by Jane Fonda
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Dad was ordered back to the States the same day that Japan surrendered and was subsequently awarded a Bronze Star. Like a lot of men, he came back from the war changed. He had been living a man’s life with his war buddies, unencumbered by family responsibilities. I think he liked the sense of mission, the male bonding, being a success at something real instead of just a screen hero.
In fifth grade with my braids.
After he came home, I sensed that Dad was not attracted to Mother anymore. She seemed not to be conscious of it, however, and would walk around naked in front of him. I wanted her to put her clothes on. Didn’t she know? She was probably still very beautiful, but—oh, I hate myself for this betrayal of her—I saw her through my father’s judgmental eyes. As an adolescent, I would recognize Dad’s eyes sizing me up unfavorably. I blamed Mother for the growing distance that I sensed between her and Dad. She wasn’t doing the right things to make him love her. And what it said to me was that unless you were perfect and very careful, it was not safe being a woman. Side with the man if you want to be a survivor. Go out there and listen to jazz with them and pour them their whiskey and even bring them women, if that’s what they want, and learn to find that exciting. Be better than perfect if you want to be loved. And don’t walk around naked.
A sad memory from those postwar days was the afternoon I decided to get a book and read next to Dad. Like his father before him, Dad was an avid reader and would sit reading for hours in a big overstuffed chair. My own reading skills had been honed during the years he was away, and I thought reading would be something we could share that didn’t require talking. I got the novel Black Beauty and sat in a chair opposite him. He hadn’t acknowledged my presence, but when I came to a passage that made me want to laugh, instead of stifling the laughter I encouraged it, hoping he’d ask me to share with him what was so funny. But he never looked up or said anything. It was as though I weren’t even there. I’d known he loved me when I was little, but now, at nine, I wasn’t so sure.
In 1947 Dad left for New York to begin rehearsals for a Broadway play called Mister Roberts, directed by Joshua Logan and produced by Leland Hayward, Brooke’s father. Right after that, Brooke came to Tigertail to tell me that her parents were getting divorced. It was the most frightening thing I’d ever heard. If it could happen to that family, where everyone was always laughing and having fun, then . . . No, too frightening to think about.
That was in the beginning of my tenth year. By the time we rounded the circle to the bottom of that year, the end of my first decade, we’d be living in Greenwich, Connecticut—and life as I’d known it would never be the same.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHERE’D I GO?
I was doing research in a an elementary, middle, and high school and sometimes we would thank the students by getting them pizza for lunch. When I would ask the girls what they wanted on their pizzas, the ten-year-olds would say, “Extra cheese with pepperoni,” the thirteen-year-olds would say, “I don’t know,” and the fifteen-year-olds would say, “Whatever.”
—CATHERINE STEINER-ADAIR, ED.D.,
Full of Ourselves: Advancing Girl Power, Health and Leadership.
PEOPLE MADE A FUSS over us as we waited backstage in the darkened theater where my father was starring in Mister Roberts. We had just landed in New York that night in early June 1948, and Mother, Peter, and I had been driven directly to the Alvin Theater.
Standing next to the stage manager, Peter and I waited for intermission to release our father to us. As I peered around the curtains I saw—was it a stage or a sliver of heaven? It was so close yet far away, bathed in light, awash in an electric energy that crackled back and forth between an unseen audience and Dad in his khaki lieutenant’s uniform. But he wasn’t “Dad.” He was a funny, talkative Mr. Roberts. Even the gunmetal gray of the set, the decks, antiaircraft guns, and turrets of the navy destroyer, seemed to glow from within. No wonder he’d left us to come to this place: Here he was more alive than life, the eye in the center of a hurricane of love and laughter.
Suddenly there was thunderous applause. People began running around backstage, and before I knew it, Dad was next to me giving me a big hug and I could feel some of the energy he’d picked up out there coming through his uniform right into me, along with a heady wave of his musk smell. I didn’t want to leave, ever. But he and Mother said it was late and that we had to go to bed. So we hugged again and made the thirty-five-minute drive to Greenwich, Connecticut, our new hometown.
Peter was disconsolate at having to leave Tigertail, and rancor fairly oozed from his every pore. While I knew that the days of buckskin and bareback with Sue Sally were over, to me, it felt—at least initially—rather like an adventure. Besides, pragmatist that I am, I always meet necessity with enthusiasm. What was I to do, beg Sue Sally’s mother to adopt me? No, my connection to Dad, fragile though it sometimes felt, was still my lifeline, and I wasn’t about to put it to a test. I was forever amazed at Peter’s willingness to test everybody all the time. How was he so sure the bonds wouldn’t fray and break?
I slept late that first morning and the sun was fully up when I jumped out of bed and threw open my window. Below me was an apple orchard that stretched farther than I could see. On either side was what appeared to be a jungle. I realized that the astounding array of greens in my colored-pencil case weren’t invented by the pencil company; they were right there below me. I never got dressed so fast, and I was downstairs and out the door. The sound of the door slamming behind me made me do a double take: my first screen door—there were no mosquitoes in California. New too was the heaviness of the air that made my skin wet before I’d even had a chance to sweat—humidity. Whoa, this new place was going to be great!
The grounds seemed enormous, probably because there were no fences to mark the property. Dense hardwood forests and swamps surrounded us on three sides. By the end of the day, I had explored what seemed to be miles of steamy forest. Along the front of the property, separating the orchard from the road, was an old wall made from stacked, lichen-covered rocks without any mortar. Here and there granite boulders poked up through the lush green grasses. I had never seen rocks like these. In my California mountains, the boulders were sandstone—which could be dramatic, like a herd of elephants huddled together—but didn’t have shiny grains of mica and veins of quartz and didn’t seem to carry the history of the earth itself, the way these Greenwich rocks did. I fell in love with rocks that summer. Even today, the sight of an old Connecticut stone wall makes me happy.
A whole new environment suddenly became mine that first Greenwich summer and was like a salve on the wounds of the various illnesses and broken bones that began to manifest themselves as the tensions between my father and mother became more and more palpable. That was also when I started to bite my fingernails down to the bleeding quick. Mother made me sleep wearing white cotton gloves. She put bitter-tasting stuff on the ends of my fingers. She got neighbors to talk to me about how, like hairballs in cats, the chewed nails would create a ball in my stomach and make me sick. But nothing could get me to stop the nail biting, since nothing spoke to the reasons I was doing it. Same reasons I was getting sick so much.
One day, while walking down one of the narrow country roads that had no sidewalks, I encountered a tall, skinny, freckled-faced girl with short dark hair. Diana Dunn. It didn’t take long to discover that we shared a passion for horses and would both be in the same class that fall at the all-girls Greenwich Academy.
She introduced me to the Round Hill Stables and Riding Club. I learned to take a horse over a jump there, and it was there that Teddy, the stable boy, broke my arm in a wrestling match. Another boy would find his way over to our house to play with me that summer. I don’t remember his name, but he was the son of the gardener on a nearby estate. He, Teddy, Diana, and I would roam for miles like a pack of wild dogs, noses to the ground, sniffing, snooping, rolling about, wrest
ling. They knew I was a girl because my name was Jane, but aside from that, it was hard to tell me from the boys. I don’t think that Mother was terribly pleased that my friends were the sons of gardeners and stable hands, but she was slowly sinking into a state of painful desperation and I was left to choose the company I kept.
Diana had her own horse, a black-and-white paint named Pie. Her mother, a tall, slim woman, very much a part of the “horsey” set, was kind to me during the almost four years we lived in Greenwich. Someone, perhaps Mother, must have asked the Dunns if I could stay with them during some of her protracted absences, because I spent an inordinate amount of time there. In the fall of that first Greenwich year Dad told Mother he wanted a divorce, and then she began to disappear to what I now know was the Austen Riggs Center. That’s when Grandma came from California to take care of us and run the house.
The Dunns filled the void that had opened when we left Sue Sally Jones and her mother behind in California. While Sue Sally had represented cowboys, Indians, and buckskin, Diana was about fox-hunting, canary yellow jodhpurs, patent-leather-topped boots, and hard velvet caps.
A good thing about starting a new school is that it’s a chance to try on a new personality. One day I did something in study hall that made the class laugh. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember how good it made me feel to be found funny. Being a clown and a cutup gave me an identity.
My first fall was a revelation to see the leaves turn vivid orange and red. It was also when I started fox-hunting at the urging of Diana Dunn. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t scared while hunting. I was scared when we’d come to a jump, and I was terrified every time we’d gallop around a sharp corner when the ground was wet, for fear the horse would slip and fall on me. I was used to being scared, but I always felt that courage is the manifestation of character, so I pretended not to be. No one ever knew, especially Diana. Being scared was absolutely the worst thing a girl could be. Being scared meant you were a sissy.
Then winter came. I’d seen snow before but had never lived with it, where you have to shovel it to get to the car to go to school, where you can go sledding in your backyard. I was furious that Peter could whip out his little penis and write his name in the snow, so I tried to do the same by taking off my panties and running as fast as I could with my legs wide apart, trying to spell “Jane” as I peed. Needless to say, it was indecipherable—and I got very cold.
That first Christmas in Greenwich, Dad gave me a Mohawk Indian costume made out of buckskin, complete with beaded moccasins and a strip of fake hair that stood up straight when I pinned it on my head, a real Mohawk hairdo. At that point, I was only six months out of California, still had my long blond braids, and the Lone Ranger was still my role model, so this was about the most perfect thing Dad could have given me. That very afternoon I put on the outfit and Dad made a home movie of me. Out of the thick underbrush I ran on silent, agile feet to the top of a knoll, where I stopped and, just like an Indian scout, put my hand above my eyes and scanned the horizon for the enemy. Dad even shot a close-up of my serious little face, looking slowly from right to left before slipping silently back into the forest—my film acting debut. When I look at the footage now, I remember it was about that time that I started to hate the way I looked, especially my round, chubby face. I thought I looked like a chipmunk with nuts stored in my cheeks.
Performing for Dad that Christmas afternoon would mark the end of my cowboy and Indian fantasy life. I never dressed up as a Mohawk again. I was entering the period when social acceptance becomes more important to an adolescent girl than almost anything else. Shortly after that is when I had my beautiful braids cut off. Nobody else at school wore braids and they made me feel nerdy. I don’t remember who cut them, Mother or a professional, but whoever did it wasn’t doing me any favors. The way it was cut, my hair hung to just below my ears as straight and stubborn as a mule’s tail, no style, no shape, and my cowlick made my bangs stand up as if they’d been electrocuted. Hair matters just about more than anything when you’re that age, right? Girls with good hair were always more popular. I was in every sense just “plain Jane,” the cutup—with bad hair.
Sometimes in the evenings I would walk down the road, peer inside houses, and watch a family at the dinner table. I was fascinated by the differences between our home and other people’s. Later, when I made friends and was invited to their homes, I would sit at the dinner table feeling like a Martian as I watched parents, guests, and kids interact. The experience of being asked what I thought about a particular subject was new to me. This didn’t happen in our house. Witnessing adults having multilayered exchanges, full of lively opinions and disagreements, allowed me to understand that beyond the sliver of reality that was my ten-year-old life there lay a vast world of ideas that I would one day grow into.
I lived in Greenwich through two elections—when Truman beat Dewey and when Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson. I remember lively discussions about the elections during dinners at my (Republican) friends’ homes. Even though my father was a “yellow dog Democrat” (he’d sooner vote for a yellow dog than for a Republican) and cared passionately about his politics, he rarely engaged us children in political discussion. It was around this time that a rupture occurred in Dad’s friendships with his old pals John Ford and John Wayne and his best friend, Jimmy Stewart (though this last would be patched up over time).
The rupture centered around Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). “McCarthyism” became synonymous with baseless mudslinging and the manipulation of the American public through fear. Every organization associated with Roosevelt and the New Deal was labeled subversive. Thousands of innocent people who had done nothing more than join liberal organizations were criminalized. McCarthy and HUAC, which included a young congressman from California, Richard Nixon, interpreted any dissent whatsoever as subversive. Dad saw this as a “red-baiting witch hunt,” and he once kicked in a television set while the HUAC hearings were being broadcast. Looking back on those times, I find it interesting that Dad never joined Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Huston, Lucille Ball, John Garfield, and Danny Kaye, who flew to Washington where the HUAC hearings were taking place and held a press conference in support of the Hollywood Ten, as they were called: producers and directors accused of being Communists. Some in Hollywood, like Ronald Reagan (then president of the Screen Actors Guild, who had been an FBI informant since 1946), Gary Cooper, George Murphy, Walt Disney, and Robert Taylor, cooperated with the committee and agreed to name those they believed were Communists. These “friendly” witnesses were given prepared statements and as much time as they wanted to speak, whereas “unfriendly” witnesses were cut off and their lawyers were never allowed to cross-examine. Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, though they didn’t testify, were staunch McCarthy supporters. I didn’t understand what it all meant at the time, except that the careers of many people who worked in Hollywood were being destroyed because the big studios agreed to break their contracts with the Hollywood Ten and never hire them again unless they swore an oath that they weren’t Communists. Charlie Chaplin, for instance, was labeled subversive and was not allowed to reenter the United States until 1972, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented him with an honorary award. I was there at the Oscars, onstage with him, that year. Little did I know that almost twenty years later I would be called before the later version of HUAC, or that at age fifty-four I would marry a man who had been brought up by his father to believe that Roosevelt and the New Deal were Communistic.
Riding in Greenwich meant jodhpurs, boots, and a velvet cap.
Summer camp right after Mother died, with my bunkmates, Brooke Hayward (foreground, upper bunk) and Susan Turbell. We painted the horses.
In the fall of 1948, as if it had been ordained, we were once again reunited with Brooke, Bridget, and Bill Hayward. It was amazing to all of us Fonda-Hayward children that once again our families, though slightly reconfigured, f
ound ourselves together on the opposite side of the country from California—with all of us going to the same schools, Bill to Brunswick with Peter, Brooke and Bridget to the Greenwich Academy with me.
It helped having another Hollywood family there, because soon I realized that people were gossiping about the Fondas. In Hollywood, no one had paid much attention to the fact that Dad was a movie star and delaminating families caused little stir, but in Greenwich it shook things up. It was thought, probably correctly, that divorce and scandal were more common among entertainment folk, and perhaps there was fear that it would become contagious.
I also first heard the word nigger in Greenwich. One day, while riding in the backseat of the car, which Dad was driving, I said the n-word. Dad stopped the car, turned around, and smacked me (lightly) across my face, saying, “Don’t you ever, ever use that word again!” You better believe I never did. It was the only time Dad ever hit me.
I have often wondered about my interest in people regardless of fame, fortune, or race. I can’t help but feel that the answer lies in my father’s films. Dad himself was never verbal about race or class, yet the characters he played were the kinds of men he admired: Abraham Lincoln, Tom Joad (the Okie union organizer in The Grapes of Wrath), Dad’s character in The Ox-Bow Incident (who deplores the lynching of a Mexican), Clarence Darrow, Mr. Roberts. I once asked Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter, Yolanda, if her father had talked to her much when she was little about life and values and spirituality.