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

grandmother, about whether or not to tell the children the truth. Newspapers and magazine subscriptions had been canceled lest Jane and Peter stumble on some reference disclosing the real cause of their mother’s death. They had been informed that Frances had died of heart failure. The entire student body at the Greenwich Academy was warned at assembly by Miss Campbell that it was to respect that story for an indefinite period of time. How Mrs. Seymour managed to keep the facts from Jane and Peter as long as she did was surprising. Some months later, during art class, Jane and I were leafing through a movie magazine under the pottery table, and we came upon a biographical digest of the stars, alphabetically listed. I flipped the page but not quickly enough. Jane turned it back and silently read the truth. Afterward she did not say a word about it to me, nor did I dare to bring it up. Now, at sixteen, she had passed through the most awkward stages of adolescence unscathed. Her skin was perfect, her face and figure beautiful, her personality original. She was, of all my friends, Mother’s favorite. “Jane has remarkable character for one so young,” Mother used to say. “She’s incapable of telling a lie.” (Since I was all too capable, this observation was artfully designed to strike terror into my heart, which it did.)

Peter was as singular an individual as any other Fonda. A year or so after Frances’s death, Hank married Susan Blanchard, Oscar Hammerstein’s stepdaughter. While they were honeymooning in the Virgin Islands, Peter accepted the invitation of his friend Tony Avery to spend the weekend at the family hunting lodge. Stepping out onto the roof with a sawed-off shotgun he’d found in the attic, Peter, unable to figure out how to load it, jammed the barrel against his belt buckle for leverage and the gun went off, blasting a hole through his stomach. His life was saved by a cool-headed chauffeur who drove him, unconscious, fifty miles to the nearest hospital. Peter basked in glory. Nobody else in Greenwich had ever had such an accident. In fact, he preferred to play down the accidental part and to impute dark subconscious motives to his trigger finger. (That was during the Korean War; Bill and Peter had fallen in with the Fawcett brothers, a wild crowd. The Fawcetts had substantial property nearby, which lent itself to the large-scale building of trenches and foxholes. Evil weapons were developed. Bill, who had a way with firearms, came up with a grenade that consisted of a cherry bomb dipped first in Le Page’s glue and then rolled in BBs to give it the perfect weight for throwing long distances. Amazingly, only one of the gang sustained a major injury: Roger Fawcett, younger brother of Rocky, was accidentally shot in the eye with a BB gun.)

Eventually, the Fondas had moved from Greenwich into New York City. This had forced Peter to consider other outlets for his prodigious energy; he had taken up the trumpet and flower-arranging. It was then—across the tables in the Museum of Modern Art’s garden, where our families met for lunch—that Peter (he claimed later) had fallen secretly in love with Bridget.

That summer of 1954, however, Bridget was in Switzerland with Mother and Kenneth. Bill and I were not particularly sorry; she could be something of a tribulation. While the rest of us were able, somehow, to express ourselves, she had remained, as in childhood, aloof. Not that she felt superior; the reverse was true. But to me—something I would never have dreamed of telling her—she personified the best qualities in all of us. I admired her integrity, and was afraid of her. I had the feeling that she had been dropped many times and glued back together but that the cracks still showed. I wanted to set her in the sun and let her turn a golden brown like Mother. To me that golden patina meant strength. At the same time, I was relieved to be rid of the responsibility. In a way I hoped that the school in Switzerland would do the job I wasn’t up to.

At seventeen I was cockier than ever. I was also outrageously flirtatious. No man was exempt from my coquetry. Danny Selznick, a year older than I, took me to a small French bistro for escargots, and chastized me for flirting with his father. “There’s a creature,” he warned, “whose name begins with the letter ‘V,’ to which you bear a remarkable likeness.” I was charmed by the notion that he saw me as a vixen. At David O. Selznick’s annual Fourth of July party in Malibu, I set out to conquer all of Hollywood; much to Father’s concern, Richard Rodgers told him I was delectable and Cole Porter gave me a cigar.

My greatest treasure that summer was my driver’s license. For my seventeenth birthday, Father had promised me a car but weaseled out by temporarily substituting a very skimpy dress from a new Beverly Hills store named Jax. That evening I wore it to dinner—without a bra (quite shocking in those days), since it was too low-cut to accommodate one. My date was Warner LeRoy, son of Mervyn LeRoy, who was to replace John Ford as director of Mr. Roberts. Afterward, Warner took me to watch Jimmy Dean shoot the Ferris-wheel scene in his first movie, East of Eden. “He’s going to be the biggest young star in Hollywood,” predicted Warner, whose brand of worldliness was quite unlike that of the average Eastern preppie. But Jimmy Dean’s fate was far less interesting to me than Marlon Brando’s. I had high hopes toward Marlon Brando that summer. For one thing, he was in Los Angeles making a movie, Guys and Dolls, which, for another, was being directed by an old friend of the family, Joe Mankiewicz. And if that wasn’t luck enough, it just happened that I’d grown up with Joe’s niece Johanna.

With me at the