Haywire by Brooke Hayward Read Free Book Online Page B

apartment and the way she decorated it. Somewhere along the way, Bridget was trying to fit into a mold that had nothing to do with her. Her spirit had nowhere else to go.”
    • • •
    I didn’t know it was going to be her last summer.
    She spent it in Williamstown, Massachusetts, working as an apprentice at the Williamstown Theatre.
    I spent it commuting frenetically between Greenwich and New York, where I then had a tiny room on the third floor of an old brownstone. Every day, I would race from fashion modeling to voice lessons to auditions for the fall theatre season to apartment hunting. Although New York City in the heat was practically unbearable, the more manic my schedule the better I liked it, particularly on Sundays when the whole city seemed to migrate to the country and I was left alone to read the newspapers lazily. Irene Selznick had given Father and Pamela, newly wed, her house in Bedford Village for the summer. It was about an hour from the city or twenty minutes from my house in Greenwich. I had a new car, my first convertible; driving it anywhere with the top down and a scarf around my hair was the most exhilarating experience I could think of.
    Irene’s house sat on roughly fifteen acres of beautifully landscaped property; it was called Imspond to honor the combination of her initials, I.M.S. (Irene Mayer Selznick), and an enormous pond with a rowboat. I loved going to that house; it was a one-story rambling cottage, filled with fireplaces and antique country furniture, bright handwoven rugs, wonderful quilts, and deep chintz-covered sofas, always cool inside even on the hottest day, but with a warm sense of light floating through all the rooms.
    Father was deeply, instinctively suspicious of country life. His abhorrence of insects—mosquitoes, in particular—and any kind of snake amounted to a phobia, which had been a source of amusement to us as children when we lived for three years in rugged rattlesnake and coyote terrain—then the wild mountains of the Doheny Estate, now the cultivated steppes of Trousdale in Beverly Hills. To my chagrin I discovered, when I was eleven or twelve and fixated on Hemingway and Africa, that although Hemingway was a close friend and client of Father’s who had many times invited him to go along on safari, Father had always declined because of the “goddamn bugs all over the place.” Also he distrusted the country because poison ivy and sumac lurked there, lying in wait for the innocent wayfarer, and houses were not generally air-conditioned like apartments in the city.
    This particular summer, however, he seemed to enjoy himself. Winston, Pamela’s son by Randolph Churchill, came overfrom England, and Father promptly blew him to a course in flying instruction; aviation had always been one of Father’s major passions. The other, photography, he indulged day and night by taking hundreds of color photographs of Imspond from every conceivable angle, inside and out. As usual, he would have “the best color lab in the world,”
Life
magazine, blow them up to an extravagant sixteen by twenty inches, eventually to be edited by Bridget into a scrapbook for Irene. One Saturday I drove out for the day with my friend Jones Harris. Father intrepidly lowered himself into the rowboat with three cameras slung around his neck, and shot pictures of the receding shoreline with a zoom lens while I rowed; Jones, reclining languorously in the bow, inquired, “Leland, do you think you’re going to be able to bring this picture in for under one million three?”
    Bridget called me several times from Williamstown to report on her activities and to see if I would drive up for a visit. She was having a splendid time working backstage in a hodgepodge of production exigencies; the drive up through the Berkshires was beautiful, she informed me, and she could press me into service any day of the week. As an added inducement, I would know a lot of people: Suzie Pleshette was up there