My Life as a Mankiewicz by Tom Mankiewicz

attending Columbia University and living uptown. We were a family of three guys now: Dad, Chris, and me. Adelaide Wallace, Dad's secretary for more than thirty years, occupied a small office on the ground floor. She was, in effect, the female component of the family. Addie was sharp, funny, loyal, and helpful. Everyone loved her. Things finally seemed to be calming down for me at last. But not for long.
    Bridget Hayward
    Bridget Hayward was the younger daughter of Leland Hayward and Margaret Sullavan—blond, emotionally fragile, and attractive to the point of being ethereal. I fell desperately in love with her. She was in her early twenties.
    I was a smitten eighteen-year-old college sophomore staring at an age gulf that effectively made her unattainable. Because of that, I loved her more. To me she was as magical as a character in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bridget was troubled enough to have earlier been committed to the Austen Riggs Center, something I either wasn't aware of or ignored.
    Her older sister, Brooke, also became a friend. Unlike Bridget, Brooke was knockout glamorous, outgoing, and a sought-after photographic fashion model with acting aspirations. She has remained a good friend of mine over many years, especially in California after I moved back and she'd married Dennis Hopper. My obsession with Bridget was well documented by Brooke in her best-selling family autobiography, Haywire , which also became a highly rated TV miniseries. It's a wonderful read, beautifully written, and if anyone thought the Mankiewicz family had its emotional problems, we were pikers compared to the Haywards. Leland, a legendary agent and producer, was Brooke and Bridget's father. Their mother, Maggie Sullavan, had committed suicide. There was a younger brother, Bill. He too had once been committed to Riggs. He tried to straighten himself out by doing a stint as a paratrooper, then had a brief romance with the movies, attaching himself to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda on Easy Rider. In 2008 he put a bullet in his head and killed himself.
    As fate would have it, Bridget struck up a relationship with a young director named Bill Francisco who taught at the Yale drama school and staged productions at the Williamstown Summer Theater in Massachusetts. I took courses in the drama school as an undergraduate, and Bill invited me up to Williamstown one summer as his assistant. Bridget came up as well, working as an apprentice. Bill was smart and talented, but he was also clearly gay, so I felt free to continue my fantasies about her. Bridget took her job seriously and worked hard, seemingly trouble free until one night at a cast party in a Williams College fraternity house. It was late, she'd had a little to drink. We were sitting together at the top of a staircase when suddenly, in mid-sentence, her eyes rolled back into her head. She called out for her mother, then collapsed and pitched forward down the stairs, unconscious, the victim of what looked like some sort of catatonic fit. A doctor was called. Bridget was taken back to her room and medicated. I sat on the carpet outside her door all night.
    Later, back in New York, Brooke and I visited Bridget in her apartment one day. The two of them began negotiating over some belongings that Maggie had left them in her will. I remember Brooke asking Bridget what she wanted in trade for two small paintings she had. “The only way you're going to get these paintings is when I die,” Bridget said. A few weeks later I returned to my room at Yale after having dinner. My roommate had left a note on the table in big letters: “Call your father, Brooke Hayward, and your cousin Josie. Very important!” A sense of dread instantly shot through me. That combination of messages could only mean one thing. I decided to call Josie first: “Hi, it's me.”
    â€œBridget's dead, kid. I'm so sorry.” Another suicide. But this time I felt no sense of relief as I had after Mother died.