SECTION ONE
PAGE FOUR
sm
COLUMN
SIXTY-THREE, SEPTEMBER 1, 2001
(Copyright © 2001 Al Aronowitz)
AMERICA'S
ANSWER TO BARDOT
THE YOUNG JANE FONDA
IV.
Her
mother was Frances Seymour, a descendant on her maternal side of Samuel Adams,
one of the hosts at the Boston Tea Party, a later governor of Massachusetts and
a cousin of John Adams, the second Presi?dent of the United States.
"Was
Jane's mother in society?" Shelly Winters once asked me.
"Because she left Jane some aquamarines, a necklace and some other
jewelry, and whenever she wears them, with her hair up, there's a quality about
her that changes. She behaves in a
certain way. She behaves like...like a princess...like Grace Kelly...like a
queen."
In
Jane's memory, her mother was "a great beauty" with "a great head
for finance." When she committed suicide on April 14, 1950, she left her
children a trust fund estimated at six hundred thousand dollars.
Henry
Fonda was Frances Seymour's second husband and, when Jane was born in New York
City on December 21, 1937, Frances Seymour was Henry Fonda's second wife.
Henry Fonda's first marriage was to Margaret Sullavan one of the stars of
her time. Frances Seymour's first marriage was to George Tuttle Brokaw, whom
Jane likes to describe as "a lawyer and sportsman" from "a famous
New York family." When he died in 1935 he left an estate worth more than
five million dollars and a daughter, Frances, six years older than Jane.
"I'm
not very close to my half-sister," Jane says. "When I was a child, I
didn't understand her."
Out of her marriage to Henry Fonda, Frances Seymour also had a second child, Peter, two
Peter
Fonda says
his sister is going to
snap like THAT!
years younger than Jane and now an
actor as well.
"I was
always very possessive with Peter," Jane says, "I was always very
protective. But now I find that he's
the strong one and
About Jane,
Peter says, "That girl is going to snap like that!"
Soon after
Jane was born, her parents moved to what she remembers as a twenty-four-acre
farm in Brentwood, California, where they built what looked like an old New
England house, with shingles that were artificially weather-beaten and furniture
that was made from cobbler's benches and butter churns and a swimming pool that
was disguised as a pond. There were
rabbits and dogs and chickens and cats and two burros on the farm and Jane
remembers always wearing levis like her father and sitting on the roof with
Peter and saying, "Tell me the truth, Pete, which one of us could lasso a
buffalo better?"
They would
ride the burros bareback out into the hills amid visions of bobcats, coyotes and
rattlesnakes and they would play the roles they had seen their father play in the
movies.
"Prowess,"
she told me, sitting in her apartment, "everything was physical prowess.
The kind my father had in the movies, he was always the hero, beating people up.
I've spent half of my young life wanting to be a boy, because I wanted to
be like my father, you know. I
didn't start wanting to be a girl until I was in my early teens and I felt
uncomfortable. I mean I was embarrassed. I was shy of boys.
I didn't know how to treat my femininity.
I don't remember owning a dress until I was eight.
'the
first time a boy came up to me and asked me to go to a dance---needless to say,
we were about nine years old and the dance would have been with parents picking
us up and driving us there and nobody knew how to dance anyway. But I remember, he walked up to me, he was probably about
three yards away, but it seemed like he was standing, on top of me.
I had a crush on him anyway, and he asked me to go to the thing, and all
I could do was punch him---I punched him on the nose.
So much happened inside of me that the only way I could express myself
was to hit him---and I was maaad for him.
"I
feel very differently now but I know that it's taken me a long time to learn
that I have a deep femininity in me and to allow that to really please me so
that I can then allow it to come out. Because
I've always tried to cover it up. And
it's like that with many women. It would be difficult for me to play the part of
a beautiful woman--?you know, the way these scripts describe a character:
'So-and-so, a beautiful, sexy, blah-blah-blah type of woman." It would be very
difficult for me to play that kind of part.
Because even today, I have enormous insecurities as a female, tremendous
insecurities.
"I
remember I was about twelve years old and I cut all my hair off. And someone came up to and said, 'Are you a boy or a girl?'
And I was so pleased."
She wanted to be a hero. Like millions of others, she wanted to be all the heroes her
father had been. It was strange for me
several days later to listen to Henry Fonda remember his emotions when Lady cut
off her hair.
"She
was at an age," he told me, "when she was twelve or thirteen or
fourteen and she was a member of the Fairfield Fox and Hounds, which is an adult
hunt club. And she was going off on
horseback Sundays with these adults, jumping the fences and the walls.
"Or
the meets that they had when you're around the ring on a Saturday afternoon.
And this little girl with her long pigtails, two pigtails sticking out
here," and he motioned with his hand to show two pigtails, horizontal in
the horseback wind. "And a
little hard black velvet hat on.
She
just looked so darling on the horse, going around there, taking the jumps.
Like almost anybody, you just stand there or sit and watch and cry, just
'cause she was so beautiful. And
when she first cut her braids off, I cried," and it seemed as if he were about
to cry again.
"I
say I cried. It wasn't a tragedy, but I can picture that little girl. I still
can see the braids strung out back there as she was taking the jumps. She just
didn't want her hair long any more. It's
just one of those things about growing up, It was just one of those phases."
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