would be hogwash and that she would have to learn someday that she could not continue to pursue a course of selfishly taking more and more without giving anything back. It said that she had forfeited all the deep love and respect he, Kenneth, had for her, that although one of the happiest features of his marriage to Mother nine years earlier had been the advent into his life of two entrancing little girls, Bridget had gone to great lengths to ruin that pleasure. It concluded with the information that he was sending the letter behind Mother’s back and would only tell her after it had been mailed.
I was changing my clothes in Bridget’s apartment when the mail came that day. She read the letter, handed it to me wordlessly, went to the closet, and packed a suitcase. I went downstairs with her and followed her along the street for a while but she refused to speak to me. I went on to a class at Lee Strasberg’s; she checked back into Austen Riggs in a severe depression.
Kenneth was a kind Englishman of considerable equanimity. He seldom lost his temper. When he did, he recovered quickly.Bridget did not. In December, while Mother was in rehearsals, Kenneth sent several letters to Bridget at Riggs.
In the first one he apologized for the prolonged unhappiness caused by his previous letter, and begged her to take his tantrum in her stride, as she must know how solid the foundation of his love for her really was. He explained that, in the past, Mother had always stopped him from expressing his flashes of temper but this time, to his present regret, he had eluded her. He implored Bridget to surmount the wall that had arisen between herself and Mother, and assured her there were many doors in it that Mother would crawl through if she knew Bridget would be waiting on the other side.
In the second, he enclosed a torn piece of yellow legal paper penciled in Mother’s familiar scribble, which he’d rescued from the wastebasket:
My darling Bridget
I want you to know about my love for you. It is the most completely unselfish emotion I have ever known. It is forever, and needs nothing in return. I know, after these five years, that if you never write me or see me again, my love will continue just as strong and constant. So please, my darling, stop worrying about what you have or haven’t done to me—the snag, of course, is that my judgment falls far short of my love—and I
The writing stopped there. Bridget did not respond, and was still at Riggs when Mother died two weeks later on New Year’s Day, 1960.
Tom Mankiewicz:
“I saw more and more of Bridget. She’d come to New Haven, stay at the Taft for three or four days during final rehearsals; the week of the play she would be there every day. Everybody liked her—all the people in The Dramat who would normally hate the director’s girl friend
.
“We got to be really close. We knew a lot of people in common; we hadn’t seen each other in a while and it was like catching
up on our lives. It was during that time that I saw the chinks in her armor which made me love her more; naturally, when you’re eighteen, you think you’re on top of the world and can take care of anybody. I had no idea there was any kind of mental disease, if you could call it that, or withdrawal, or whatever. She didn’t talk about it at all. I would say: gee, I’m sorry that you seem to be upset about this or that or so on, and she would talk about herself and her life, always, in the beginning, skirting the fact that she had been in Riggs. She didn’t trust people a great deal and she was not an extrovert. If she thought she liked you, you could talk to her night after night, but it would only be after a certain number of nights that she would really start to tell you something about herself. She would test you, telling you the way she thought about things that perhaps frightened her; but she never opened herself up until she was really sure of you, and that took a long time. I found her an
I was changing my clothes in Bridget’s apartment when the mail came that day. She read the letter, handed it to me wordlessly, went to the closet, and packed a suitcase. I went downstairs with her and followed her along the street for a while but she refused to speak to me. I went on to a class at Lee Strasberg’s; she checked back into Austen Riggs in a severe depression.
Kenneth was a kind Englishman of considerable equanimity. He seldom lost his temper. When he did, he recovered quickly.Bridget did not. In December, while Mother was in rehearsals, Kenneth sent several letters to Bridget at Riggs.
In the first one he apologized for the prolonged unhappiness caused by his previous letter, and begged her to take his tantrum in her stride, as she must know how solid the foundation of his love for her really was. He explained that, in the past, Mother had always stopped him from expressing his flashes of temper but this time, to his present regret, he had eluded her. He implored Bridget to surmount the wall that had arisen between herself and Mother, and assured her there were many doors in it that Mother would crawl through if she knew Bridget would be waiting on the other side.
In the second, he enclosed a torn piece of yellow legal paper penciled in Mother’s familiar scribble, which he’d rescued from the wastebasket:
My darling Bridget
I want you to know about my love for you. It is the most completely unselfish emotion I have ever known. It is forever, and needs nothing in return. I know, after these five years, that if you never write me or see me again, my love will continue just as strong and constant. So please, my darling, stop worrying about what you have or haven’t done to me—the snag, of course, is that my judgment falls far short of my love—and I
The writing stopped there. Bridget did not respond, and was still at Riggs when Mother died two weeks later on New Year’s Day, 1960.
Tom Mankiewicz:
“I saw more and more of Bridget. She’d come to New Haven, stay at the Taft for three or four days during final rehearsals; the week of the play she would be there every day. Everybody liked her—all the people in The Dramat who would normally hate the director’s girl friend
.
“We got to be really close. We knew a lot of people in common; we hadn’t seen each other in a while and it was like catching
up on our lives. It was during that time that I saw the chinks in her armor which made me love her more; naturally, when you’re eighteen, you think you’re on top of the world and can take care of anybody. I had no idea there was any kind of mental disease, if you could call it that, or withdrawal, or whatever. She didn’t talk about it at all. I would say: gee, I’m sorry that you seem to be upset about this or that or so on, and she would talk about herself and her life, always, in the beginning, skirting the fact that she had been in Riggs. She didn’t trust people a great deal and she was not an extrovert. If she thought she liked you, you could talk to her night after night, but it would only be after a certain number of nights that she would really start to tell you something about herself. She would test you, telling you the way she thought about things that perhaps frightened her; but she never opened herself up until she was really sure of you, and that took a long time. I found her an
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