HAYWIRE

Sometimes things go haywire, crazy, they don't work the way that they should. This is the title used by Brooke Hayward who wrote the autobiographical book Haywire which details the life of her family. Her mother was Margaret Sullavan, one of the greatest stage and screen stars of her era and her father was Leland Hayward, one of the most elegant and talented agents and producers in both Hollywood and New York. Together, this dynamic couple were an amazingly talented team and a team that made a mess out of the lives of their children. Two of the children were put into mental hospitals and one committed suicide. Or, that seems to be the story that Brooke would have us believe.

Her mother and father were both married four times. Mom first married Henry Fonda, then the great movie director William Wyler, then Leland Hayward. They had three children---Brooke, the oldest, then Bridget and finally Bill. After divorcing Leland, she married Kenneth Wagg.

Her father first married Lola Gibbs (actually he married her, divorced, and remarried her), then he married Margaret Sullavan, then Nancy (the ex-wife of famous film director Howard Hawks), and finally married an Englishwoman, Pamela Churchill Harriman. (Interesting that their final spouses in both cases were English?) You may recall that Pamela eventually became the United States Ambassador to France in recent years.

The three Hayward children lived exciting, interesting, and demanding lives. Although they moved from West to East Coasts on more than one occasion, they were often playmates with Peter and Jane Fonda. (Peter and Bill, as adults, co-produced one of the most famous films of all times---Easy Rider---which starred Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, and Dennis Hopper (Dennis also Directed the movie and eventually married Brooke, her second husband). The three children, like their parents, were all beautiful and gifted.

But, all of them were also very manipulative. When Bridget would get mad at her mother she would withdraw as a form of punishing her mother. "Nobody knew better than Mother how extremely effective this punishment was, she by her own example having instructed all of us in its subtleties for years. Bridget's was a classic case of the pupil outdistancing the master. By now her acquired skills far surpassed Mother's and, more than skills, had become involuntary and chronic, even pathological, reflex actions. As the oldest of the three of us, I had, upon reaching adolescence, taken great pride in also being the most rebellious. I saw myself as a pioneer, a pathfinder repeatedly beating my head against the barrier of Mother's authority. I, too, had become well versed in the art of psychological warfare as she taught it, but to me it had never seemed more than one of her numerous idiosyncrasies, a dreadful game whose rules I knew even when I was being too stubborn to play. The first rule was that Mother, in a state of wrath, almost never raised her voice: she lowered it drastically until it was a distant murmur. Second: the more I attempted to make contact, to explain, to argue, the more remote her voice and demeanor became. Third: I would be sent to my room with instructions not to reappear except for meals until I could apologize. (It was a challenge to see how long I could go without breaking…Once I proudly lasted a week, but it was excruciating.) Fourth: when I joined the rest of the family at dinner, Mother would behave as if I were invisible, never once looking at me or addressing me. And so on. After dinner, if I tried to kiss her good night, she would turn her cheek away, and since she was a fine actress, she knew how to make her silences as eloquent as words. Bridget and Bill watched with demure interest; much later I was to wonder if these scenes didn't have more effect on them than on me. Usually after a few days I would crack and make my way downstairs for the apology scene. Mother expected a proper apology with real conviction; otherwise I was sent back and we would continue the ordeal until she was satisfied" (pp. 43-44 of the Bantam edition of Haywire, 1978---the book was originally published by Knopf in 1977).

This is the theme throughout the book. The parents are to blame. Even though the children dearly loved their parents, even though the parents dearly loved their children, the fact that the children had problems was because of the behavior of the parents. In 1977, when the book was first published, this was the accepted attitude of those who were trying to understand human behavior. Unfortunately, it is still a common way of explaining away behavior. But, it is a distortion to view behavior in this way. Brooke's parents were, as parents, less than perfect---alas, such is the case with ALL parents. None of us are perfect. What is needed, by both parents and children, is an acceptance of our mutual imperfections. If Brooke had not been so hardheaded and creative, she would not have entered into the clash of wills with her mother and mother would not be viewed as such a manipulative person. The parents create the environment, but, so do the children. And, both parents and children are significantly driven by their genes.

When Bridget became an adult she could not let go of the games that she played, which eventually led to her death. But, at the same time that she refused to let go of the games, she was also aware that they were unfair. "Bridget felt deeply that, looking back on everything, she had been unreasonably antagonistic to mother and that she had hated her for a lot of things that weren't her fault…" (p. 56).

The three children didn't feel that they could express their feelings to their mother. "'I'm your best friend,' she would say, 'and if you have any problem, you should come to me first.' But that was a trap, because whenever we presented her with a disagreeable fact, or argued with her, or crossed her, or chafed at a policy we thought unfair, she would do one of two things. Either she would override our dissent with a twenty-minute sermon or lapse into wounded silence, a silence that was anything but passive. We knew, subconsciously, that it was a form of repressed anger, but it didn't make our own anger any easier to blurt out. There was no way to win. Once I said that to her, and she was quite taken aback. When it came down to it, I was more argumentative than Bridget and Bill; they were cleverer, although no less resentful. I fought a lot of battles, theirs as well as mine, and spent a lot of time in my room, working off the punishment for my insubordination" (p. 234).

After the parents divorced, the children were caught in the typical bind when visiting the absent parent, in this case their father. "We were confused and ashamed, when we did go to see Father (never often enough), about enjoying ourselves thoroughly; it seemed an act of deliberate disloyalty to Mother" (p. 235).

When they did visit Father, he typically spoiled them and bought them things that the mother felt were extravagant. Mother tried to instill values that were related to hard work and felt that the Father was undermining these values. As Brooke notes: "What counted was that he loved us, not whether he did so wisely or well" (p. 259). This brief line is the most profound in the book and one that Brooke and the other children should have taken to heart. What does count, in the final analysis, is love, not its expression, which can always be faulted, but, LOVE, the deep and sincere concern for your children that all but a handful of parents possess.

One of the final lines in the book is: "We'd been careless with the best of our many resources: each other" (p. 368). This more than any other lesson is what we should take away from this biography, from most if not all biographies, that we need to pay attention, to care about those we love. That children should not take their parents for granted any more than parents should take their children for granted. That spouses should never take their beloved for granted, that siblings should never take one another for granted.

Acceptance and not taking loved ones for granted. These are the foundation stones upon which all important relationships should be built---and, tragically, we so infrequently build as well as we are able. When you think of your parents, siblings, spouse/boyfriend, I hope that you will examine how you can be more accepting of them and how, specifically, you can take them less for granted.

(Note: If you want to see one of Margaret Sullavan's films, I would recommend Three Comrades, as she was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in this 1938 film.)