by Jane Fonda
After the breakup, Dad describes going into a Christian Science Reading Room and finding a man to whom he bared his soul. “I don’t know what it was,” he said to Teichmann. “I must have had faith that day. I don’t even know who the man was, but he helped me to leave my pain in the little reading room. When I went out, I was Henry Fonda again. An unemployed actor but a man.” Oh yes, Dad, I want to cry out when I read that, but why didn’t you let that experience teach you that talking to someone who listens with an understanding ear can be healing, not a sign of weakness. If faith brought you a sort of miracle on that one day, why didn’t you allow yourself to be more open to it and why did you scorn us—Peter and me—each time we turned to these supports—therapy or faith—for help in our own lives?
Dad apparently withdrew into himself after that, working odd jobs here and there. A lot of people, including Dad, didn’t have enough to eat. For a while he shared a two-room apartment on the West Side with Josh Logan, Jimmy Stewart, and radio actor Myron McCormick. The four of them lived on rice and applejack. The other tenants in the building were prostitutes, and two doors down the notorious Legs Diamond had his headquarters.
While my mother, the woman who would become his second wife, was living in splendor as Mrs. Brokaw, in a mansion with a moat on Fifth Avenue, Dad was barely hanging on.
In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated president, and within a year Dad got his first big break, doing funny skits in the Broadway review New Faces with Imogene Coca. His reviews were terrific and his career started to take off. Around that time, Leland Hayward, who was on the brink of becoming the top talent agent in the country, signed him up and convinced a reluctant Fonda to go to Hollywood for $1,000 a week. He was on his way.
Two years later, in 1936, my mother, complete with chaperone and her own Buick touring car, sailed to Europe. In London, while visiting a friend on the set of the film Wings of the Morning, in which Dad was starring with French actress Annabella, my mother met my father. By now, Dad had become something of a star, with six movies and the lead in a Broadway play under his belt.
“I’ve always gotten every man I’ve ever wanted,” Mother once told a friend. My father was divinely handsome, appealingly shy, and she wanted him. He admitted that, though too shy to make a move himself, he was easily seduced if a woman set her mind to it. Well, as I learned from Laura Clark, mother was nothing if not seductive.
Soon after their return to New York, Mother and Father were married, and a year later, from that interesting and troubled genetic amalgam: me voilà.
They were very different people. His heart was with Roosevelt and the New Deal, hers was with the elite, many of whom were her relatives and who worried about “that man in the White House.” His tastes were spartan; hers, glamorous. He wanted to go to clubs in Greenwich Village and Harlem to hear Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. She wanted to dine with New York’s high society. Not that very different people can’t laminate successfully, but . . .
It’s been easy for me to see Father in myself. I look like him, went into his profession, and have many recognizable characteristics of his—including, unfortunately, a tendency to withdraw and be abrupt (traits I have worked hard to rid myself of). But Dad’s genes also gave me his midwestern staunchness, a respect for integrity, an identification with the underdog, and a dislike of bullies. I credit him with my feelings for the land. Though he grew up in the city of Omaha, you can’t live in Nebraska—at least you couldn’t back in his time—without an awareness of the land. The Midwest is our farm belt, its economy tied to the rolling grasslands of the Great Plains that seem to stretch to infinity and shimmy in the wind. I believe Dad carried a land-based morality within him till the day he died, and I inherited it—as have my children.
Partly because of my resemblance to him and partly because I wanted to distance myself from my mother, I never bothered to explore what her genes contributed to my makeup. But I have learned that there are traits of hers for which I am very grateful. Her genes provided the leavening in Father’s Calvinist mix: the need to reach out to people and nurture them—and also to love a good party. My ability to organize a complex home environment comes from her, as does my generosity.
In an ideal world, people would take classes to learn how to parent. I wish I had. After all, we are required to take lessons before we can drive a car or fly a plane. Does it make sense to embark on the most complex and important task we can undertake in our lives and not be required to demonstrate even a modicum of understanding? I have learned to forgive my parents their shortcomings. I hope my children will forgive me mine.
But forgiving before you’ve faced why forgiveness is needed is like sewing up a wound and leaving the bullet inside. Forgiveness can’t happen until we have gone back to the dark place and experienced the feelings that have been unacknowledged since childhood, named them for what they are, and then separated from them. Taking this journey back in time requires courage. When possible, it helps to have the guidance of a gifted and empathetic professional.
In Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, psychologist Alice Miller says, “Emotional access to the truth is the indispensable precondition of healing.” Only then can we see that it wasn’t about us. Parents were cruel, perhaps, or neglectful, but it wasn’t because we weren’t lovable. It’s because they knew no other way or because they weren’t mentally well.
There are, of course, those lucky few who grew up in homes with parents who loved and respected each other; where raising children was a shared responsibility, not one left solely to the woman; where being a man meant nurturing and cuddling; where the child saw her parents work out their differences in a loving and respectful way; where the parents, when they were there, were really, wholly, fully there.
CHAPTER THREE
LADY JAYNE
In childhood dream-play I was always the knight or squire, not the lady:
quester, petitioner, win or lose, not she who was sought.
—DENISE LEVERTOV,
“Relearning the Alphabet”
I LIKE THAT I WAS BORN on the shortest day—winter solstice. It makes me feel connected by some primordial energy to Stonehenge and Machu Picchu, where the solstice was celebrated and revered by the Celts and Incas. I also like that I am able to look back over my span of history to a time before plastic, before smog and sprawling suburbs and fast-food restaurants. Before television, even! I like that I can remember in my bones what it felt like to have a lot fewer people in the world than there are today. Four billion fewer, to be exact. Four billion fewer feels different, trust me. Life was very different then, just because of the fact of four billion fewer people, seven million fewer just in Greater Los Angeles alone when I was born. It’s a feeling of space, more space between people, between houses, between tempers and cars, more open spaces with grass where a girl could explore and hear birdsongs. More birds.
By 1938, the year after I was born, people had picked themselves up and were dusting themselves off from the Depression. The New Deal had put in place the Social Security system, farm subsidies, a minimum wage, and public housing, in an attempt to level the playing field, to protect ordinary people from those Roosevelt, in his speech accepting the nomination, called “economic royalists.” In spite of the rise of Fascism in other parts of the world, in the United States there was a sense of hope in the air.
Hope may still have reigned in my parents’ marriage when I was born. Near her due date, my mother took the train to New York and checked in to the swank Doctors Hospital, where the socially prominent came to be sick, have babies, and be treated royally.
My father was filming Jezebel with Bette Davis at the time, and his contract stipulated that if his wife went into labor during the shooting, he could fly to New York to be with her. When the time came, Bette Davis was left to play some of their love scenes to the script supervisor. Later, she would feign anger at me about it: “You’re the one who robbed me of my leading man, damn you!” she would bark in
that clipped, staccato voice of hers.
They named me Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda. “Lady”! That was actually what they called me! Later, when I went to school, the cloth name tapes that had to be sewn onto my collar read LADY FONDA. Apparently I was related to Lady Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII, on my mother’s side. (But who cares about royalty; the poor woman died shortly after giving birth to the king’s long-awaited son.) Not to mention the fact that I didn’t want to be anything resembling a lady, nor did I want in any way to stand out. To make things worse, there was that “y” in the Jayne. (That was a Fonda family thing: My father’s middle name was Jaynes.)
It appears my father was very excited about my arrival. In his biography, he is quoted as saying, “That was a great day! I took dozens of snapshots with my Leica. Every night the floor nurses had to kick me out.” I liked reading that. I’ve saved those photos. They show me either alone in a crib or being held by a nurse with a white mask over the lower half of her face. Not one shows me in Mother’s arms.
Not that my mother wasn’t happy about my arrival, but if I am to believe Grandma Seymour, Mother really wanted a boy. In those days women were cautioned against having more than two cesareans and she’d already had my half sister, Pan, so as far as she was concerned, this was her last birth and it better have a penis.
Ah, how deliciously simple it would be to blame that for my lifelong feeling of not being good enough.
Two years later, in spite of her doctor’s warnings, mother took a final stab at having a son. Grandma Seymour told me that in the event this third child was a girl, a baby boy had been lined up to adopt—that’s how much it mattered to her. Mother flew back to New York to the same hospital she’d delivered me in, but when Peter was born, instead of expressing jubilation, Mother moved into the Pierre Hotel for seven weeks instead of coming home with him. What was that about?
To find out, I asked Susan Blumenthal, M.D., M.P.A. Dr. Blumenthal has served as U.S. Assistant Surgeon General and the country’s first Deputy Assistant Secretary for Women’s Health. A national expert and leading authority on suicide and depression in women, Dr. Blumenthal is also a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University and Tufts University Schools of Medicine. Dr. Blumenthal told me that Mother’s behavior suggests that she may have been suffering from post-partum depression (PPD), a mood disorder that can have serious health consequences for mothers and their children. Even today, PPD often goes undiagnosed, and back then it is probable that Mother’s doctors were unaware of it as a problem that needed urgent attention. In addition, Dr. Blumenthal said that bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness) often has its initial onset in women after the birth of a baby. After years of suffering, Mother was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the end of her life.
Dr. Blumenthal also underscored that mood disorders (including manic-depressive illness) often run in families. Some research suggests that there may be a genetic vulnerability in certain families for alcoholism in the male relatives and depression in the females. Dr. Blumenthal emphasized that alcoholism can co-occur with bipolar disorder and clinical depression and that there is a higher incidence of alcoholism in people with bipolar disorder as compared to the general population. Therefore, my grandfather’s possible undiagnosed mood disorder and alcoholism might have increased Mother’s genetic vulnerability for bipolar disorder. Apparently, there can be a link between a father’s mood changes and alcoholism and his daughter’s depression, both biologically and psychologically.
So at the time of our entry into the world, Peter’s and mine, everyone was hidden behind something: Mother was hidden behind depression, Dad behind his camera—capturing the moment but never in the moment—and the nurses behind their masks.
For Peter’s birth Dad had graduated from a Leica to a home movie camera, and as soon as he got back home to California he showed Pan and me the movies he’d taken right before Mother moved into the Pierre. I remember exactly where I was sitting in the living room, close to the whirring 16-millimeter projector, when the image appeared of Peter in Mother’s arms. This is my first clear memory. The bottom of life dropped out, I was falling down a dark hole. In a letter I found recently from Grandma Seymour, she wrote, “I shall never forget your reaction to seeing Peter in your Mother’s arms. The tears streamed down your cheeks, but you didn’t cry out loud.” I believe it was right then that I sent some soft part of myself down into a vault someplace for safekeeping. I would begin to learn the combination only some sixty years later, at the start of my third act.
I remember the day, almost two months after Peter’s birth, when Mother at last came back to our California home. I can see her standing in the doorway of our nursery with Peter in her arms. She was wearing a navy blue skirt and a navy blue short-sleeved pullover sweater with two little nautical flags embroidered on it. I’ve never been fond of navy blue.
My grandmother told me that she remembered I wouldn’t let Mother touch me for a long time after she came home from the hospital with Peter, and if she did, I would cry. “You couldn’t forgive your Mother,” Grandma wrote me. “You thought that she had rejected you for Peter.” I’m sure that her being away for so long after the birth contributed to my feeling of being abandoned, but it was deeper than that. Mother’s beautiful aquamarine blue eyes were like mirrors covered with duct tape . . . they could not see me and mirror me back lovingly to myself as a mother’s eyes are meant to do. Instead, I became frozen in her sightless gaze. She didn’t love me. Real love means seeing the other as she truly is, fully, not just some parts that coincide with what you want to see.
Me right after birth, in the arms of the masked nurse.
Peter’s come home and I am definitely skeptical. That’s Pan standing behind Mother.
I know he loved me when I was little.
Dad liked me, though. I knew that, especially in the earliest years. I was his firstborn, I had the Fonda look, and I was a tomboy. In the summer, he would take me into his arms, walk down the steps into the swimming pool, and play with me in the water. I would bury my nose in his shoulder on the way down the steps and smell his skin. He always had a delicious musky smell that I loved . . . the smell of Man. Yes, he was happy with me when I was little—and deep down I knew his was the winning team, the one I’d do anything to join.
My first four years were spent living in a spacious house in California, sandwiched between Beverly Hills and the coastal city of Santa Monica. Margaret O’Brien lived down the street in a big white plantation-style house. Producer Dore Schary, whose two daughters, Jody and Jill, would become schoolmates, lived around the corner. Mother had purchased a home for Grandma Seymour a few doors down from ours.
This is how Dad looked when he’d take me into the pool.
(John Swope, Courtesy the John Swope Trust)
Today, the house we lived in belongs to actor/director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle. In the nineties, with my third husband, Ted Turner, I attended one of their Oscar-viewing parties in a new wing of the house that was the projection room. During a break in the ceremonies, I got Rob Reiner’s permission to wander around the house, seeing how much of it I could remember. I walked into the first-floor master bedroom. I knew exactly where I was because the nicest memories I have of being with my mother took place right there at around age four. She would sometimes take me into her bed in the mornings and read me Grimms’ Fairy Tales and the Oz stories.
Mother spent a lot of time in bed even then, and she had one of those rolling hospital tables that would swing over the bed, tilt to hold reading material, and flatten to receive a breakfast tray. She always had beautiful lacy bed jackets and peignoirs, and soft, silky sheets. Her bed was a nice place to be, and by then I guess I had forgiven her for preferring my brother. The fairy tales and children’s poems she read were illustrated by Maxfield Parrish: colored plates of princesses, sorcerers, fairies, and knights brandishing swords to slay fire-breathing dragons. There was a dreamy, haunting quality about the
illustrations, equally romantic and frightening. Even though the illustrated plates appeared only once every chapter, the images were so evocative that they would draw me into their dark, languorous world. Mother’s voice would disappear and I would become the story, like a movie inside my head.
Why, I wonder, have these stories, filled with sadness, loss, and danger, lasted through the ages? Why did the writers put in things that can frighten children? But if I put myself back then, back into my four-year-old mind, I think that I, like all children, already had an existential understanding that life is dangerous and there is sadness—and rather than lying about these realities, these stories and images externalize them so that we can see and acknowledge them but not die from them.
Starting in the final years of the thirties, right at the end of our block lived the Hayward family. What was rather extraordinary about this was that Mrs. Hayward was none other than Margaret Sullavan, my father’s first wife—the woman who had broken his heart. Mr. Hayward was Leland, my father’s agent. The Haywards had three children, Brooke, Bridget, and Bill. By now, Sullavan had become a big star of both stage and screen, but her role as mother to her three children took precedence. Leland’s client list included not just my father but every major star in Hollywood: Greta Garbo, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers—and on it went. Inevitably, the Hayward kids were over at our place or we were over at theirs. But during all those years my parents were invited only once to the Haywards’ for a dinner party, an invitation my mother never reciprocated. I intuited that something in Dad became more alive when Sullavan was around, and if I picked it up, Mother must have.
