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

go through her accounts and conclude she was going bankrupt. Nothing was further from the truth, but when she’d announce she was broke and would have to go back to work, we, in turn, would commiserate out loud and smile to ourselves, knowing that she’d read a script that excited her. The first time she came out of retirement was in 1949, to make a movie, No Sad Songs for Me. Her explanation to the three of us and to Kenneth was both earnest and self-mocking: “I feel I should earn the money while I can; forget my principles, sacrifice my integrity, and go back to Hollywood. This means being a career woman—and a neglectful mother—for two years in order to get some security. This plan will be known as my two-year plan and certainly excludes marriage—much too expensive and distracting. I’m meeting Cohn, head of Columbia, on Tuesday, and think I’m about to cry. It’s sort of like goodbye forever.”

Forever was three months in Hollywood. During the shooting of the film, Mother’s letters and phone calls exemplified what we came to recognize as constitutional extremes of temperament, more pronounced when she worked than ever before. Everyone was so kind and complimentary it frightened her: secretaries came out of their offices to say how proud they were to have her on the lot; the producer and director were wildly enthusiastic; they all seemed to have such high expectations that she wanted to crawl back into her little Greenwich home. She felt she was posing as an actress. Her acting was phony, old-fashioned, theatrical; if she continued to be as bad, they would have to replace her. One day she was wonderful, the next she stank.

No Sad Songs for Me was the last movie Mother ever made. It was our undeniable right, we argued vociferously, to be allowed, this one time, to see her on the screen; we were old enough not to be warped by the experience and it would be our last chance. Kenneth, similarly disadvantaged, backed us up. Mother’s capitulation was based on the premise that her performance was so awful we would all be disappointed enough to discourage her from working again. Adhering to a rigid policy that she never see herself in a movie, not even in daily rushes, she waited nervously for us outside the Radio City Music Hall where No Sad Songs for Me was breaking records as the Easter attraction. We emerged dazed and shaken, unable to differentiate between our mother and the woman we had just seen die of cancer. For the next few weeks we treated her with inordinate tenderness (“Never have I known any of you to be so dear and well behaved”), and insisted that she go to the doctor for a thorough checkup.

In 1952, again claiming she was broke—but, according to our private appraisal, just plain bitten by the bug—Mother returned to the Broadway stage after almost nine years of absence. The play was Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, brought over from London by Alfred de Liagre, her old friend and producer of The Voice of the Turtle. Never able to justify any half-measure undertaking, she “adored” the play, “adored” Terry Rattigan, “adored” Delly.

We were far more excited than she. At last we were going to witness the revelation of her most profound secret: what she was really like as an actress. She was about to breathe life into those old press clippings that lay yellowing and collecting dust—concealed from whom did she think?—behind the blue leather covers of the ten or so scrapbooks. We were going to have the chance to sit in a theater filled with anonymous people all paying for the privilege of sharing her with us. We would hear the applause, the oohs and ahs, the sighs, the comments, the coughs all around us; at the sound of the familiar husky voice, we would smile, titillated by the bittersweet pleasure of knowing her in a way nobody else could. We took turns cuing her with her lines; she was word perfect when she went to the first cast reading. We were not taken aback at the discovery that she was even more self-demanding as an actress than as a mother. Nor were we baffled by her protestations of hatred for what she was doing, nor by her nightly fulminations about the rehearsal, the director, the two leading men, the part, herself in it, and anybody, everybody who could not immediately rectify matters with the most constructive criticism—which to her meant telling her, line by line, scene by scene, how lousy an actress she was. It all made beautiful sense. It all added up to the intangible whatever-it-was we already knew about Mother.

But what was amazing, stupefying, stunning was the impression we had of her on opening night. We were unprepared. We had no idea, no idea at all. She was absolutely wonderful. “I rely on you to be my harshest critics,” she’d said wistfully when we’d kissed her backstage beforehand. And she was right; Brooks Atkinson was no better equipped than we. Exposed to every nuance, every trick in her performances at home, we were primed to pick her performance on stage to pieces. But on stage all the tricks fell into place. Gestures, movements, voice inflections that might seem a shade too broad, too histrionic for the business of everyday life were totally right when mounted on a proscenium, bathed in intense light, and viewed from a distance of thirty-odd feet. We were shocked that she had ever given up—for whatever reason, even if it happened to be us—a profession at which she excelled.

“Damn,” I growled out of the corner of my mouth at intermission, “it works better here than in life.” Bridget jabbed my ribs with her elbow. But it was true. I resented Mother for alleging that her talent was less important than the happiness of her three children. Given a choice, we would have been just as happy all