He was an agent to about 150 artists in Hollywood, and produced the original Broadway stage productions of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific and The Sound of Music.

Hayward's father subsequently remarried, to Maisie Manwaring Plant, one of the wealthiest women in America at the time,[1] who later traded her Fifth Avenue mansion to Cartier for a perfectly matched strand of pearls.

In the early 1940s, he handled about 150 artists, including Fred Astaire who had been his first client, James Stewart, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Karloff, Judy Garland, Ginger Rogers, as well as the two former husbands of his second wife Margaret Sullavan, Henry Fonda and William Wyler.

He produced The Ford 50th Anniversary Show on June 15, 1953, a live two-hour simulcast on CBS and NBC that looked back on the history of the United States and the world up to 1953.

He ate only white foods such as potatoes, chicken hash, lamb chops, eggs, custard and vanilla ice cream.