by Jane Fonda
Once rehearsals had begun, Ms. Hepburn would invite me over to her house for tea. We’d sit in the comfortable white wicker chairs that were scattered about her glassed-in porch and she would tell me how I should play my role. I’m serious—and so was she. Ms. Hepburn would have me read her part and she’d read mine and give me line readings. Though I was stunned by this, I never let on that I found it . . . well, strange. I did not want to offend her.
I never tired of looking at her. Though in her mid-seventies, she was still magnificent. It was part attitude and part bone structure. I realized that if the architecture of a face is upward reaching (those cheekbones!) and properly proportioned, as hers was, it mattered not if the skin that was draped over the scaffolding was wrinkled and blotched . . . the essential beauty held. Aging takes more of a toll on less structured faces.
Though she told me once that she thought the two of us were very much alike—both strong, independent, liberal-minded women—she also let me know what she saw as our differences. For one thing, she thought I should be more involved on a day-to-day basis with the film production, which of course is how she was in her heyday—involved in all the details from casting to lighting. She has been quoted as saying, “Acting was all I ever wanted to do,” but I wasn’t like that. I loved acting, especially once I began producing my own pictures, but it was one important part of my life among others. I had my children, my ongoing political work with CED, the new Workout business to help fund it all . . . and a dog. (Ms. Hepburn wasn’t big on pets, either.) But I know Ms. Hepburn looked askance at all of this; she simply didn’t understand the concept of having a working partner like Bruce, of having a business unrelated to my profession, and of putting as much or more time into political work as I did into my career. Ms. Hepburn was livid that CED’s steering committee were all there, living at our camp (the smaller one, which I’d thought appropriate for Ms. Hepburn and Phyllis) in cabins and tents. She thought it was unpardonable for me not to be 100 percent concentrated on the film. We had to wait for a day when we were utterly certain Ms. Hepburn would not be coming to the set before we could invite the CED organizers to pay a visit and watch the shooting.
Of course, the idea of an actor having children was anathema to her. She told me that she had never wanted children because she thought she was too selfish. “If I’d had a child,” she said, “and the child got sick and was crying just as I had to leave for the theater, where hundreds of people were waiting for me to perform, and I had to make a choice—the play or the child—well, I’d smother the child to death and go on with the show. You just can’t have both,” she said with frightening certainty, “a career and children.”
I don’t think she was right, at least not for me. Maybe for her she was: To have had the career she wanted perhaps required 100 percent attention. I do know that I felt terrible after these conversations. They played to my tendency to feel that I should be handling my life differently, more like . . . I don’t know. There was always a roster of women whose lives seemed more sensible than mine, just as there was always a list of actresses who could do my part better than I. I stayed awake many a night fretting about this, feeling sure that she was right, that my kids would be totally screwed up because of me.
But guess what. They aren’t. In fact, my kids have grown up to be amazing, talented, well-balanced, lovable people. Not that I can take credit for it all, but still. Anyway, I am what I am. In a 1978 interview in Rolling Stone, Donald Katz wrote about me, “No one else has ever stepped out to such a band of new drummers in the movie world and maintained a career.”
On more than one occasion during those teatime conversations, Ms. Hepburn talked of her relationship with actresses Constance Collier and Ethel Barrymore, both elders with whom she seemed to have assigned herself the role of acolyte. She described how when Barrymore was hospitalized toward the end of her life, Hepburn would visit her regularly. She told me about this so often that I began to wonder if she was hoping for a younger actress who would befriend her—and whether perhaps the actress she had in mind was me. I was never sure. But she was more comfortable with people who had no other attachments, not even pets.
She talked a lot about the importance of her parents in her life, always speaking of them as the most wonderful, fascinating parents anyone could have and crediting them with making her what she was. Apparently her habit of swimming every morning when she was at her country house in Connecticut, even in winter, had been developed at an early age. She told me that her father had insisted all his children take baths in a tub filled with ice every morning before school. When I suggested that this might be considered child abuse, she said, “Oh no, that is what builds character; and that is why I have such a strong constitution and never get sick.” I wasn’t convinced but kept my mouth shut.
She told me that every morning in the city she would get up at 5:00 A.M., have breakfast in bed, and write about her life’s experiences. One chapter, she said, was called “Failure” and described her monumental failure in a Broadway play called The Lake.
“One reviewer said, ‘Go see Katharine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B,’ ” she said with a snort. “I’m writing about how you learn more from failure than you ever do from success.” On that one I agree with her.
Having learned my lesson, I was not about to miss a second historic event, so I was present on the first day of shooting, even though I was not in the scene. Ms. Hepburn was all made up and waiting for my father on the front steps of the house in which we were filming. She had a twinkle in her eye and we could tell she was hiding something behind her back. As soon as Dad arrived, she walked up to him and said, “Here, Hank. This was Spence’s favorite hat. I want you to have it for this film.” Dad was clearly moved by this gesture from his leading lady, as were we all. In the course of the film he wore three different hats and Spencer Tracy’s was one of them. When the film ended, he made a painting of the three hats, so real that you could feel their texture; he had lithograph copies made and presented one to every member of the cast and crew.
My first day of filming was the scene of my arrival at my parents’ summer home with my fiancé and his son. Ms. Hepburn had not seen me in costume and makeup. She took one look at my high-heeled shoes and disappeared, returning a few minutes later in a pair of her old platform shoes from the thirties, which increased her height by at least two inches. That’s when I remembered that height was important to her. (I’d read that she’d brought it up in her first encounter with Spencer Tracy, telling him, “You’re not as tall as I expected.” This prompted producer Joseph Mankiewicz’s famous comment, “Don’t worry, Kate, he’ll soon cut you down to size.”) I suppose that for her, height established dominance. She’d be damned if she’d let me tower over her.
That same day, between takes, I was standing in front of the mirror that hung near the front door where Norman’s hats were hung when Ms. Hepburn surprised me by coming up behind me. She reached around and took a chunk of my cheek between her fingers.
“What does this mean to you?” she asked, pulling on my cheek.
“What do you mean?”
“Your image. What do you want your image to be?” She gave my cheek another little tug. “This is your package. We all have our package, what presents us to the world. What do you want your package to say about you?”
“I have no idea,” I answered.
But I thought a lot about this for days afterward and still do today. (That’s the thing about Ms. Hepburn: She got under my skin and stirred things up.) I think I now know why she asked me the question. She thought I needed to be more self-conscious about my image. That’s what she felt movie stars needed to do—God knows she did. She had a persona, a style particular to her that will live on in the minds of her public, and she never wavered from it. I, on the other hand, was a hodgepodge, still searching for who I was, lacking self-consciousness about my persona, and this bothered her. She didn’t want me to be this way; it was one more thing about
me that she didn’t approve of. We tend to think of the term self-consciousness as meaning something bad, as being awkward or uncomfortable with oneself. But the way I am using it it means something rather different—a consciousness of self, the impact our presence has on other people. The only other person I have known as self-conscious is Ted Turner. And, as it was with Hepburn, it’s part of his charm.
Everything about our summer on Squam Lake was magical. Even nature wanted to get in on the act. Take the loon, for instance. The loon is a wondrous bird about the size of a small goose, with dramatic black-and-white markings and a haunting cry that resembles the trill of distant laughter. It dives underwater to catch fish and nests in the lake-rich areas of the northern regions. In the winter it migrates to warmer climes. Loons mate for life, the males and females share in the rearing of their children, and for all of us they became emblematic of the film’s couple, Ethel and Norman Thayer. Loons are shy, wary of humans. One rarely gets the opportunity to watch them up close, but one day some crew members were eating lunch down by the lake’s edge and one of them suddenly came running, calling us to come down. A family of loons, mama, papa, and several babies, were just a few feet offshore and seemed to want to stay there. The camera operator grabbed the camera and filmed them, and they hung out there for several days, as though knowing that this film would be wonderful and wanting to be a part of it. They are the first image you see in the film.
From the moment I arrived in New Hampshire, I began taking backflip lessons from the University of Maine’s swimming coach, who summered near Squam Lake. I started with a belt around my waist, hooked up to a rope that assisted me in the flip, with a mattress to cushion the fall. After a week or so I graduated to the coach’s diving board, and Troy would sit poolside and watch his mother’s pathetic attempts to get herself all the way around, which generally ended with me landing on my back. I was terrified, always on the verge of tossing in the towel. After a month of this I moved to the float, the one in the movie, in front of the house, out in Squam Lake. It was the beginning of July, and I had less than a month to get it right. Every day when I wasn’t needed on the set I would be out there, diving backward, over and over again, my body slapping against the water as I failed to make it around.
Then one day about three weeks into this ordeal on the lake, I finally got it right. Nothing to write home about, but I had managed to flip far enough over to have time to straighten my legs and enter the water headfirst. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to do it again, but at least I’d done it once. As I crawled, battered and bruised, onto the shore, out of the nearby bushes appeared Ms. Hepburn. She must have been hiding there, watching me practice. She walked over to where I was standing and said in her shaky, nasal, God-is-a-New-Englander voice, “Don’t you feel good?”
“Terrific,” I answered. And it was true.
“You’ve taught me to respect you, Jane. You faced your fear. Everyone should know that feeling of overcoming fear and mastering something. People who aren’t taught that become soggy.”
Thank you, Lord! I’d been redeemed. God knows the last thing in the world I wanted to be was soggy, certainly not in the eyes of Ms. Hepburn, a living testament to nonsogginess. It was odd. In the film the backflip was to prove myself to my father. In real life I had proved myself to Ms. Hepburn. Dad probably couldn’t have cared less if I’d done the dive myself or used a stunt double.
We finally shot the diving scene in the third week of July. I managed a fairly good dive and was relieved to have it out of the way. Wrong, wrong, wrong, as Ms. Hepburn would say. A few days later we learned that the footage of the scene had somehow been damaged in the lab and I would have to do it all again. As though that weren’t bad enough, when we finally got around to reshooting, it was mid-September and the water was numbingly cold. I will never forget having to walk out on the diving board, all wet and shivering, while the crew sat in the camera boat in their down parkas. I was out of practice and too cold to execute the dive as well as I had the first time. When I came to the surface and said, “I did it! It was lousy, but at least I did it,” those were my own words, spontaneous and totally true.
There is a scene where Dad and Ms. Hepburn are playing Parcheesi and I’m sitting on the couch reading a magazine. Dad makes a remark about my not wanting to play because I’m afraid to lose. I respond, “Why do you like playing games? You seem to like beating people. I wonder why.” After we shot the master and the crew had finished lighting for my close-up, I got into place and realized that there were so many lights on me that I couldn’t see Dad’s eyes, which would hinder my playing of this brief, hostile exchange. It was easy to fix; I just asked the cameraman to throw a little light onto his face. That done, it was time for Dad’s close-up, and just before we were set to go, I asked, “Is it okay, Dad? Can you see my eyes?”
“I don’t need to see your eyes,” he answered dismissively, “I’m not that kind of actor.”
Whoa. His words pierced me to my core. It felt like such a put-down. Forget that I had made this project happen for him. Forget my two Academy Awards, that I was the mother of two children, forget all of that. I was suddenly reduced to a quivering, insecure fat girl, in the same way my character is. As Chelsea says to her mother in another scene, “I act like a big person everywhere else. In California I’m in charge of things . . . yet I get back here with him and I’m just a fat little girl again!” I could relate to that.
And yet—and this is what makes life so interesting for actors; hell, maybe it is why some of us become actors—while one part of me was in emotional agony because of his comment, the other half of me was saying, Oh my God—this is so great. This is exactly the way I’m supposed to feel. This is just perfect for the character.
When the scene was over and everyone had prepared to go home for the day, I remained on the couch, unable to move but sure that no one was aware how Dad’s words had hurt me.
To my surprise Ms. Hepburn came over and sat next to me, put her arms around me, and whispered in my ear, “I know just how you feel, Jane. Spence used to do things like that to me all the time. He’d tell me to go home after I’d done my close-up, say that he didn’t need me to be around, he could do his lines just as well to the script girl. Please don’t feel badly. Your dad has no idea that his words hurt you. He didn’t mean to. He’s just like Spence.” I was deeply grateful for her understanding and compassion. It showed me it hadn’t all been my imagination. I had a witness; I wasn’t alone.
Speaking about her experience on the movie, Ms. Hepburn told her friend and biographer A. Scott Berg, “It was strange. . . . There was certainly a whole layer of drama going on in the scenes between her [me] and Hank, and I think she came by to watch every scene he and I had together. There was a feeling of longing about her.” She was right about the longing. I longed for him to love me and see me as an able grown-up. And for me to do so, too!
On Golden Pond is an archetypal story of love and loyalty, but it’s also about the difficulty of resolving generational differences when a parent is withholding and a child is angry because of it. Of all the films I have made, none seems to have resonated so profoundly with so many people as this one. I realize the universality of the dilemma, because people—men and women—to this day go out of their way to tell me how their relationships with their fathers resemble Chelsea and Norman’s. In many cases, they tell me that it was taking their fathers to see the movie that enabled a breakthrough to occur.
Isn’t one of the difficulties knowing who should make the first move? The child is angry because the parent hasn’t been what he or she should have been, and the child waits for the deficient parent to admit he or she was terrible and to ask forgiveness. But it’s harder to change when you are older. You know you’ve made mistakes, but you don’t understand this new generation and you’re stuck in your ways (unless you keep working on yourself to not get stuck). Playing Chelsea in On Golden Pond and paying attention to the advice her mother gives her allowed me to see
that it has to be the child who makes the move toward forgiveness and that if it is done from a loving place, the parent will almost always be there to receive. One important caveat that Ethel gives Chelsea: “Sometimes you have to look very hard at a person and remember he’s doing the best he can.”
Everyone on the set was sensitive to the fact that my father and I had had a complex relationship and that this film in many ways mirrored real life—but with a resolution at the end. I hoped that somehow the resolution between father and daughter in the film would lap over to Dad and me. He always said that acting gave him a mask that allowed him to reveal emotions he did not feel safe revealing in real life. Maybe showing his emotion about his daughter in the film would release the real ones.
There is a scene with the mother when Chelsea comes back from Europe to pick up Billy. She is hurt that her father has developed such a close relationship with the boy, and her mother is trying to get her to realize that underneath the gruff exterior her father loves her, that she just needs to talk to him and pay close attention.
“I’m afraid of him,” says Chelsea.
“Well, he’s afraid of you. The two of you should get along just fine.”
“I don’t even know him,” Chelsea says plaintively.
“Chelsea,” the mother admonishes, “Norman is eighty years old. He has heart palpitations and trouble remembering things. Just exactly when do you expect this friendship to begin?”
The scene that follows is my key scene in the movie, the one where I confront my father. I wade into the water by the dock as Norman and Billy pull up from their fishing trip. “Norman, I want to talk to you.”