Book-It '22! Book #20: "Haywire" by Brooke Hayward

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Title: Haywire by Brooke Hayward

Details: Copyright 1977, 2011 Random House

Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "From the moment of its original publication in 1977, Haywire was a national sensation and a #1 bestseller, a celebrated Hollywood memoir of a glittering family and the stunning darkness that lurked just beneath the surface.
Brooke Hayward was born into the most enviable of circumstances. The daughter of a famous actress and a successful Hollywood agent, she was beautiful, wealthy, and living at the very center of the most privileged life America had to offer. By the time she was twenty-three, her family was ripped apart. Who could have imagined that this magical life could shatter, so conclusively, so destructively? Brooke Hayward tells the riveting story of how her family went haywire."


Why I Wanted to Read It: During the first few months of the pandemic, I was seized, as many were, by nostalgia: of particular relevance to this review, trying to hunt down information on one of my favorite childhood books.
In the process, I discovered an absolutely delightful blog, Mondo Molly, an immensely entertaining examination of YA literature from roughly the 1930s until the 1980s (with exceptions of course, and stopovers in other vintage youth culture artifacts). Although I've mentioned and linked to the blog before, please consider this my official recommendation! Go read it and get your comment on! At any rate, along with a lot of jogged childhood memories, the blog is also a delight for book recommendations. This is one of said recommendations. I think I half-remembered hearing about it, but had never read it.

Which is silly, because if you've been reading this blog for a bit, you know I have a passion for nearly all things Old Hollywood (and have since my teens!). In fact, one of my favorite Old Hollywood books of all time is the memoir of a daughter of a movie star (as well as unfortunately quite infamous in her own right given the true crime connection of accidentally killing her mother's abusive boyfriend), Lana Turner's daughter Cheryl Crane's Detour.


How I Liked It: CONTENT WARNING! THE BOOK REFERENCES SUICIDE AND OTHER MENTAL HEALTH STRUGGLES, AND THE REVIEW WILL MAKE MENTION OF THEM; PLEASE PROCEED ACCORDINGLY.

Sometimes, I wonder if my book reviews are talking to each other.

No, I haven't gone any further 'round the bend (despite some of the books I read this year that tried to send me that way), but having finished Helter Skelter, a book that paved the way for so many in a genre and yet stands on its own even still, it's strange to think that this book also does just that, only in a completely different genre. What do I mean? As always, I promise you'll understand by the time I'm finished.

In the meantime, let's meet Brooke Hayward! Or more importantly, her very famous family, who we meet by a series of quotes from the staggeringly famous (the 2011 edition has a new forward by Buck Henry and the book is peppered with personal stories from no less than Truman Capote, Jimmy Stewart, Jane Fonda, and other people so famous it's practically a joke) about Hayward and her family. The book itself opens with a sort of mission statement from Hayward about the memoir ("This book is a personal memoir; but it is also a larger story-- about carelessness and guilt, and the wreckage they can make of lives.") and a miniature introduction to her family, particularly her parents (although she cautions "However, this is not primarily about my parents' lives, except as they bore directly upon our own. It is really about their children-- Bridget, Bill, and me-- each of whom reacted uniquely to the hap-hazard stew of catastrophes, looking for a means of escape.").

The book then begins in October 1960, right before her sister Bridget's death (a likely suicide) at only twenty-one, less than a year after their mother's death (another likely suicide, ruled an accident). We're taken through their final conversations, and the horror of discovering Bridget's death and Hayward's unwillingness to believe it (along with her own strange station in life, being the now divorced mother of two at only twenty-three years old), right into a flashback to her mother's death months before, her overbearing and unbearable stepmother (more on her later) present and awful at both. From there, the book nudges both backwards and forwards in time for the first two chapters, resting finally more or less straightforwardly from the third chapter on, describing both her parents' backgrounds, childhoods, and their meeting to her childhood as oldest (with two-years younger Bridget and four-years younger Bill).

She and her siblings have a whirlwind at least partially Hollywood royalty upbringing and are somewhat cousins to other Hollywood royalty like the Fonda children (convenient as the Haywards' mother was once married to Fondas' father), playing with them often and attending the grand birthday parties (Jane Fonda is a great food-fighter). They have a staff they love very much (particularly their nanny) and although they attempt "regular" school with "regular" people, it simply doesn't work out for the two girls (Bill is a different story) and they resume private lessons.

Their parents divorce when Hayward is ten, a ripping, unsettling event, particularly during a time when divorce is barely spoken and accompanying therapy for children is non-existent. From there, it sometimes feels like a tug of war between parents, and a strange one at that. All siblings grow up and start to go their own ways, no matter how troubled (especially Bill, who is in and out of mental institutions). The book from there jumps over the loss of both Bridget and their mother (since it was primarily covered in the first two chapters of the book) to the slow, excruciating loss of Hayward's father of a stroke, where the book ends.

The 2011 updated version contains an afterward from Hayward including the tragic acknowledgment of her brother Bill's death by suicide in 2008.

So this isn't the first Hollywood memoir to exist. It's not even the first Hollywood memoir to assert that something uglier was going on underneath the glittering service. I'm not even sure it's the first Hollywood memoir to be written by a child of a movie star. But it is ONE of the first of all of those (now quite ubiquitous) things, and one of the most successful of all time. Arguably, it rode a nice zeitgeist of the jaded, cynical late 1970s reflecting on a supposedly more innocent era, at least outwardly. It's also incredibly important to note that this book predates another famous, massively popular Hollywood memoir, Mommie Dearest (more on that later).

Hayward apparently has a natural affinity for writing, having loved to write as a child (and even being offered a publishing deal after her stepfather kindly sent to a publisher a book she'd painstakingly cowritten with a friend at twelve) and was urged on in this project by professional writers like Buck Henry. And to be clear, she's got some utterly gorgeous, evocative ways with words.

I tended to measure my life in summers, perhaps because I was born in one. (pg 278)

The road was too hot to walk on barefoot, so with no prearranged destination in mind, we crossed into the alfalfa and corn fields on the other side. Warm green cornstalks swished over our heads like a dense thicket of bamboo. At the far end of the meadow was the pine forest. After looking back to make sure the house was still visible, we plunged into its cool Gothic shadows and remained there for the rest of the afternoon. When there were no eggs left to peel or milk to swig, we fanned out on the dead pine needles and took a nap.

Although we had no intention of ever going home, toward dusk we were seduced by the sound of Emily ringing the dinner gong. In order not to appear too anxious, however, we took the long way home along the crest of the hill past Andrew Tomashek's unkempt farmhouse where the pigs were being fed, past a bramble of ripe raspberries, over the fence and down through the meadow, ignoring Bridget's squeals about nettles and poison ivy; then back across the road-- cool now-- and up onto the stone wall that bordered our property. Already we could tell it was doing to be a perfect evening for a firefly hunt. The air was thick with the hum of tree toads and mosquitoes, the rustle of squirrels in the maples, the flutter of bats. In the home stretch now, we moved more and more deliberately, creeping from stone to stone over the vines of shriveled morning-glories, snatching at the overhanging branches for unripe apples, testing them, spitting them out at each other. (pg 281)

But the book takes a bit to get into since timeline-wise, particularly at the beginning when the reader needs to be hooked, it's all over the place. The quotes from famous individuals are fascinating (and illuminating), but have a way of jarring the narrative flow at a time when it doesn't need any more jarring. The author's tangents, particularly at the beginning, are also a bit confusing and having scant knowledge of the Hayward family, I found myself having to look up some dates and times to understand what I was reading. Given both her parents' fame at the time of publication, maybe it was assumed everyone knew what happened when, but as a relative newcomer I was too often confused and felt like I was entering an intense conversation midway through.

This problem is emblematic of a larger theme: I've read so many books like this, I'm forgetting that this is one of the first and thus not fair to assign it to the same standard. Which would be that had Hayward written this book ten years later, it's likely that affinity for writing or not, she would have had a co-writer or at least a stronger editor to keep things in line.

But again, maybe we don't want Hayward to have a stronger editor or an experienced co-writer. Because there's a rawness to her writing, particularly about the trauma, that feels like it could be lost too easily.
The book ends somewhat abruptly with her saying goodbye to her dead father:

I laid his head gently back down on the pillow and kissed his forehead. It was time to go.

I got as far as the middle of the room before I stopped, feeling him over my left shoulder. If I look back now, I thought, I'll never let go; maybe that's why Brother Paul keeps his vigil tonight-- to guard the living as well as the dead.

So I started for the doorway and the dark corridor beyond, knowing, as I passed through it, that my one choice was to keep moving forward. (pg 325)

It's a somewhat uplifting ending, at least with the last sentence.
But again, had she written it even ten years later, it's too likely it would've been subject to the urging to make it lighter, brighter, and give it a happier ending. For Hayward to go on about how she's different from her parents, she's not letting the demons of her past and upbringing claim her the way they did her sister (and later, her brother), but to choose to be happy. Instead, the ending as it is, that Hayward went on because she had no choice, has a subtler but harder impact.

Similarly, her complicated feelings about her siblings, in the unique way siblings can relate to each other particularly in dysfunctional families, has a similarly beautiful raw and authentic quality:

Although I had seen little of them in the last few years, the two people I loved most in the world were my sister and my brother. It was an odd kind of love, one that did not demand much of my time or of theirs. I was not dependent on them, nor they on me. We expected nothing of each other, nothing at all. Perhaps we had deduced from the way matters had ended with Mother and Father that even the most committed relationships were not to be counted on. We couldn't damage each other if we wanted nothing from each other, not even rudimentary loyalty. The quantum "nothing" had its own value. Unhindered by what brothers and sisters ordinarily expected of each other, were were free to love without ordinary rules. We were free to come and go as we pleased. We were free to feel without demonstrating what we felt. By the same token, we were exempted from the need to regret what we didn't feel. Outsiders were often surprised the we didn't keep better track of each other. What they dismissed as cold or flippant or imperious behavior was devised by us as an intricately expressive sign language. All this was a long way of saying that however deeply we cared about each other, our care had a rogue quality. And occasionally, when it mattered most, our signals could get crossed. (pgs 242 and 243)

Similarly when she and her brother Bill, her now only remaining sibling, are watching over their dying father, she muses:

We were definitely flip sides of the same coin. I knew that much. I felt better whenever Bill's life touched mine. I felt, when I saw him, as if I were coming home after a long journey. As unreliable as he might be (and was) where anyone else was concerned- as eccentric, as fundamentally off center as I knew him to be- at that moment, he was the only person left in the world with whom I would unequivocally trust my life. We sat side by side in the armchairs at Father's feet, and I thought irreverently it was unfortunate Bill was was my brother; if it weren't for the taboos about incest, I would have married him. It wasn't so much sexual attraction (although I'd never pursued this line of psychological investigation: the taboos were thicker than blood); it was much less complicated than that. We had a tacit understanding. (pg 292)

When less than twenty years after the book's publication, the idea of a dysfunctional family would be so well-plumbed in just about every genre of media, the boldness of the family's dysfunction, particularly at a time when so much of this was still unspoken, is sometimes chilling.

Tom [Mankiewicz]:

"I remember at the reception you said to me, 'I'm the daughter of a father who's been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I'm twenty-three and divorced with two kids.' I said, 'Brooke, either you've got to open the window right now'-- we were on the tenth floor-- 'either you've got to open the window right now and jump out, or say, "I'm going to live," because you're right, it's the worst family history that anybody ever had, and either you jump out the window or you live.'" (pg 59)

Bridget:
"I sometimes think there is only one way for me to resolve my struggle with Mother and that is to go down to Greenwich, push her in the river and then jump in after her to drown." (pg 253)

"By our standards," [Bill] said without interrupting his contemplation, "most people don't know the meaning of word 'depression,' although it's become fashionable to bandy around. But we had a superb education; our family wrote the textbook. We could probably give courses in it. Carry on the tradition." (pg 293)

Even in the 2011 afterward when dysfunctional families had now been a sitcom staple for decades, the author's assessment of her situation still shakes.

In the thirty-odd years since Haywire was originally published, for me the most noteworthy personal events have been the deaths of many of my best friends, as well as my brother, Bill, who shot himself in the spring of 2008. Thought I'm still alive and well, not a single day or night, not twenty-four hours, goes by since the death of my mother, my sister, my father, and my brother that I do not think of them. (pg 327)

Extra chilling is the fact in a conversation with her brother at their dying father's bedside, he tells her exactly how he would die by suicide and why. Horrifyingly, that is exactly the method he ultimately took over thirty years after Haywire was first published.

But if you're interested in the book's Hollywood connection, you probably won't be disappointed either. The book isn't a hatchet job by any means on Hayward's famous parents (the constant stories from famous people that run alongside Hayward's narrative generally support her version of events but you get the feeling that's not their primary purpose; they're just adding and filling in to the stories she's telling, not offered as any kind of "proof"), nor is it merely interested in pointing to the dark unease behind the happy glamorous facade. Her parents largely keep the business away from their children, particularly her mother, and the one of the only tells in childhood are the famous faces that populate Hayward's childhood memories. Oh, and the birthday parties.

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. Possible 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. (pg 90)

In the book, Margaret Sullavan comes across as someone who was far more interested in being an actress than in being a movie star, and forbids her children to see any of her performances, save her last film (No Sad Songs For Me) since she feels it's terrible anyway (her children are enchanted and marvel at her talent). But yeah, those birthday parties.

At a typical Hollywood birthday 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 or petticoats under dotted swiss or organdy, sashed at the waist with plump bows and lace-trimmed to the neck to set off her dainty yellow curls. (pg 90)

Incidentally, if that passage looks familiar, it's because it was quoted in the godawful biography of Joan Crawford I read earlier this year as seeming evidence that Christina Crawford was lying about her claims of abuse at the hands of her mother. It's worth noting again that this book predated the publication of Mommie Dearest by a year, although supposedly Christina Crawford had made it known she was working on a memoir before then (and according to other memoirs and biographies I've read, Joan Crawford's treatment of her first two children was notorious Hollywood gossip, although it wouldn't become known to the public until after the publication of Mommie Dearest). To be clear, I don't think that Hayward was making any kind of statement one way or the other about Christina Crawford's allegations of abuse and I haven't found any evidence (from admittedly a cursory search) that she's ever commented on Mommie Dearest.
Throwing lavish parties for your child was, as Hayward (as well as Cheryl Crane in her memoir) points out, somewhat of a Thing in Hollywood at the time, and there was considerable competition and movie star parents trying to outdo one another (and in some cases, make up to their children for their absence).

Though Hayward's mother tries to shield her children from her fame, it creeps in and there's at least one notable encounter when the family is visiting a museum:

We went for the first time to the Museum of Natural History, where I shivered at the sight of the huge blue whale floating over my head in the main hall and the vast rooms inhabited by dinosaur skeletons, the first fleshless bones I'd ever seen. While we were standing with noses pressed against the glass behind which lay a tawny African landscape with its appropriate spiral-horned eland and tufted gnu (shot and donated by Grandfather Hayward), a young black woman tapped Mother gently on the shoulder and said, "Excuse me, Miss Sullavan, can I please have your autograph?"

Mother mumbled something and shook her head. We clutched possessively at her coat, amazed that a stranger would know our mother's name. The young woman repeated her question a little more plaintively.

Mother drew herself up and regarded the intruder with a cold eye. "I beg your pardon," she said crisply, "but I think you have the wrong person. I am not Miss Sullavan."

The stranger was now as confused as we. "Margaret Sullavan," she said, thrusting a forth a piece of paper and pencil, but Mother was already moving away.

"Come along, children," she said. "and we'll have a quick look at the mummies, which you will love."

"But, Mother," we exploded on the way down the marble stairs, "aren't you Margaret Sullavan?"

"Yes, that is my professional name," she answered, but before she could say anything else, we pounced on her with glee, clamoring all together, "But then you've told a lie, Mother, why did you tell such a terrible lie to such a nice lady? You don't let us tell lies! She looked so sad when you said that-- why didn't you want her to know who you are?"

Mother sighed and waited for us to stop. "You see, she said patiently and with slow emphasis on every word, so that she would never have to say it again, and she never did, "there are a lot of people in the world who think if they get the signature-- autograph, it's called-- of someone who is famous down on a piece of paper-- sometimes even collect these signatures in books-- that that will somehow make them more important. Well, I feel sorry for them because they think they can have some part of me by having me write my name for them, but that doesn't mean I approve of it, and besides, I certainly don't want to be famous or looked at when I walked down the street or take you children to a museum." Here she gathered us in her arms as we were about to come to the mummies and spoke with such intensity that we felt swept up and purified by some glorious hurricane: "I think people who try to intrude on other people's privacy or personal life in any way-- and you children are my personal life-- I think those people are rude and silly. Now look- look!" she exclaimed, her eyes widening with excitement and her low magical voice stretching until it seemed it might snap and carry us with it, so that we sighted down her outstretched hand, with its crimson enameled nails glistening like Faberge charms, at the room that danced before us and at the gold-inscribed sarcophagi tilted so that we could see their stained linen-wrapped contents. (pgs 66 and 67)

When Hayward decides to give acting a try for herself when she's older, her parents are typically against it, and Hayward is somewhat dismayed to learn that doors open for her thanks to her parents:

I had entered Lee Strasberg's acting classes after an interview with him, in which, having asked me some cursory questions about my previous acting experience (none) and who my favorite actors or actresses were (Olivier, Brando, and so on), he told me that I could start immediately. As it was almost impossible to get into his classes, and I knew several people who had waited for years before a space opened up, I summoned up the courage to ask him why he was prepared to expedite the procedure in my case. He replied unhesitatingly that it was due to my mother's prominence as an actress and my father's as a producer. I boldly told him that I didn't want to be accepted by him as a student for that reason. He sighed and soothed his fine white hair with both hands, then turned on me a dazzling smile. "It has nothing to do with favoritism, darling," he said. "Your mother and father are very talented. You might inherit the talent, see? The odd are that you will prove to be more gifted as an actress than most other people with experience that I interview. And your lack of experience is a blessing-- it means you have had no bad habit yet to unlearn, no preconceived ideas about how to act. I consider myself lucky to have you in my classes, darling. You will start on Monday morning." (pgs 35 and 36)

Noticeably absent, however, is much of Hayward's own time in Hollywood, particularly with her one-time husband Dennis Hopper with whom she shares a daughter, and there's apparently a good reason for that that Hayward explains in the 2011 afterward:

I [in the 1970s] was also under contract with Knopf to write a book about Los Angeles and the art world of the 1960s, but my ex, Dennis Hopper, threatened to sue me if I did. The best First Amendment lawyer in New York city as the time took me to lunch and explained that such a book, if honestly written, would have a catastrophic effect on Dennis's career and I would lose the suit. Needless to say that book has never been written. (pg 328)

Hayward could write quite a book about Hopper, given this aside from Buck Henry's 2011 introduction:

I returned to Los Angeles and waited patiently for Brooke's marriage to break up, which it ultimately did following the legendary Karate kick that broke her nose. I felt badly about moving in-- well, not that badly-- because I liked Dennis. (pg xiv)

But mostly, it's a book about dysfunctional families and how we survive them, or don't.

In the decades since Haywire was first written, both the Hollywood memoir and the dysfunctional family (and sometimes both) are now even more familiar to the public as the iconic movie stars of Hollywood's golden age were at the height of their fame. Reading Haywire isn't just important in terms of recognizing what paved the way, it's important in terms of recognizing the raw emotion at the heart of such well-trod subjects. Like another book this year (!), it has the power to take the much-discussed and make it feel fresh.




Notable:

WOW, HAYWARD'S SECOND STEPMOTHER PAMELA CHURCHILL WAS AWFUL

When Hayward's sister is dead less than a year after their mother and about to see her father:

"What is essential in this moment is that I take you back to [your father]-- I think Josh and Nedda Logan are on their way over now-- and you must be strong and brave, Brooke, absolutely no tears, really, because I cannot have him made any more upset than he already is." Right: I am a potential hysteric, who can be transformed on order into a paradigm of stoicism. "Besides, you are supposed to be an actress; be a good one tonight, please." (pg 15)

In keeping with [Mother's] original intention, [her pearl necklaces were] turned over to Bridget and me when we became twenty-one. Neither of us had ever had the nerve to put them around our necks. Bridget acted as caretaker, since I was notoriously lackadaisical. When Pamela saw them that day, she pointed out that they would be much safer with her (and besides, there was also a huge emerald ring of Mother's to consider). Pamela had a priceless jewellery collection that reposed in her custom-built safe-- a series of drawers, each with an individual combination- which rose grandly from the floor to the ceiling of her closet. I was in no mood to defend my irresponsibility, so away went the pearls and the emerald [after Bridget's death]. Ten years later, when I asked to have them back for my own daughter, they had vanished. (pg 57)

Pamela Churchill Harriman was still alive when this book was first published. Wonder if Hayward ever got the jewellery back?

Pamela also expressed delight that Bridget's trust fund would go to her father, along with her savings account.

I had removed myself to the comparative sanctuary of the West Coast upon my marriage to struggling actor-director Dennis Hopper; Father's disapproval of that union was exceeded only by Pamela's. (She was offended by the way Dennis dressed; he couldn't be relied on to turn up in the proper raincoat for the proper occasion.) (pg 284)

Ultimately, Hayward realizes why her father would marry (and stay with) Pamela, who would become his widow:

Just as Father liked all nursery food-- puréed peas, creamed chicken, mashed potatoes, ice cream-- he liked being taken care of. He loved Pamela because she took wonderful care of him. English women, far more than American women, are built-in nannies, housekeepers, gardeners- with the lightest touch in the world. Pamela had a great gift: she understood the men she loved. That was where she began and ended; it was the only life she had. No man could ever leave a woman like that. Where could he possibly go? (pg 274)

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She and I spent a lot of afternoons at the florist buying huge flowering bushes for the new space or visiting the food department at Bloomingdale's to browse through the imported delicacies. She had a passion for crystallized ginger and crème fraîche, which was hard to find anywhere else (pg 52)

In the early 1960s and probably more recently then we'd realize, crystallized ginger and crème fraîche were only available at such places.

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I mean, this was a man-about-town, a bon vivant, a gay, carefree, marvelous guy, with big ideas of finance and involvement in business, and suddenly she wants him to come home at 5:30 and sit down and play with the children or everybody go on a picnic or do something that was so foreign to him-- he hadn't been raised that way himself. But it was a gay house, even when he was miserable, and she had him raising vegetables on Evanston Street; he became absolutely domesticated. (pg 62)

I felt very gay (as if we were playing hooky) and, at the same time, guilty. Unfairly privileged. Charmed. (pg 297)

Just fun with the fact the meaning of words changes very much over time.

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Brentwood was mostly then fields of avocado trees. (pg 72)

Hayward reflecting on what would become an affluent neighborhood, but in the early 1940s was still mostly farmland. Also interesting is that her brother Bill, born during the War, marvels at life post-rationing.

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Their nanny, Emily, is far more a parent than Hayward's actual parents.

To us, Emily was everything in the world. We loved her totally because she belonged to us; she was entirely ours in a way that Mother and Father never were. We loved them from a distance; we admired them as we admired the sun and the moon, adoring their beauty and constancy, their infinite power. They were gods, we worshipped them. But we loved Emily in a different way. (pg 93)

When her father is dying, Hayward is suddenly seized with a grief and longing for the comfort of Emily, who was dead by then.

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Most of the children's Christmas presents were sent by fans of their mother ("Horrifying!" she exclaimed, but let the children open them on Christmas day, only for them to be packed up by their nanny "for a rainy day" although Hayward notes that from experience, "we knew that 'rainy day' was another way of saying that the entire mountain would be hauled off in a truck to a children's hospital after the holidays." pg 109)

Mother had one longstanding fan who kept track of all kinds of dates, and on Bridget's fourth birthday sent her a diamond brooch, allegedly a valuable family heirloom; for once, Mother was at a loss. (pg 109)

Just a reminder than stalkers have probably always existed, there just weren't proper laws against them.

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[The dining room table] was built by slaves in the South before the Civil War, and Mother, who came from Virginia, never relinquished that innate pride Southerners have about anything to do with their heritage. (pg 123)

She also had grave misgiving about the bigotry in Greenwich; there were no Jews. I'd never heard the word "Jew" until we moved to Greenwich. One afternoon we were all drinking iced tea on the flagstone terrace when a friend of mine idly quoted her mother as being greatly relieved that the owners of such-and-such a house had held out against the irresistible bid of a rich New York Jewish couple who'd driven out three times to look at it-- supposedly very prominent, too, but you know how that is: let one in, then another, and suddenly property values-- Whereupon Mother exploded. It was one of the only two times I ever saw her really lose her temper (the other was when I punched Bridget in the nose for breaking one of my china horses), and I was extremely impressed. She sprang to her feet, her face purple with emotion. "There is one thing I will not tolerate-- not in my house, not from anyone, not ever!-- and that is discrimination of any kind, particularly anti-Semitism." She pounded one fist in the other hand for emphasis. "The finest, most brilliant people I know are Jews!" She paced agitatedly back and forth, superstitiously avoiding the cracks in the flagstone, delivering herself of a long impassioned lecture that not only detailed the entire history of the Jewish race, its accomplishments and persecutions, but also lamented the incalculable loss-- cultural, intellectual, and scientific-- that that rest of civilization would have suffered without it. Inflamed by her oratory, we all felt a terrible collective shame at not being Jewish ourselves. "I find the only prejudice worth having," she concluded vehemently, "is against people who are prejudiced." (pg 202)

Hayward's mother is full of contradictions. I mean, to some extent everyone is, but putting it that way makes it so stark.

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Bill was excluded from the nightmare of school because he was too young. Up to this point, Bridget and I had thought of him as a younger extension of ourselves, with a few savory, even enviable physical characteristics thrown in (one of Bridget's first paintings for which Mother was hurriedly called to a conference at nursery school, was entitled "Bill with a Beetle Crawling Up His Pants"; in the painting, the infant Bill stood facing front with his arms outstretched and his blue suspender shorts raised to display, in scrupulous detail, what could only be a black beetle securely affixed to the tip of his penis.) (pg 126)

The bizarre and often hilariously inappropriate nature of children comes across frequently in Hayward's interactions with her siblings as young children. She and Bridget try to pass off Bill as a girl, teaching him to curtsy and putting on a dress (horrifying their mother before famous company), he loudly declares he needs to use the bathroom during a wedding, and their mother is absolutely shaken when she finds him still and covered in blood (he wanted to try shaving, got bored and fell asleep).
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DAMN, LELAND HAYWARD REALLY DIDN'T WANT KIDS

At a time and in a culture where you were expected to have children, people apparently completely unfit for (and completely undesiring of) parenthood seemed to be treated like almost a quirky novelty.

Although Father was by no means paternal by nature, he was beginning, as we grew more capable of expressing ourselves and establishing a verbal rapport with adults, to take as much interest in us as we had in him.

"Your mother and I have absolutely opposite points of view about children," he stated one evening, trying to teach us how to play chess. "She's most fascinated by them when they're babies, and babies categorically don't interest me at all, little pieces of hamburger meat-- and listen, no question about the fact that, as babies go, you were three were sensational-- but the point is, now that you're getting older and I can see how your brains are starting to work, thank God, now that's an interesting process to me, and I feel as if I'm part of it. It's about time." (pg 148)

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 this time you were twelve and Bridget was ten-- he said: 'You know, Johnny, these girls have reached the age where 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." (pg 200)

As much as she liked to congratulate herself on her ability to refrain from open hostility, once after I accused her of making Father inaccessible to us, she replied, "Your father's one of the most attractive men I've ever known, but that does not presuppose his talent as a father. He should never have been a father. But to be honest, he has not pretensions about that. I do think he cares about you and loves you in some abstract way without knowing how to show you. Besides, he's so addicted to his work he doesn't have the time. The brutal truth is this requests to see you are not as frequent as you'd like to think." (pg 227)

He admitted to being not only a romantic but a man who truly preferred the company of women. Even when he most disapproved of the way I was leading my life, he still adored me, not because I was his daughter but because I was a female. I wanted him to be an archetypal father, and he couldn't be. He knew it, too. (pg 275)

"Your brother, Bill," he once announced to me on the telephone in the angriest voice I'd ever heard him use[,] "is going to be worth just about a plugged nickle. That is, if he's lucky." (pg 277)

When, in the 1961 Bel Air fire, Dennis's and my house burned to the ground, Father's response, by long-distance telephone, had been, "Christ, I hate Los Angeles; why the hell didn't God burn down the whole city while he was at it?"(pg 284)

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When Hayward is fifteen, her mother surprises her by allowing her to pose for Vogue, wearing (very, very slight) make-up, and allowing her to keep the very grown-up dress they sent. She's featured on the cover and enjoys a modest level of fame in their Connecticut community. Her thirteen-year-old sister Bridget is quietly jealous and her eleven-year-old brother Bill handles it in his own interesting way:

Bill surreptitiously took a roll of nude pictures of me skinny-dipping and sold them to Brunswick students for black-market prices. He had quite a profitable business going until Mother confiscated the negatives.(pg 221)

Yikes.
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At his insistence, his limousine and driver picked him up and drove him home-- to Haywire House.

He'd named the house after his cable address, an ingenious logo he'd devised thirty years earlier and had incorporated ever since into the letterhead of his blue-on-blue stationery. It was also imprinted indelibly on my mind. "Get it?" he'd pointed it out with pride when I was a little girl. "Haywire. Hay-wire. Damn clever. Means kind of nuts. Never forget it. That way you'll always be able to reach me day or night, wherever you may happen to be in the crazy old world." (pg 287)

And we have a title!
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"It's a bummer, no doubt about it." As Bill moved down the line-up of suspended glass jars, he tapped each one experimentally with his fingernails. The room tinkled with varying tones. "But, Brooke, he is dying. Face it. He can't possibly go on like this. When you come in here every morning and rap with him and there's no change, or he's worse-- yes, worse. I remember when I first got here. At least he was coherent for a while, and then he kind of slipped into the --weirdness." (pg 291)

Rapping! Again!
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Hayward's father's fatal stroke leaves him in a mostly vegetative state after a failed operation. The doctor is shocked by Hayward, her brother Bill, and their step-brother Winston's complaints and anger and offers a truly horrifying pacification:

"Most people," the doctor tried again, "would be grateful to be able to take their father home at all. Even if his mind isn't as acute as it was, things won't be as bad as you anticipate. It's like having a pet-- a cat or a dog-- around the house. I've known cases where the woman of the house told me she was happy to have someone to take care of--"

"A pet!" we exploded. "Doctor, you have to be kidding! A cat or a dog! Woman of the house to take care of!"

And that was the end of it. He moved on to make his rounds. (pgs 309 and 310)

Yikes.

Final Grade: A-