d deliberately become a public figure, how could she go on being one without being one?

“She made a mistake,” I said aloud. Bridget was putting the books back so that their bindings lined up with the edge of the dust marks on the shelves.

“More than one,” replied Bridget, smiling impishly.

“No,” I said. “Seriously. She made a bad choice back when she was eighteen. She should have become an English teacher instead. Or a camp counselor.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Bridget. “If that was true, you wouldn’t be here.” Bridget’s logic could be breathtakingly righteous.

“I know,” I said. “But she should have gone back to Virginia all the same. She’ll never be happy. Just wait and see.”

Millicent Osborn:

“There was one very sad thing: at the time of the last play she did—the one she died in—while she was in rehearsal, she came here to dinner. We were alone and she was gay and charming; we were having a perfectly lovely time talking about all kinds of things, and suddenly she took me into my bedroom and she said, ‘Millicent, I can’t go on and I can’t get out.’ And I had such a sense of horror—there was something in the way she said it that implied more than the play. Because then I took her by the shoulders, and I held her, and I said, ‘You must go on.’ And I didn’t mean the play. But there was that crazy confusion, that ambiguity.…”

Johnny Swope:

“I’ll never forget a remark your father made. We all went to a World Series game together, September, 1949. We were sitting at the table having lunch, the five of us: you and Bridget, Leland and Slim and I. And Leland looked at me and said—now at this time you were twelve and Bridget was ten—he said: ‘You know, Johnny, these girls have reached the age when I can really enjoy them. I can take them to the theatre without having to take them to the bathroom or having to feed them; I don’t have to hold their skirts up when they go to the potty and I don’t have to tell them how or what to eat.’ It was such a funny remark to make in front of you—as if he were rejecting the first twelve years of your life.”

One sleepless night when I was thirteen or fourteen, following the exchange of some punishment or other on Mother’s part for some provocation or other on mine, I finally accepted the idea that being a parent might be worse than being a child. Maybe Mother had bitten off