"Forever Young" by Hayley Mills

When I was growing up in the 1960s, my sister & I often spent Saturday afternoons at the matinee at the local movie theatre, which was always a film geared to younger audiences -- Beach Party & Gidget movies, Elvis Presley vehicles and, quite often, Disney movies. (The cost of a ticket was 35 cents -- later jacked up to 50 cents -- and a bag of popcorn was 10 cents. Those were the days...!)  

Sunday nights, we faithfully watched "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Colour" on TV (albeit our TV was black and white, until we finally got a colour set when I was about 12). It was the one night of the week we were allowed to watch TV while eating dinner, sitting on the couch with our plates set on TV trays. 

(I didn't know it then, but my great-uncle, who worked for the U.S. Coast Guard in the Santa Barbara area of southern California, was friends with Walt Disney. He introduced Disney to his mother/my great-grandmother, when she came to California to visit her family in the 1940s. I never met my great-uncle, who died in 1969, not too many years after Disney. But, I digress.)  

Between those two screens, I saw a LOT of movies that featured one of the biggest child stars of the era, Hayley Mills:  "Pollyanna," "Summer Magic," "That Darn Cat," "In Search of the Castaways," and "The Truth About Spring." Two of her movies in particular are still huge favourites of mine:  first, "The Parent Trap," in which Mills plays identical twins separated as infants when their parents split up -- one winding up in California and one in Boston. By coincidence, the girls wind up at the same summer camp -- and take an instant dislike to each other. Eventually, of course, they become friends, figure out why they look so much alike, and decide to switch places -- first, to see how the other half has been living and second, to try to bring their parents back together again and reunite their family.  

(One more digression:  Disney remade "The Parent Trap" in 1998 with Lindsay Lohan (!) as the twins and Dennis Quaid and the late, lovely Natasha Richardson as the estranged parents. Hayley Mills has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo as a hotel elevator passenger. My mother & I went to see it as a diversion in mid/late August that year, shortly after our Katie was stillborn. I thought it was cute on its own merits, but I still far prefer the original.)  

My other fondly remembered Mills favourite is "The Trouble With Angels:" Hayley and June Harding play two students at an all-girls Catholic boarding school whose "scathingly brilliant ideas" keep them in constant trouble with the Mother Superior (Rosalind Russell).  

So, as you can imagine, I was pretty thrilled to find a memoir written by Mills -- "Forever Young" on the shelf of my local mega-bookstore early last fall.  (I have a huge weakness for Hollywood memoirs generally!) I was able to get an e-copy at a fraction of the hardcover price not long afterwards, and it's been on my "priority TBR list" ever since then. 

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The book begins with Mills returning to Disney studios in 2016 for the first time in many years, where Walt's office has been preserved exactly as he left it for the final time before he died suddenly in December 1966.  She'd already been thinking about writing a memoir for many years:  

I wanted to go back and remember, to make some sense of it all, not only for myself but also for my children, who I felt deserved some clarity. After all, it was they who had borne the brunt, as well as reaped the benefits, of my unusual childhood. 

At lunch with some Disney friends, old and new, the co-creator of "Frozen," Michael Giaimo, asks her, "So come on, Hayley, tell us... What was he like?"  

And then it hit me -- of the hundreds of people now working at Disney, most had never known him, never met him. But I had... For better or for worse, I'd literally grown up at Disneyland. 

And that was it. The penny dropped. Not a bolt of lightning, exactly, but the missing piece of jigsaw puzzle that I needed to write this book. For while this is the story of my childhood, and of course my career, it is also about a time that has now passed into history -- when Hollywood was still "Tinseltown" and the great Walt Disney was at his zenith, ruling over what was, at least in his own head, still a family business. 

Mills grew up in an acting family:  her father was the distinguished stage and film star John Mills;  her mother, Mary Hayley Bell, acted before turning to writing;  her older sister, Juliet, was an actress, and her younger brother Jonathan eventually carved out a career behind the scenes. Mills had no thoughts about entering the family business until she was 12, when the director J. Lee Thompson came to the visit her father about a part in his new film, "Tiger Bay."  He wound up casting Hayley in a pivotal role in the movie too. A Disney producer saw the movie and thought she would be perfect for the studio's next big project, "Pollyanna."  Walt Disney agreed. Not only did he offer Hayley the part, he insisted on signing her to a six-film/seven-year contract. 

In Hollywood, Mills met many other current and former child actors who provided her with cautionary tales about the business. On the one hand, Mills was grateful to her parents for providing her with a relatively normal life in England between making movies for Disney;  on the other hand, she sometimes chafed at their well-meaning attempts to protect her and control her career. (She wasn't aware of just how much they were involved behind the scenes, or the errors in judgment they made, until much later in her life.)    

All of us struggle to some extent with growing up and learning to stand on our own two feet -- but Hayley had to do it on the big screen with millions of people watching. She clashed with her mother, a complex woman who descended into alcoholism and depression, and she struggled with shyness and feelings of inadequacy. She also struggled with her weight, which led her to develop an eating disorder. 

If you're a fan of Hayley Mills and/or Disney movies from the 1960s, or just enjoy a good Hollywood memoir, you will enjoy this book.  There's lots of name dropping and wonderful descriptions and anecdotes about the famous people she met along the way (Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were neighbours and good friends of the family;  Noel Coward was her sister's godfather; Richard Attenborough was "Uncle Dickie"). Her paths crossed with the Beatles several times, and my favourite story in the book is probably about how her mother called up George Harrison, at the height of Beatlemania, and asked him to escort Hayley to a charity function (!). Despite being mortified by her mother's interference, and being pestered by autograph seekers all evening, she enjoyed George's company. They wound up back at her parents' home, with her dad making scrambled eggs for them at 4 a.m. :) 

My one quibble about this book:  it ends in the early/mid-1970s, when Mills was in her mid-20s, shortly after she gave birth to her first son, Crispian, and divorced her husband, Roy Boulting, who was 30 (!) years old than she was. The rest of her life since then is glossed over within a couple of pages. I'd like to have read more about her life between then and now. Perhaps she'll write a sequel someday? 

(Also: ALI/CNBC warning: near the end of of the book, Mills waxes rhapsodic about motherhood and being a grandmother. Mercifully, it's not for too long. She does admit to fearing that she wouldn't have children at all, having been told she wouldn't by an astrologer when she was a child.)  

4 stars on Goodreads.  

This was Book #9 read to date in 2022 (and Book #4 finished in February), bringing me to 20% of my 2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 4 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2022 tagged as "2022 books."