Haywire

Year: 1980

Runtime: 184 mins

Language: English

Director: Michael Tuchner

Drama

Based on Brooke Hayward’s memoir, the film follows the daughter of Broadway producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan as she grows up amid fame, luxury and pressure. In a world both glamorous and cruel, she confronts the emotional instability of her parents’ turbulent relationship and the contradictions of privileged, troubled family life.

Direct adaptation

Read the Haywire book behind the movie

Brooke Hayward Looks beyond Her Family's Hollywood Glamour to Record Margaret Sullavan and Leland Hayward's Marriage, Their Children's Losses, and the Cost of Maintaining a Beautiful Public Story · by Brooke Hayward, Buck Henry

Why this book?

The television miniseries directly adapts Brooke Hayward's memoir of actress Margaret Sullavan, agent-producer Leland Hayward, their marriage and divorce, famous social world, and the psychological crises and deaths that shaped their children. Dramatization turns Brooke's retrospective first-person judgment into performed family scenes, selects a narrower chronology, and assigns dialogue and causal emphasis that memoir can leave uncertain. The Vintage edition restores Hayward's own narrative authority, including the adult perspective from which glamour, parental love, illness, sibling loss, and public reputation remain connected without becoming a single melodramatic explanation.

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