My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  He was determined to marry the young Sophie, and she was too young to have seen the warning signs. After the wedding he moved her to New York City. He would come home after work at the law firm complaining of terrible headaches and have Grandma put cold cloths on his head to soothe him. When her mother came to visit them, she saw right away what was up and said to her daughter, “Darling, the reason his head aches is because he’s drunk!” Yes, it turns out Grandpa was a ladies’ man, a poetry-writing philanderer with mental health problems, and an alcoholic. Alcoholism, according to a cousin, ran in his family. His paranoia led him to become pathologically jealous of any attention that his male colleagues paid to his beautiful young wife, and in 1906, shortly after the birth of their first child (my uncle Ford), Grandpa left his New York job and bought a farm just outside of Morrisburg on the St. Lawrence River. Within a year, Grandma found herself right back in Canada whence she’d come, and that is where my mother was born, in April 1908. When Mother was a year old, her mother gave birth to a third child, Jane, but there was something wrong with the little girl from the very beginning. She was later diagnosed as epileptic and needed constant attention.

  Mother in the 1930s.

  The photo of nineteen-year-old Grandma that brought thirty-five-year-old Grandpa a-courting.

  Mother in the South of France, 1935.

  Life was not easy for the Seymours. Mother described how her father “spanked” the children so often and so hard that Grandma would beg him to stop. Today we call that child abuse. He also kept bars on the doors to keep out anyone who knew Grandma, put towels over the windows, and wired himself into his room. The only outsider allowed to come in was the man who tuned their piano. Mother wrote that when she was eight years old this piano tuner sexually molested her.

  I believe this trauma colored her life, and mine—which I will get to in a moment.

  Grandpa no longer worked, and the Seymour family received financial help from wealthy relatives, supplementing this by raising chickens and selling eggs and apples. There were no machines to do the washing and no electric irons (although Grandpa expected everything to be ironed all the time); everything had to be made from scratch—including bread, soap, and butter. The only way Grandma could do all the housework and look after her ill daughter Jane was to train the young child to hang on to her skirts at all times. Wherever Grandma went, Jane would be tagging along. How, then, did the other children get the attention they needed? My heart breaks when I imagine my mother, scared of her father’s spankings, hiding the dark secret of her sexual abuse by the piano tuner, and seeing this little Jane take whatever attention her mother had left to give. Mother wrote of her anger at her father for having so many children that he could neither support nor educate.

  Grandfather’s sister, Jane Seymour Benjamin, had a daughter, Mary, who was married to Colonel H. H. Rogers, a professional military man and the son and heir of Henry Huttleston Rogers, vice president of Standard Oil. Over the years, Mary Benjamin Rogers, who was a kind, generous matriarch, must have grown aware that her troubled uncle’s family was having a hard time of it up on their farm in Canada. Fifteen years had passed, and by now Grandma had five children to take care of. Mary decided to bring her cousins to Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Before leaving, Grandma put her fifteen-year-old daughter, Jane, into an institution, where she later died of pneumonia.

  Mother spent the two final years of high school in Fairhaven and was doted on by her cousin Mary and Mary’s daughter Millicent Rogers, six years my mother’s senior. Millicent was to become a strikingly beautiful and fashionable socialite, jewelry designer, and humanitarian. The Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, New Mexico, which houses part of her art collection and the heavy gold and silver jewelry she designed, is testimony to her talent and taste. These relatives of Mother’s were interesting, gracious, strong women—the glue that held things together—and they must have been powerful role models. But Mother makes clear in the history she wrote that she was shy and intimidated by them. In her medical records, her doctor wrote, “Always she felt painfully inadequate and inferior socially and intellectually as the poor cousin.”

  At their home, Mother met Miss Harris, a secretary on Wall Street who earned $10,000 a year, a startlingly high salary at the time. Maybe this is what gave Mother the idea of becoming a secretary. Mother once told her friend Eulalia Chapin that she “would go to secretarial school, become the fastest typist and best secretary anyone could hire. Then I’d descend on Wall Street and marry a millionaire,” she said. And that is exactly what she did.

  With some financial assistance from Mary Rogers, Mother attended Katharine Gibbs secretarial school, pulled a few strings with her family’s banking connections, and landed a job at the Guaranty Trust Company bank, where she learned the business world firsthand. Then, at twenty, she met multimillionaire George Brokaw, whose family fortune had come from factories that made uniforms for Yankee soldiers during the Civil War. Brokaw had recently been divorced from Clare Booth, author and future wife of Time, Inc.’s Henry Luce. In January 1931, Mother and Mr. Brokaw were married and moved into an elaborate stone mansion with a moat around it on the corner of Seventy-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City.

  Mother, like her mother before her, married a man nearly thirty years her senior who was a serious alcoholic. Brokaw died in a sanitarium a few years later, leaving my mother with a three-year-old daughter (my half-sister, Frances—nicknamed Pan—Brokaw) and a share of his wealth. No longer dependent on the kindness of cousins, she now assumed the role of dispenser of largesse and immediately moved her mother, sister Marjory, and brother Rogers from Fairhaven to New York City to live with her and help look after Pan. This was when my mother met and befriended the beautiful young Arden model Laura Clark.

  I closed Mother’s medical records and lay in bed feeling indescribably sad for her and at the same time utterly relieved. I wished I could fold her in my arms, rock her, and tell her everything was all right, that I loved her and forgave her because now I understood. Finally, I understood the nature of one of the shadows I inherited from her that has incubated in my body for so long—the shadow of guilt that an abused girl like Mother carries. Why, you may ask, would a child feel guilty for abuse over which she had no control?

  For the last decade—not knowing why until now—I have been drawn to studying the effects of sexual abuse on children. What I have learned is that a child, developmentally unable to blame the adult perpetrator, internalizes the trauma as her own fault. Carrying this guilt can make her blame herself for anything that goes wrong and hate her body and feel the need to make it perfect in order to compensate—a feeling that she can pass on to her daughter. (In her history, I was astonished to read of my mother’s shame at having had plastic surgery on her nose and breasts.)

  A sexually abused child will feel that her sexuality is the only thing about her that has value, and this frequently results in adolescent promiscuity. Several times in the history she wrote, Mother used the words boys, boys, boys to describe her school days. Often, victims of sexual abuse seem to carry a strange luminosity because of the sexual energy that was forced into their lives far too early. I have recognized this in women I know who have been abused and subjected to incest and have seen how men are drawn to it . . . proverbial moths to a flame. Learning this has given new poignancy to my father’s early description of my mother: “She was as . . . bright as the beam from a follow-spot.”

  I can now understand that my mother was all the things that people have described—the icon, the flame, the follow-spot—and also all that I had felt as a child—a victim, a beautiful but damaged butterfly, unable to give me what I needed—to be loved, seen—because she could not give it to herself. As a bright, resilient child, I had sensed, with the animal instinct children have, deep wounds that had been inflicted on her early in her life. I had caught the doomed scent of her fragility, which was probably only intensified by the men she chose. As a child, this scared me, and I moved a
way from it. Now, as an adult, I can see it as her story, not mine, and begin to move into my own—which is the story this book aims to tell.

  FATHER

  My father’s people, the Fondas, were originally from a valley in the Apennines, about twelve miles outside of Genoa, Italy. The valley was deep, and the town cradled in it was named Fonda, which means “bottom.” In the fourteenth century, one of my Italian ancestors, the Marquis de Fonda of the Republic of Genoa, attempted to overturn the aristocratic government in order to allow ordinary citizens to elect the doge and the senate. My kind of guy. His efforts failed. He was branded a traitor to his class and fled the country, taking refuge in Amsterdam, Holland. I assume it was during this time that Dutch Calvinism seeped into the Fonda genes. Over the generations, the Fondas became more Dutch than Italian, though there remained, as my brother says, “just enough Italian to put some music into the mix.”

  The first Fonda to cross the ocean was Jellis Douw, a member of the Dutch Reform Church, who came to the New World in the mid-1600s, fleeing religious persecution. He canoed up the Mohawk River and stopped at an Indian village called Caughnawaga in the middle of Mohawk Indian territory. Within a few generations after my Dutch-Italian ancestors arrived in the Mohawk Valley, there were no more Indians—the town became known as Fonda, New York.

  Dad as Tom Joad.

  (Photofest)

  It is still there, not far from Albany. You get to it by riding north along the Hudson River for a while and then west, a train ride I took from Grand Central Terminal for six years—while attending the Emma Willard boarding school in Troy, New York, and then Vassar College in Poughkeepsie.

  Tina Fonda, Troy, and me in Fonda, New York, by the graves of our namesakes.

  (Montgomery County Department of History & Archives)

  The last Fonda family reunion, in Denver. Dad is fourth from left in the front row next to Shirlee, then Aunt Harriet and her daughter Prudence. Back row, left to right: Peter, Amy, Becky, Bridget, and a cousin, Lisa Walker Duke.

  In the seventies, I visited the town of Fonda with my children and my cousin Tina, daughter of Douw Fonda, direct descendant of the original Jellis Douw. We spent most of our time in the town’s graveyard, where, on lichen-covered gravestones, some almost toppled over, we could read the old Italian name Fonda, preceded by Dutch names such as Pieter, Ten Eyck, and Douw. But there, among them, was a Henry and a Jayne—our long-dead namesakes.

  Mother’s ancestors were Tories, loyal to the British. The Fondas were staunch Whigs who actively supported the colonial cause. After the Civil War, Ten Eyck Fonda, my great-grandfather from Fonda, New York, brought the Fondas to Omaha, Nebraska, where my father was raised. Ten Eyck went there as a telegrapher with the railroad, a skill he’d gained in the army. Omaha at that time was a hub of the new railway network.

  I never knew my father’s parents, who died before I was born. William Brace Fonda, my grandfather, ran a printing plant in Omaha, and my grandmother Herberta, whom I apparently favor, was a housewife who raised three children—my dad and his sisters, Harriet and Jayne. Dad’s parents and many of their relatives were Christian Scientists, Readers, and Practitioners. If one can judge from the photos, they were a close, happy, smiling family.

  I have often pored over shoeboxes full of family memorabilia looking for clues to my father’s dark moods. I am not alone in this quest. Several years ago, when it became clear that Dad’s remaining sister, Aunt Harriet, hadn’t long to live, I went to visit her at her home outside of Phoenix to ask my questions.

  “Was Dad close to his mother? Were there problems in the family?”

  “No, absolutely not!” she answered. “And I just don’t understand all you girls coming down here to look at the pictures and ask me questions about our family!”

  This took me by surprise. “What do you mean, Aunt Harriet? Who else has come?”

  Aunt Harriet named various cousins and their daughters. Ah-ha, thought I. Perhaps the Fonda malaise has crept into other corners of the family. Now, it seemed, some of the younger generation were seeking answers, too.

  My visit with Aunt Harriet served to remind me how little the people of my father’s generation were accustomed to introspection. Her memory held no nuances, no shades of gray. As far as she was concerned, theirs had been an idyllic life, and perhaps it had been.

  I knew that my father had great admiration for his father, William Brace Fonda—like him, a man of few words. There are two stories my father told, and they are revealing.

  One evening after dinner, William Brace drove his son down to the printing plant. From a second-story window, he had Dad look down onto the courthouse square below, where a crowd of shouting men brandished burning torches, clubs, and guns. Inside the courthouse, in a temporary jail, a young black man was being held for alleged rape. There had been no trial, not even any charges filed. The mayor and sheriff were there on horseback trying to quiet the mob. Eventually the man was brought out into the square and, in the presence of the mayor and sheriff, hanged from a lamppost. Then the mob riddled his body with bullets.

  Fourteen years old, Dad watched all this in shock and terror. His father never said a word—not then, not on the drive home, not ever. Silence. The experience would forever be a part of my father’s psyche. It played itself out in his 12 Angry Men, in The Ox-Bow Incident, Young Mr. Lincoln, and Clarence Darrow, and in unspoken words that I heard plainly throughout my life: Racism and injustice are evil and must not be tolerated.

  The second story has to do with his father’s attitude about acting. Dad had a $30-a-week job as a clerk at the Retail Credit Company in Omaha, but Marlon Brando’s mother, a friend of my grandmother’s, got him involved with the Omaha Community Playhouse, where Dad was offered the part of Merton in the play Merton of the Movies. When Dad began talking about acting as a career, his father said it was not appropriate for his son to earn his living in “some make-believe world” when there were good steady jobs available like the one he had. Dad argued, and his father refused to speak to him—for six weeks.

  Still, the play opened with Dad as Merton. And the whole family, including his father, went to see it. When Dad got home after the show, the family was sitting around the living room. His father had his face buried in a newspaper and still had not spoken to Dad. The mother and sisters began a very complimentary discussion of Dad’s performance, but at one point his sister Harriet mentioned something she thought he could have done differently. Suddenly, from across the room his father lowered his newspaper and said to her, “Shut up. He was perfect!”

  Dad said that was the best review he ever got, and every time he told the story tears would well in his eyes.

  These are among the very few clues I have about my father. I think that the repressed, withholding nature of his early environment colluded with a biological vulnerability to depression to make Dad the brooding, remote, sometimes frightening figure he became. I was stunned to discover in talks with my cousins that undiagnosed depression ran in the Fonda family. Dad’s cousin Douw suffered from it, and I suspect Dad’s father did as well.

  Dad was a study in contradictions. Author John Steinbeck wrote this about him:

  My impressions of Hank are of a man reaching but unreachable, gentle but capable of sudden wild and dangerous violence, sharply critical of others but equally self-critical, caged and fighting the bars but timid of the light, viciously opposed to external restraint, imposing an iron slavery on himself. His face is a picture of opposites in conflict.

  Dad could spend hours stitching a needlepoint pattern he had designed or doing macramé baskets. He painted beautifully, and there was a softness in many of his acting performances, with nary a trace of the macho ethic. But to me, Dad was not a gentle person. He could be gentle with people he didn’t know, utter strangers. Often I run into people who describe finding themselves sitting next to him on transatlantic flights and go on about what an open person he was, how they drank and talked with him “for eight hours no
nstop.” It makes me angry. I never talked to him for thirty minutes nonstop! But I have learned that it is not unusual for otherwise closed-off men to reveal a softer side of themselves in the company of total strangers, or with animals or their gardens or other hobbies. In the confines of our home, Dad’s darker side would emerge. We, his intimates, lived in constant awareness of the minefield we had to tread so as not to trigger his rage. This environment of perpetual tension sent me a message that danger lies in intimacy, that far away is where it is safe.

  In his early twenties, and with his father’s permission, Dad hitched a ride to Cape Cod with a family friend and soon hooked up with the University Players, a summer stock repertory company in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Among them was Joshua Logan, one of my future godfathers. Dad was the only non–Ivy Leaguer among them.

  When Margaret Sullavan, a petite, talented, flirtatious, temperamental, Scarlett O’Hara–style southern belle from Virginia, was invited to join the University Players the following summer in Falmouth, she stole his shy Nebraska heart. Their romance bloomed, until Sullavan went off to star in a Broadway play.

  They carried on what was reported to be a fiery, argumentative courtship. After a year and a half, Dad proposed, she accepted, and they married and moved into a flat in Greenwich Village. Less than four months later it was all over. Dad moved into a cockroach-infested hotel on Forty-second Street, and Sullavan took up with the Broadway producer Jed Harris. Dad would stand outside her apartment building at night looking up at her window, knowing Harris was inside with her. “That just destroyed me,” he said a lifetime later to Howard Teichmann. “Never in my life have I felt so betrayed, so rejected, so alone.”