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

accepted, and they married and moved into a flat in Greenwich Village. Less than four months later it was all over. Dad moved into a cockroach-infested hotel on Forty-second Street, and Sullavan took up with the Broadway producer Jed Harris. Dad would stand outside her apartment building at night looking up at her window, knowing Harris was inside with her. “That just destroyed me,” he said a lifetime later to Howard Teichmann. “Never in my life have I felt so betrayed, so rejected, so alone.”
    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.
     
    T wo 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.
     
    T hey 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