by Jane Fonda
“No,” she said. “He never did that.”
“Neither did my father,” I said, “but they taught us through their films and sermons, didn’t they?”
Part of the school gossip was that my father was dating a “tomato.” I asked a friend what a tomato was and was told it meant a luscious, ripe young thing. The thought made me feel sort of nauseated. But like my mother, I didn’t allow myself to get angry at Dad.
In seventh and eighth grades, I began my love affair with Broadway show tunes. Brooke and I learned every word to every song in the Broadway hits South Pacific and The King and I. Little did I know that the “tomato” Dad was dating was the twenty-one-year-old stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein—the man who wrote all the words to the show tunes I loved to sing.
As we rounded the circle to the bottom of my eleventh year, sexual feelings and being twitter-pated around certain boys had become a major facet of my life. If I felt a boy was cute, he’d be the one I’d beat up. I already mentioned Teddy, the stable boy who broke my arm. What I didn’t say, though, was that he was blond and very cute and I had kicked him in the balls several weeks prior to our wrestling match, causing him to collapse and turn white. Seemed to me like a perfectly reasonable way to flirt.
I used to think I really wanted to be a boy because that’s where the action was, and for a while I looked so androgynous that I’d be asked whether I was a boy or a girl. That was the biggest compliment I could get. Looking back, I think I just wanted to be exempt from what was required of girlness. I could do tomboy, but I didn’t know how to do girl—except in my active fantasy life.
I remember getting sick at school once and being sent to the infirmary, where I was told to lie down till someone could come get me. As I was lying there, I looked up and saw, on a bookshelf above me, a pamphlet titled Masturbation. I couldn’t have been all that sick, because I wasted no time getting it down and reading as much of it as I could before the school nurse came back. It said that masturbation gave you acne and made you go insane. I bet it was planted there just for girls like me. Needless to say, it shook me up, much more so than the governess who would smell my fingers. Today I believe it should be criminal for adults to try to make children feel guilty for things that are natural and perfectly healthy. It’s probably because so many of them were tormented themselves by their parents and teachers when they were children, so they’re taking it out on the next generation!
I was in seventh grade when we moved out of that house and into the spooky house on the hill overlooking the Merritt Parkway—where I built my little cardboard house-within-a-house and Mother began to collect butterflies.
My roaming soon ended. The Lone Ranger had become obsolete as a role model. I watched some of my friends becoming flirtatious and felt they were in on something I just didn’t get. I was so earnest (like my father) that I thought if I flirted, it meant I had to be ready to follow through, go all the way. “Going all the way” seemed less sinful than being accused of “cock teasing.” If you started, you were supposed to finish, sort of like cleaning your plate.
In June 1950, two months after Mother’s death, I was sent to a camp in New Hampshire with Brooke and another friend, Susan Turbell. It was a complex summer for me. Outwardly I showed no effects of Mother’s death, but Brooke said I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming about my mother: “I mean screaming so that the entire staff had to appear to calm her down,” she wrote in her memoirs.
I got sick with a flu that was going around camp. But in addition I developed some sort of “down there” issue and it wasn’t menstruation. I spent a lot of time in the infirmary for whatever diagnosable sickness I had, but I was too scared or embarrassed to ask the nurses to see what was wrong with me. It hurt, it itched, it was scary, and I told no one. I began to think that my down there was made wrong, that when God was passing them out, I got a defective one. It was a fear that stayed with me for years. That’s one of the problems with not having a mother to talk to.
Mother had killed herself ten months before a new house she’d been building for us was finished. It was April and I guess she couldn’t wait. It didn’t help that April was also the month of her birthday. Dr. Susan Blumenthal reminded me of this line from a poem by T. S. Elliot, “April is the cruelest month.” She said that of all the months of the year, April has the highest suicide rate, followed by October. “Spring is coming, seasons are changing, it should be a time of hope, coming out of winter, but it’s also a time of changes.”
Dr. Blumenthal explained that the peaks in suicide rates during the spring and fall may be linked to seasonal changes, disruptions in the sleep/wake cycle, and/or alterations in circadian rhythms—the body’s biological clock—that can affect mood and behavior. She said, “Some researchers hypothesize that these seasonal changes with accompanying alterations in sleep and/or circadian rhythms and brain neurotransmitters may trigger the cycling phenomenon from depression to mania and mania to depression in certain people with bipolar disorder. Following the long winter of depression, a person’s mood may seem to be improving, but in fact the individual is becoming agitated and is acquiring more energy during this cycling phase to plan and carry out a suicidal act. Additionally, there is usually some precipitating, humiliating event or loss that occurs (in the absence of protective factors) that triggers the event.”
But I didn’t know yet that Mother had killed herself. I learned it that fall in study hall, when a classmate passed me a movie magazine with a story about my father. I started reading it and came to this sentence: “His wife, Frances Fonda, cut her throat with a razor while in the sanitarium.” I knew instantly this was the truth, that they had lied to me about the heart attack.
Following study hall was art class. We were all painting things onto black tin trays—mine were white dogwood blossoms and two yellow butterflies. Brooke was sitting next to me and I made her lean under the table, where I whispered, “Brooke, did my mother commit suicide?”
“Well, I . . . gosh, Jane . . . I don’t know. I . . . ,” she stammered, managing to avoid an answer. Later, in her memoirs, Haywire, she wrote that when my mother died:
the entire student body at the Greenwich Academy was warned at the assembly by Miss Campbell that it was to respect that story [that Frances Fonda had died of heart failure] for an indefinite period of time.
As soon as school got out that day, I ran all the way home and right up to Mrs. Wallace’s room. Mrs. Wallace was a governess who’d been hired to help Grandma with us after Mother’s death. She was an attractive, kind lady with gray hair pulled back into a soft bun.
“Mrs. Wallace,” I asked breathlessly, “did my mother commit suicide?” If Mrs. Wallace was surprised by my question, she didn’t show it. Instead she took me onto her lap and said gently, “Yes, Jane, she did. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”
“But is it true that she cut her throat with a razor?”
Mrs. Wallace hesitated for a second. Right then and there she must have made the decision to tell me as much of the truth as a twelve-year-old could handle.
“Yes, she did. For a few months she’d managed to convince her doctors in the sanitarium that she was doing better. They wrote your father and grandmother that she didn’t seem ‘to be behind the eight ball anymore.’ That’s how they put it . . . ‘not behind the eight ball.’ They were hopeful that she’d be coming home for good soon and so they relaxed their guard and that’s how she did it. She wrote notes to each of you before she died.”
“Does Peter know?”
“No, he doesn’t, and I really think it would be best if we didn’t tell him just now. He’s so fragile.”
“Do you think I could see the note she wrote me?”
“Your grandma told me that she doesn’t have the notes anymore. I’m sorry.”
That would give me plenty to think about.
I wasn’t angry, but I would have liked to have read her note to me. Was she mad that I hadn’t seen her on her last visit h
ome? Maybe if I had seen her, I could have said something really nice to her and she would have changed her mind. Maybe she knew I didn’t love her and that’s why she did it. But did I love her or didn’t I? I couldn’t answer that, because some part of my heart had been tumbled into numbness.
A few months later, in December 1950, Dad married the girl he’d fallen in love with—the tomato—Susan Blanchard, Oscar Hammerstein’s stepdaughter. They flew to the Virgin Islands for the honeymoon.
One evening I was over at Diana Dunn’s house when the phone rang. Mrs. Dunn answered it and her face sort of collapsed as she listened and the “Oh” that came out of her was about two octaves lower, the way voices get when there’s bad news. She glanced quickly at me, then dropped her eyes and covered the mouthpiece.
“Jane, your brother has had an accident. He’s shot himself and is in a hospital in Ossining. Your grandmother wants me to bring you there right away.”
Peter’s shot himself.
I went outside myself again.
The hospital was near Sing Sing prison. When I got there Grandma explained that Peter had been declared dead on arrival but at that very moment, miraculously, the prison doctor, who was a leading surgeon for puncture and bullet wounds, had walked into the hospital from a hunting trip. He discovered Peter’s heart was still beating, though faintly, and he had worked fast to stop the bleeding. The bullet had gone into Peter’s belly, hit his rib cage, pierced his stomach and kidney, and lodged just under the skin next to his spine. I sat with Grandma in the waiting room. After a while, the doctor came out of the operating room and called Grandma into the hallway. I heard him tell her that in spite of his efforts, Peter’s heart had stopped beating, and while they’d managed to start it up again, he didn’t know if Peter was going to make it. That was the first time I remember seriously praying. I said, “Dear God, if you let him live, I’ll never be mean to him again. Amen.”
Dad cut short his honeymoon, managed to get a plane from the islands (no mean feat back then), and arrived within hours at the hospital, where the three of us kept vigil into the night. Then we went home to get some sleep and came back again the next day. We did that every day for five days. I was allowed into Peter’s room once to see him lying there, so small that he was barely a bump under the sheets, with all the tubes going in and out of him. On the fifth day, the doctors announced that Peter appeared to be coming out of the crisis zone. Several days later his condition was said to be stable. He was going to make it.
I returned to school in a zone of somnambulance. My routines were done, my homework turned in. But my body always felt tense, my breathing shallow. Nothing seemed to have a reason. “Isn’t she something?” the teachers said. “The worse things are, the stronger she gets.” The kudos I received for appearing strong satisfied a need for approval and locked me into a modus vivendi: Jane, the strong one. The shell that formed around my heart served a purpose by keeping me on my feet, but it solidified both my superficiality and my independence.
Peter stayed in the hospital for a month. He became a brat almost immediately and I began to backpedal on my promise to God.
The shooting accident had happened when Peter was visiting friends, one of whom persuaded the family chauffeur to drive them to a skeet range near Sing Sing to practice shooting an antique .22-caliber pistol. While Peter was reloading, the pistol discharged into his stomach. Fortunately, the chauffeur knew where the hospital was and acted fast to get him there. Given the timing, however, I can’t help but wonder if unconscious forces weren’t at work in a boy who was very hurt and angry that his father had remarried and that everyone seemed to have so quickly forgotten his mother.
It had been a rough couple of years, starting with Mother’s illness and death. The following year, my classmates started having parties at their homes when their parents were away, where games like post office and spin-the-bottle were de rigueur. I wanted to be popular and fit in, but while Brooke and other girls seemed to have things under control, I dreaded these games. I don’t remember if I was more scared that someone would “get” me and try “to go too far” or that no one would want to. As other girls became more and more “feminine,” I seemed more and more out in limbo, a lump of androgyny, always behind, scrambling to catch up. What happened to the girl who was described in her third-grade report card as adjusted, self-confident, and assured—the girl who saw herself as heroic? She had slipped away so quietly that I never even said, “Good-bye, see you again in fifty years.”
CHAPTER SIX
SUSAN
Ah, as we prayed for human help: angels soundlessly, with single strides, climbed over our prostrate hearts
—RAINER MARIA RILKE
ONE AFTERNOON, Grandma took me to a New York hospital to visit Dad, who was recovering from knee surgery. I walked into his room, and sitting next to his bedside was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She seemed to be in her early twenties and had light brown hair pulled back tightly into a large chignon that accentuated her pale blue, slanted eyes, not unlike Mother’s. She wore a rather old-fashioned high-necked white blouse trimmed with lace. Around her wrist was a watch on a black velvet band. Dad introduced us.
“Jane, this is Susan.”
She was only nine years older than me. Still, I so desperately needed a woman to show me how to be that it must have been the angels who climbed over our prostrate hearts to bring Susan to us. If she was a “tomato,” it was definitely the sweet, sun-ripened kind.
In the summer of 1951, a little over a year after Mother’s death, was when I got to know her. I was going on fourteen. Dad was finishing the national road tour of Mister Roberts and would be performing in Los Angeles all summer, so he had arranged for Peter and me to spend the vacation with them there.
We were ensconced in a magnificent mansion built years earlier by William Randolph Hearst for his paramour, actress Marion Davies. It had been converted into a hotel with marble columns, mosaic tile floors, gold-leafed mirrors, an Olympic-size tile swimming pool, and a beach club. We spent that entire summer at the beach, partly because it was a fun place to hang out and partly because Susan, a New Yorker, didn’t know how to drive. Other wives might have demanded that Dad get a chauffeur in order to spend a lot of time in Beverly Hills engaging in “cash therapy.” Not Susan. She hung in there with us. I don’t understand it, given what might be my own callowness at her age, but somehow her twenty-two-year-old soul had the generosity and know-how to wrap itself around Peter and me and be a mother. Peter liked to call her Mom Two.
Susan on the beach at Ocean House.
One perfect California evening, when the sun was setting red and the breeze was velvet and smelled of salt and kelp, she and I were sitting on the marble steps leading down to the pool when she asked me how I was feeling about Mother’s death.
I stopped breathing. In all that time—more than a year—no one had raised the subject of Mother with me, much less asked how I felt. It was a germinal moment. The problem was that I had no words to offer her. I was so unused to expressing my feelings that I’d become emotionally illiterate. I did tell her that I hadn’t been able to cry at the time and that I had learned it was a suicide from a movie magazine. She was quiet for what seemed a long time. I don’t think she knew what to say. I certainly wouldn’t have at her age, but I remember her suggesting that perhaps Mother’s death had been a blessing in disguise. It seems strange to me now that I could have found those glib and potentially insensitive words comforting, but my thinking about Mother was so utterly confused that “blessing in disguise” provided me with a handle, a way to explain the event to myself. Maybe Susan knew I needed a handle.
She was lithe, with tiny, well-turned ankles and long, El Greco knees. She’d studied dancing with the fabled Katherine Dunham, and dancing was important to her. She was superb, often twirling or cha-cha-ing around rooms with pretend partners, her waist-length hair flying, while singing Broadway show tunes. Sometimes she’d doo-wop to a jazz record, fingers sn
apping, head shaking, eyes closed, while she’d dance a cool little jitterbug in place. I would go to my room afterward and try to imitate what I’d seen her do. I imitated her a lot. If I could be like her, maybe Dad would love me more.
Laughter, which had been an unfamiliar sound in our family for a long time, was a gift from Susan to us. She had a repertoire of jokes, some long, elaborate ones that would crack her up when she finally got to the punch line; some Jewish jokes that required my learning Yiddish words; some from the dark, smoky world of jazz musicians, a world with which she was familiar. Susan was a wonderful combination of goofy and sophisticated, with a little pioneer thrown in for ballast. Her joie de vivre washed over us that summer.
Mother’s younger sister and her alcoholic husband had joined Grandma as our caretakers in Greenwich and were reportedly trying to get legal custody of us. Susan told Dad that it was unconscionable for us to be adopted by relatives and that he absolutely had to take us to live with them in New York. I guess he was thinking of leaving us in Greenwich and just visiting from time to time. If the wife who followed Mother had been someone other than Susan—say, like wife number four, the Italian one—I honestly don’t know what would have become of us. I would have survived, maybe, but not as a productive citizen. During her brief five years with my father, Susan taught me by example how to be a stepmother. Little did I know how well that would serve me later when, between one husband or another, I would have six stepchildren of my own.
I was too smitten and immature to notice (though I probably saw but quickly forgot what I’d seen) that Susan wasn’t quite the same when Dad was around. Of course, nobody was the same when Dad was around, except Peter. Her ebullience would dim a little. If she got too rambunctious, Dad would rein her in, perhaps embarrassed that her spontaneity and exuberance accentuated their age difference—twenty-three years. She once said it was as though Yente the matchmaker from Fiddler on the Roof lived with Ibsen’s uncompromising Minister Brand. When she was interviewed by Howard Teichmann, she said, “I was your typical Japanese wife. I wanted to do everything to please him.” Again, I was seeing woman-as-pleaser as the way to “do” relationship. Unbeknownst to me as well was that she was bulimic, which I would soon become.