Haywire by Brooke Hayward Page B

outstretched hand, with its crimson enameled nails glistening like Fabergé 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.
    One cold night, Father took me to the Morosco to see Mother in
The Voice of the Turtle
. Mother disapproved vociferously, but Father had his way. “Your mother is the best actress in the world—I ought to know, for God’s sake—after all, I’ve been her agent for eleven years.” And when Mother protested: “Come on, Maggie, let her sit backstage, can’t possibly hurt her; for God’s sake, she may never see you in anything as good again.” And so I sat backstage in the wings in my pajamas and bathrobe and saw my first play. Mother took me with her to her dressing room whenever she came offstage to change; I was enthralled watching her apply layers of mascara to her lashes and lipstick out beyond the natural lines of her own mouth (“My mouth is just a straight line, the horror of all Hollywood make-up men, and so is my crooked tooth and my mole and high forehead and lousy chin”), and move swiftly from one change to another without a superfluous motion or sound, while her maid slipped one dress over her head and removed another, leaving her hair and make-up unruffled. At the end of intermission, the stage manager would knock—“Two moreminutes, Miss Sullavan”—and Mother would grab her pink swan’s-down powder puff, dab her nose with a last fillip, and snatch my hand, whispering, “Come, darling, hurry, hurry or they’ll
murder
me!” and we would race to the wings where I would plop down in my chair and Mother would just keep on going as Sally Middleton. During one change, as she slid into a silvery dress, she admonished me breathlessly, “Now, don’t be horrified by this next scene; everybody thought this play was very immoral when they first read it, because of this scene, but remember it’s only make-believe. I close my eyes and pretend I’m somebody else, and so must you, but don’t forget I’m
really
your mother and it’s your father I
really
love, and you and Bridget and Bill.” But the audience and even I gasped audibly when, at the end of the second act, Elliott Nugent took a pair of pliers from the kitchen drawer because the zipper had stuck on her silver dress, and, wrenching it as hard as he could, stepped back as the dress fell to Mother’s feet, leaving her standing in nothing but a slip as the curtain came down. “Your mother,” reiterated Father as we all piled into a car afterward, Mother ignoring the crowd pressed against the car brandishing pens and paper, “your mother is the best actress alive today.”
    “Oh, Leland, you’re just hopelessly biased,” she said, laughing. “Let’s go have a chocolate soda.” And we did.
    The Voice of the Turtle
was an enormous hit. Mother was under contract to stay with it for a year, so after Christmas, Father, who had business to attend to on the Coast, took us home. In those days the train trip lasted four days and three nights. Father was somewhat impatient with that particular mode of travel; he’d had his own airplane for years and, before the war introduced gas rationing, had flown it across the country hundreds of times. In his office at 444 Madison Avenue hung two brightly colored maps showing his former air routes between New York and Hollywood, which he used to fly several times a month, logging an average of seventeen or eighteen hours a trip. Before he’d married Mother in 1936 (owing to my imminent birth, which also necessitated Mother’s buying her way out of
Stage Door
, a play by Edna Ferber, coincidentally another of Father’s clients), Father’d been equally in love with Kate Hepburn. He claimed that at one point, with both actresses (and clients) safely separated by three thousand miles, Mother on the stage in New York and Kate making a movie in Hollywood, he would take off in his plane from New