My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  One day Mother came home accompanied by a uniformed nurse. I refused to see her. I was playing jacks with Peter on the hardwood floor upstairs when she arrived in a limousine. Grandma called for us to come down.

  “Peter.” I grabbed his arm. “Don’t go down. I’m not going to. Let’s just stay up here and play jacks. I’ll let you win. Okay?”

  “No, I’m going,” Peter said, and he went downstairs.

  Why didn’t I go down? Was I so angry with her for not being there for us? Was it I’ll-show-you-I-don’t-need-you-either?

  I never saw her again.

  She must have known it would be her last time home. She’d come, I guess, to say good-bye—but also to get the small razor that she kept in a black enamel box given to her years before by her friend Eulalia Chapin. Apparently, she had rushed upstairs and just managed to slip the razor into her purse when the nurse, who’d been sent to make sure such a thing didn’t happen, caught up to her.

  A month later, in April, on her forty-second birthday, Mother wrote six notes—one each to Peter, Pan, and me; one to her mother; one to her nurse, telling her not to go into the bathroom but to call the doctor; and one to the doctor, her psychiatrist: “Dr. Bennett, you’ve done everything possible for me. I’m sorry, but this is the best way out.”

  Then she went into her bathroom in the Craig House sanitarium, carefully withdrew the razor she’d managed to keep hidden, and cut her throat. She was still alive when Dr. Bennett arrived, but she died a few minutes later.

  The fluttering slowed; the wings grew still. Then peace.

  I came home from school that afternoon, and as I walked through the front door, Grandma called down to me from her bedroom at the top of the stairs.

  “Jane, something’s happened to your mother. She’s had a heart attack. Your father is on his way here right now. Please stay in the house and wait for him. Don’t go out.”

  I turned right around, ran out the door, and ran all the way to the stables, where I was to have a riding lesson. I don’t remember feeling anything at all, though I must have known something serious was happening, because Dad didn’t just travel out from the city unexpectedly on a weekday.

  In the middle of my lesson the phone in the stable rang. It was Dad telling whoever answered to make me come home immediately. But I took my time. There were so many dead bugs and interesting rocks in the dirt driveway that I needed to stop and examine. Eventually, when I could find no more ways to stall, I trudged up the hill. A strange car was parked at the bottom of the steps. Must be Dad’s rental, I thought with a shudder. In some deep part of me that wasn’t my mind, some part that could keep secrets from the rest of me, I knew what was coming. My conscious mind knew this was all a dream, that I was about to wake up. I opened the heavy front door and walked into the living room. Nobody had turned on any lights, and the room seemed grayer than usual. Dad and Grandmother were sitting up very straight, each on a different couch, facing each other. Dad took me on his lap and told me that my mother had had a heart attack and was dead.

  Dead. Now, there’s a word. Short, heavy. I felt myself holding it in my hands, like a brick. Dead, like the butterflies mounted on that board on the other side of the living room wall. Her jars and tweezers were lying spread around on the table out there. I’d seen them only yesterday when I’d gone to polish the saddle. She couldn’t be dead. She hadn’t put her things away. Maybe I was dreaming. Then I was outside my body looking back at myself, waiting for myself to react. Everything was familiar, yet nothing was the same. From another room came the loud ticking of a clock—jarring, wrong. Didn’t it know that time no longer mattered? I noticed wrinkles in the chintz slipcovers and tried to smooth them out. Make it better. I know I can make it better.

  Peter came home a few minutes later. Dad got up and switched seats with Grandma, taking Peter on his lap and repeating the story to him. I had to get away from all of them, to be by myself, try to get myself back into my body, figure out how I felt.

  “Excuse me, please. I’m going to my room.”

  I could hear Peter crying as I followed myself upstairs. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I wondered why I couldn’t cry, like Peter. “Mother’s dead. I will never see her again.” I said it over and over to myself, trying to bring up some tears. But I felt nothing.

  I remembered that I had stayed upstairs the day she’d come home for the last time. Why hadn’t I gone down to see her? I felt something begin to stir in my chest. Ah, here it comes. I’m normal. But the feeling skittered away and I went outside myself again, and again I went numb.

  When I was in my forties and the tears for Mother did finally come—unexpectedly and for no apparent reason—they were unstoppable. They came from so deep within me that I feared I wouldn’t survive them, that my heart would crack open, and like Humpty-Dumpty, I’d never be able to be put back together again.

  Grandmother and Dad arranged to have Mother cremated, and then Dad drove back into the city in time for his performance of Mister Roberts. Didn’t miss a beat. I don’t think this implied he didn’t feel anything; it’s just that Dad didn’t know how to deal with feelings or to process pain. He knew only how to cover it up. Or maybe he’d grown numb, like me. Maybe I learned it from him.

  As soon as Dad left the house, I went into Mother’s room and found a favorite purse of hers, with its special lipstick smell. On the bedside table lay her dog-eared copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Everywhere—on the floor of her closet, in her coat pocket—there were pieces of her unfinished—never to be finished—life. In the medicine cabinet all the little bottles were lined up: FRANCES FONDA, with dates of expiration—but she’d expired first—lined up like orphans. Like me. Would they be thrown out now? Would I?

  My girlhood friend Diana Dunn told me recently that her father said to her, “Jane’s mother has just died and we have to go to her house and bring her here.” Dad or Grandmother must have called and told him. Diana says I stayed with them for several days, but not one word was ever spoken about Mother’s death. “You never cried,” she said. “I felt fear then. Your mother had just died and I didn’t understand why no one said anything to you. You were my best friend. I loved you and I didn’t know what to do for you.”

  Never in all the subsequent years, all the way to his own death, did Dad and I ever mention Mother. I was afraid it would upset him. I was sure he felt guilty because he’d asked for the divorce. Make it better. I don’t even know if he knew that I knew the heart attack story wasn’t true. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Peter, on the other hand, wore it all on both sleeves. The following Christmas, eight months after her death, Dad came up from New York City to open presents with us in Greenwich, where we were being looked after by Grandma and Katie, the maid. Peter had filled an entire wingback chair with presents for Mother and a letter he’d written to her. Looking back, it is so terribly sad and poignant, an eleven-year-old boy needing to let his mother know he loved her and missed her and wanted people to acknowledge her. But, oh God, nothing he could have done could have made that Christmas Day any worse. I was furious with Peter and sided with Dad, who seemed to see Peter’s behavior as a play for sympathy. What a thought!

  In the week that followed Mother’s death, my seventh-grade teachers seemed to go out of their way to be kind and understanding. I became aware that the rap on me was just what I had hoped: that I was remarkably brave and took everything in stride. What was really happening, though, was that I was getting psychic perks for shutting down! What had been a tendency for most of my young life was now being praised, and I began to hone this into a fine art: You don’t really feel what you feel; you didn’t really hear what you heard. It’s not that I consciously did these things—buried them. It’s just that I’d been doing it for so long that I had begun to live that way. I simply didn’t know anymore what I knew or wanted or thought or felt—or even who I was in an embodied way. I would become whatever I felt the people whose love and attention I needed wanted
me to be. I would try to be perfect. It was safer there. It was a survival mechanism that served me well—back then.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MY BLUE GENES

  And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE,

  Letters to a Young Poet

  The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

  —WILLIAM FAULKNER,

  Requiem for a Nun

  MOTHER

  SHE WAS AN ICON, always at the center of things, and, boy, did she love life!” Listening to the voice at the other end of the line, I thought this woman must be a little batty to have seen Mother as an icon!

  The woman speaking was Laura Clark. She had worked for Elizabeth Arden in New York in the mid-1930s, modeling tea gowns for Arden clients while they were getting their beauty treatments. One day she walked into the room where my mother, a regular at Arden’s, had just finished getting a facial. Mother took one look at the beautiful young girl and, instead of asking about the tea gown, offered her a cup of tea.

  “My goodness,” said Mother. “You look exhausted. Come over here and sit down.” Whereupon they struck up a conversation that led to a lifelong friendship.

  Laura Clark had been trying to reach me for more than twenty years, to talk to me about my mother, it turned out. In the seventies she had even gone backstage after my father’s Broadway play First Monday in October to ask him how she could contact me. “Try the police!” he’d told her brusquely, referring to my controversial activism.

  I vaguely remembered getting letters from a Laura Clark, but when I’d come to the sentence where she’d say she had been a friend of my mother’s, I’d toss the letter away. Mother, as far as I was concerned, had no place in my life. Now, after many years, another letter had arrived from Laura, giving me a number to call if I wanted to talk. She had no way of knowing that I had decided to write this book, that I had reached a point when I knew I would need, at last, to understand my mother. I was sitting at my desk writing when I made the decision to pick up the phone and call her. I was ready. Or so I thought.

  Laura’s soft voice was describing a woman I don’t remember knowing.

  “Your mother took me under her wing and invited me to the wonderful parties she gave at her Long Island estate and at the club El Morocco. Men just fell over themselves when they saw her. She’d cast those slanted eyes at a man across the room and he couldn’t resist.”

  “Wasn’t she married?” I asked. “Was her daughter, Pan, already born?”

  “She was a widow when we met. Her first husband, George Brokaw, had just died and their daughter must have been a couple of years old.”

  Laura went on to describe how later, during World War II, Laura had moved to Los Angeles with her young son, Danny, to find work.

  “Of course, by then your mother and father had married and you and Peter were young children. Your mother found me an apartment, took me to parties like she had in New York, and helped me meet people. My name then was Laura Pyzel. Do you remember?”

  “You’re that Laura! Of course I remember you and Danny. He was Peter’s age and was at our house a lot. Tell me more about my mother. Did you ever see her depressed?”

  “Never. She was always ‘up,’ the most lively one of all, like a butterfly. Her suicide shocked me. Oddly enough, I was wearing a black lace dress she’d given me when I heard the news on the radio.”

  I’d always wondered if it had been difficult for Mother to adjust to a much less social life with my father in California, and I asked Laura about this.

  “Yes, they were so different, and it was hard on her.” Laura went on for a while, reminiscing about life in Los Angeles in the forties, and then she said, “You know, Jane, your mother was a very sexy woman with a modern outlook on life.”

  “What do you mean?” I sat up, alert, in my desk chair.

  “Your father was overseas in the navy during the war. Frances was lonely, and while he was away she fell madly in love with a young man named Joe Wade. He was divinely attractive, a real party boy! She was crazy about him. All the women were.”

  My heart began to race and I had to stop taking notes. “Can you describe him to me?”

  “He drank a lot and was very wild,” Laura said. “We were scared for her because he was such a loose cannon. We worried what would happen when your father came home.”

  Suddenly a thought flashed into my mind. “Was he by any chance a musician?”

  Laura was silent for a moment, then, “Why, yes, I believe he was.”

  Oh, my God! There it was. The puzzle was starting to come together.

  When I was about seven and Dad was overseas, Mother and I were walking up the driveway of our house in California and out of the blue, she said to me, “Never marry a musician.” I remember it vividly—not just because it is such an odd thing to say to a seven-year-old, but because I can’t remember Mother ever giving me any other advice about life. I would wonder about those words over the years. I vaguely remembered hearing that when Dad was away she had taken a fledgling musician under her wing and was trying to manage his career. I saw so clearly now: She’d fallen in love with Joe Wade and he’d left her.

  “Do you know if Joe Wade ever came to our house?” I asked Laura. By now I was shaking and hoping Laura couldn’t tell from my voice.

  “Yes, he was there often. Like I said, he was wild, like an animal. In fact, he carried a gun and once he shot a hole in the ceiling.”

  “In her bedroom ceiling?” I asked, trying to imagine what had been going on. Wow! Mother was beginning to take on a Mae West cachet.

  “Yes,” Laura answered. “Your mother was so worried about that hole in the ceiling.” I shouldn’t wonder! What could she possibly say to my father when he came home: “Oh, Hank, it’s nothing really. I was just trying out a new pistol and . . .”

  I felt a tectonic shifting of plates deep within me, an owning of my mother. For the first time I was seeing her not as a victim but as a woman who had claimed her own pleasure. I hung up the phone and began to sob uncontrollably.

  The previous fall, another coincidence had made me aware that a Dr. Peggy Miller, a psychologist from Pacific Palisades, California, knew about my mother. Peggy had been the daughter-in-law of Mother’s best friend, Eulalia Chapin. Sitting with Peggy in her living room, I felt like an archeologist on a manic dig for clues from the past that could illuminate the present.

  “Talk to me about my mother, Peggy. Everything you know.”

  She, like Laura, spoke of Mother as someone who was always at the center of things, an adventurer.

  “Dick, my late husband, even though he was a good deal younger than your mother, told me that he loved being with her because she was the most fun, amusing person he’d ever seen. He told me men were drawn to her like moths to a flame.” I asked about Mother’s affair with Joe Wade and she confirmed the story, saying that her mother-in-law played the role of Mother’s “beard,” pretending to be the one Joe was having an affair with and letting them use her home for their liaisons.

  Paul Peralta-Ramos, a son of the socialite and artist Millicent Rogers and a cousin of Mother’s, said:

  The thing about Frances was that she was the person we’d go to if we had a problem. Nothing shocked her. If you knocked up a girl, your mother’d be the one to go to. She was the one who’d find a doctor. She was a rock, a problem solver.

  I was stunned. Mother? A rock!

  Was I crazy never to have seen my mother as three people had now described her to me: a lively, pleasure-loving, iconic rock of a woman? Why have I remembered her only as a sad, nervous victim to whom I would no more turn for help than try to walk on quicksand, whom I desperately did not want to be like? I discovered the answer a year later when, with the help of lawyers, I was able to obtain Mother’s medical records from the Austen Riggs Center.

 
I was alone in a hotel room one evening when I opened the thick envelope. When I saw the title, “Medical Records of Frances Ford Seymour Fonda,” I couldn’t breathe. I flung off my clothes and crawled into bed. As I began reading, my body started shaking, my teeth chattering.

  In the midst of the nurses’ daily accounts of Mother’s deteriorating condition and the medications they were giving her, I found eight single-spaced pages that Mother had typed herself on admission to the institution, with numerous additions and corrections in her hand.

  It was beyond belief. I had longed to know her early story. Now I was holding it in my hands. I’m going to share here those parts of it that have helped me understand her—and hence myself. Added to what she wrote herself are things that I have learned from others, including my half sister, Pan Brokaw.

  Mother’s father, Ford Seymour, was a thirty-five-year-old lawyer with a large New York firm when, while visiting his hometown, he saw a photograph in the window of a local photography store of nineteen-year-old Sophie Bower. She lived in Morrisburg, on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence River. He was immediately smitten, which is not surprising given the fetching twinkle in my grandmother’s eyes and her slightly open mouth with upturned lips. My grandfather was an exceedingly charming, devilish gentleman from a wealthy, well-connected family. He had, as my half sister, Pan, says, “a touch of madness, which was appreciated by the ladies.” Madness indeed! Based on what Mother told them, the Austen Riggs doctors identified him as a paranoid schizophrenic.