Haywire (15 page)

All the way home, Father animatedly talked to Mother about technical matters: how every airport had its own pattern for instrument landing, how really lousy it was to land by instrument in bad weather. I was too worn out to ask what happened to the stunt pilot; later it seemed that if it was really important to know, Father would have told me, so I forgot about it.

I can’t imagine a childhood without Johnny and Jimmy in it. Johnny was around even the night I was born. It was the Fourth of July, and Mother, who was getting bored with being so pregnant, cajoled Father and Johnny into taking her out to dinner and then down to the amusement park on the Santa Monica Pier. They all tried for the gold ring on the merry-go-round, but Father was much too elegant to set foot on the roller coaster, so Mother and Johnny rode on it seven or eight times—and also the Ferris wheel, for good measure—while Father tried in vain to get them off. They threw darts, rode bumper cars, watched fireworks, paid a visit to every booth and rode every ride until two in the morning, when they went home and Johnny passed out on the sofa exhausted. He awoke at dawn, boiling hot and in a state of suffocation, because
the cat had lovingly wrapped itself around his neck and gone to sleep, too; when he disentangled himself from its steaming fur and leaned over to see what time it was, he found a note pinned on his chest, which said, “Dear Johnny, when you wake up you will be a godfather. Congratulations.” He ran frantically around the house but it was empty. Nobody had been able to rouse him from his stupor for the big event, so he drove down to the hospital and consoled himself by taking pictures of my bare behind, which was identified by a little piece of tape with my name on it.

Johnny was a wonderful photographer. He’d taken up flying and photography at the same time, and used to say that he learned photography by taking pictures of Bridget, Bill, and me. From the very beginning, he practiced the theory that if we never saw him without his camera we would never be self-conscious if he pointed it at us, and he was right. He was always hanging around, ready to document every move we made, every step we took, and we allowed him to study us in depth, assuming, naturally, that he was one of us.

On weekends, Jimmy and Johnny were permanent residents. Jimmy had met Mother in 1930 while he was majoring in architecture at Princeton and she was touring in the road company of
Strictly Dishonorable
. He had no intention of becoming an actor; in fact, he obtained a scholarship to go back to Princeton for his master’s degree in architecture. Josh Logan, who was a class ahead, had persuaded him to join the Triangle, because he could sing and play the accordion. Josh also brought him into the University Players, not as an actor but as an accordion player in the tearoom that adjoined the theatre in Falmouth. He lasted one night in the tearoom, because it was unanimously decided that his music spoiled people’s appetites; then he was given various jobs—property man, some small parts—and finally was hired by Arthur Beckhart, New York producer, to play the chauffeur in
Goodbye Again
, a part that lasted two minutes in the first act and that put an end to Jimmy’s architectural career.

By 1936, he was a contract player at Metro, working all the time but getting only small parts in B movies. At Mother’s suggestion, Universal tested him for the leading man in
Next Time We Love
, a movie in which she was about to star, and he got the part. He played a newspaper reporter and she played a young actress who gave up her career to marry him. They were both particularly fond
of the scene in which Jimmy had to go away on some assignment, leaving his young wife and baby behind. Jimmy felt that the situation called for a tear or two on his part, and had no difficulty filling his eyes for the first take, but the baby threw something at him and they had to cut. The second take was likewise ruined by the baby, and the third and fourth. By the fifth take, Jummy was unable to summon up any more tears. He didn’t know about glycerin, which is often used in movies to stimulate tears, and, in any case, would probably have been too embarrassed to ask for it, so he went behind the scenery, lit a cigarette, and held it to his eyes in the hope that the smoke would make them tear up. This experiment transformed his eyes into two raw blobs, and he almost threatened to shoot the child. Mother was delighted, particularly by the cigarette.

After he was drafted at the beginning of the war, Jimmy would come back to Evanston Street on leave, most of which he’d spend on our badminton court. During his first leave, I was in bed with a cold, lying grandly in the fourposter (canopied in green checks) of my new room in The Barn. Unexpectedly he slipped upstairs to pay me a visit during my nap time, when I was supposed to be asleep but was instead sneaking a forbidden look at some Beatrix Potter books, which tumbled loudly to the floor when I caught sight of Jimmy in uniform. He rolled me up in my bedspread like a sausage in wrapping paper, while I howled with laughter, and then perched me on his bony knee to tell me a story.

When Johnny Swope finally got married, in 1943, the ceremony took place at our house. He’d fallen in love with Dorothy McGuire, a young actress who had just starred in the stage and movie productions of
Claudia
. Johnny had swept her up romantically to Santa Barbara to be married at the historic old mission there, but to his chagrin was turned away because he was not a Catholic. Father suggested our house and that was that. Johnny had wisely avoided bringing Dorothy around before; past experience had taught him that Mother had a subtle way of overwhelming the girls whom he and Jimmy might bring over.

For Bridget and me, the wedding was the most exciting thing that ever happened at 12928. Bill was two years old and, as far as we were concerned, too young to appreciate the importance of the occasion. All the same, we allowed him to help us with our
wedding present, a painting that depicted Dorothy in a red dress holding purple flowers, surrounded by the rays of the sun, while Johnny stood apart (separated from her by the three watery figures of us children) in a brown suit and porcine bowler stuck with a red feather; over all floated the message “
DEAR JOHNNIE AND DOROTHY. I HOPE YOU LIKE YOUR WEDDING. LOVE BROOKE AND BRIE AND BILL
.” It was a very small wedding on a glorious July day, late in the afternoon. Our shadows fell in a procession on the wide lawn as we stood in a semicircle under the gnarled olive tree, banked with pots of flowers. Bridget and I were flower girls. Jimmy, who was stationed at the Air Force base in Albuquerque, flew in to double as best man and piano player of the wedding march: he ticked off the wedding march inside the house and then ran back out just in time to be best man.

Halfway through the ceremony, Bridget and I were jarred out of the trance into which the occasion’s solemnity had beguiled us by Bill tweaking our eyelet lace pinafores and whispering confidentially, “I have to go to the bathroom, I have to go to the bathroom.” Bridget scornfully snatched her skirt away and I pondered the petals in my basket, but his complaint became rapidly more desperate and audible.

“Ssh,” said Bridget in disgust.
“Sssh.”

Bill closed his eyes dreamily and began to chant, “I have to go to the bathroom, I have to go to the bathroom—”

Bridget flapped her sharp elbow at him and hissed,
“Ssssh!”

“Ow,” said Bill, then began wetting his pants slowly while he continued to sing, at the top of his high-pitched voice, “I have to go to the bathroom, I have to go to the bathroom,” throughout the remainder of the mercifully short ceremony until he was carried off by our nurse Emily.

While pouring the champagne afterward, Otto, our German butler, informed Johnny that he was taking lessons in photography and would consider it an honor to be permitted to shoot the official wedding pictures. Johnny turned over his camera (which, of course, he’d brought along) and posed with Dorothy in the doorway. Shortly after that, Elsa and Otto were arrested as German spies and we found out that Otto had been enrolled in a photography school for less than patriotic purposes, but Johnny said he couldn’t have been very good at his second trade because his photographs were so terrible.

• • •

Birthday parties were events of great consequence in Hollywood, and even though Mother deplored everything in or about Hollywood—keeping aloof from its social functions and disdaining its tribal customs, particularly as they related to stardom—she relented when it came to our birthday parties. Possibly one of the reasons for this was that after she took us out of school we so seldom saw other children except those of her friends on weekends. In no other way did Mother conform to the prevailing behavior of the Hollywood star, since she never had any great ambition to be a star at all. It wasn’t a glamorous career and its by-products that she really wanted, but a family, and I suspect that in the matter of birthday parties she felt obligated, more for the sake of her children than herself, to overcome her disapproval of the life around her.

At a typical Hollywood party, there would be twenty to thirty children (at ours, Johanna Mankiewicz and her cousins Tom and Chris, Danny Selznick, Jane and Peter Fonda, the Scharys—Jill, Joy, and Jeb—Maria Cooper, Christina Crawford, and Jonathan Knopf were the hard-core regulars), each with his or her own governess. When we all sat down to eat, there would be an attentive line-up of white uniforms packed in close formation behind us. A ritual, even competitive air infused all these parties, from the entertainment (magicians or clowns, caravans of ponies or elephants transported by truck for gracious rides around the ancestral lawns) to the menu (creamed chicken in a ring of rice garnished with peas, ice cream molded in a myriad of shapes and flavors-frozen animals in nests of green cotton candy were
de rigueur
at our house—and the birthday cakes themselves, angel food, swagged and flounced with boiled frosting like hoop skirts under white ball gowns). Joan Crawford’s daughter Christina was the most envied party hostess because invariably she offered the longest program: not only puppet shows before supper and more and better favors piled up at each place setting but movies afterward; besides, her wardrobe was the fanciest—layers and layers of petticoats under dotted swiss or organdy, sashed at the waist with plump bows and lace-trimmed at the neck to set off her dainty yellow curls.

The Hayward parties were the most boisterous, largely because The Barn seemed to inspire a lack of decorum. Our guests would arrive with their governesses and parents (the latter would
soon disappear into The Other House for a quiet drink), laden with presents and attired in crisp frocks or shorts with knee socks; curtsies would be made (by all the girls except Bridget and me) and shy greetings exchanged, and then pandemonium would rage. In front of The Barn was an enclosed play yard, stocked with jungle gyms, swings, rings, and slides, and within fifteen minutes not a dress would be clean or a knee unskinned. Covered with grass stains, the panting guests would assemble at the vast trestle table. There—under the stern jurisdiction of Emily (in her one good dress), who, arms crossed, eyed the entire company like a stage manager faced with a tricky production number—trouble began in earnest. By the time the creamed chicken was served, Jane Fonda and I usually would be throwing paper snappers across the table at each other; oblivious to Emily’s barked admonitions, we would swiftly move on to the peas and rice, packing them into mushy little balls—stained with brilliant vegetable dye from the favors—which we hurled at anyone who hadn’t already joined in, until we achieved total participation. At my fifth birthday party, I fell passionately in love with Tarquin Olivier, seated on my left, because he led off with a round of piercing battle cries in an English accent.

Tarquin, two years older than I, was the son of Jill Esmond and Laurence Olivier. Evacuated from London during the war, he had been brought by his mother to live in California. The name Tarquin Olivier was the most beautiful I had ever heard. I used to lie on my bed in a reverie—seeing the four posts as guardian angels, with glowing satin robes and creamy wings flowing to the floor—and dream of Tarquin and myself building sand castles on the beach at the grand old Carlsbad Hotel in Oceanside, where, for a summer, the Hayward and Mankiewicz families formed a colony. One weekend, Father drove Tarquin down from Los Angeles to visit us. Every afternoon we ate tomato sandwiches on toast, dripping with mayonnaise—then, while the grownups sat in canvas deck chairs on the beach, Tarquin and I dug deep moist tunnels through which we squirmed, excited by our bare skin and the proximity of our wriggling bodies. On the morning of Tarquin’s seventh birthday, his mother, Jill, brought him over for a swim.

“Mother,” I asked, somewhat anxiously, “what are we giving Tarquin for his birthday?”

“Umm,” said Mother, squinting at Tarquin, “let’s see.
Tarquin,” she kicked off her shoes and squatted down, making herself no taller than he—she never liked to address children from any height at all—“tell you what. If you can
guess
exactly what it is—one guess is all you get—then, by gum, that’s what we’re giving you for your birthday.”

Tarquin cocked his head with interest and dangled his foot thoughtfully in the water. “A watch,” he answered, his voice rising with hope, “a real wristwatch!”

Mother shook her head sadly. “Uh-uh. ’Fraid that’s way off. What we’re giving you is much more special than a watch, something that nobody else has. How would you like”—Mother gave me a wink and stood up—“a darling little roly-poly bug?” She opened her hand and there, in the crack of her palm, was a potato bug, rolled into a tight gray ball.

“Oh, no!” cried Tarquin. “You’re teasing me!”

“Why, Tarquin,” said Mother, “don’t you have any idea what wonderful pets roly-poly bugs make? You can take them anywhere.”

“Phew!” said Tarquin. “All I want is a wristwatch. Are you teasing me, Maggie?” Mother began to laugh, and for the rest of the morning he followed her around the pool, not quite sure what to anticipate at his party that afternoon, but politely hoping for the best.