Hayley Mills was a popular 60's child-star. She had blond hair. Her beautiful upper-crust speech aroused sympathy and enlisted concern. Her pert-nosed face was slightly fleshy and puffy. Her mouth was an erotic flower bud. Her eyes were dangerously curious.

Around the time Hayley Mills worked for Disney (1960-65), my parents were enhancing my childhood with such Disney entertainment as "Mary Poppins" and "Swiss Family Robinson." One night I saw a Disney movie aimed at children and adults. This was my first encounter with the projected image of Ms. Mills, and her last film for Disney. She had reached babysitter age. She played opposite Dean Jones (of "Company" fame). The script for the film, "That Darn Cat," neutered their limited chemistry. I do not remember her yet I remember hating the film. What story resolution offended me when I was seven?

Upon my recovery, the Wonderful World of Disney televised "Pollyanna," a 1960 film about the cheery orphan who falls from a tree to become paralyzed. Ms. Mills played the title role with superiority and intelligence, although I disliked the peripheral townsfolk with whom she associated. I forgave her mingling, although I would not then have willingly given them the time of day. The fact that this film even entered our home bothered me, I who became indignant when my sister watched the Brady Bunch or The Partridge Family.

Like Patty Duke, Ms. Mills had a special effects twin and, after "Pollyanna," Disney cast her opposite herself. I confused the film, "The Parent Trap," with "The Family Way" (memorable for a Paul McCartney soundtrack credit). I was too embarrassed to see either film, although Ms. Mills was in both, but I saw coming attractions of Ms. Mills wrecking double havoc on the world. These excerpts provided fodder for my growing fantasy of friendship with her.

Marketing the success of "The Sound of Music" and "The Singing Nun," the incorrigible Ida Lupino directed Ms. Mills in a convent school film called "The Trouble with Angels." Ms. Mills smoked cigarettes in that one. It covered the gamut of Ms. Mills' subversive charm, never so perverse as when, at the end, she announced she would remain with Rosalind Russell to, herself, become a nun.

The film to define my then short life was "The Chalk Garden." A couple of years after its theatrical release, this 1964 film was broadcast as a TV movie of the week. That night, while my parents were out and my sister was playing with the babysitter downstairs, I sat in front of the miraculous television that picked up its broadcast in my sister's canopied bedroom as the film transformed the room. I may have been 8; and my sister, 5. As usual, instead of risking social interaction, I had left them earlier that evening to watch television alone.

The station announcer alerted viewers that they would be seeing John Mills and his daughter, Hayley, in a film for mature audiences. I consulted my copy of TV Guide. The TV guide, my then appointment book, would define a movie with a dash after its title. It never assessed entertainment value, but it characterized programs as comedy, variety and drama, with melodrama reserved for films like "Dracula" and "The Creature from the Black Lagoon."

The TV Guide called "The Chalk Garden" a drama, and although I could never watch a drama, my attention span locked when the camera left a civilized sitting room to catch the teenage Hayley yelping around a bonfire. She lived on a cliff over the ocean (a nice place) with her grandmother, who was indulgent enough to allow this one-girl "lord of the flies" to do whatever she desired. Meanwhile, the grandmother suspiciously interviewed nannies to serve the child, and if the grandmother didn't scare them off, then one glimpse at the girl feeding wood to the flames did.

The grandmother thought highly of Laurel, as Hayley was called, and said such primal outbursts were proof of a gifted artistic temperament. I agreed. I am sure my grandmother would have said the same about me. The weak-willed nannies ran. The nanny that got the job was the one that carried herself with the most detachment and negative expectation.

While the script circled around Hayley, the director surrounded her with high powered actors believably concerned for her future. Her father played the butler. Deborah Kerr played her new nanny.

Laurel dispatched prior nannies by uncovering and revealing indiscretions of their past. This game in no way prepares her for the nanny who served time for a murder committed during her unhindered wonder years. When Laurel discovers the secret, she has befriended her nanny and no longer wants to hurt her.

The murder details remain a murky part of the story, although the grandmother intends to spend the rest of her life finding out the truth. The message, however, is clear: children need hindrances. It lets them know people care about them. It keeps them out of trouble.

Looking at the film recently, I saw a child treated like a child, even by the musical accompaniment. As a child I was with Hayley Mills. I didn't want her to be claimed by her flaky mother against her grandmother's wishes.

The grandmother is left with the Nanny and the Butler to help her deal with the challenge of raising garden plants in chalky soil by the sea. In addition, the film suggests that the divorced mother will remarry, and I went to bed and took the movie from there. Hayley Mills' new father relocated his family to New York where she and I met and became great friends.

What do we really know about The Chalk Garden? Herbert Ross produced it. The director was Ronald Neame and the original play was by Enid Bagnold, the author of National Velvet. It seems an odd movie for Universal Pictures to release. I was shocked to discover after years of black and white TV that it was filmed in a luxurious Technicolor.

I am writing this because I dreamt last night that a Hayley Mills films was on TV and I walked right in and participated as a helpful audience member. I took her around a college campus in search of a lawsuit. We found it while peaking into the hall to the boys' dorms where water sprayed from the ceiling. Randomly placed objects discreetly covered the private parts of a naked boy as he slipped out of one door and into the next.

The leaking dormitory hallway was as animated as an animal house as Hayley goaded me to continue the search. She had a younger brother with her whom she was trying to protect as I pretended, with her, that she was old enough not to need protection herself.

Our lawsuit went to trial where I found out, during cross examination, that Hayley had altered her social security number on an unrelated job application. I didn't care but the jury held it against her.

As this is 1995 and the entertainment industry has regained control over what the public wants, I am reminded of an amoral adulation of dynamic subversives. Remember when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway portrayed the bank gangsters, Bonnie and Clyde, as heroes?

I wanted to be their son with Hayley Mills as my sister. I invented a serialized fantasy called "If It Ever Happened" which considered the following: what if before they were killed, Bonnie and Clyde had had children? Not only would the kids have had these dynamic parents there for the kids to learn from, but those parents would soon be gone and we, the children, would have the good fortune to be orphaned on our own to take their lessons a little further.