My Life So Far (12 page)

One day, while walking down one of the narrow country roads that had no sidewalks, I encountered a tall, skinny, freckled-faced girl with short dark hair. Diana Dunn. It didn’t take long to discover that we shared a passion for horses and would both be in the same class that fall at the all-girls Greenwich Academy.

She introduced me to the Round Hill Stables and Riding Club. I learned to take a horse over a jump there, and it was there that Teddy, the stable boy, broke my arm in a wrestling match. Another boy would find his way over to our house to play with me that summer. I don’t remember his name, but he was the son of the gardener on a nearby estate. He, Teddy, Diana, and I would roam for miles like a pack of wild dogs, noses to the ground, sniffing, snooping, rolling about, wrestling. They knew I was a girl because my name was Jane, but aside from that, it was hard to tell me from the boys. I don’t think that Mother was terribly pleased that my friends were the sons of gardeners and stable hands, but she was slowly sinking into a state of painful desperation and I was left to choose the company I kept.

Diana had her own horse, a black-and-white paint named Pie. Her mother, a tall, slim woman, very much a part of the “horsey” set, was kind to me during the almost four years we lived in Greenwich. Someone, perhaps Mother, must have asked the Dunns if I could stay with them during some of her protracted absences, because I spent an inordinate amount of time there. In the fall of that first Greenwich year Dad told Mother he wanted a divorce, and then she began to disappear to what I now know was the Austen Riggs Center. That’s when Grandma came from California to take care of us and run the house.

The Dunns filled the void that had opened when we left Sue Sally Jones and her mother behind in California. While Sue Sally had represented cowboys, Indians, and buckskin, Diana was about fox-hunting, canary yellow jodhpurs, patent-leather-topped boots, and hard velvet caps.

A
good thing about starting a new school is that it’s a chance to try on a new personality. One day I did something in study hall that made the class laugh. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember how good it made me feel to be found funny. Being a clown and a cutup gave me an identity.

My first fall was a revelation to see the leaves turn vivid orange and red. It was also when I started fox-hunting at the urging of Diana Dunn. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t scared while hunting. I was scared when we’d come to a jump, and I was terrified every time we’d gallop around a sharp corner when the ground was wet, for fear the horse would slip and fall on me. I was used to being scared, but I always felt that courage is the manifestation of character, so I pretended not to be. No one ever knew, especially Diana. Being scared was absolutely the worst thing a girl could be. Being scared meant you were a sissy.

Then winter came. I’d seen snow before but had never
lived
with it, where you have to shovel it to get to the car to go to school, where you can go sledding in your backyard. I was furious that Peter could whip out his little penis and write his name in the snow, so I tried to do the same by taking off my panties and running as fast as I could with my legs wide apart, trying to spell “Jane” as I peed. Needless to say, it was indecipherable—and I got very cold.

That first Christmas in Greenwich, Dad gave me a Mohawk Indian costume made out of buckskin, complete with beaded moccasins and a strip of fake hair that stood up straight when I pinned it on my head, a real Mohawk hairdo. At that point, I was only six months out of California, still had my long blond braids, and the Lone Ranger was still my role model, so this was about the most perfect thing Dad could have given me. That very afternoon I put on the outfit and Dad made a home movie of me. Out of the thick underbrush I ran on silent, agile feet to the top of a knoll, where I stopped and, just like an Indian scout, put my hand above my eyes and scanned the horizon for the enemy. Dad even shot a close-up of my serious little face, looking slowly from right to left before slipping silently back into the forest—my film acting debut. When I look at the footage now, I remember it was about that time that I started to hate the way I looked, especially my round, chubby face. I thought I looked like a chipmunk with nuts stored in my cheeks.

Performing for Dad that Christmas afternoon would mark the end of my cowboy and Indian fantasy life. I never dressed up as a Mohawk again. I was entering the period when social acceptance becomes more important to an adolescent girl than almost anything else. Shortly after that is when I had my beautiful braids cut off. Nobody else at school wore braids and they made me feel nerdy. I don’t remember who cut them, Mother or a professional, but whoever did it wasn’t doing me any favors. The way it was cut, my hair hung to just below my ears as straight and stubborn as a mule’s tail, no style, no shape, and my cowlick made my bangs stand up as if they’d been electrocuted. Hair matters just about more than anything when you’re that age, right? Girls with good hair were always more popular. I was in every sense just “plain Jane,” the cutup—with bad hair.

Sometimes in the evenings I would walk down the road, peer inside houses, and watch a family at the dinner table. I was fascinated by the differences between our home and other people’s. Later, when I made friends and was invited to their homes, I would sit at the dinner table feeling like a Martian as I watched parents, guests, and kids interact. The experience of being asked what I thought about a particular subject was new to me. This didn’t happen in our house. Witnessing adults having multilayered exchanges, full of lively opinions and disagreements, allowed me to understand that beyond the sliver of reality that was my ten-year-old life there lay a vast world of ideas that I would one day grow into.

I lived in Greenwich through two elections—when Truman beat Dewey and when Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson. I remember lively discussions about the elections during dinners at my (Republican) friends’ homes. Even though my father was a “yellow dog Democrat” (he’d sooner vote for a yellow dog than for a Republican) and cared passionately about his politics, he rarely engaged us children in political discussion. It was around this time that a rupture occurred in Dad’s friendships with his old pals John Ford and John Wayne and his best friend, Jimmy Stewart (though this last would be patched up over time).

The rupture centered around Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). “McCarthyism” became synonymous with baseless mudslinging and the manipulation of the American public through fear. Every organization associated with Roosevelt and the New Deal was labeled subversive. Thousands of innocent people who had done nothing more than join liberal organizations were criminalized. McCarthy and HUAC, which included a young congressman from California, Richard Nixon, interpreted any dissent whatsoever as subversive. Dad saw this as a “red-baiting witch hunt,” and he once kicked in a television set while the HUAC hearings were being broadcast. Looking back on those times, I find it interesting that Dad never joined Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Huston, Lucille Ball, John Garfield, and Danny Kaye, who flew to Washington where the HUAC hearings were taking place and held a press conference in support of the Hollywood Ten, as they were called: producers and directors accused of being Communists. Some in Hollywood, like Ronald Reagan (then president of the Screen Actors Guild, who had been an FBI informant since 1946), Gary Cooper, George Murphy, Walt Disney, and Robert Taylor, cooperated with the committee and agreed to name those they believed were Communists. These “friendly” witnesses were given prepared statements and as much time as they wanted to speak, whereas “unfriendly” witnesses were cut off and their lawyers were never allowed to cross-examine. Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, though they didn’t testify, were staunch McCarthy supporters. I didn’t understand what it all meant at the time, except that the careers of many people who worked in Hollywood were being destroyed because the big studios agreed to break their contracts with the Hollywood Ten and never hire them again unless they swore an oath that they weren’t Communists. Charlie Chaplin, for instance, was labeled subversive and was not allowed to reenter the United States until 1972, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented him with an honorary award. I was there at the Oscars, onstage with him, that year. Little did I know that almost twenty years later I would be called before the later version of HUAC, or that at age fifty-four I would marry a man who had been brought up by his father to believe that Roosevelt and the New Deal were Communistic.

Riding in Greenwich meant jodhpurs, boots, and a velvet cap.

Summer camp right after Mother died, with my bunkmates, Brooke Hayward (foreground, upper bunk) and Susan Turbell. We painted the horses.

In the fall of 1948, as if it had been ordained, we were once again reunited with Brooke, Bridget, and Bill Hayward. It was amazing to all of us Fonda-Hayward children that once again our families, though slightly reconfigured, found ourselves together on the opposite side of the country from California—with all of us going to the same schools, Bill to Brunswick with Peter, Brooke and Bridget to the Greenwich Academy with me.

It helped having another Hollywood family there, because soon I realized that people were gossiping about the Fondas. In Hollywood, no one had paid much attention to the fact that Dad was a movie star and delaminating families caused little stir, but in Greenwich it shook things up. It was thought, probably correctly, that divorce and scandal were more common among entertainment folk, and perhaps there was fear that it would become contagious.

I also first heard the word
nigger
in Greenwich. One day, while riding in the backseat of the car, which Dad was driving, I said the n-word. Dad stopped the car, turned around, and smacked me (lightly) across my face, saying, “Don’t you ever, ever use that word again!” You better believe I never did. It was the only time Dad ever hit me.

I have often wondered about my interest in people regardless of fame, fortune, or race. I can’t help but feel that the answer lies in my father’s films. Dad himself was never verbal about race or class, yet the characters he played were the kinds of men he admired: Abraham Lincoln, Tom Joad (the Okie union organizer in
The Grapes of Wrath
), Dad’s character in
The Ox-Bow Incident
(who deplores the lynching of a Mexican), Clarence Darrow, Mr. Roberts. I once asked Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter, Yolanda, if her father had talked to her much when she was little about life and values and spirituality.

“No,” she said. “He never did that.”

“Neither did my father,” I said, “but they taught us through their films and sermons, didn’t they?”

Part of the school gossip was that my father was dating a “tomato.” I asked a friend what a tomato was and was told it meant a luscious, ripe young thing. The thought made me feel sort of nauseated. But like my mother, I didn’t allow myself to get angry at Dad.

In seventh and eighth grades, I began my love affair with Broadway show tunes. Brooke and I learned every word to every song in the Broadway hits
South Pacific
and
The King and I.
Little did I know that the “tomato” Dad was dating was the twenty-one-year-old stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein—the man who wrote all the words to the show tunes I loved to sing.

A
s we rounded the circle to the bottom of my eleventh year, sexual feelings and being twitter-pated around certain boys had become a major facet of my life. If I felt a boy was cute, he’d be the one I’d beat up. I already mentioned Teddy, the stable boy who broke my arm. What I didn’t say, though, was that he was blond and very cute and I had kicked him in the balls several weeks prior to our wrestling match, causing him to collapse and turn white. Seemed to me like a perfectly reasonable way to flirt.