The Unconventional World of Kendall Hailey : Young Author of ‘Day I Became an Autodidact’ Reflects on Her Decision to Self-Start Her Life of the Mind : Of contemporary culture, she says, ‘I still haven’t quite got a grip on it.’

Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kendall Hailey believes that school, not war, is hell.

When Hailey was 15, the aspiring novelist, fledgling actress and eldest child in a remarkable, idiosyncratic family decided to graduate from high school early, nix college--which she considered suicide-inducing--and become an autodidact: a self-taught person.

Joining the legendary autodidacts before her--George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, H. L. Mencken, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Chaplin, Harry S. Truman and Virginia Woolf to name just a gaggle--she began a journey of independent intellectual exploration as soon as she graduated from the private Oakwood School in North Hollywood at age 16.

During the last four years of the trip, Hailey started a couple of novels, co-wrote and acted in the play, “The Bar Off Melrose,” and completed a nonfiction, rites-of-passage work that evokes, in the words of one critic, Holden Caulfield in the fiction classic “Catcher in the Rye,” only “shrewder” and “more literate.”

Her book, “The Day I Became an Autodidact,” subtitled “and the Advice, Adventures and Acrimonies That Befell Me Thereafter,” was published Friday by Delacorte Press. In it, you will find the world according to Hailey:

I realize I have always overlooked the use of drugs, alcohol, and sex by my classmates in an attempt not to feel odd man out.

Why are there so few of us who find life exciting enough not to need to hallucinate? Perhaps if what my classmates were facing now was life and not just another year in high school they would share my excitement. I have a feeling it is conventional choices that lead to unconventional stimulants.

Creative Eccentrics

Unconventional choices come easily for Hailey, 21, who was born “the same day as Thoreau.”

She is part of an extended family of creative eccentrics sure to be immortalized on the stage one day in a play written by one Hailey or another.

Her father is playwright Oliver Hailey (“Who’s Happy Now?” “Father’s Day,” “For the Use of the Hall,” “And Where She Stops Nobody Knows”). Her mother is best-selling novelist Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey (“A Woman of Independent Means,” “Life Sentences,” “Joanna’s Husband and David’s Wife”--this last work being turned into a play). Her sister, Brooke, 17, also plans to be a writer. And she too is autodidactically inclined, planning to hold off going to college at least for a year after high school. Her grandmother, Hallie May Hailey, 83, known as Nanny, and her father’s brother, Thomas, crippled by polio as a child, are also part of the resident clan.

It was her uncle, Kendall Hailey writes, “who sparked my first battle with formal education. . . . ( One ) day when I was in kindergarten, I decided to paint a picture of his wheelchair.”

Her teacher told her it was the most depressing thing she had ever seen, “and wouldn’t it be nice to put some yellow in it?”

‘A True Rendering’

“At the age of 5, I did my best to explain that the painting was a true rendering of my uncle’s wheelchair, not a comment on my life.

“And that was the only trouble my uncle Thomas’ being in a wheelchair ever caused me. When we went to Europe as a break from kindergarten, I rode in his lap across the continent. There is little better in life than a movable lap,” she writes. “In Paris, I had a nightmare--Thomas had learned to walk. And there had gone my lap.”

Nurtured by this loving crew, all of whom she is loath to leave, Kendall Hailey resides in a once-upon-a-time setting, a shaded, woodsy place in Studio City reached by a long, narrow footbridge whose sides are blanketed with ivy. It seems a fitting place for this young woman fired by the world of the imagination. Were she to run to you across this footbridge now, in the diffused light of late afternoon, her hands clutching a sweater draped around her shoulders, she might conjure images of a gentle, charming, young Dorothy McGuire.

And when she crossed the bridge and finally spoke, her voice would come with the hyperbolic rush of the romantic, like Jennifer Jones in “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.” Remember the moment when she gets the phone call with the telegraph message that makes clear, yes, William Holden would really be hers?: “He’s stopped biting his nails,” Jones gushes melodramatically.

It is one of Hailey’s favorite cinematic moments. But in reality, she’d probably effuse: Plato, he’s a fascist. She discovered it as an autodidact.

I am appalled by Plato. That anyone could write a book like the “Laws” (which denies free thought and places all authority with the state ) and still be considered a great philosopher is shocking. He was no more than an ancient Hitler . . . .

I am certainly glad I read about the old fool, so if his name ever comes up I shall not have to be quiet out of undeserved awe. Though the chance of Plato coming up in conversation with the people I run with is doubtful.

She is sitting in a room of her own. From her childhood remains a miniature house, filled with myriad rooms and life scaled down to fairy-tale proportions. A small bookcase is filled with videocassettes of classic Hollywood movies--she loves screwball comedies. On an end table rests a copy of Life magazine, Feb. 18, 1946. Dorothy McGuire is on the cover.

The conversation begins with important stuff, her boyfriend, Matthew.

“Now we can get to essentials,” she laughs. He’s on Michael Dukakis’ campaign staff. “He is now in Boston. I’m happy to say he has left college,” Wesleyan. “He says he is just taking a semester off, but we won’t believe such evil lies as that.”

Such evil lies as that? The mannered syntax fits Hailey. And her distinctive voice--she speaks from the back of her mouth--is almost uncontrollably effervescent, but strong. Disembodied, one would guess it belonged to an older woman--women: maybe Jean Arthur, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard; anyone of a number of great voices soaked into her subconscious over the years.

She plays classic Hollywood films at night as she writes--”midnight until 4 or 5 a.m. Those are my work hours. I put on an old movie and Norma Shearer is there keeping me company.” The black-and-white certainty of time caught on film, unchanging, repeatable is psychologically comforting. It leaves her free to “concentrate and explore.”

During the day “I try to do a little bit of reading and try to educate myself.”

She started her life as an autodidact reading Proust. Then she used Will and Ariel Durant’s historical works as a guide through the ages, later turning to original source material from the ancient Greek and Roman bards, dramatists and historians. Next she tackled Dante, Dostoevsky, Hemingway and “Beowulf.”

“Now . . . I want to read all the different philosophers because my sister, Brooke, was reading John Stuart Mill. And he said something about the higher pleasures and the lower pleasures and I found that very appealing.” She admits that she was going through a “brief resurgence” of regret when she encountered this bit of Mill. She feared that her friends, who had gone to college, were having more fun than she. But no, she’s decided that she is just “enjoying the higher pleasures like John Stuart Mill said.”

Oh, but those low pleasures. She writes:

Just tried to call Matthew. He is always out (after swearing to me he doesn’t socialize), and as Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard in “ My Man Godfrey “ ) would say, “probably with some woman on his lap.”

So why doesn’t she date someone else?

Sighing, she says she doesn’t know what will happen between her and Matthew, a friend since childhood. “I read the Brownings’ love letters when Matthew went off to college since we’ve been writing letters.”

She concedes that she is more comfortable with the past than the present. Of contemporary culture, she says, “I still haven’t quite got a grip on it.”

Why not?

“That’s a good question. I don’t know. I suppose I don’t want (the past), to be forgotten by people my age. I feel like I’m going to hold out. Until they pay attention to the past, I’m not going to even look at the present,” she explains in a rush of words punctuated by laughter.

After Hailey decided to stay home and teach herself, George Furth--playwright, actor, family friend--wrote her a letter, which she published in her book:

See, you are shy. And you are sheltered. And you are suspicious. And a little bit fearful. But so is everyone. But going off on your experience into newness will eliminate all that. I guess what I’m saying is either go away to college or go away to explore. But move.

You have it in you to nest and hide out and stay protected and the reason for this letter is to beg you to begin the journey in your mind that soon you will begin your life. Move figuratively and literally.

Noted educator Diane Ravitch, author of “The Trouble Crusade,” the history of education since World War II, and co-author of last year’s “What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?” confirms the obvious about Kendall Hailey. She is unusual.

“I would say it is very rare that anyone can successfully educate themselves. There is nothing to replace a great teacher.” Having said that, Ravitch, an adjunct professor on the faculty of Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, readily offers, “I think that most people can look back and count on the fingers of one hand the great teachers that they have encountered from kindergarten on.”

‘It’s Not Accidental’

The other side of all this, Ravitch says, “is that no matter where you’ve gone to school or how much schooling you’ve had, the only way you can be really educated is at some point in your life to become an autodidact. Because the most valuable learning is the learning that you come to out of self-motivation. So what she has done is terrific for her. I don’t think it could be considered a pattern for large numbers of people. It’s not accidental” that someone like Hailey is able to teach herself, says Ravitch, who points out that Hailey is self-motivated and “comes from a richly cultured and intellectual background.”

Laughing, Ravitch adds, “the truth is most people are too lazy to be autodidacts.” That’s why they go to an institution that makes them do the work.

Hailey compares herself to friends who have gone to college and believes they come up wanting. “The information I’ve acquired I’ve really grown passionate about. It’s information I love . . . (that) will stay with me for all my life.” Her friends in college “may have sampled more wide-ranging things. I’m sure they’ve learned a lot. I just don’t know how much will stay with them and really be part of their lives.”

If Hailey was seeking reinforcement from the social sciences, she could find it from Claudia Danis and Nicole A. Tremblay, professors at the University of Montreal.

They examined the implications of autodidactic learning for adults in a study published last year.

Educators have generally believed, they write, that “learning for the pleasure of learning was mostly an attribute of the child,” whereas learning for short-term, utilitarian reasons was characteristic of adults.

Not so, the professors say. “Challenge, curiosity and pleasure” are still what motivates people to learn when they are adults. And adult educational programs should be reorganized in a way that recognizes that, they say.

Further, they said that even though autodidacts tend to initially “narrow” their field of interest, “surprisingly enough, the very phenomenon of specialization seems to lead to an opening onto other fields of learning.”

You can hear Hailey yelling now: That’s me, that’s me. Proust to Plato.

While the Canadian professors study focused on adult education--and most academics might not place 16-year-olds, even a high school graduate in that category--Hailey clearly thought of herself as an adult at that age. She’d graduated early and resented the intellectual regimentation she thought a university education would have imposed. Besides, she says, she didn’t want to be a brain surgeon, a lawyer or a physicist. She wanted the classic liberal arts education of a would-be writer.

“I think I worried more than Oliver,” Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey says about her daughter’s self-education.

Growing up, she says, “I made all the conventional choices, until I met Oliver. And (that) threw open all the doors.” But she says her daughter’s decision was never irrevocable.

The whole family is seated in the living room. Oliver Hailey has taken a break from a presidential news conference to join in. ( Dad is going to see a diagnostician tomorrow. As a friend said, “You’re the only person I know who wants a second opinion when a doctor tells you nothing is wrong . “ ) It turned out, he has Parkinson’s disease. He was ready to beat up the doctor with the first opinion who told him he was fine, after the second doctor confirmed he was not, his daughter writes.

“Oliver was always the rebel,” his novelist wife continues. He recognized early that his oldest child “just will never get along in a regular school. ‘We’re going to have to get her a tutor,’ ” she recalls him saying.

The playwright admits to selfish reasons for wanting her home. “My daughters and my wife are my three best friends. And I want them with me as long as I can keep them.”

Indeed, his daughter says, “my father is a Mr. Bronte.”

Exposed to More

Her mother says, “I do think . . . because Kendall has always known our friends and been part of our lives that she may have been sheltered physically (but) emotionally she’s been exposed to a great deal more than I had been at her age.”

Not many young girls have had intimate chats with Joan Hackett who taught her family the pleasures of frozen grapes. Or been told what it means to be an actress by Mildred Dunnock: ‘It’s an awful business, but if you have to, then there’s nothing else.”

“And she has known,” her mother says, “how much pain and trauma goes into living (even) a fairly ordinary life out here.”

That Kendall Hailey seems to have so few people her own age in her life doesn’t bother her mother.

“This whole idea of peers is nonsense, anyway.” College is “the only time in your life when you are forced to associate with people your own age. I mean, I was very bored in school. I couldn’t wait to be 21 and have life get started.”

Her daughter speaks, the singular voice shaped by stars here and gone: “I spoke the other day at a reading group and this one elderly lady came up to me and said, ‘Oh, but you’ve got to know people your own age.’ I felt so sad,” Hailey says, “because now her only friends are people her own age. And they are slowly dying. I want to always have friends. I’m cultivating 3- and 4-year-olds now.”