by Jane Fonda
I remember times at Emma Willard when someone would pass around a list of every sexual act we could imagine, and we’d check off what we’d done. Carol Bentley could check off just about everything: French kissing, intercourse, oral sex, and all sorts of other things that made my breathing change just talking about them. I was in awe of her. All I’d done was kiss (no tongue) and pet, so I’d check off things I hadn’t done, like French kissing and intercourse. Junior and senior year I had two boyfriends (one after the other), and with each one I tried to have intercourse. But in spite of all the huffing and puffing and rug burns, it didn’t work. My body didn’t seem receptive, it wouldn’t let them in. Despite my doctor’s assurances, this gave me a new reason to think something was wrong with me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WAITING FOR MEANING
They use wise discretion in disguising themselves with the caricatures we design for them. And unfortunately for us, as for them, too often adolescents retain the caricatured personalities they had merely meant to try on for size.
—LOUISE J. KAPLAN,
psychologist
DURING THE YEARS after Emma Willard and before becoming an actor, I was basically just treading water—waiting for meaning. I’m rumored to have done some wild things: ridden a motorcycle into a bar, danced on a table while stripping, setting a fire in the dorm. At Vassar, where we supposedly had to wear gloves and pearls to dinner (untrue), I’m said to have flouted the rules by coming downstairs in gloves and pearls and nothing else. Moi! I confess to having harbored a fondness for shocking, but frankly I never had that kind of chutzpah. My life outside of school was very different from the other girls’. They could just call up and meet friends at the local drive-in; they had boyfriends they jitterbugged with at sock hops in their basements. I didn’t do any of those things. The reflected glamour of being Henry Fonda’s daughter, who lived in New York City and could put on a good façade, made people think I was more experienced and sophisticated than I was.
To make up for what I lacked, I borrowed bits and pieces of other people’s personae and wove them together into large enough patches of personality to get by on dates or at parties. Only when I was comfortable with someone would I garnish this carefully constructed persona with my uniqueness, but generally I looked and behaved as conventionally as seersucker, blending perfectly into the flat, Ozzie-and-Harriet-Kelvinator-Wonder-Bread, predigested world of the fifties.
Acting never beckoned. I was too self-conscious and never heard anyone—certainly not my father—talk about getting emotional fulfillment from acting. I never connected acting with joy. In fact, I had developed a philosophy: “Actors are too egotistical. I have problems enough. I don’t want to encourage my self-centeredness—it’s not for me.” In truth I thought of myself as fat and boring, and I was scared to death of failure.
The summer after my last year at Emma Willard, the family went to Europe, where my father was filming War and Peace in Rome with Audrey Hepburn. That summer Susan decided she’d had enough of the lonely marriage, and she told Dad she wanted a divorce.
“I couldn’t be myself,” she told Howard Teichmann. “I wanted to discuss problems with him, and he’d turn a deaf ear. He had an ability to avoid confrontations with me. . . . [But when] his anger broke out it was terrifying. Slowly it dawned on me that I had always been afraid of this man.” And slowly she had come to realize that what she had taken in the beginning for charming shyness was a more clinical rigidity that, try as she might, she could not break through. She told me that Dad would go all day without speaking to her and then, buoyed by male entitlement, hop into bed at night and expect her to make love with him.
“I’m not a machine, Jane,” she said sadly. She had begged him to go into therapy with her and he’d refused. When she went to a therapist on her own (to address her bulimia), Dad told her she’d have to pay for it herself.
Susan was helping me see that what I had witnessed in my father for so long was neither imagined nor my fault. Here was a woman who, unlike my mother, was able to walk away rather than continue to live in a superficial relationship—walk away not to another man but to herself. She was his third wife, but introspection and professional help weren’t Dad’s way or his generation’s way. As a result, he was married again in less than two years, to an Italian woman he met during the filming in Rome. That marriage, his fourth, would last not even four years.
Susan had come into our lives, and now she was going. But Peter and I would be forever grateful for what she had brought us.
In 1955 I was accepted at Vassar College (I had applied because Carol Bentley was going there) and went with Peter, Dad, and Aunt Harriet to spend the next summer in Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod. Dad had just completed filming 12 Angry Men, Sidney Lumet’s first time directing a feature film (Sidney would go on to direct such greats as Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon). The rental house was located just behind the Kennedy compound. Since Dad knew the Kennedys, we saw them from time to time. To say they were like royalty is a cliché, but it’s the truth.
The Dennis Playhouse was in easy driving distance from our house and had a summer apprenticeship program that Dad felt might interest me, at least the backstage, scenery-making part of it. While some acting classes were involved and the apprentices were sometimes given the opportunity to play small roles in the professional summer stock productions that came through on tour, the decision to enroll me in the program was in no way meant as encouragement for me to become an actress. Dad made that clear to both Peter and me: Acting was a very difficult profession to succeed in. He had too many friends who’d ended up performing at auto shows.
On the first day of the program, we were introduced to the stage manager, James Franciscus, whom everyone called Goey, and the moment I saw him the complexion of the summer changed. He was blond, blue-eyed, and movie-star handsome; in fact, he later became something of a star, playing the lead in such television series as Naked City and Mr. Novak and in thirty-some movies. As it happened, he was also a sophomore at Yale. I was smitten. My previous inarticulate philanderings had not prepared me for true romance, and I was very shy with him. Goey, I would soon discover, may have looked like a playboy, but he was shy, too.
Goey supervised the apprentices, so there was ample opportunity for us to be together. It soon became apparent that my interest in him was reciprocated. We talked a lot. I discovered there were things about Goey to like beyond his looks and the fact that he went to Yale: He was smart and literate; he had a sense of humor, lived in New York City, and was a preppy (only by virtue of Yale), but didn’t belong to a fraternity. His family wasn’t rich, he had to work, he didn’t love football, and he had a passion. Other boys I’d liked had hobbies but no passion. Goey’s passion was an epic drama he was writing in iambic pentameter. When he read me what he’d written so far, about a third of the entire piece, it seemed heroic and profound.
Peter, Susan holding Amy (the daughter Susan and Dad had adopted at birth), me, and Dad en route to Rome, where he filmed War and Peace.
(Bettmann/Corbis)
Goey and me at the pool by our house in Villefranche.
Finally, one Saturday before I went home, he asked if he could take me to dinner the next evening, since there were no performances to stage-manage on Sunday nights. He picked me up in his old red Ford convertible, I remember that part, but nothing of the dinner or what we talked about. It’s what happened afterward that still reverberates in my body when I think about it. Goey and I drove to the pier at the end of the Kennedy compound right near our house, walked out to the very end of it, and stood looking out at the setting sun. I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood still. Hoping. Heart racing so loud I was sure he could hear it. Then he put his hands on my shoulders, turned me to him, and looked deeply into my eyes. His look was so long and intense that I felt embarrassed and started to pull away, but he wouldn’t let me. He held me firm and then, with his eyes still looking into mine, slowly pulled me into him. My body swooned
against him, my knees buckled, and he had to hold me to keep me from falling, which made him laugh while he was kissing me, a laugh of pleasure. When our lips parted I stepped back and had to sit down, plunk. Everything was swirling: the sea, the sky. The sky! I will never forget the sky, the way it looked right then. It was a different color from what it had been two minutes before, all covered with a shimmering haze. Hemingway’s line “And the earth moved” came to me. This is what he meant! I thought. The earth is moving.
It was my first swoon, and while it wouldn’t be my last, there’s something about that first swoon—and the boy who caused it. Goey and I became an item. We were together every spare minute for the rest of that summer. I was eighteen, he was twenty, and we seemed so much younger than most kids that age seem today. Though we kissed endlessly and exchanged furtive caresses in the moonlight, we never made love, and I relished the sweet pleasure of postponement. It was the best summer of my so-far life.
Dad brought his new woman friend up to Hyannis Port. She was a Venetian woman in her thirties, with green eyes, red hair, and a certain hard-sell charm that Peter and I mistrusted instantly. “Phony” was the word that came to both our minds. We figured he intended to marry her, since he never exposed us to girlfriends unless marriage was at hand. We sensed immediately that this was no Susan, no cozy, openhearted stepmother, but we were just enough older that it didn’t matter as much as it would have earlier. In some ways my relationship with my father seemed to grow even more distant the closer to womanhood I got, and his choosing to bring this Italian woman into his life created further distance. But I loved him dearly, and his long shadow was still the defining factor of my life.
I had been trying (sequentially) to lose my virginity for at least a year and a half with three different boyfriends, but it hadn’t worked in the total-penetration sense—almost, but not quite. It fell in the “but I didn’t inhale” category. (This technicality matters if you’re trying to prove to yourself that your “down there” is normal.) My persistent virginity just sort of sloughed away incrementally and—as Carrie Fisher wrote in Surrender the Pink—“not because it was so large that it took three times to knock it out.” It was more that my body simply said, Sorry, not ready. (I couldn’t call what we did making love because it wasn’t, and I didn’t know then that the love part would be important to me. After all, it hadn’t been important to Carol Bentley, or so she said.) Later on I remember listening (sequentially) rapt and envious as two of my husbands told me of their own first times.
Vadim had lost his virginity rapturously in a haystack in France during World War II. As he wrote later in Memoirs of the Devil, when he climaxed, the ceiling of the barn “began to move. The ground trembled. . . . An apocalyptic rumbling filled the air.” Vadim assumed at first this was the result of his orgasm (the Hemingway factor again). What had happened, however, was that he had chosen to lose his cherry “at one of the great moments of history: zero hour, 6 June 1944—the first wave of the Allied landings in Normandy”—and the barn was only a few kilometers from the coast.
Ted Turner, on the other hand, didn’t make love until he was nineteen years old, but when it happened it was such an epiphany he “did it again ten minutes later” (a story he told me on our second date and often thereafter for ten years, if there was someone around who hadn’t heard it before).
I can make no such life-altering claims. I simply don’t remember. I know that it happened with Goey that fall at Yale. I do have an acute memory of how it felt the first time we spent an entire weekend alone together during a blizzard at a small farm his family had in upstate New York: having a whole house to ourselves, not having to worry about noise, waking up in the same bed, taking baths together, him teaching me to make whiskey sours. That part I remember. Just not the sex.
Having a steady boyfriend who was writing a classical drama validated me. I decided to ask for a dorm room of my own at Vassar, preferably a tiny garret where I could appropriately wallow in existential angst, recite speeches from Shakespeare, listen to Mozart and Gregorian chants, and read Kant into the night.
In the mid-1950s, most of the girls I knew didn’t go to college to learn where their interests and talents lay in order to prepare for a profession. It was what they did until they got hitched. And they were dropping like flies. Carol Bentley left Vassar in our second year to get married, and so did Brooke Hayward. Most Americans then believed that there was something wrong with a girl if she wasn’t at least engaged by the time she left college. Not me. Much as I enjoyed my relationship with Goey, I was never tempted to consider marriage. In this one area, at least, I had the good sense to know that if I got hooked to one man at that point in my life, I’d get stuck someplace I didn’t belong.
One day during sophomore year I got a call from the headmaster of Westminster, the boarding school Peter had graduated to, telling me that Peter had flipped out and I should come get him.
When I arrived I found him hiding in some bushes, his hair bleached light blond. He asked me to call him Holden Caulfield, the antihero in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye; Holden is kicked out of his prep school because he refuses to adjust to the phoniness he finds there. I bundled Peter up to take him—where could I take him? “Home,” Dad’s house in New York, wouldn’t do because Dad was away working someplace and we weren’t allowed to stay there alone. I couldn’t keep him with me at Vassar. So I called Aunt Harriet in Omaha. Peter ended up living with her and Uncle Jack for four years.
When he first arrived they had him tested to see if he was crazy; the answer was that he needed help. They also tested whether or not he should repeat a grade; it turned out he had an IQ of over 160—in the genius category. So he began psychoanalysis (with financier Warren Buffett’s father-in-law) and entered the University of Omaha. Peter was the nonconformist who “acted out.” Psychotherapist Terrence Real writes in I Don’t Want to Talk About It that acting-out boys are “little protesters, sit-down strikers refusing to march off into the state of alienation we call manhood. . . . We usually call these boys delinquents.” People would say about Peter, “Well, he’s just looking for attention,” and I’d nod in agreement, thinking, Why can’t Peter just grow up? Today, if I heard adults saying that about a kid like Peter, I’d shout, “So why don’t you give him some of the attention he’s looking for before he starts acting out, some loving attention!”
I acted out, too, in my way. But I was much more ready to buy into the system than Peter ever was. I never ventured too close to the edge. I knew how to play both sides—almost getting into big trouble but never really.
Aside from my relationship with Goey, nothing much remains from the two years I spent at Vassar. I drank too much, didn’t study enough in spite of my good intentions, “experimented among the passions,” became hooked on Dexedrine, got better grades than I deserved, and wasn’t inspired by my teachers. I’ve learned over the years that for me to want to study, it can’t be the generic liberal arts approach. I have to understand why I am learning, what I’m learning for, have to feel the need to learn because it relates in a palpable way to my life, to what I am doing. For the last twelve years or so, because of my nonprofit work with youth and families, I have needed to know why people behave as they do and what causes them to change. So I devour books on psychology, relational theory, behavioral sciences, early child development, international development, and women’s biographies. But at Vassar I didn’t know what I was learning for.
In my final music-history exam, I used my exam book to draw pictures of women screaming. A few days later, when I was called into the dean’s office, I fully expected to be told I had flunked out. Instead I was told that they understood I was going through a difficult emotional time because my father had just married again (the Italian), so I would be allowed to take the music exam over. This seemed preposterous. I didn’t feel emotionally upset over Dad’s marriage—I was inured by then—and I found it disturbing to be let off the hook that way. I wanted and needed to be h
eld accountable for my actions, to be challenged. That’s when I decided I was wasting my time and Dad’s money and that I should leave.
I told Dad that I hadn’t finished my exams and didn’t want to go back to college in the fall, and then I found myself telling him that I wanted to go to Paris to study painting. The truth is I wasn’t entirely sure that was what I wanted, and I secretly hoped Dad would save me from myself and say no. Maybe he was distracted by his new wife. Maybe the two of them wanted me out of their hair. Whatever the reason, he agreed to let me go.
The summer of 1957 Dad rented a villa on the French Riviera near the town of Villefranche, which still retained the charm of a small fishing village. The villa was large, with a generous front yard, a pool, and a lawn rolling straight out to the edge of the rocky cliffs that rose at least one hundred feet above the Mediterranean. They did a lot of entertaining all summer long—or rather Afdera, his wife, entertained. Dad had never been part of the international jet set. It was touching to watch him try to disguise his discomfort and fit in, usually by hiding behind his camera. I loved that about him.
The luminaries of the international elite would come and go: Gianni and Marella Agnelli; Jacqueline de Ribes; Princess Marina Cicconia and her brother, Bino; Count and Countess Volpi and their son, Giovanni; Senator Kennedy and Jackie. Elsa Maxwell, the internationally known “hostess with the mostest,” had rented the adjacent villa. We visited Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis on his enormous yacht, the Christina—which had a Picasso hanging in the living room, gold-leafed faucets in the bathrooms, a mosaic swimming pool, and always many pretty girls with secrets in their eyes who talked easily with men who owned Picassos. We paid a visit to Picasso in his nearby studio. We met Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, and Charlie Chaplin. I was continually speechless.