‘Autodidact’ Author Charms Her Fans, Signs Books, Chats

One woman in the audience jokingly told Kendall Hailey: “I’m almost terrified to take your book home. I know my 14-year-old will think it’s wonderful to just get a lot of books and sit on the beach.”

Hailey, the author of “The Day I Became an Autodidact”--a chronicle of her decision to forgo college and instead follow the example of such legendary “self-taught” persons as Abraham Lincoln, Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw--peered through owlish glasses and grinned broadly.

“I know of several mothers who kept the book in their purses while they read it,” said the 22-year-old writer and oldest daughter of playwright Oliver Hailey and novelist Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey.

Hailey and her mother (the best-selling author of “A Woman of Independent Means,” “Life Sentences” and “Joanna’s Husband and David’s Wife”) were guest speakers at a breakfast and book-signing sponsored by the Friends of the Huntington Beach Library on Sunday at the Holiday Inn in Huntington Beach.

Speaking in a voice that is as distinctive as Katharine Hepburn’s and which has been described by one writer as being “almost uncontrollably effervescent,” Hailey regaled her audience with the story of how she decided to graduate from the private Oakwood School in North Hollywood a year early and begin her own course of self-education.

As in her book, Hailey also filled the audience in on her “remarkable and slightly odd” extended family, which lives in Studio City and includes her younger sister, Brooke, her grandmother and an uncle who was crippled by polio as a child.

Here’s Kendall Hailey on:

Her family: “I think the great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to in life.”

Her sister: “Brooke is my opposite in many ways, most particularly when it comes to reading. Her irreverent attitude toward great literature is a constant source of amusement. I know when she was reading ‘Waiting for Godot,’ she said, ‘I hope when Godot comes he brings a plot with him.’ ”

Her 84-year-old grandmother, Nanny, whose health and longevity is attributed to “the nutritive benefits of white bread and chocolate”: “The only nutritional advice I’ve ever heard her give is ‘Finish your Coke.’ ”

After their talks and a question-and-answer session, the two Haileys autographed copies of their books.

And for her part, Hailey seemed genuinely pleased to meet fans of her book, alternately smiling and laughing and chatting animatedly before writing lengthy inscriptions--more often than not for the women’s sons and daughters.

Nearly a year after the publication of “The Day I Became an Autodidact,” the first-time author and fledgling actress-novelist-playwright is still surprised by the positive responses to her rights-of-passage account of her intellectual exploration, which included travels with her family and hours spent on the telephone with her boyfriend, Matthew.

Before the book’s publication last spring, she was prepared for the worst.

“I was really terrified of the response,” she said in an interview after the crowd had dispersed. “I expected to get letters from parents saying, ‘I spent this much money to send my child to school and now you tell me. . . .

“I think what I’ve done is unleash, thank heavens, a lot of closet autodidacts.”

With a grin, Hailey said: “This woman (today) said, ‘I’m a college instructor. I agree with you: College is wasted on 18-year-olds.’ And I said, ‘I’m glad you heard it that way because that’s just what I feel. When you’re ready, it’s wonderful. But when you’re dragging along--when you don’t want to be there--it’s a waste of everybody’s time.”

The main reason she didn’t want to go to college, Hailey said, was the way literature was being taught at school.

“The analysis was just making me crazy,” she said. “It was ruining books I just knew I would love if I read them by myself. I mean, it will be years before I can pick up ‘The Great Gatsby’ and not hear what the green light meant a dozen times. I just want to read it. And (literature) was my favorite subject, and I thought if my favorite subject is being ruined for me. . . .”

While acknowledging that she was “a little nervous” by her daughter’s decision to graduate from high school a year early and begin her self-education, Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey said she was all for it.

“It was always kind of a year-by-year proposition in the beginning,” she said. “And the fact that she had graduated a year early from high school meant she had a margin of a year, so we figured she could take that year while her friends were finishing high school and if she was bored or restless or didn’t know what to do with herself, she hadn’t lost anything. She could still apply to college and go with her classmates.”

Being an A student, Kendall Hailey’s decision to not go to college especially confounded her college-bound classmates.

“She was awarded the Harvard Book Prize, which is given to the most academically promising juniors and which everybody says is a ticket to Harvard,” said her mother. “That’s what really made her friends nervous. If she had been a bad student, everybody would have understood. But the fact that she was a good student, her friends were quite threatened by the whole idea that she was good at it, and she still didn’t want to go to college.”

Asked if she recommends other young people to become autodidacts, Kendall Hailey said she usually suggests taking a year off after high school.

She is now writing a novel and has just finished her first full-length play. She also has acting ambitions. During the period covered in her book, she co-wrote and acted in a play, “The Bar Off Melrose.” And this summer, she’ll play the lead in a two-character play based on her mother’s novel, “Joanna’s Husband and David’s Wife,” at the Pasadena Playhouse.

While her sister Brooke plans to attend acting school in New York, Kendall, true to form, has no intention of going to school to learn acting.

Laughed her mother: “She calls herself an ‘autodidactress.’ ”

Kendall views this autodidactic business as a lifetime proposition.

“I feel like I’m responsible to myself now to keep on trying,” she said. “I’ve kind of set aside the major plan of going through civilization. I’ve done the Greeks and Romans. Now, in this 4-year span, I’m going to do the Middle Ages. I’ve put it off and put it off (laugh), but it’s going to happen. And then I’ll get to the Renaissance. . . .”