THE DAY HAYLEY GOT
IN A HEARSE

Most girls get kissed in a car--preferably a convertible with the top down and the stars and the moon overhead. But not Hayley Mills! Her kiss came in a big hearse. Did the weird setting spoil the romance? Here's what she has to say.

"Kissed?" Hayley Mills echoed, thinking hard. "Me, kissed? Are you sure?"

She made rather a big thing of trying to recall the incident. Then she broke into giggles--she's a very giggly girl.

"Oh," she said, so off-handedly that she couldn't have fooled a baby, "oh, that kiss!"

"That kiss" was the very one I was talking about. It is reputed to be the very first grown-up, screen kiss ever to be planted on Hayley's pretty face. It is bestowed on her by Peter McEnery, in the course of her newest film, Disney's "The Moon-Spinners." Peter is a most attractive English actor of twenty-three, and you would hardly expect his kiss to be so overlooked and unimportant.

But Hayley chose to play it way, way down.

"All that to-do about a kiss!" she said. "Why, it's nothing but a pop!" And she kept on with her knitting. Literally. Between scenes on the set at Pinewood Studios, near London, Hayley was deeply involved with a great mass of heavy white wool. And some indefinable shape was emerging from the knitting needles.

"It does look like a scrap of nothing, doesn't it?" Hayley said contentedly, turning her handiwork around and upside down. "But actually, it's a pram cover for my sister." Then realizing what she had said, she broke up with laughter again.

"Oh, not for my sister herself," she amended, "but for the baby boy my sister had in April. Isn't it marvelous--I'm an auntie now!"

"Yes, that's marvelous. Now about the kiss . . ."

Hayley has beautiful manners, really; but this time she plowed right on past me.

"When we first knew Juliet was going to have a baby," she said, "she thought she might be doing a film in Sicily, and she warned me, 'Don't tell anybody about the baby, because if they knew they might not trust me with the film. So since it was such a big secret and all, I decided that I'd start knitting this pram cover. Then if anybody asked what I was making I could say a sweater, or a hat or a sock--because it does look as if it might be just about anything, doesn't it? Of course it doesn't matter now--but I still haven't finished it!"

But about that kiss--was it a wonderful experience? Did it start bells ringing? Did she hear faraway music? Did her young heart go wham?

Hayley looked at me pityingly.

"Oh, now," she said. "If people are going to expect Bardot or anything like that, they are definitely going to be disappointed. It was nothing, really, just an impulsive sort of a thing--in a hearse, you know."

"Oh, of course," I murmured. "People ride around in hearses every day . . ."

More laughter. This gal has a delicious sense of the ridiculous.

"We're in a hearse," she explained, "because I have just rescued Peter from being shot, and he has rescued me from certain death in a windmill. So it's not a passionate sort of kiss--it's just a solemn and rather nice thing of gratitude--because we've been through a lot together. But I really can't tell you more of it or I'll be giving the plot away, you understand."

We understood that--and a great deal more. Notably, that Hayley is no longer the rubber-featured little hoyden who endeared herself to everybody on both sides of the Atlantic in her early roles, and won a special Academy Award for her heartbreaker of a "Pollyanna."

At seventeen going on eighteen--her birthday is April 18--she is less tomboy and more young lady, but as delightful as ever. The laughter and the giggles are still there, but something new has been added. Weight-watching!

This is Hayley weight-watching: She ordered a severe luncheon of steak and salad. Then buttered three slices of bread and ate every crumb of them. . . . She stoically refused to touch a piece of huge cake at a birthday party on set that day. ("Oh, I can't!" she protested. "I have to lose weight.") Then she borrowed threepence from one of her friends on the studio staff, and squandered it all at the candy machine on a package of something she called "crackers." In simple American, cookies.

"Why," I wanted to know, "can you eat cookies if you can't eat cake?"

"Oh these are nothing, absolutely nothing!" She popped another into her mouth, adding judiciously, "but they're good."

But it was a typically Hayley exaggeration. True, her face is a little fuller than the rest of her--but the rest comprises a nicely curved five-foot-three-and-a-half inches of girl. With her flying blond hair and her blue eyes, the former tomboy is on her way to becoming a real beauty.

"Fat days" and "thin days"

As to actual scale weight, "Oh, I don't know, it changes from day to day. I have fat days and thin days. Today I feel like an elephant. But at least they haven't had to let out my costumes yet." (Much hilarity over this sly little sally--at Elizabeth Taylor and her costumes for "Cleopatra," perhaps? One never knows, with Hayley. She can be so ingenuous, and then so unexpectedly knowing.)

With equal slyness, I tried to lead her back to the subject everyone wants to hear about. Her first screen kiss. But she was by no means finished with the precious baby, Sean Ryan, Juliet and Russell Alquist's first child; the first grandchild of John Mills, celebrated English actor, and Mary Hayley Bell, celebrated writer; the first nephew of fourteen-year-old Jonathan Mills and of Auntie Hayley Mills.

"I'm with Sean constantly," Hayley said. "I sometimes think that my sister and her husband must be so sick of seeing me that when they spot me coming next time they'll shout, 'Lock the doors, put out the lights--here comes Auntie again! Maybe she'll think we're not home and she'll go away!'" The delighted laughter pealed again at the utter absurdity of lovely Juliet ever locking anyone out of her house--Hayley especially.

"About Peter McEnery--the boy who gives you the kiss. . . ."

"Oh, yes," Hayley exclaimed enthusiastically. "Peter--did you know he was in 'Tunes of Glory' with my father? He's a very good actor."

I agreed that was very nice for Peter. And had Hayley ever dated him?

"Well," she said, "to be exact--no."

Then with one of her sudden verbal leaps, she was off on the joys of being past the age of chaperoned dates. Or for that matter, any kind of guardianship at all. Up to sixteen she'd had to endure a tutor on her heels at every step, it was a necessary legality. "And you know," said Hayley, "though I loved her, she was a sweetie, I sort of resented having to have one. It made me feel childish, as though I wasn't trusted."

A childhood memory brought on a chuckle. "When I was very little, people would even wait for me outside the loo (British for bathroom, powder room, little girls' room). This really used to bug me. I'd crawl out through the window, and they'd be left standing there for an hour, wondering why I was taking so long.

"But now that my tutor's gone," she added, "I sometimes miss her. Especially when we went to Crete for 'Moon-Spinners.' Mummy and Jonathan came out with me at first, but then Jonathan had to get back for school and Mum had to meet Daddy in London.

"Well, here I was, all alone and independent for the first time in my life. But the worst of it is, one comes to rely on people and lean on them, because you know they're always going to step in when you need them. And suddenly I was alone." Hayley squinched up her blue eyes, remembering the alone feeling.

"It was about a month," she said. "And it doesn't sound like much, but if you've never been alone before, you're absolutely bewildered. And I was floundering. But then I thought, 'Don't let it get you down, one's got to leap out of the nest some time and try her wings.' After that it was marvelous, it was terribly good for me."

The Island of Crete was adventurous. Once when Hayley went sailing, with her mother and brother on the Mediterranean, a storm blew up and marooned them, while all on shore chewed their nails to the elbow with anxiety.

In Crete the temperature climbed above a hundred and Hayley thrived on it. "I adore the sun," she said. "I am like--I was going to say flower, but I think vegetable is better--I am like a vegetable without the sun. We miss it in London so much in the winter,"

Back in sunless, wintry England for interior shooting, Hayley had a new adventure. She mixed it up with a cheetah.

Pola Negri, a great vamp of the silent screen, is making her return in "Moon-spinners" as Madame Habib, an eccentric gem collector who shares her sumptuous yacht with a pet cheetah. The script originally called for a cat, but Pola convinced director James Neilson that a cheetah would be more dramatic. It certainly was!

The morning of my visit, I watched Hayley go through a scene in which Pola is seated at her dressing table on the yacht, the cheetah lying nearby on a chaise lounge. Hayley barges in to ask Madame Habib for help. And when Hayley barges, she barges! She rushed past the supposedly tame cheetah so fast that, startled, he jumped up and sprang at her! And this wasn't in the script!

Hayley screamed. The animal's trainer rushed out and tried to quiet him. Someone brought a dish of red meat. Everyone was excited, only Pola Negri kept calm.

"Give him some va-tah," she kept demanding in a deep, throaty voice, "it will calm him down." When the animal was finally quieted, the scene had to begin all over again. If Hayley was nervous, she didn't show it. Not for nothing is she a second-generation trouper.

This was part of a day that had begun at 6:00 A.M. Hayley stopped for one press interview at 4:00 and another from 6:00 to 7:00. That's a full day in anyone's language, but Hayley remained her chipper, chatty, unaffected self.

She is no temperamental teenager! Wherever she walked everyone on the set in any capacity called a friendly hello, and she answered everyone by name.

She passed the open door of a large room, empty except for one sound man testing ". . . one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . ." and looking as foolish as anyone does talking to nobody. Hayley began to giggle. "Oh come now, Austin," she called to him, "you'd better get hold of yourself."

Quite pleased with her little joke, she walked to her dressing room. And if there is any doubt that Hayley has grown up, her dressing room at Pinewood puts an end to that. For one thing, it used to belong to Elizabeth Taylor, and not in her child-star days, either.

Asked how she felt about occupying Liz' former digs she answered, optically, "I just hope some of it rubs off on me!"

Hayley's own contribution to the furnishings was a collection of books which includes a dictionary. She adores them because "you look at all the words and read them saying, 'I'm going to keep this in my vocabulary.' But of course you never remember them, you only remember words like 'burke'--which is just a way of murdering somebody without letting it show on the body." (Her memory proved accurate--the dictionary says "burke" is a form of murder by suffocation.)

A bookworm Hayley may be, but she is also woman enough to love beautiful clothes. This is a new image of Hayley, whom many fans still lovingly remember in her rough farm coat and heavy boots of "Whistle Down the Wind." Or in the quaint period frocks of her Award-winning "Pollyanna."

Or the kid-teen clothes of "The Parent Trap." More recently, her role in "Summer Magic" brought out the woman in her. But "The Chalk Garden" put her back into blue jeans. And that's a story!

The blue jeans bugged Hayley. Not that she minded wearing them, but the picture was being produced by Ross Hunter, and Hayley knew his reputation for lavishing costumes on many of his stars when a film is finished. As Ross himself tells it, "She came to me wailing, 'I've been cheated. You have beautiful clothes made for your stars and afterwards you give them the complete wardrobe. You have nothing to give me but blue jeans!'"

Her sorrow touched Ross. He felt he had to give Hayley some sort of consolation prize.

Prize? He had Jean Louis, the Hollywood designer, make up a fabulous gown, rows and rows of white handmade lace over a pink slip. It cost $3,500 and as Ross says, "I ought to have my head examined. But I couldn't resist it! She can wear it for years and then take it out and look at it and hand it down as an heirloom. You should have seen her face when I gave it to her. Pure rapture."

How time flies! It wasn't too long ago that so much rapture was reserved exclusively for the horses and cattle that abounded on the Mills' four hundred and fifty-acre farm in Sussex. Hayley would spend every minute of her spare time among the animals she so dearly loved.

But after twenty years of Mills ownership, the farm has been sold, and the family has moved its home base to their town house in the smart Belgravia section of London, just off historic Berkeley Square. For the first time in her life, Hayley of the great outdoors is officially a city girl.

To be sure, she will not stay in London consistently. She has already spent years of her young life traveling with her family almost all over the world. She's been to Hollywood five times and to a school in Switzerland to be--she'll laugh about it--finished.

And, wherever she's gone, life has been a breathless adventure, a regular cliff-hanger, because she makes her own excitement by the very way she savors it. In America she is impressed by hot dogs, night baseball and the enormous freedom that teenagers enjoy.

"They have their own cars at sixteen," she once breathed, awed by such a lavish way of life. But she added disapprovingly, "What I don't like is the way Americans buy a different car every year. It's not--quite dignified."

Now Hayley Mills has grown up to her own freedoms, has become an auntie and has had her first screen kiss. Whether she's been kissed off the screen, or how often, she won't tell. And when Hayley doesn't want to tell, she's a talented subject-changer. But she'll tell you how she loves to dress up and go to premieres, "just so long as they're other people's, not my own. Mine I try to avoid. Just think, if the film is absolute sploge--oh no!"

Or she'll head you off with a spirited account of how underage children in England get into theaters featuring horror movies. "If you look under sixteen, they'll ask how old you are, and you say twenty four and okay, in you go! Just so long as you don't look six. And Jonathan, he's getting so enormous, soon all he'll have to do is stick on a moustache and who'll know? You could take a dummy in, they don't care--I mean it's money!"

About Jonathan: "He's taller than I am. It's marvelous. Suddenly he's like an older brother, which is something I've always wanted. I think all girls should have older brothers."

On dates: "I'm not utterly desperate about dates, you know. I don't mind if I'm boyless on a Saturday night." But this is a girl who has dated Frank Sinatra, Jr., Sal Mineo, Johnny Crawford, Rex Thompson, and Stewart Granger's son, Jamie. And only Hayley and her mother know who else.

"How about Peter McEnery?" I asked. "Oh he's very nice--I'm so sorry he isn't on the set today. He's so much nicer to interview than I am. And such a good actor. It's marvelous to watch him work--he's done so much at twenty-three. . . ."

"No, I mean is he married?"

"No, Peter's not married."

"Would you like to date him?"

"Well, he's good company, I mean he's very good company. I think an evening out with him would be marvelous. . . ."

"Then, if he asked you, would you like to go?"

Hayley laughed. She muttered, practically to herself, "One has to be a bit cagey about this." Then, evidently, she made a big decision: to come clean. Aloud she said a very clear and definite "Yes."

Honestly, it leaves you wondering--just how much of a nothing was that kiss? It must have been a something.

--JULIA CORBIN

Hayley is in Universal's "The Chalk Garden" and "The Moon Spinners," Disney.