by Jane Fonda
As we prepared to leave I said to Lucy and Waco, “If we ever get the movie script right, I’d like to come back and spend time with you.” They nodded, expecting never to see me again.
Three and a half years later I returned. The moment Bruce and I had a good script and a date set for filming, I had written asking if I could come stay with them for two weeks, “but only if you let me work for you and not tell anyone who I am.” They were surprised but agreed to the arrangement.
It was Easter and bitter cold in Mountain View. Waco, now seventy-eight, had been chopping wood, the fireplace being their only source of heat, and on my first day there I insisted he let me take over the job. I had never chopped wood in my life, but I figured, Heck, he’s in his seventies and I’m the fitness queen. No sweat. I awoke the next morning unable to move my hands, much less lift my arms. I developed boundless admiration for Waco and realized the depth of the problem that faced folks like them: What would happen when Waco got too old to chop wood? Their children, like most of the young people from the mountains, had moved away to cities and towns. This was a way of life that would soon disappear before most Americans would even know what it had been.
Having proved I was not strong enough to do what old Waco did every day, I moved on to other chores. I milked their cow every morning, collected eggs from the free-roaming chickens, and learned to churn butter in an old wooden churn like the one my mother had made into a floor lamp back on Tigertail Road. I went with Waco into the woods, where he shot a possum and showed me how to skin it. Lucy told me how to find a sassafras tree and use the bark to season the possum, which I cooked for dinner on the wood-burning stove. (I didn’t like it. It was greasy and had too many tiny bones.) Lucy also taught me to make scratch biscuits (biscuits from scratch) and cook them in the fireplace in a heavy iron Dutch oven. I learned about sorghum and how you could slather it on bread, what a back log was (the largest log that you’d put at the back of the fire), how to carve apple dolls, and how a late spring frost could wipe out the garden and leave them short of food.
We all slept in the same room with sheets hung on wires between the beds for privacy. They were iron beds with old, sagging springs and lightweight feather mattresses so thick that I had a hard time crawling out in the morning. Every evening after supper we would sit on their well-worn sofa in front of the huge stone fireplace and they would tell stories and jokes and sometimes play their instruments and sing. It dawned on me (duh!) why everyone we’d met told great stories and played at least one instrument. Without electricity there was no radio or television to entertain them. They had only each other, and especially on those cold mountain nights, the arts of storytelling and music were precious as gold. I wondered: Was this special art of talking to one another every day in danger of extinction for those of us “blessed” with electricity?
On Easter Sunday Lucy and Waco brought me with them to church. It was a one-room whitewashed structure heated by a woodstove. The preacher stared intently at me over its rusty top. He wore denim overalls and his hands showed he was a hardworking farmer like Waco. Suddenly he said, “You know, you look mighty like Jane Fonda. Anyone ever tell you that?” I ducked my head and mumbled something, praying that Lucy wouldn’t tell and that he wouldn’t say something nasty. Instead he said, “Well, I don’t know what you think, but I think she’s a brave lady.” I nodded in silent agreement and wanted to hug him.
During the service there was a good deal of back-and-forthing between the preacher and the congregation—the men in the congregation, that is. No woman said a word. When I asked Lucy about this later, she told me that women were forbidden to play any role in the service. She also told me that just down the way was another church where people drank arsenic and handled live rattlesnakes.
I felt privileged to have been permitted for a time to know this world and its people . . . a world that as late as 1984 was probably not so different from that of my pioneer ancestors. I was saddened by the thought that in a few decades it might all be developed, hooked up to “civilization.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ON GOLDEN POND
Sometimes you have to look very hard at a person and remember he’s doing the best he can.
—ETHEL THAYER,
On Golden Pond
I DON’T LIKE YOU!” said Katharine Hepburn, pointing her finger straight at my face, her anger making the famous voice and classic head, which quivered at the best of times, shake with tsunamic tremors. I had never met the legendary actor before, and it was a terrible moment, coming within minutes of my arrival with Bruce at her Forty-ninth Street town house—terrible not only because someone only a notch below God was damning me, but also because in less than two weeks she was supposed to travel to New Hampshire to begin rehearsing On Golden Pond with my father and me.
Katharine Hepburn was critical to the financing of this film. No American studio thought anyone would want to see a movie about two old people and a kid. On top of that, my father was suffering from heart disease that was serious enough to keep us from getting insurance coverage for the film. Everything depended on all of us working for far less than our usual salaries, and if we lost Katharine Hepburn, the whole project would be doomed.
It was difficult for me to know exactly what was at the root of her anger with me. She was famously liberal, so I knew it had nothing to do with my politics. It seemed to have something to do with my not having been present at her first encounter with my father (my having chosen instead to make the bus trip with Dolly). Despite their decades in the same profession, knowing many of the same people, Hepburn and Fonda had never met until now, and though my company was producing the film, it had never dawned on me that my presence at this coming together of two Hollywood icons was necessary. For better or worse, the need for homage had never reared its head in my twenty-five years in the business. It never dawned on me that Katharine Hepburn would perceive my absence at the meeting as a lack of respect.
There was another factor at play: The seventy-three-year-old Ms. Hepburn had dislocated her rotator cuff and torn a tendon in her shoulder while playing tennis. Our visit was in order to ascertain whether or not she would be able to begin filming on schedule.
Shortly on the heels of “I don’t like you” came “I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to do this film, Jane,” announced with the certainty of a New England Brahmin. “I don’t think my shoulder will get well fast enough to do it, and there are those scenes where I’d have to lug wood and carry the canoe into the water. So you’d just better go ahead and get Geraldine Page or someone to take over.” She reminded me of myself with Alan Pakula before starting Klute.
But then suddenly she was on to film credits—whose name would be above whose. I was relieved, because it meant she was still seeing herself in the movie; but I couldn’t fathom why she would see the credits as a problem. I just assumed she and my father would get top billing and that my name, as a supporting actress, would run beneath theirs. Then it hit me. She suspected that I might want billing above hers. Oh my God! It never would have occurred to me to feel competitive with Katharine Hepburn or to expect any special treatment because of my producing role! Film credits and such things that serve as outward proof of one’s standing had never been especially important to me: You do a good job and people take notice is the way I see it. But maybe this competitiveness is what separates the legends from the mere movie stars. I was more like my father, comfortable in an egalitarian context, and I’ve always tended to forget that everyone is not like this. I realized that this whole meeting, for her, was a testing of the waters to determine whether I knew my place . . . and, if not, to put me in it.
Once I realized this I could see how vulnerable she felt. She was a legend, yes. But I was the younger actress who because of youth was currently more of a box office draw—and I was only one Oscar behind her. (This was on her mind, as will become clear.) She was used to being in charge; but my company was producing the film as a vehicle for my father, and
I was in the driver’s seat. Moreover I had not conformed to her need for approbation. Now, with her injury, she probably thought I might want to replace her. I quickly realized that her opening salvo had been her instinctive way to put me on the defensive—I don’t like you!—and by announcing she wasn’t going to be in the film, she was assuming the offensive, getting out before I replaced her, scoping out where she stood in the delicate balance of power and protocol. From the moment I sensed what was really going on, it was easy to open my heart to her.
Chelsea, Norman, and Ethel Thayer in On Golden Pond.
(© Steve Schapiro)
I apologized for not being there when she and Dad met and said that under no circumstances would we replace her, that she was critical to the film (which was true), and that we would do whatever was necessary in terms of schedule to ensure that she had time to heal.
“Geraldine Page is a brilliant actress, Ms. Hepburn. I’ve worked with her. But what will make this film magic is the pairing of you and my dad—and that’s what we will make happen, whatever it takes.”
When she began offering ideas about how the scene with the canoe could be rigged to ease the burden on her shoulder, I knew that she had never been ready to leave the project. She was just testing us.
No sooner was the issue of her being in the movie put to rest than she issued another challenge: “Are you going to do the backflip yourself, Jane?” She looked at me and I think I saw a twinkle in her eyes.
In the film, the backflip plays an important role in my character’s relationship with her father. She hadn’t been able to do it as a youngster because according to him she was too fat. But this summer, as a grown and newly married woman, she decides to prove to him that she is now able. But holy s——! I had no intention of doing the dive myself. A stunt double was already lined up to do it for me. For one thing, I have a phobia about going over backward, and for another, I hate cold water. But the moment the question left Ms. Hepburn’s mouth, the image of her doing that perfect dive in The Philadelphia Story came into my mind, and I knew what my answer would have to be.
“Of course I am going to do the dive myself, Ms. Hepburn. But I’ll have to learn how because I’ve never done one.” I’d be damned before I’d let on that I was scared.
The meeting ended with friendly embraces all around. Ms. Hepburn announced that ten days hence she and her companion and employee, Phyllis Wilbourn, would be driving up to Squam Lake to choose a house for themselves, and we arranged to meet them when they arrived.
Once Phyllis had shown us out the front door and we’d exited the wrought-iron gate to the sidewalk, I walked far enough away from her windows so there was no risk of Ms. Hepburn seeing me and sat on the curb, right there on Forty-ninth Street. I was dazed. Within the space of one hour we’d gone from “I hate you” and “I’m not going to be in the movie” to “I’m going up to choose my house.” I’d been given a preview of what clearly would be a complicated and challenging relationship with our leading lady. I had my work cut out for me.
“Bruce, take me somewhere, I need a stiff drink.”
Wanting to check out the housing situation before Ms. Hepburn got there, I went to Squam Lake, a wild, pristine body of water, big and irregularly shaped, with small islands scattered about that made it impossible to see from one end to the other.
Bruce and his wife were already settled into a pleasant camp (that’s what homes on Squam Lake are called) on the far side of the lake and had lined up a number of summer rentals for me to look at. Over the course of the three months we would be there, Vanessa, Troy, Tom, and our German shepherd, Geronimo, would be living with me, and plans had been made for CED’s entire steering committee, all ten of them, to come up for some strategy sessions. I needed a large house.
Shirlee had already picked out a place for herself and Dad. It was a guest house close to a spacious two-story, eight-bedroom, brick main house that sat on a hill with a wide lawn that swooped down to the lake. The main house was perfect for my considerable needs, and besides, it was right next to Dad. There was another camp to the north, much smaller but cozy, with a beautiful bay window overlooking the water and a number of small outlying rustic cabins—perfect, I thought, for Ms. Hepburn and the ever attentive Phyllis.
At the appointed time Bruce and I drove to the parking lot of the restaurant where we had arranged to rendezvous with them. Within minutes their station wagon pulled up, and Ms. Hepburn got out and came over to me.
“Well, have you picked your house yet, Jane?” In that instant I knew that I had to throw out my assumptions about who would take which house.
“I have seen a number of houses, Ms. Hepburn, but you make your choice first and I’ll take what’s left.”
“Now you’re talking!” she said with a big grin, knowing I’d learned my lesson and wasn’t about to make the same mistake again. Whew! It had been a close call. Ms. Hepburn and Phyllis in a cozy little cabin? What could I have been thinking? She chose the eight-bedroom mansion.
Let me provide a little backstory: For years I had wanted to do a movie in which all the Fondas—Henry, Peter, and I—could act together. When Bruce saw the play On Golden Pond in New York he wanted to buy it right away, as time was of the essence: Dad had been increasingly in and out of hospitals with heart disease and a variety of complications that resulted from it, and I knew there wasn’t a lot of time left for us to work together. Even though there was no role for Peter and mine was very much a supporting one, I believed that in the role of Norman Thayer, Dad would win the Oscar that had eluded him for so long. I wanted to make that happen for him.
Mark Rydell had agreed to direct the film, and Ernest Thompson, the young author of the play, would rework it for the screen.
The film tells of an elderly couple who have summered for decades on a lake in Maine called Golden Pond. Norman, a moody curmudgeon played by my father, is about to turn eighty, and his daughter, Chelsea, en route to Europe with her fiancé, has planned to stop by the lake for his birthday party. Along with them is the fiancé’s thirteen-year-old son, Billy, whom they hope to leave with Chelsea’s parents for a month while they travel. Chelsea, a real estate agent who lives in California, has had a troubled, distant relationship with her father all her life and has made a point of not visiting her parents because of it—something that has hurt her father, though she doesn’t even realize he cares.
Young Billy is angry, feeling as though he’s been dumped someplace boring with a couple of “old poops”; but in the course of the summer Norman and Billy bond as Norman never has with his own daughter. He teaches Billy to fish and to execute a fine backflip (the dive Chelsea was never able to accomplish), and Billy teaches Norman such expressions as “cruisin’ chicks,” “suck face,” and “San Fran–tastic.” We can feel Norman’s heart soften because of this relationship with Billy, and when Chelsea returns from Europe to fetch the boy, she sees this and gets jealous. With her mother’s encouragement Chelsea is finally able to muster the courage to confront her father, telling him she wants them to be friends, and he is able to show his love for her for the first time. The main fabric of the story is the touching fifty-year-long relationship between Norman and his wife, Ethel, played by Hepburn. It is deeply touching when he loses his way in the woods while trying to pick strawberries and comes running home to her. So is the scene when he suffers acute angina and she tells him how scared she is of losing him. The two of them bring a rare poignancy to these scenes, and I for one cannot watch them without sobbing uncontrollably.
Time was of the essence. Because of my father’s failing health, we all knew it was this summer or never. On Golden Pond is a summer story, and we had to get it done by early fall, when the deciduous hardwood tress so characteristic of that part of New England would begin to turn their fall colors.
Cinematographer Billy Williams had insisted on finding a lake that ran east to west, because it would give him a certain kind of light he felt was essential. Our location scout visited
over one hundred lakes from the Carolinas to Maine, but Squam was apparently the only one on the East Coast that met this requirement. Then there was the unusual fact that while almost all other lakes were rimmed with summer homes, Squam seemed frozen in time. It was hard to believe that a place so beautiful was so undeveloped (until someone introduced me to the term conservation by exclusion: All the land bordering the lake is owned by wealthy families who intend to keep it undeveloped).
So we were working against time: the season changing, Ms. Hepburn’s injured rotator cuff, and my father’s health. Also, an actors strike was looming against the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and it threatened to shut down all productions. We hoped that if we had actually started shooting before the strike began, they wouldn’t ask us to stop. We were wrong. The actors struck, and we got the call to shut down. Bruce spent three desperate days arguing that because we were with ITC, a British independent company, not an MPAA studio, we didn’t fall under their jurisdiction. He was successful in getting a waiver that allowed us to continue. Had that not occurred, On Golden Pond would never have been made.