Hayley Mills’ Baby
from Woman’s Weekly, February 1973
HAYLEY MILLS’ BABY:
”He’s just like a big, warm peach”
As a result of having her first child last month, Hayley Mills says she is having “the laziest time of my life since I began work at 12.” Ever since she set up house with her producer-director husband Roy Boulting, 59, the now 26-year-old Hayley has not only worked constantly as an actress, she also managed their Chelsea flat, doing all the cooking, housework, and chores.
”We wanted it that way because we loved the privacy of being alone,” she explained in an exclusive interview just after coming out of hospital.
“But now I haven’t worked since we knew the baby was coming nearly nine months ago. And Roy insisted that we move into this furnished flat while our new house in Eaton Square is being redecorated.
“It was a great agony to begin with, parting with the little flat in which we’d been so happy for so long. But Roy was right because I really felt rather sick during my first months of pregnancy. I wasn’t ill, but I had very little energy and it was lovely to be looked after.
“Now I have a cook and a nanny who is marvellous with Crispian and is teaching me to look after him properly. You know what I mean - how to bath him without drowning him. She will only stay with us for a month jut to give me reassurance and then I want to look after him all by myself.
“I’d felt originally that I just wanted the three of us to be alone together, but I see the wisdom of the plan now. Can you imagine? All I have to do is look after myself and be with Crispian. It’s too luxurious for words.”
But habit dies hard and Hayley says that, despite newspaper reports that she has given up her career, she is already thinking about work again.
“You see, I know that if I don’t soon, it will be terribly hard to wean myself from the baby and get back at all. And then the day would come when I’d be really dying to work again and couldn’t.
“Of course I’m looking some way off because we move to the house in April and I’ve got to furnish it and everything. Roy is already busy on his next picture which begins in April, so I must do the lot.
“But just now I’ve never been happier in my life. It’s terribly hard to explain except to say that I feel reborn. I’m a different person from the one who went into that hospital - and oddly enough I know already that what I’ve gained as a fulfilled person will reflect in my acting later.
“I know I’m prejudiced but to me Crispian is the most beautiful creature in the world. He’s just like a huge, great, big warm peach - and I feel as if I could eat him.”
Huge is accurate. When born Crispian John David was just under 9 lbs. Hayley said not one of the doctors predicted he would be so big “because he tucked himself up so neatly that he hardly showed.”
He took some time in arriving, but he managed to make his entrance just three days ahead of schedule.а Hayley took a psychoprophylactic course and is proud of the fact that she was conscious throughout her labour.
“It’s so wonderful to know that you push your own baby out into the world. That is part of the experience no mother should miss.”
She is equally proud of the fact that her husband Roy is “acting as if he’s never had a baby before.”
Yet it was virtually because he took his own children by his previous marriage to see Hayley in “The Parent Trap”, which she made for Disney when she was 14, that they are married now.
When Roy was casting “The Family Way”, he said to John Mills, Hayley’s father, “She must be about the right age now for this part.”
After the film was made, Hayley decided to take a flat in Chelsea,having until then lived with her parents in Richmond.
“But I never knew that Roy lived just down the road. When I found out I felt I just had to see him again - and right from that moment I knew that was that.”
They married in June, 1971, at Cap d’Ail in the South of France.
*Thanks to Caroline for the article and the picture!*
This is the city
(Source: nicoleloveswalt)
