Elegy from a Hollywood Graveyard

By Gerald Clarke

HAYWIRE

by BROOKE HAYWARD 325 pages. Knopf. $10.

Count no man happy, said the Greeks, until he is dead. Or a family, Brooke Hayward adds, in this intense, absorbing tale of her own. On Daughter Brooke's account sheet, the story of the Haywards is not so much tragic as it is sad. They were not visited by terrible events like poverty, disease, or accident: they invited unhappiness, as casually and as carelessly as they might invite a tiresome guest to a garden party; eventually they were seduced by its dark and terrible charm.

Father was Leland Hayward, the best theatrical and movie agent in the business and later the successful producer of such hits as South Pacific and Call Me Madam. Worshiped by his children and idolized by his five wives, he exuded vitality; he was incomplete without a telephone in his hand, making a million-dollar deal or selling a Garbo, a Fonda, or a Hemingway. Mother was Margaret Sullavan, the husky-voiced star of the 30s and '40s. Though she was not a classic beauty, men found her bewitching: "The fairest of sights in twinkling lights is Sullavan with an a," rhapsodized Ogden Nash.

For ten years, from the mid-'30s to the mid-'40s, Maggie and Leland were phosphorescent figures in Hollywood, New York, and on the Super Chief in between. But Maggie, Leland's third wife, was driven to seek a life (or perhaps an ordinariness) for herself and her children; she hated her husband's job and constant telephoning as much as she loved him.

"Your mother is a remarkable woman, the bravest person I know," Leland told Brooke. "But she can't tolerate what she can't understand." For his part, Leland was an absentee father, too rigid in his own way to come to terms with marriage and children. The divorce was amicable enough for the parents, but devastating to the three kids.

When he was 16, Bill, the youngest, was sent to the Menninger Clinic in Kansas. Bridget suffered from ever worsening epilepsy and committed suicide at 21. Maggie, who had always seemed so strong, may also have committed suicide during the tryout of a play she loathed. Stomach problems forced Leland to give up most of his pleasures ten years before he died in 1971, and toward the end his once active mind was reduced and eroded by strokes. Brooke, who was on the cover of LIFE when she was 15, is now 39. She has already had two divorces, and the reader can only surmise -- she does not say -- what personal agonies she has encountered.

There is no message in this elegy from a Hollywood graveyard. The Haywards were unusual and interesting only in their good fortune, not their bad. Tolstoy was wrong: it is unhappy families that are all the same. Happiness is unique, the product of endless labor, never-ending struggle. It demanded an effort the Haywards were not willing to make.

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