22 SECOND TIME AROUND

It seems to me that my second wife, Brooke, and I were fated for each other. Certainly the connections in our lives have been too numerous and strange to be merely coincidental. For example, during our recent visit to Rosecliff, the Newport mansion built by my great-great-aunt Theresa Oelrichs, we were astonished to discover hanging in a corridor on the second floor a stunning portrait of Maisie Plant Hayward, Brooke’s step-grandmother. A woman who’d inherited an immense fortune by marrying old Commodore Morton Plant shortly before he died, she was decked out in an evening dress and an opera-length string of pearls the size of pigeon’s eggs. Brooke was thrilled. “That’s the famous strand of pearls!” she exclaimed. “Maisie traded the Plant mansion on Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue to Cartier for those pearls. Utter madness!”

I first realized there was a weird thread connecting our lives when I read in Brooke’s memoir Haywire that as a child she had named a pet squirrel Mr. Duchin. That was in 1945, when Brooke was eight. When I asked her why on earth she’d named the squirrel Mr. Duchin, she explained that, back in the early forties, her father had insisted that she and her brother and sister learn to play the piano. Hoping to provide inspiration, Leland and his wife, Maggie—the actress Margaret Sullavan—invited over their pal Eddy Duchin, who happened to be passing through Los Angeles on his way to his warship in Hawaii. The musical inspiration didn’t stick, but the name did. A few years later, when Brooke’s parents moved east to a farm in Connecticut, she acquired a baby squirrel that had fallen out of a maple tree and been rescued by her mother. Brooke remembers that Mr. Duchin would ride around the house on her bare shoulders and that her father would yell, “Get that goddamn rodent out of here!” “One day,” she recalls, “the dreaded eleven-year-old son of the neighboring farmer came around, picked up the squirrel, and swung him around by the tail like a lasso. Mr. Duchin escaped and fled back to the maple tree, never to be seen again.”

Our lives touched again after my father’s death, when Chiquita sold the house in Manhasset to Leland and his then-wife Slim, who was a friend of Chiq’s. Brooke and I had both loved that house, and in the early eighties we paid it a sad farewell visit just before it was torn down to make way for a housing development.

The first time we actually met was in 1957, when I’d returned to Yale from my junior year in Paris. Brooke had left Vassar to marry a classmate and friend of mine, Michael Thomas, the novelist and columnist. They lived in an off-campus apartment, where I went occasionally for dinner because her cooking was a whole lot better than mine. I remember Brooke as a very pretty, smart, funny girl. She remembers me as “extremely conspicuous”: “With your green loden cape and long hair flying in the wind, you cut quite a swath, intentionally or not. First, the fact that you’d spent your junior year on a barge in Paris was very romantic. Second, you were an orphan. You were exactly the sort of person my mother and father would have wanted me to marry—wild but polite.”

The summer after Yale, I occasionally glimpsed Brooke—then very pregnant—dancing with Michael at the odd party in Southampton.

In February 1961, when I was living above Carnegie Hall and preparing to record my first album, I got a call from Danny Selznick, the son of David O. and my father’s old flame Irene.

“Peter,” said Danny, “I’ve got the perfect girl for you: Brooke Hayward.”

“But I know Brooke Hayward,” I replied. “She’s married.”

“Not anymore,” said Danny.

Several nights later, Danny and Brooke slogged through a New York blizzard, bearing Chinese food to my studio. Brooke recalls that I barely greeted them as I sat at the piano, practicing arrangements and wearing a “dreamy expression.” She and Danny stood there and ate all the Chinese food. After an hour, they left. As Brooke was going out the door, I said, “Why don’t you give me a call sometime?” Needless to say, she didn’t.

I had more or less forgotten about her until the summer of 1965, when Cheray and I were in L.A. and we ran into each other at Jane Fonda’s Fourth of July party. Now Brooke was married to Dennis Hopper, the actor, and a few nights later we were invited to their house for a party. It was a collection of very hip guests—among them, Terry Southern, Tony Richardson, Rudi Gernreich, Ed Ruscha, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson. I arrived wearing a blazer and tie—very disappointing to Brooke. “Your wild, poetic look had vanished,” she says. “You’d gone back to the conservative side of your upbringing. I remember Cheray in one of those mid-sixties sleeveless dresses with three strands of pearls—very Jackie. The two of you were the only squares in the room.”

She’s right. But as far as Cheray and I were concerned, square was just fine.

Five years later, Brooke and I ran into each other again at her father’s Westchester estate. Having recently divorced Dennis, she was back in Leland’s good graces. That summer she was dating the screenwriter and actor Buck Henry, and one afternoon Cheray and I invited them over to our rented house in Bedford.

Brooke remembers thinking: “It was all so suburban. Lots of children and lots of dogs. Very tennis oriented and lots of noise.”

Right again. And I wallowed in it.

Reading Haywire cast Brooke in a new light for me. She had written a remarkable book, honest and graceful, about the collapse of her brilliant family. With devastating understatement, she’d painted her stepmother Pamela as the formidable adversary I had come to see for myself. I felt a great kinship with Brooke—she was like a long-lost sister. And she was a survivor. One night, I spotted her having dinner at “21” and sent the waiter over with a fan note. She was, she recalls, “extremely touched.”

Four years passed. I’d been hired to play for the opening of the Meyerhoff Collection, a new museum of contemporary art in the rolling hills outside Baltimore. The entire New York art world showed up, including Brooke. She looked great—lots of wonderful long hair. At some point, she came over and sat on the piano bench next to me. I usually hate it when women do this, but that night I didn’t mind.

It was the first time Brooke actually observed me as a bandleader. “I felt I was finally seeing you as you really were,” she says. “You were good at it, and you looked terribly happy doing it.”

A year later, my marriage broke up. Toddie Findlay had lent me temporary digs on the third floor of her house in the East Sixties, and I was having a bad time of it. For a month, I did little but lie in bed and stare at the yellow walls, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Then I erupted, dating every girl that came along—all sizes, types, and ages. Reading in the columns about whom I’d been with and where started to bug the hell out of me. One day I went through my address book, looking for the name of a woman who was independent, artistic, and attractive—in that order. I stopped at the H’s.

The first thing Brooke did when I called to invite her to dinner was ask why my marriage had ended. Was there another woman? I replied—truthfully—that in seventeen years of marriage I’d never once been unfaithful.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“Then what happened?”

“Cheray claims she has to find herself.”

“Oh God! Not that shit!”

That made me laugh. I repeated my invitation.

“No thanks,” she answered, explaining that her policy was never to have dinner with a man until he was divorced.

I suggested lunch. She said that would be fine. What about today?

“All right.”

At the restaurant, Brooke told me she was living in a loft on lower Fifth Avenue. It sounded interesting, and she offered to show it to me. As she recalls, “The first thing you said when you walked in was ‘Very nice, but where’s the piano?’ I thought that was kinda cute.”

I noticed shelves with lots of musical tapes.

She said, “I’m afraid I only have classical music, which will probably bore you.”

I drew myself up. “My dear,” I said, “in case you’ve forgotten, I majored in music. I think I know a bit more about classical music than you do.”

She threw me a look.

We had lunch the next day and again went back to her loft. Again, our only exchange was verbal—not even a kiss. As I was leaving, I blurted out another invitation—this one to Swifty Lazar’s Academy Awards party in Los Angeles.

“Are you mad?” she said. “It’ll get in the papers and ruin what’s left of your domestic situation.”

I decided to bag Swifty’s.

At the end of the week, I took my three kids off skiing to Vail. We had hardly settled into our condominium when the doorbell rang. There was my old friend and Brooke’s ex, Michael Thomas.

“Don’t shoot,” he said. “I’m only the messenger. I just got here with my kids, too. Brooke’s sent you this care package.”

It was a double-cassette tape of Verdi’s Requiem, conducted by Herbert von Karajan. Attached was a note: “I thought you might need a little uplift.”

Three times a day, for the next ten days, I phoned Brooke in New York. Because I felt guilty calling when the kids were around, I got up at seven. While the garbage truck was making its rounds, I pushed through the snow to a pay phone on the corner. At noon, while the kids were having lunch, I called from the restaurant on top of the mountain. Just before bed, it was back to the goddamn phone booth. Each call took not less than an hour. That was our courtship.

You can learn a lot about another person from thirty hours of heart-to-heart phone conversation. Thanks to the 2,000 miles between us, we were able to reveal ourselves with an intimacy and sense of safety we could never have had if we’d been in the same room, face to face.

On my last night in Vail, I said simply, “See you soon.”

The next evening I took a cab straight from the airport to Brooke’s loft. When she opened the door, I was loaded down with ski equipment and duffel bags. All I said was “Here I am.”

And so I moved in. One day, after I’d been there a couple of weeks, I casually remarked, “You know what? I really miss a piano.”

“There’s only room for an upright,” said Brooke.

The next day she went out and sold her “one valuable possession”—an early Warhol painting of a Campbell’s soup can. With the proceeds, she bought me a piano.

I would have been happy with a much cheaper model, but Brooke hates anything but the best. As she explained: “If we have to have a piano, it better be a Steinway.”

In the fall of 1985, I phoned to tell Ave of my impending marriage. Luckily, the call was answered by one of Ave’s nurses, who got him on the phone alone.

“Great, Pete!” he said. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

“Brooke Hayward,” I said, trusting that he wouldn’t have even heard of Haywire, in which Brooke had accused Pamela of stealing a valuable string of pearls left to her by her mother.

I was right. “That’s wonderful!” said Ave. “When can I meet her?”

We were talking about getting together when Ave interrupted me: “Wait a minute. Pam’s just walked in. Let me put her on the phone.”

There was no escape.

“Peter, what good news!” said that beautifully practiced voice. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

“Um…Brooke Hayward.”

Pam didn’t skip a beat: “That’s terrific! Where is Brooke? I want to call and congratulate her.”

Here’s how Brooke remembers getting the call:

“The last time Pamela and I had talked was in May of 1976, when I was in Los Angeles, holed up at the Chateau Marmont and editing the final version of Haywire. Somehow she’d found me. We had barely spoken since my father’s funeral service, for which she had not invited me or my brother, Bill, to speak—something I’d found unforgivable. The moment I heard her voice, my heart began to pound.

“ ‘Hellooo, Brooooke?’

“ ‘Yesss…’

“ ‘Brooke, it’s Pamela.’

“If she could play it, so could I: ‘Why, Pamela, how are you?’

“ ‘Fine….Oh by the way, I understand you’ve written this book…’

“ ‘Yes.’

“ ‘What’s it called?’

“ ‘Haywire.’

“Silence. Then: ‘Why?’

“ ‘Well, Pamela, it’s a triple entendre: Everyone in my family is crazy. My father’s cable address was “Haywire.” And Haywire was the name of his house.’

“There was a long silence. Then small talk. Then we hung up. A few days later, a friend called from New York and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Haywire is no longer Haywire. Pamela’s had the name taken off the matchbooks, the stationery, everything. It’s now called Birch Grove.’

“Now I was hearing that voice again:

“ ‘Brooooke. I want to tell you how thrilled I am with the news. We just love Peter so. The Governor is so excited. I’m going to put him on the phone.’

“No, I thought: I don’t know him. But it was too late. Averell got on the line and in his deaf way yelled, ‘You’re marrying the most wonderful man!’ Then Pam got back on and said, ‘We’re going to give you a wedding present. Five hundred shares of Union Pacific stock!’

“I was dumbfounded: It was as though nothing had ever happened.”

In the spring of 1986, Pam invited Brooke and me to her estate in Middleburg for what would be the last time I saw Ave alive. He was failing from what turned out to be liver cancer, and Pam, thoughtfully, had called and said, “I think you should see him fairly soon.”

Brooke and I flew to Washington and took a cab to the Harriman house on N Street. Pam gave us a tour of the premises. Conspicuous in the living room were two familiar works of art. One was van Gogh’s magnificent White Roses, which had been purchased at Ma’s suggestion back in 1929 and given as a wedding present to her and Ave by Ave’s mother. The other was the Degas ballerina.

The façades Brooke and Pamela maintained all the way out to Middleburg never cracked. Listening to Pam’s inquiries about Brooke’s children and her life in New York, one would never have guessed at the depths of ill feeling they concealed. What a phony, I thought. Or, as Brooke later remarked, “Pam’s the consummate pro.”

Willow Oaks was splendid. Pam took Brooke by the arm as she led us around the beautifully kept lawns and showed off the stables and cottages. As usual, she talked about her possessions—her house in Barbados, her champion show horses (one of them named Governor), and the nineteenth-century paintings of the Hudson River she’d recently acquired. Along the way, she dropped the names of important guests who’d been down to see Ave.

I was stunned by the sight of him. He was such a shrunken image of the tall, commanding old Ave. Even though he had state-of-the-art hearing aids stuck in his ears, we could make only the most rudimentary conversation, and that by shouting. He was wearing a lime green silk jacket draped over his shoulders, and most of the time he sat staring sightlessly out the window.

Lunch was just the four of us sitting at a very formal table laid with fine linen, old silver, and at least three wineglasses each. Pamela kept saying, “Ave, eat your lunch. Ave, finish up your bran wafer. It’s good for you.” A good English nanny coaxing her charge.

After lunch, Ave and I said our good-byes in the driveway, kissing each other as we had always done.

“Pete, it’s been great seeing you.”

“Good-bye, Ave.”

Pamela, before getting into the Cadillac, had the last kiss. She was now taller than Ave, and she planted it right on top of his ninety-four-year-old head. I watched as he moved very slowly off to the swimming pool, leaning on his butler.

On the way back to Washington, I asked Pam if Ave had ever mentioned the subject of death.

“No,” she said. “We never talk about it.”

“I guess he thinks he’ll never die.”

“I think you’re right,” said Pam.

A month or so later, Brooke and I were in Salzburg for the music festival when Pam called:

“Peter, I don’t want to spoil your vacation, but Averell has taken a turn for the worse. He hasn’t very long.”

“Should I come back now?”

“No. I’ll be in touch. But I’d like you to be a pallbearer.”

I said I’d be honored.

Pam’s secretary called several days later. “The Governor’s gone,” she said. “The funeral will be in St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church in New York.”

We arrived the next afternoon—it was July 28, my birthday—and that evening Pam held a wake at the apartment of her friend Kitty Carlisle Hart, my colleague on the New York State Council on the Arts. It was a room I’d been in many times for dinners and Arts Council meetings, and it felt odd to be here for this. Although most of Ave’s grandchildren were present, there was little sense of family. The affair was catered by New York’s top caterer, and I couldn’t help thinking that in the old days the food would have been Ave’s food, cooked by his staff.

The next day at noon, St. Thomas’s was packed with 900 family members, state and national politicians, diplomatic colleagues, journalists, and society figures. I was a pallbearer, along with Ave’s five grandsons and Pam’s son, Winston. At the end, everyone stood and sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—an eerie echo of the funeral nearly twenty years earlier in St. Patrick’s Cathedral across the street, when Andy Williams had sung the same anthem in honor of Bobby Kennedy.

Then I piled into a limo for the procession across the George Washington Bridge, up the Palisades Parkway, through Harriman State Park, and into Arden. At various points we passed squadrons of New York State troopers, standing in formation along the road, saluting the Governor’s hearse.

There were about sixty of us standing around the open gravesite next to Ma’s stone on the knoll opposite the little chapel of St. John. Fanning ourselves in the boiling heat, we watched as the casket was lowered halfway into the grave, while the Episcopal bishop of New York, Paul Moore, Jr., led the prayers and gave the blessing.

How fitting, I thought, that Ave should end up next to the woman who had been through so much with him during his long career. And how generous of Pam, who looked every inch the Dignified Widow, to put him there.

Afterward, we all went up to the big house for a lunch—same fancy caterer as the night before. Now that the place had been given to Columbia University as a conference center, the great reception hall bore no trace of the family living room in which I had once asked Marie Harriman if I could call her Ma. But standing with Ave’s daughters, Mary and Kathleen, and looking out over the immense, still unspoiled vista of woods and hills, I felt again that enchanted safety which the forests of Arden had always given me.

My reverie was shattered when Mary remarked, “You know, Ave’s not going to be buried next to Marie.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it was all a show. Ave’s going to be buried down by the lake. Pam says it’s what he wanted.”

“But that’s nonsense! I’m sure Ave would have wanted to be buried in the family plot, near his mother and next to Marie. The lake is four miles away.”

“Well, according to Pam, a couple of years ago they were walking by the lake one evening when Averell said how lovely it would be to be buried there, just the two of them side by side.”

“That sounds like Pam, not Ave. I can’t imagine him coming out with anything so sentimental. I certainly can’t imagine him talking about death.”

“I can’t either,” said his daughter.

It was shocking that Ave would not be buried in the family plot. After we had witnessed the blessing, Ave’s casket was returned to New York, where his body lay for two months on ice at the Frank Campbell Funeral Home while the lakeside site was readied to receive him. When reports of the deception hit the papers, more than one distinguished mourner was furious at having come all the way up to Arden for what turned out to be a sham burial.

After this, I wasn’t surprised to hear that Ave had left virtually his entire fortune, including all the houses and art, to his widow. People like Pam don’t settle for half. Curiously, she never thought to send me even the smallest memento of Ave’s—no set of cuff links, tie clasp, anything. She’d finally gotten it all for herself—even his bones.

Brooke was right: a consummate pro.