(5 of 10)
The right man happened along in 1934, after some valuable matchmaking arrangements by his sister. Having met Frances Hayden (now Mrs. Merritt Riggs of Sherman Oaks, Calif.) in a Roman Catholic health resort in Denville, N.J., where both had gone to recuperate from the pressures of life in Manhattan, Phyllis McGinley was duly introduced to Fran's brother Charles, better known as Bill.* An lowan with New England ancestors, Bill Hayden worked for the Bell Telephone Co. by day and at night played jazz piano in his own musical combo, which staggered under the title of Benny Benedict's Bouncing Blue Boys and His Five Celestial Harmony Rhythm Kings. Bill was good. Oscar Levant once told him: "I'd give my right hand to be able to do what you do with your left."
But Phyllis McGinley reacted warily. To her, Bill Hayden's alter ego as Benny Benedict suggested a man who fancied the footloose and unfettered life. When he tried to impress her with his jazz piano playing she asked him if he knew any Bach. "I thought somehow he wouldn't stay at home. It was all invented on my part. Then, without telling me, he called on the pastor at St. Joseph's and arranged to have the banns read. When I went to church on Sunday and heard them, I almost swooned in the aisle. It was the only really brash, rash, adventurous thing Bill Hayden ever did." She was married in St. Joseph's in 1936. She was 31.
Prenatal Euphoria. She responded to domesticity as if it were poetry—which, for her, it was. She loved and lyricized over everything about it. "Julie was born in 1939, and I have never felt so divine in my life as the time before she was born. I was so full of euphoria, I was practically immune to all human illnesses!" A second daughter, Patsy, came along two years later. Even before these two events, the Haydens had gone house hunting in suburbia—where Phyllis knew just what she wanted. "Don't you have a house with a bathtub on legs?" she demanded of real estate agents. This requirement was met in Larchmont, a bit of suburbia 19 miles north of Manhattan: "I just lost my mind over this adorable town full of old Victorian houses!"
In one of them the Haydens took up residence, and there the poet and the housewife irrevocably merged. "I was very surprised when I first met her," says Jean Kerr, the author and playwright, and one of the Haydens'Larchmont neighbors. "I expected her to be someone with a cigarette in a long holder, terribly soignée, terribly brittle. Even now sometimes, I'll read something she's done and I'll think, 'She couldn't have written that—she's just a housewife.' "
Domesticating the Muse. Phyllis McGinley's amber eyes fell with approval on everything about her, and the muse set the scenes to verse: the view from her suburban window, little boys racing madly by on bicycles, Memorial Day parades, the simple comforts of a warm