Book Review: 'Haywire' by Brooke Hayward

It would be easy to lump Brooke Hayward's 1977 memoir Haywire into the rush of "shocking" tell-all books that came out in the late seventies and early eighties, written by the children of classic Hollywood stars -- among them Christina Crawford's infamous Mommie Dearest -- but to do so would be a mistake, because Haywire is neither a tell-all nor a drubbing of Hayward's parents, agent Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan. Rather, the Newsday quote on the back cover of the 2010 edition of the book that describes the memoir as Fiztgeraldian, "with the glow and the glamour, and finally, the heartbreak," is a much better summation, because Hayward's motivation in writing Haywire was not to criticize her mother or father but simply to chart -- and, perhaps, understand -- how the idyllic existence she knew as a child fell apart by the time she was twenty-five.

A little background information: I decided to read Haywire primarily because Hayward's mother, Margaret Sullavan, is one of my favorite actresses, and because Sullavan's life ended so tragically and mysteriously at the age of fifty-one: she might have killed herself, and then again she might not have -- her death from an overdose of barbiturates might well have been accidental. Anyone hoping to find clues to the nature of Sullavan's death in Haywire will be sorely disappointed, however, because Hayward makes it quite clear from the beginning of the book that she won't ever be certain how her mother died, nor does she have any answers as to the death of her younger sister Bridget, who died nine months after Sullavan, also from an overdose. These two events act as the starting-place for Haywire, which goes back in time to describe Hayward's early life and investigate how the seeds of her family's tailspin were planted long before her parents' divorce in 1947. What you find in Haywire is a story that really is quite similar to an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, not only in its theme of paradise lost but also in the way it struggles to find a reason for all its destruction without ever quite providing one. The Haywards suffered a run of bad luck, certainly, but in the end they destroyed themselves mostly because, well, they just did.

The crux of the story is the marriage between Sullavan and Leland Hayward, consisting as it did of two people very much in love who were ultimately extremely ill-suited for one another. Leland Hayward was the ultimate Hollywood agent, a wheeler-dealer who represented the likes of Fred Astaire, Ernest Hemingway and Greta Garbo, and was never happier than when he had a phone pressed to his ear; Margaret Sullavan, as I've already talked about on this blog, was almost an anti-star, a wonderful actress who nevertheless pretended to be someone else when fans approached her for autographs and whose dream was to raise her family out in the country, far away from anything outwardly "Hollywood." The fact that they remained married for eleven years is a feat all its own, yet what Brooke Hayward seems to suggest in Haywire is that if her parents had only reigned in their idiosyncrasies -- Sullavan her pride; Hayward his restlessness -- a bit when their marriage hit a rough patch in the late forties, they might have remained married another eleven years, and the trouble that followed their divorce might have been avoided. Then again, maybe not: mental instability definitely ran in the Hayward family, with Sullavan, Bridget, and the youngest child, Bill, all spending time in mental institutions, so some of the problems they encountered after the divorce might have been unavoidable.

Hayward is a sharp, talented writer, and part of what makes Haywire so readable is that rather than using her ability to build up the memoir into peaks and valleys of salacious revelations, she creates a rich, even narrative that reflects the wholeness of the world in which she grew up. She occasionally skimps on details -- I felt like there had to be something she wasn't saying in regards to her brother's stay in his mental institution, because although she seems to accept his explanation that their father put him in there more out of exasperation than a real need for mental evaluation, she also makes no move to help get him out -- but her balanced portrayal of everyone in her life ultimately serves her well, making Haywire seem informative rather than gossipy. It also doesn't hurt that, no matter how dramatic the Haywards' lives ended up being, there's not a lot for Brooke Hayward to gossip about in the first place: the Haywards, probably largely because of Margaret Sullavan's influence, were a surprisingly "normal" family, albeit a normal family that ultimately went off the rails, as normal families are wont to do.