New Faces: Second Generation

When she was a Hollywood child in the 1940s, she seemed surrounded mostly by chauffeurs, governesses and magicians who performed at birthday parties. A list of her classmates at the Brentwood Town and Country School read like a second-generation all-star cast: Lady* Jayne Seymour (Henry) Fonda, Tarquin (Laurence) Olivier, Maria (Gary) Cooper, Jenny Ann (Ingrid Bergman) Lindstrom. Her own parents were Actress Margaret Sullavan and Producer Leland Hayward. Last week, with most of the class doing post-graduate work†,Brooke Hayward, 23, made her TV debut on the U.S. Steel Hour, walking prettily through a preposterous play about a convict's revolt in an Australian penal colony. More than a promising newcomer to acting, she is something of a Scott Fitzgerald throw-back—the golden girl with "a voice full of money"—and a case history of Hollywood adolescence.

Beans & Peanut Butter. Yanked by her mother from progressive Brentwood ("when she discovered we were being taught to count with lima beans"), Brooke bounced back and forth between school and private tutors. After her divorce from Hayward, Margaret Sullavan moved to Connecticut, and Brooke went to a school unused to the Hollywood breed. Within six months after her arrival, Brooke recalls proudly, one teacher had a nervous breakdown. A little later Brooke was expelled from the Girl Scouts. Meanwhile, Mommy married Kenneth Wagg, then a director of Horlick's Malted Milk, and, insists Brooke, "we had nothing but malted milk in our pantry. I was even sent out on my bicycle to peddle the new products in the neighborhood."

In those days, she cared only about horses, but that soon changed ("I became interested in men when I was 13"). During her freshman year at Vassar, Brooke met Michael Thomas, a Yale sophomore whom she "loathed on sight." He wooed her persistently by effective intellectual maneuvers—"He'd sit as far away as possible from me in the taxi and read his term paper on Botticelli." In the summer of 1956, Brooke traveled with her family through Europe, met Mike in Paris and eloped with him two weeks later. "We didn't tell our families until September, by which time I was thoroughly pregnant." While Mike finished up at Yale, they lived in New Haven, "living literally on peanut butter and baked beans, while I was mother confessor to all the boys." But after four years of marriage and two children, Brooke and Mike were divorced.

Gum & Machine Guns. Now staying with her two sons (Jeffrey, 4, Willy, 3) in an apartment high above New York's Central Park, Brooke Hayward has much family history to live with, including divorce (her father recently married for the fifth time) and death (her mother, just over a year ago, died of an overdose of sleeping pills, and her sister, 3½ months ago, committed suicide).