For Russell Perreault, the re-publication of Brooke Hayward’s memoir Haywire has been more a labor of love than anything else. Perreault, v-p and director of publicity at Knopf’s paperback imprint Vintage/Anchor, fell in love with Hayward's tragic account of her privileged childhood as a member of a dysfunctional Hollywood family, when he was in high school. The book, in which Hayward recounts her own problems as well as losing her actress mother (Margaret Sullavan) and sister to drug overdoses and her brother to suicide, is a title Perreault said he “recommended all the time.”
Given his deep affection for the book, and the fact that Knopf originally published it, Perreault made it his mission to reissue the title when he discovered it had fallen out of print. Now, after about 15 years off the shelf, Haywire, which came out in 1977, will be available again. Knopf is doing a first announced printing of 7,500 on an edition featuring new cover art, which publishes March 8.
That many of the people who were involved in the publishing the original—among them Hayward’s editor Bob Gottlieb and her publicist Pamela Henstell—are still at Knopf, made the reissuing process that much more nostalgic for Perreault. The fan within the publicist also hopes that the re-release of Haywire may spur its author to return to another long-abandoned literary project. As it turns out, Hayward has been under contract for a second book for decades, this one about her eight-year marriage to Dennis Hopper. Perreault said that Hopper always insisted he would sue over any potential tell-all Hayward wrote, but now that Hopper has died, a lawsuit is less of an issue.
