The Curse of Brilliance: Brooke Hayward’s Frayed Family Ties

“My parents failed, as they succeeded—on a massive scale,” actor, model, and writer Brooke Hayward writes in her best-selling 1977 memoir, Haywire. “And they left behind them a legacy, vested in their children, that put the odds against survival ineluctably high.”

Hayward’s mother was film and Broadway actor Margaret Sullavan, star of films like The Shop Around the Corner and Cry Havoc. Her father was lauded Broadway producer and super-agent Leland Hayward, whose clients included Greta Garbo, Ernest Hemingway, Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, and Gregory Peck. Both were brilliant, boundlessly energetic, ambitious, self-absorbed, and, in the end, a little loopy.

“Haywire. Hay-wire. Damn clever,” Leland Hayward once told his daughter. “Means kind of nuts. Never forget it.”

Hayward never would forget. In many ways the poetic, beautifully written Haywire is a heart-wrenching detective story, an elegy for Hayward’s lost family, which imploded in spectacular fashion.

Unlike many memoirists, Hayward does not only relyi on her own memories. Her book also includes reminiscences from famous friends and family, including her beloved ex-stepmother and Truman Capote-anointed “Swan” Slim Keith; her mother’s ex-husbands, William Wyler and Henry Fonda; and famous friends like Capote, Jimmy Stewart, Diana Vreeland, Joseph Cotton, and Jane and Peter Fonda. Letters from her parents, hersiblings, and folks like her father’s former paramour Katharine Hepburn round out the picture.

The anti-Mommie Dearest, this memoir is not all doom and gloom. It’s filled with warmth and generosity for a family that collapsed under the weight of excess: too much talent, fame, opinions, opportunity, and untreated mental illness.

“I wept for my family, all of us, my beautiful, idyllic, lost family,” Haywards writes. “I wept for our excesses, our delusions and inconsistencies; not that we had cared too much or too little, although both were true, but that we had let such extraordinary care be subverted into such extraordinary carelessness. We’d been careless with the best of our many resources: each other.”

A Thanksgiving of Riches

“Our lives were a series of extremes,” Hayward writes. “A thanksgiving of riches was bestowed on us at birth: grace and joy and a fair share of beauty; privilege and power. Those blessings which luck had overlooked could be bought.”

Brooke Hayward was born on July 5, 1937, in Los Angeles. Appropriately, her mother had spent the night before her birth riding rollercoasters at the Santa Monica Pier.

Her siblings—Bridget, an otherworldly and mysteriously wan beauty, and the hell-raising Bill—followed soon after. The trio were in awe of their golden parents. Father Leland was an elegant bon vivant, a master salesman who loved nothing more than making deals on the telephone. But the utterly original, fun-loving and manic Margaret, who eschewed the Hollywood glamour game, was the family’s unequivocal leader. “When we were very young,” Hayward writes, “life seemed like an exciting game, invented, explained, and directed by Mother.”

Desperately clinging to her happy memories, Hayward’s first decade reads like a Hollywood fairytale. Here is her mother winning every poker game at a table of heavyweights like Sam Goldwyn and David O. Selznick. Hayward’s first crush is Laurence Olivier’s son Tarquin, and life is brightened by the constant presence of “Uncle” Jimmy Stewart, who one day “rolled me up in my bedspread like a sausage in wrapping paper, while I howled with laughter, and then perched me on his bony knee to tell me a story.”

But from the start, the extremely close Hayward siblings were singular even in Hollywood. They lived in a separate home from their parents’ mansion, nicknamed “The Barn,” where pandemonium, imagination and rowdy children’s parties reigned. They were pulled in and out of school by their remarkably progressive mother’s romantic whims, and dinnerswere always expected to be pitch-perfect with excellent manners, large appetites, and stimulating non-stop conversation.

“Never be afraid to be different—you don’t want to be exactly like everyone else,” Hayward’s mother would tell her children. “How boring that would be.”

Falling Apart

Despite all her wealth and privilege, Hayward’s feelings are highly relatable—particularly when she worries that she is the only one of her siblings to remember her family’s happy life before her parents’ divorce in 1948.

Margaret moved the children to a beautiful, rambling farm in Greenwich, Connecticut, while Leland settled in New York, becoming a satellite Santa Claus in their lives. As Margaret became increasingly eccentric, dogmatic, and high-strung, Brooke, Bridget, and Bill became tighter and tighter. “The two people I loved most in the world were my sister and brother,” Hayward writes. “It was an odd kind of love, one that did not demand much of my time or of theirs.”

Things imploded in the late 1950s, when a fed-up and rebellious Bridget, followed by Bill, decided to live with their absentee father—who offered them a high-flying, glamorous life that their down-to-earth, controlling mother refused to provide.

This decision was cataclysmic to Margaret’s self-punishing psyche. “Mother did not blame Bridget and Bill at all,” Hayward writes. “She blamed herself. This, more than anything else, made me want to cry.”

Margaret was crushed, and a year later she was found in a ditch, curled up by the side of the road. After disappearing before a TV appearance, she finally agreed to go to Austen Riggs, a noted mental health clinic. The spritely and sickly Bridget, suffering from undiagnosed epilepsy, would also be sent to the clinic for extended stays. Infuriatingly, the wayward Bill, a chronic runaway from boarding school, was placed in another mental health hospital for extended stays, simply because his parents did not know what else to do with him.

This horrifying series of events would lead to breaches which would never fully be healed. “I sometimes think,” Bridget said, “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.”

The Feisty Fondas

Brooke writes movingly about growing up with Jane and Peter Fonda, the children of their mother’s first husband, Henry. Although they were not related by blood, Henry Fonda and Margaret had stayed close after their divorce in 1933. While watching Margaret perform headstands in the yard, Jane and Brooke dreamed their parents would get back together. “We liked to suppose that beneath their rectitude smoldered a still unbridled passion for each other,” Hayward writes.

But mostly, the kids raised hell together—. first in Hollywood, and then in Greenwich, where both families settled. The five children were all rebellious rabble rousers. They caused constant trouble and hoopla: smoking, performing intricate plays, stalking Marlon Brando in Hollywood, setting fire to grasslands, and flinging food during interminable birthday parties.

At school, Brooke and Jane, both highly intelligent, sophisticated, and defiant iconoclasts, caused a commotion by getting kicked out of their Brownies troop and dreamed of becoming glamorous brothel owners. “Jane and I threw spitballs,” Hayward writes. “Pages of wadded-up semi-masticated notebook paper went into our daily stockpile of spitballs, which, at a prearranged signal, were fired off with devastating accuracy at any target.”

Accused of causing a heart attack and nervous breakdown in two teachers, Brooke and Jane were proud of their reputation. But underneath all the bravado was a deep sadness. In high school, the two were flipping through a magazine which noted that Jane’s mother, Frances, had died by suicide in 1950. This had been kept secret from Jane and Peter. “I flipped the page but not quickly enough,” Hayward writes. “Jane turned it back and silently read the truth. Afterward she did not say a word about it to me, nor did I dare to bring it up.”

Ten Months of Tragedy

The same tragedy that befell her best friend would visit Brooke when she was 22. At the time, Hayward was an it-girl in the city, with a Vogue cover, a failing marriage, and two young sons. On New Years Day, 1960, she called her mother and stepfather for encouragement on her way to perform in an off-Broadway play.

Instead, her stepfather informed her that her dazzling mother had died (of a drug overdose, which Brooke learned later). In a haze, she took the subway to the theater. A drunk man asked her why she was so sad.

“My mother died tonight,” I informed him because he was a stranger. Water began to rise in his crusty red eyes, and then he sat down quietly next to me, shaking his head. I was grateful he was there. We both waited until my stop came, and he stood up with me as I got off.

In a state of shock, which she viscerally describes, Hayward convinced herself that she must perform, that her mother would have wanted her to. In front of the theater, as a crowd of co-workers gathered, she flailed wildly as her soon-to-be-stepmother, the legendary Pamela Churchill (whom Hayward is deliciously nasty about), arrived in full-length fur “like a bird of prey” to swoop her away to her father’s apartment.

Unbelievably, on Oct. 18, 1960, her 21-year-old sister Bridget, recently released from Austen Riggs, would also die of an overdose. It was again Pamela who was sent to bring Brooke the news. In a passage almost too sad to recount, Hayward recalls that the day Bridget died, she had plans to meet her, but was too annoyed and swept up in her own glamorous life to force entrance to Bridget’s apartment when her sister didn’t answer the door.

“I, Brooke — I would never be able to forget this — almost literally would have held in the palm of my hand the singular and now irretrievable opportunity to save my sister’s life.”

Perhaps the most poignant assessment of the tragedy came from Jane Fonda. “Here were two women, your mother and your sister, who had infinite spirit—a certain kind of brilliance, a crazy brilliance, erratic, difficult, neurotic, but still unique,” Fonda told Hayward. “I don’t think society offers solutions to people like that, especially women. They were never provided with a constructive way of harnessing that kind of energy and brilliance. It turned inward and destroyed them.”

The Height of Hip

At Bridget’s funeral, screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz gave Hayward sage advice. “Either you’ve got to open the window right now and jump out, or say, ‘I’m going to live.’”

And live Brooke Hayward did. In 1961, she married the rebellious, brilliant actor and photographer Dennis Hopper, much to her father’s chagrin. “Those years in the ‘60s when I was married to Dennis,” Brooke remembered, “were the most wonderful and awful of my life.”

As recounted in Mark Rozzo’s frenetically fun-filled biography, Everybody Thought We Were Crazy, Hayward and Hopper’s home in the hills above the Sunset Strip became the hippest spot for “New Hollywood.” Everyone from Paul Newman to Jack Nicholson, the Hells Angels, The Byrds, The Monkees, and Andy Warhol partied and played there. Overseeing it all was hostess Brooke, with her elegance, steely sophistication, masterful eye, and artist’s soul.

“[It was a place] of such gaiety and wit that it seems the result of some marvelous scavenger hunt,” frequent guest Joan Didion recalled, per Rozzo.

The Hoppers, who had a daughter named Marin, became some of the premier pop art collectors in the country, their home filled with works by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Stella, Ruscha, and Rauschenberg. The first people to purchase a Warhol soup can, they befriended a new generation of artists and attended every major opening and every hip party and club.

“I, for one, certainly never paused for an instant of introspection,” Hayward told Rozzo. “It was vital to keep swimming, even upstream; movement for its own sake seemed imperative.”

But as the ‘60s progressed, dark forces swirled as success mounted. Hopper would direct the counter-culture smash film Easy Rider, which was co-produced by Hayward’s brother Bill and Peter Fonda. As Hopper became increasingly addicted to drugs, he became violently abusive and crazed, and Hayward and their children often fled to the Chateau Marmont. According to Rozzo, one day Hayward—much more straightlaced than the times—was appalled when Hopper, Jane Fonda and her husband Roger Vadim bounded into her room in search of a foursome.

The madness stopped in 1969, when the pair divorced. “Congratulations,” her father told her, “on the first smart move you’ve made in six years.”

The Last of the Haywards

“Though 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,” Brooke Hayward writes in a 2010 post-script to Haywire.

Leland Hayward died after a series of strokes in 1971. Her brother, Bill, died by suicide in 2008. But even faced with this tragic family tree, Brooke kept living, becoming a writer, designer, noted collector, and society leader in New York with her third husband, celebrity band leader Peter Duchin, whom she divorced in 2008. She continues to collect and create, although she told New York Social Diary in 2007 that an attempt to write of her life with Hopper had been thwarted by threats of lawsuits from her ex-husband. Sadly, she also said she and Jane Fonda had grown apart.

For Hayward, Haywire was an understandable cathartic release, although mystery of just what haunted her doomed family never seems fully solved—either to her or to the reader. “I wrote in a bedroom crowded with ghosts,” Hayward once said, per Rozzo. “My mother would disapprove, and my father would be horrified. The moral of my book is that you pay for everything. They were rich, accomplished, famous and beautiful. We were drowned in privilege, yet it ended in all this hideous tragedy.”

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