A Fairy Tale Gone Awry

...it seemed an act of deliberate disloyalty to Mother...

...Reviewed by Anna Quindlen Reporter, New York "Times" The author of Haywire is the daughter of two famous people: Margaret Sullavan, the doe-eyed 1940s actress any man could adore without feeling either silly or unabashedly carnal, and Leland Hay-ward, agent-producer par excellence, an accomplished trader of human talent...

...Distracting, too, are the italicized sections sprinkled throughout...

...While they were wandering through the exhibits, a woman approached the celebrity and asked for her autograph...

...I suspect the idea was to add depth, a wider viewpoint...

...The split had a devastating effect...

...Hayward's accounts of death and mental disintegration, with their slow, underwater quality, are especially effective—comparable to sections of Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar...

...Then came the nightmare: Their parents, terribly in love and just as terribly strong-willed, divorced for no discernible reason...

...Brooke recalls that one day the girls were taken by their mother to New York's Museum of Natural History...

...Bridget was found dead nine months later, at the age of 21, a victim of either an epileptic fit or suicide...

...To read this tragic finale to Haywire is to know what it feels like to have life go awry, the way Brooke Hayward's has...

...In later life, Bridget claimed a total blank when trying to remember the happy years before the marriage came apart...

...The children loved both parents, yet felt they had to protect their mother from their feelings for their father...

...They lived at first in a rambling house in Hollywood, moved to a farm-like place in rural Connecticut, and finally settled on the Gold Coast of Greenwich...

...There are problems, however...

...In a very real sense, it is about us all...

...Objectivity in this sort of narrative, though, is really unthinkable...

...In addition, her recollections of childhood remain unscathed by an adult's perspective on the world...

...Brooke Hayward has resisted what must have been a strong temptation to distance herself from her suffering by turning this extremely painful material into an autobiographical novel...

...Once upon a time, Brooke, Bridget and Bill Hayward, handsome, adored and sun-kissed children, inhabited a fairy tale...

...But occasionally the detail borders on trivia, as when we learn that Brooke and Jane Fonda were adept at making spitballs in the seventh grade...

...Unfortunately, the tactic gives the impression that the author is excessively concerned with being objective...

...Well, I feel sorry for them because they think they can have some part of me by having me write my name for them...

...To her great credit, she does not descend into the maudlin or the self-conscious...

...She has told us her story without embellishment, letting it speak for itself...

...Thus one might well expect that her memoir, with its revelations about family and friends, would be of interest primarily to film buffs, gossip mongers and nostalgia freaks...

...The unnatural, schizoid situation imposed by the actress was to take its toll: Margaret Sullavan died on New Year's Day, 1960, a possible suicide...

...These contain quotes from such people as the Fondas and Diana Vreeland that describe—never as well as the author—the subjects of Hayward's reminiscences...

...But they could never do to Margaret Sullavan the kind of damage that she apparently did to them, and to herself, by dividing her existence as a mother and actress in half and not permitting the two roles to come together...

...The children were amazed to hear their mother assure the woman that she was not Margaret Sullavan, and they complained: "But then you've told a lie, Mother . . . you don't let us tell lies...

...It does that with particular power at the end, when the author writes of her father's death...

...We were confused and ashamed, when we did go to see Father (never often enough), about enjoying ourselves thoroughly...

...Still, these are not major flaws in a book that is on the whole immensely readable and often intensely moving...

...And Brooke has written this book that recounts these tragedies...

...You see,' she said patiendy and with slow emphasis on every word, so that she would never have to say it again, and she never did, 'there are a lot of people in the world who think if they get the signature—autograph, it's called—of someone who is famous . . . that will somehow make them more important...

...The three siblings' were for years purposefully isolated from her career, notoriety, even her films...

...RatheT, it tells of five people who made great mistakes in their dealings with one another, who were kind but often careless and hot-headed...

...Bill spent his formative years in a mental institution...

...For example, the author has a sharp eye for the minutiae of life, and enumerating the contents of Iceland Hayward's closets—he had no less than 300 pairs of shoes and a vast handkerchief collection—tells us a great deal about both the man and die little girl who adored him...

...Happily, though, Brooke Hay-ward's first book is not simply the story of three children raised by a movie star and a star maker...

...li Margaret SuIIavan's reply to this was understandable, it nevertheless did not diminish the children's incomprehensibility at being excluded from half of her life...