Brooke Hayward > Quotes

“I had never confronted my parents with the true feelings I had for them, and I had certainly never expressed the depth of my feeling for my mother, being too selfish to try when I should have.”
― Brooke Hayward

“I wept for my family, all if us, my beautiful, idyllic, lost family. I wept for our excesses, our delusions and inconsistencies; not that we had cared too much or too little, although both were true, but that we had let such extraordinary care be subverted into extraordinary carelessness. We'd been careless with the best of our many resources: each other. It was as though we had taken for granted the fact that there would be more where we had come from too; another chance, another summer, another Brooke, Bridget or Bill.”
― Brooke Hayward

“I remember at the reception you said to me, 'I'm the daughter of a father who's been married five times. Mother killed herself. My sister killed herself. My brother has been in a mental institution. I'm twenty-three and divorced with two kids.' I said, 'Brooke, either you've got to open the window right now'--we were on the tenth floor--'either you've got to open the window right now and jump out, or say "I'm going to live," because you're right, it's the worst family history that anybody ever had, and either you jump out the window or you live.”
― Brooke Hayward, Haywire

“This book is a personal memoir; but it is also a larger story-about carelessness and guilt, and the wreckage they can make of lives.”
― Brooke Hayward, Haywire

“Nobody moved. "Now it's silly of me to make this all too serious," she said, changing the matter - of - fact inflection in her voice to one of levity. "You all look stricken and there's no need to be. Everything will be practically the same, you'll see." She smiled at us in a secret way, knowing how to make us giggle.”
― Brooke Hayward, Haywire

“I contemplated the phone for some time. Never had I heard her so oddly gay and forthright; as a matter of fact, we hadn't discussed sex since adolescence. Her entire inner life was secretive and mysterious, and no one dared violate it. She sent out powerful "No Trespassing" signals and I had learned to honor them. It crossed my mind that my sister was drunk.”
― Brooke Hayward, Haywire

“Out of perverseness, I jumped on the subway and went down to a sound stage on Fourth Street to watch the shooting of Kay Doubleday's big strip scene in Mad Dog Coll, a gangster film that can still, to my embarrassment, be seen occasionally on late-night TV... Kay Doubleday was in my class at Lee Strasberg's; it was in the interest of art, I told myself, to watch her prance down a ramp, singing and stripping her heart out.”
― Brooke Hayward, Haywire

“The minute we moved in (1712 North Crescent Heights), Dennis Hopper decided to give a party for Andy (Warhol), who was coming out to Los Angeles, and he decided that the one thing that would really make the house stand out, fabulously, would be billboards. So he papered the downstairs bathrooms with billboards. He had also decided that the food at the party would be hot dogs and chili. So we had a hot-dog stand! And Dennis had found huge papier-mâché Mexican figures with firecrackers hanging on them.”
― Brooke Hayward, Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album - Vintage Prints From the Sixties

“They were both so alive, so insuperably optimistic.To watch them together was dizzying, hypnotic. One was aware of infinite potential, possibilities undreamed of-- possibilities of magical endurance and energy, magical vitality. To watch them both was to strain on;es own ability to keep abreast, to tread bottomless water; finally it was to know the real meaning of exhaustion.”
― Brooke Hayward, Haywire

“Mother claimed that “Sabrina” was one of the happiest theatrical experiences of her career.”
― Brooke Hayward, Haywire

“I wrote in a bedroom crowded with ghosts," Brooke Hayward says. "My mother would disapprove, and my father would be horrified. The moral of my book is that you pay for everything. They were rich, accomplished, famous and beautiful. We were drowned in privilege, yet it ended in all this hideous tragedy." (interview from People magazine (May 23, 1977)”
― Brooke Hayward

“Our lives were a series of extremes. A thanksgiving of riches was bestowed on us at birth: grace and joy and a fair share of beauty; privilege and power. Those blessings which luck had overlooked could be bought. We seemed to exist above the squalor of suffering as most people know it. We were envied. But there were also more expectations...”
― Brooke Hayward, Haywire

“And no matter what Mother said, we weren't at all sure that different meant better when events seemed to contradict that concept—as, in fact, did Mother herself at times when she would expound at length on the importance of our leading 'normal everyday lives' like other people.”
― Brooke Hayward, Haywire