The Flying Fondas and How They Grew

PETER, the youngest Fonda, denies it. Henry and Jane, older and wiser, know that talent, like blood type, is decided before birth; that the plainsman, the rebel and the runaway are all branches on the same family tree. It is more than the physical resemblance that unites them--the El Greco shanks, the narrow faces with too much jaw, and the pale, inquiring eyes of hunted animals. There is also a common quality of purpose, a mutual undertow of melancholy.

It is probably no accident that each player has reached his--and her--peak in a doomed role. As Mr. Roberts, Henry Fonda caught the audience's sympathy--and then died discreetly, as one would expect, offstage. Jane's brains are blown away in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? As for Peter, he has the most muscular, corpuscular death: groovily shotgunned down on his bike in Easy Rider. '--Until lately, the Flying Fondas have not been a show-business family notable for harmony. But there is no melody like success. Henry has just completed his 72nd film, The Cheyenne Social Club, and currently is directing the Plumstead Playhouse version of Our Town. Jane has just won the New York Film Critics Award for her gritty, indomitable performance as a Dust Bowl Cassandra in They Shoot Horses. As for Peter, he will doubtless be a millionaire before the age of 30 for producing and starring in Easy Rider, the little movie that killed the big picture. Recognition, and years, have altered them all--particularly the kids. Jane is no longer content to play an ectomorphic Bardot. As a new mother, she resembles a full page in McCall's rather than a Playboy foldout. And the expatriate stance has vanished. "America is where I belong," she says, after a six-year sojourn in France. "This is where it has to happen." The girl who turned down the leading role in Bonnie and Clyde and Rosemary's Baby is not about to let a plum go by her again. "I'll take on anything," she states, "even a musical." Peter, whose volatility could make Librium jittery, has turned out to have, his father says, "one of the great marriages of all time." When he talks today, he sounds as outrageous as ever, but miraculously, studio heads no longer shake their heads in bewilderment; they nod them in bewilderment. As John Cheever puts it at the end of Bullet Park, it is all "as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been."

The question is, just how wonderful had it been?

"I am not neurotic," says Henry, "but I think you become an actor maybe because there are these complexes about you that aren't average or normal, and these aren't the easiest things to live with. You can be easily upset, or short-tempered, or lack patience." It is an uncanny summary of two other Fondas. If, on occasion, Henry is painted warts and all, his children used to picture him warts and nothing. "I'm between planes somewhere," he once recalled, "and a reporter has a clipping that says Jane Fonda thinks her parents led a phony life. Or that she thinks her father should have been psychoanalyzed 35 years ago. Now it's all right for her to think it, but I don't think it's all right for her to say so in interviews. After all, I'm her father.'" Peter was content to show enormous sensitivity--for himself. "I dig my father," he used to say. "I wish he could open his eyes and dig me."

Henry has opened. He digs. "I'm in awe of Peter," he now says. "I can't get over the fact that he got where he is at this point in his life." Peter is 29. Pater is 64. Take away 35 years and Henry is hoofing in New Faces on Broadway for $35 a week. The Fonda name is no help--though in five years it will become so well-known that the Federal Writers' Project guide to Nebraska lists Grand Island as the birthplace of Henry Fonda, stage and screen actor, as well as the home of Jake Eaton, "champion gum chewer of the world, said to be capable of chewing 300 sticks at a time."

Henry has kicked over his job with the Retail Credit Co. and left the Community Playhouse in Omaha.

Willa Cather, laureate of Nebraska, once wrote: "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before." Fonda is the son of a printer--a conservative, a straight. "I want to live my own life," complains young Henry.

"Sure," says Dad. "But not in my house."

Henry goes through several stock companies and a brief marriage--to Actress Margaret Sullavan. He weds a New York socialite, Frances Seymour Brokaw, by whom he has two children, Jane and Peter. Henry and his ex-roommate, Jimmy Stewart, begin to click onstage. He signs with a hot actor's agent, Leland Hayward --and the ink on the contract rewrites his life.

Weighed and Sifted

"I was visiting Omaha," Fonda recalls, "when I got a two-page telegram from Hayward in Hollywood, telling me to come on out. I sent a one-word telegram saying NO. But nobody can keep saying NO to Leland for very long.

I went out to Hollywood--he met me at the airport, took me to a hotel suite. Half an hour later, as I stepped out of a cold shower, there was Hayward with a man whose name I had heard often.

Dripping wet, I shook hands with Walter Wanger, and that's how I signed for two pictures a year, $1,000 a week." The Fonda style rapidly sets: the methodic drawl, the slightly stooped, wary posture. In a sense, he has never left the credit company. At home, he is a nitpicking perfectionist. At work, each word, each gesture seems weighed and sifted twice before he allows it freedom. His pictures sometimes falter;

Fonda rides above them like a man on a gelding. Without missing a hoofbeat or a paycheck, he appears in westerns (Jesse James), biographies (The Story of Alexander Graham Bell), even comedies (The Mad Miss Manton). But it is not until 1940 that the man and his role fuse into the permanence of art. More than 20 years later, John Steinbeck unreels a print of The Grapes of Wrath.

"Times pass and we change; the urgency departs and this is called dating," Steinbeck says. "But I did thread the thing on my home projector and sat back to weather it out. Then a lean, stringy, dark-faced piece of electricity walked out on the screen, and he had me. I believed my own story again. It was fresh and happening and good."

The careers of most men up to 1941 are prologues to the war itself. For Fonda, the war is a prologue to his work. He climbs out of Navy blues and into Navy blues. An old friend from stock-company days, Joshua Logan, has collaborated with Thomas Heggen on an adaptation of Mr. Roberts. Leland Hayward is the play's producer. "It was like being in love," recalls Fonda. "You had this good feeling in the guts practically all the time."

Mr. Roberts opens to thunderous ovations. The career has been established, reestablished, entrenched, ensured. Henry and Frances have a house in Connecticut, two bright, eager children of their own, plus a third child by Mrs. Fonda's first marriage. He becomes a cautious, skilled Sunday painter--and even sculpts a clay model of Peter's head, which later cracks.

Josh Logan recalls the marriage: "Frances was not really interested in the theater, so she was always embarrassed to talk about it. She'd talk of children, operations, jewelry, the stock market. I often wondered what she and Henry talked about, because these are the only subjects Henry couldn't talk about." There are rumors of rift, there are reports that Frances has been institutionalized with unshakable fits of depression.

But no one, including Henry, is prepared for the lurid obituary of April 14, 1950: FONDA'S WIFE, ILL, COMMITS SUICIDE. At a "rest home," Frances has slashed her throat. Fonda plays in Mr. Roberts that night, recalls Logan, "to keep from going crazy."

Tear Along the Line

Frances' will pointedly includes the children and excludes Henry. What the world knows, the father hides. As far as the kids are concerned, their mother has died of a heart attack in the hospital. It is a year later that Jane, then 13, learns the truth from a friend who is thumbing through a movie magazine in art class. "It seemed easier on the kids not to tell the whole truth," Fonda says sadly. "But the bottom line of it all is: I wasn't telling the truth."

The kids tear along the bottom line.

"It seemed to be a normal life to me," Henry Fonda reminisces. But no child comes equipped with bifocal hindsight, least of all a Fonda. Almost from the start, the public roles and the private lives were at catastrophic odds. Steinbeck stated what the kids only felt: "Henry is a man reaching but unreachable, gentle but capable of sudden wild and dangerous violence. His face is a picture of opposites in conflict."

So were the settings. In the Hollywood days, he had built a Pennsylvania-style farmhouse and farm on nine acres in Brentwood. If the world found him at home as an actor, the kids found him more so on a tractor. Jane, in fact, had no idea of her father's vocation until she asked her mother why Daddy occasionally wore a beard. She adored him. She recalls, "I spent half of my young life wanting to be a boy because I wanted to be like my father." Still, it is easier to be Henry Fonda's daughter than his son. "Peter was always rebellious," recalls Henry.

"We overworried about him, I think."

Peter overrebelled. Resentment exuded from his pores. Years later he recalled an early boarding school: "What kind of parents would send a kid away at six to make his own bed?" A childhood friend remembers him as "a weird kid, relegated to purgatory." Peter admits, "I was shy, difficult and I lied a lot." Peter may have been a hellion, but Jane was a well-behaved, red-haired stick figure at the Brentwood Town and Country School. Her class was filled with other kids as plain as Jane: Gary Cooper's and Claude Rains' daughters, Laurence Olivier's son. A classmate recalls a bit of the Fonda home life down on the farm. "We were all afraid of Jane's father in those days. We always felt he was a time bomb ready to explode. But it was years later when we actually saw him lose his temper over some forgotten trivia. He was booming, purple-faced, with veins sticking out on his temples. It was the only time I was ever privileged to see what may have been a constant for Lady Jane."

The "lady" was a chain that Jane had to drag around all through school. The very name tapes on her clothes read "Lady Fonda," and she was referred to at home as "Lady Jayne." It was not until the Fondas moved east for Mr. Roberts that Jane shook off the adult humor. Her family had preceded the Hay wards to Greenwich, Conn., and Brooke Hayward noisily greeted her old classmate: "Lady Jayne!" "My name is Jane," came the icy reply. "J-A-N-E." Peter chose his own way of self-expression. "I wrote I HATE THE EAST on the walls of the houses we moved into, and then my father would make me go around and erase it all."

Less than a year after Frances' death, Henry the widower married Susan Blanchard, stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein II. They honeymooned on St. John's in the Virgin Islands, free from the family and the phone. Peter, 10, chose that moment to aim a gun at his stomach and pull the trigger. The slug went through his liver. "I don't know if I was trying to commit suicide or not," says Peter. "Since then, the idea has occurred to me many times to do my self up, but righteously."

The Coast Guard fetched Henry to the bedside; Peter miraculously bounced back. He never lost that elasticity. In prep school, one of the masters developed an interesting theory about the boy's father. "Anybody who's been married all those times has got to be a son of a bitch," he reasoned. Peter knocked the teacher down and out.

Stalag 17 1/2 Peter was 16, a vibrant, defensive manic-about-town. He tried to slow him self down with barbiturates; to little avail. His sister once found him babbling outside school to a bunch of dogs and dubbed him a spaced-out Holden Caulfield. Peter loved, he thought, a girl named Bridget, Brooke Hayward's sister. She took her own life the same year he quit the University of Omaha.

College proved like too much. Or not enough. "I split before that scene went down." he recalls. "I went into summer stock. I did everything I had to do, all I could, majoring in liberal arts and ab normal psych."

Summer stock was in Fishkill, N.Y.

Henry's kid had done theatrical bits in prep school; he had even performed in his own satire, Stalag 17 1/2. Now he worked the lights and learned, just like another kid did 30 years before. At 21, he won a part in a Broadway service comedy. Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole. Mr. Poole was no Mr. Roberts, but Peter was called another Henry, and it bugged him. "I can hear them in the front row," he griped. " 'It's your old man all over again.' " By the time Peter had made it on stage, his sister was swinging in Hollywood. The sibling revelry turned into solo performances. "It was a time when we weren't very close," recalls Jane.

"Peter had very short hair and insisted on getting married in a big church ceremony. I didn't understand his life and he didn't understand my friends." Peter admits, "I was trying to grab all the straight paraphernalia -- the country club, have a silver pattern register at Tiffany's." His new wife, Susan, was the stepdaughter of Noah Dietrich, an ex-assistant of Howard Hughes. His best man was a young millionaire named Eugene ("Stormy") McDonald.

If an ironist were to select a trio diametrically opposed to the Fondas of today he could do no better than to choose the Fondas of 1960. Henry had married a fourth time, to an Italian countess, Afdera. He became unrecognizably Bonifaced. Leland Hayward attended one dinner party for Afdera's friend. "For dessert they had ice cream and chocolate sauce. There was dancing, and all of a sudden those nutty Italians began throwing ice cream and sauce on the walls. I thought Hank would commit murder. But he just stood there and smiled and enjoyed it."

Peter may have been playing Master Wonderful. But Jane ... In the sixth grade in Connecticut, Brooke remembers, "there was this shed on the school grounds where we all used to go to listen to Jane tell her dirty traveling-sales men stories." At Vassar, she made reality out of wistful thinking. Jane once discovered that school administrators knew she was AWOL. She telephoned, crying. "But before I got a chance to say I was sorry," she recalled, "the professor said he understood that my father had just married for the fourth time and that I was emotionally upset.

I wasn't. I'd just gone away with a boy for the weekend." And from Vassar soon afterward.

She split to Paris for an extended fling, until Henry recalled her to New York. Together, father and daughter did some stock turns, but acting was strictly kicks until she enrolled at the Actors Studio in New York. "The only reason I took you," said the Method guru, Lee Strasberg, "was your eyes. There was such a panic in the eyes."

She attacked her craft with monomaniacal zeal. "I have never seen any one involve herself so much," says Brooke. "She worked at it five days a week. Between classes she took modern-dancing lessons, psychoanalysis and massages." Her attack on her background was equally relentless. She became inseparable from Andreas Voutsinas, the actor Mel Brooks carefully chose to play the insinuating homosexual in his comedy The Producers.

Different strokes for different folks, said the Fonda watchers; Jane has a more rational explanation. "There is always a period when a child is looking for its own identity. The stronger the father figure, the harder the fight to break away. During that period, Peter and I had access to the press. We would go ruff, ruff, and that would develop into a big deal."

Intimations of Mortality The kids played ruff almost every where they went. Peter unrestrainedly spieled about the girl whose abortion he had arranged -- and made necessary -- the drugs he took, the lousy pic- tures he made. He claimed that when he first viewed Tammy and the Doc- tor, he vomited. The bombing of The Victors and Lilith did not sweeten a pesonality that seemed to have sand under its skin. Reality was to be fled; Peter became the acidhead of the house. "In those days, it wasn't an il legal drug," he says. "It was pure, non-chromosome-breaking, non-habit-forming, nondangerous. So I dropped 500 micrograms and never came back.

That's what I like to say, 'cause then people say, 'See, see, I told you, he never came back.' I was looking to get my head straight. And it helped."

During the process, while Peter was visiting him in Tucson, Stormy MacDonald slashed his wrists, then shot himself. Mother, girlfriend, best man -- all suicides. Intimations of mortality began to cling to Peter. Nothing he said seemed edited by his brain. His sister had gath- ered a barefoot-in-St.-Tropez reputation as Director Roger Vadim's newest protegee. When Henry objected to Jane and Roger's live-in arrangements, Peter announced, "Father was living in Malibu and the only difference was that he'd send his chick home at night. His duplicity blew our minds."

Through it all Henry retained a stoic but visibly worn exterior. Audiences who saw him as the President in Fail Safe or the Secretary of State in Advise and Consent thought his face showed lines of global tension. They were only signs of middle-aged fatherhood. "I knew those two children were going to be rebellious if their old man was suc- cessful at something and they decided to do the same thing," he sighs. "I had to hold my breath sometimes and not let it hurt too much."

Jane became the sexual rebel, triumphantly denouncing marriage, ap- pearing topless, and on occasion bottomless, in films. Such Vadim-witted flicks as The Game Is Over were 25% titillation, 75% marzipan; but because they were 100% Jane, they were worth while. Even the overblown Barbarella had style when she was on, peeling her futuristic armor to stand nude before an elderly gentleman. "Barbarella," he nodded. "Mr. President," she replied.

"Daughter? I don't have a daughter," Fonda once said during Jane's Francophile period. He refused to see some of her pictures, and never did get around to attending her wedding when she and Vadim decided to make it legal in 1965.

There seemed an extra conviction in his performance in the Broadway com- edy Generation that year. It was about the father of a headstrong girl and an undesirable son-in-law.

Moral Support Onscreen, Jane had sex cornered. Violence became Peter's bag. His big role was the vicious cyclist in The Wild Angels, and personality posters' big number was Fonda on a chopper. Two million of the posters were sold, claims Peter, three of them to their subject. "I looked at them on the wall of my house and decided it was the hang-up of the people who bought them, not mine." Peter's private life remained astonishingly placid; his marriage seemed to have everything his father's four marriages had lacked. He referred to his wife as "my old lady." They presented Henry with his first two grandchildren.

His conversation remained free association. On occasion, the subject turned to drugs. It was uncool in a state whose government likes to see its grass mowed, not smoked. While Grandpa was making a movie appropriately entitled Welcome to Hard Times, he made an unscheduled appearance beside Peter in a Los Angeles courtroom. The charge: narcotics possession. "I'm here," said Henry, "to give moral support or any other support to my son." The case was dismissed, but the experience, recalls Henry, "shook Peter real good, and it should have."

Business went on as usual during altercations. Henry married a fifth time, to Shirlee Adams, a willowy ex-airline stewardess. "Henry is a very moral man," paradoxically concludes his third wife, Susan Blanchard. "If he were not, he wouldn't have been married so many times." Remarriage, observed Samuel Johnson, is the triumph of hope over experience. If Henry was moral, he was also congenitally optimistic.

He delightedly learned that the generation gap was not a Fonda exclusive. He resisted his son's sales talk on drugs and his daughter's on psychoanalysis, but he tried some self-analysis and reached a shrewd conclusion: "I'm a self-conscious person, and I'm an actor because I don't have to be myself."

The kids made vaster, faster metamorphoses. "I did two things," says Jane. "I had a baby and I made Horses. I went into pregnancy at 31. It felt like I could be destroyed. I was afraid. When Vanessa started growing in me, I got hooked. I'm a late starter. It has taken me a long time to get it together."

Peter abruptly realized what, as well as who, his father was. "Acting is putting on a mask," Henry had once confessed. "The worst torture to me is not having a mask to get in back of." The trouble was, no one had ever written a part for Henry the father. Both kids cursed their childhoods; yet their closest friends are from those anguished years. Brooke Hayward is Jane's confidante: her brother Bill is Peter's partner. Jane rebuilt a 140-year-old farmhouse 35 miles west of Paris as meticulously as Henry had once worked on the Brentwood place. She brought in full-grown trees. "They don't cost as much as an evening dress," she says, "and they last a lifetime." Peter even tried to buy back the Brentwood haunt his father had sold in 1947. Today Peter understands the move: "Looking back on it now, I can see you don't blow Mr. Roberts for a house, you blow the house for Mr. Roberts." When his son learned that Henry was campaigning for Eugene McCarthy, he swore: "It blows my mind. I won't have to send him poison-pen letters in the press."

Greyhounds Between Races Habit cannot be thrown out the window; it has to be coaxed downstairs one step at a time. Henry has never doted. His was an old family, traceable back through Holland to Italy -- and Henry is most comfortable in the role of the tight-lipped senior aristocrat. He belongs to Manhattan's Raffles club and maintains a town house in New York.

"People think you're rich because you live well," he says. "But you have to put up a good front if you're a star." The frontage feeds on constant employment. The Fonda annuity may just turn out to be the other Fondas.

Both children have become astonishing refractions of his spirit. Relaxation for both will never be defined in customary terms of lolling or woolgathering. At rest, both suggest greyhounds between races. But the energy no longer dissipates itself in showy cloudbursts. The old-model Jane used to welcome an entourage on the farm or at the Vadim pad on the beach at Malibu. For the heavy work in They Shoot Horses, she quit the crowded homestead and holed up with her baby in a trailer on the set. There was sex in her performance, but she was no longer the kitten from Cat Ballou or the dirty blonde of The Game Is Over. "She had," says Joshua Logan, "her father's unseducibility."

For the first time, Jane realized Henry's philosophy: less is more. "You have to keep some of the mystery," she concludes, in life as well as art. "If you bring a plastic penis into the classroom as they do in Sweden, that removes all the mystery. If you go to bed with Human Sexual Response under your arm, things can get very boring." The new unseducibility does not end at the set. Confesses Vadim: "I do much more giving than Jane. In a way, in our relationship she is the man and I am the woman." Her attitude on marriage remains a bit like Dad's: "Forever is a very difficult word."

She has reduced her weight ("I like to feel close to the bone"), and her lifestyle. The haute-couture frocks have been exchanged for thrift-shop goods. French cooking has given way to health foods, plus occasional side orders of hash. Her father owns a Bentley, a Mercedes and a Thunderbird. Peter is a bike freak. Jane owns no car and does not drive.

In the '70s, the daughter will dominate the screen far more successfully than the father did in the '30s, '40s, '50s or '60s. Her bony body and lean, clean features can attack grin or grim pictures with equal ease. She has performed in period, contemporary and science fiction with total facility. Her speech still smacks of elocution lessons, but her throat thrums with conviction.

She is all by herself, a vindication of the maligned Method acting that Henry puts down as "crap."

Waiting Out the Rain Even so, she may not be the greatest Fonda. It has taken Peter the longest to establish priorities, to coincide his in- telligence and his energy. He still guns his emotional engine too loud, and the exhaust from his pronunciamentos of ten obscures the man. "Peter has made a career of not being repressed," says Susan Blanchard. But the career has gone from bullying waste to something measurable. His scenario for Easy Rider was sometimes self-indulgent. Its villains were as exaggerated and snarling as the overdrawn wrongos of his Dad's old oaters, and its bloody ending reminiscent of the Emperor Nero's desire to attend his own funeral. Today Peter has evolved an elaborate ambiguity to justify its action-comic wanderers, Wyatt and Billy, and the mindless violence of their redneck antagonists. "Dennis Hopper and I represent a complete misunderstanding of what freedom's all about," he claims. "Both concepts are untenable, whether it's scoring and wanting to retire to Florida and ride around on your chopper, or whether it's just making money off of people."

The family belligerent has turned his hostility outward--toward the System. He has established a modest production office--where he arrives anonymously in a Volkswagen. His movie company, Pando, forbids the word star. "We have other words that concern us," he boasts. "We will make documentary films designed to overthrow the church, Mom, Dad and fashion in general." Such projects are unlikely to feature Henry--and possibly not even Jane. But then the family similarity is marbled with varied outlooks and insights. They are not yet the new Barrymores. "We're not a theatrical family," insists Peter. "Someone else may think of us like that, but my father is Henry Fonda, a peculiar, incredible person on his own. My sister is Jane Fonda, but she could be Jane Seymour, see, and she on her own is incredible. And I'm Peter Fonda. I could be Peter Henry and still be doing my number."

It is a number that viewers are getting to know better than the digits of their own phone. Henry and Jane have something, but the little brother with the big mouth just might have everything. Outside his spacious Bel Air home, Bridget, 6, and Justin, 3 1/2, gambol; Sue has retained her appeal; the checks from 22% of Easy Rider will soon annihilate the bills. A newspaper cartoon pinned above the fireplace says it all: two teen-age girls moon around a room waiting out a thunderstorm. "Do you think," asks one, "that it rains on Peter Fonda too?" No longer.

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