My Life So Far by Jane Fonda Read Free Book Online Page A

attitude about acting. Dad had a $30-a-week job as a clerk at the Retail Credit Company in Omaha, but Marlon Brando’s mother, a friend of my grandmother’s, got him involved with the Omaha Community Playhouse, where Dad was offered the part of Merton in the play
Merton of the Movies.
When Dad began talking about acting as a career, his father said it was not appropriate for his son to earn his living in “some make-believe world” when there were good steady jobs available like the one he had. Dad argued, and his father refused to speak to him
—for six weeks.
    Still, the play opened with Dad as Merton. And the whole family, including his father, went to see it. When Dad got home after the show, the family was sitting around the living room. His father had his face buried in a newspaper and still had not spoken to Dad. The mother and sisters began a very complimentary discussion of Dad’s performance, but at one point his sister Harriet mentioned something she thought he could have done differently. Suddenly, from across the room his father lowered his newspaper and said to her, “Shut up. He was perfect!”
    Dad said that was the best review he ever got, and every time he told the story tears would well in his eyes.
    These are among the very few clues I have about my father. I think that the repressed, withholding nature of his early environment colluded with a biological vulnerability to depression to make Dad the brooding, remote, sometimes frightening figure he became. I was stunned to discover in talks with my cousins that undiagnosed depression ran in the Fonda family. Dad’s cousin Douw suffered from it, and I suspect Dad’s father did as well.
    Dad was a study in contradictions. Author John Steinbeck wrote this about him:
     

    My impressions of Hank are of a man reaching but unreachable, gentle but capable of sudden wild and dangerous violence, sharply critical of others but equally self-critical, caged and fighting the bars but timid of the light, viciously opposed to external restraint, imposing an iron slavery on himself. His face is a picture of opposites in conflict.
     
    Dad could spend hours stitching a needlepoint pattern he had designed or doing macramé baskets. He painted beautifully, and there was a softness in many of his acting performances, with nary a trace of the macho ethic. But to me, Dad was not a gentle person. He could be gentle with people he didn’t know, utter strangers. Often I run into people who describe finding themselves sitting next to him on transatlantic flights and go on about what an open person he was, how they drank and talked with him “for eight hours nonstop.” It makes me angry.
I
never talked to him for thirty minutes nonstop! But I have learned that it is not unusual for otherwise closed-off men to reveal a softer side of themselves in the company of total strangers, or with animals or their gardens or other hobbies. In the confines of our home, Dad’s darker side would emerge. We, his intimates, lived in constant awareness of the minefield we had to tread so as not to trigger his rage. This environment of perpetual tension sent me a message that danger lies in intimacy, that far away is where it is safe.
     
    I n his early twenties, and with his father’s permission, Dad hitched a ride to Cape Cod with a family friend and soon hooked up with the University Players, a summer stock repertory company in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Among them was Joshua Logan, one of my future godfathers. Dad was the only non–Ivy Leaguer among them.
    When Margaret Sullavan, a petite, talented, flirtatious, temperamental, Scarlett O’Hara–style southern belle from Virginia, was invited to join the University Players the following summer in Falmouth, she stole his shy Nebraska heart. Their romance bloomed, until Sullavan went off to star in a Broadway play.
    They carried on what was reported to be a fiery, argumentative courtship. After a year and a half, Dad proposed, she