Free Haywire by Brooke Hayward Page A

marry Bill. But Bill was terribly unsure of himself, and to have Bridget fall in love with him was scary because her welfare was really completely in his hands
.
    “Anyway, Bill had convinced Nikos Psacharopoulos that I had to be his assistant up in Williamstown that summer. Nikos was the director of the Williamstown Theatre, which was really an offishoot of the Yale Drama School
.
    “Bridget wanted very much to be an apprentice and to work. And she worked her ass off. She was painting scenery and banging away with nails between her teeth. I think in many ways during that summer she was happier than she’d been in a very long time—at least she told me that and she certainly showed it. Not so much because of Bill, but because all the kids up there liked her
.
    “By that time I was so in love with Bridget I just couldn’t see straight. She was to me the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. She always used to wear gardenia perfume. About two days before the first opening night up there, I found a place over the mountain
,
about an hour’s drive, that had gardenias but they couldn’t send them. I borrowed Peter Hunt’s car, a little red M.G., and I went over the mountain; it took me two hours to get there and back. I got the gardenias and she never knew where they came from. Every week when a play opened, I would borrow Hunt’s M.G. and go get them. I guess I must have logged sixteen hours or more getting her gardenias. About twice a year, I run into somebody or some place that smells of gardenias and even now, sixteen years later, I think of Bridget, instantly.”
    One night in mid-August, when New York was at the height of a heat wave, I hopped in my little convertible for a cooling drive.
    By the time I got to Greenwich, I knew where I was going. I stopped at my house there long enough to throw some clothes in a bag and to call Bridget in Williamstown. Although it was an ungodly hour, I told her I was about to pay her that visit she’d been suggesting for weeks. She sounded sleepy but pleased, and gave me explicit directions on how to get there. As I reached the Berkshires, the dawn came up; the land became more and more beautiful. Suddenly I understood why Bridget had often said she wanted to live in Stockbridge for the rest of her life. When I got to Williamstown, I went straight to the theatre as she’d instructed me, and there she was with Tom and a welcoming committee standing on the green.
    She immediately enlisted my services as a coffinmaker; the company was in rehearsal for the second to the last show of the season,
The Visit
, which starred E. G. Marshall, and his coffin was a vital prop. I worked all morning under Bridget’s careful supervision and we ended up with a very impressive black-and-gold casket.
    Then she dispatched me somewhere in somebody’s truck to pick up some sort of special fabric for the costumes. For me to be bossed around by my younger sister was a complete reversal of roles, and not at all unpleasant. In the afternoon she allowed me time off to watch a dress rehearsal for
The Visit
. Nikos was the director; Bill Francisco wasn’t there. Tom had a walk-on as a town policeman in an absurd helmet. Bridget amazed me; she was all over the place running most of the backstage action like an old-time production manager. Everyone came to her for advice on the props, the costumes, the lighting, the scenery. I was proud of her.She had metamorphosed into a figure of authority, the last thing anyone would ever have expected of her. As I was leaving the next morning, I told her that she should ask Father for a job on his next show. Bridget confessed that she had a secret ambition to become a producer and that it was behind-the-scenes action she really liked.
    She blew me a kiss as I started back to New York, and I couldn’t help thinking how pleased Mother, whose career had begun in summer stock with the famed University Players, would have been to see her so happy.
    Tom Mankiewicz:
    “You