My Life So Far (57 page)

THE FINAL PUSH

We will fight you with all the joys / of a woman in childbirth.

—V
IETNAMESE POET TO
R
ICHARD
N
IXON

I
WAS BOTH IN LOVE
with and in awe of Tom. For me he was friend, mentor, lover, savior, pillar of support, and example of what I hoped I could become. I saw him as a pure person who could not be corrupted, someone who was on an eternal quest to understand human nature. I loved watching him devour books and I loved watching him while his left hand curled like a claw around his pen as he covered page after page of the yellow legal-size pads he preferred.

I remember the day he called his mother, Gene, to tell her I was pregnant. There was a long pause. “What’s the matter, Mom?” he asked, and then, with an occasional look to me, he just listened.

When he finally hung up he said, “Well, my mother wants to know if we’re getting married. She says people won’t like it if we have a child and aren’t married. She said, ‘What if you go on the Johnny Carson show to talk about the war and all he wants to know is why you aren’t married? Is that a battle you want to have on top of all your other battles?’”

Right on target, Gene! I thought.
I
wanted to get married. I wanted to be with Tom forever. (I hadn’t been that certain with Vadim.) But I had avoided bringing up the m-word with Tom and was elated his mother had jumped in. Perhaps Tom was, too, because it didn’t take but a few minutes for the two of us to agree that marriage would be a good idea. But we couched it in political terms. Needing a political justification for everything was fast becoming a pattern of ours. I think it made Tom comfortable—and if he was comfortable, I was, too.

Just after we wed, sitting in front of the fireplace. Left to right: Holly Near, Peter, me, Tom, and Reverend York.

(AP/Wide World Photos)

Pregnant in my purple poncho at a Claremont College antiwar rally with Ron Kovic, February 1973. This is when I heard Ron say, “I may have lost my body, but I’ve gained my mind.”

Vadim was friendly and funny when I called him to ask for a divorce in January 1973. We had been apart, really, for two years. I could tell we would have a better friendship as exes than we had had as marrieds. (I wasn’t the only ex of his who felt this way.)

I was three months pregnant when Tom and I were married on January 19, 1973. The ceremony took place in the living room of my home with the two of us sitting on a brick ledge in front of the fireplace, my brother on one side, Holly Near next to him, the Episcopal minister on the other side. An eclectic group of about forty people sat facing us: Dad, holding four-year-old Vanessa on his lap, with his wife, Shirlee, next to him; and Tom’s mother, Gene, who had flown in from Detroit. Holly and Peter sang us a wedding song that she’d written. As Tom said, it wasn’t exactly Norman Rockwell, but then it was hard to find anything Rockwellian in those days. The marriage vows included a promise to maintain a sense of humor—only one of the promises we failed to keep.

My relationship with my father had been shifting subtly since Tom and I had gotten together. It was as if my being with a man again somehow made me okay—or at least not his responsibility—and it helped that Dad liked Tom. First of all, Tom, like Dad and Vadim, was a fisherman; second, Dad was impressed with how Tom could deliver an eloquent speech without notes; third, they both came from the middle of the country. In addition, Dad clearly wanted to mend fences and be there for me. Even today I am moved as I write this.

Tom and I wanted to find a name for our baby that was both American and Vietnamese, as a way to acknowledge what had brought us together and motivated us to have a child. The only name I could think of that met this criterion was Troy (Troi in Vietnamese). We also decided we didn’t want to saddle our child with either of our surnames (both Fonda and Hayden carried too much baggage), so we chose Tom’s mother’s maiden name, Garity. The middle name, Tom decided, would be O’Donovan, after the Irish national hero O’Donovan Rossa. Troy O’Donovan Garity. It felt right.

N
ot long after our wedding, former Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. were convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping in the Watergate incident. Meanwhile the Indochina Peace Campaign had opened a national office in Ocean Park, the beach community just south of Santa Monica. One day while I was in the office working on the layout of our newly launched newspaper,
Indochina Focal Point,
I started to miscarry and was ordered to bed for a month, just as had happened at the end of my first trimester with Vanessa. Actually it was fortuitous: I needed downtime to reflect on my so-called career and what, if anything, I wanted to do about it. Tom or Ruby would bring me coffee in the morning and then drive Vanessa to school while I lay there and thought how slim the chances were that I would be offered the kinds of movies I wanted to make; in spite of the need for money, I couldn’t conceive of spending three months (the average time for a feature film) doing something I didn’t believe in when there was so much else to be done. But could I actually make my own movies? I knew I was not a businesswoman: I have always been numerically challenged. Faced with anything that has to do with numbers—costs, profits, distances, or bomb tonnage—my mind goes blank. Perhaps this is because my mother was always doing numbers on her adding machine and my father hated it. Whatever the reasons, I was at a disadvantage as a producer. What I thought I could be good at, however, was conceiving a story.

The week before being sent to bed, I had shared a platform at an antiwar rally in Claremont, California, with Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, a highly decorated Vietnam marine now in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down from a shrapnel wound to his spine. In time everyone would know Ron’s story: Tom Cruise would play him in the film based on his autobiography,
Born on the Fourth of July.
I can still see Ron on the speaker’s platform, ferocious in his wheelchair, insistent, articulate, telling how he had been a believer, had enlisted and
re
enlisted, how he’d been wounded and paralyzed, and how, on his journey back from war through rat-infested, understaffed VA hospitals, he realized that he’d been used and discarded. This had got him thinking about the entire nature of the war and the macho ethic behind it, the realization, he said, that had saved him. Then he added: “I may have lost my body, but I’ve gained my mind.”

As I lay in bed, this sentence haunted me. It echoed the redemptive journeys I’d seen the Winter Soldier veterans take. Could a movie be built around Ron’s sentence?

I began to imagine a story: Two men, both believers, go to Vietnam; one returns like Ron, angry but able to shed the old warrior ethos and free his mind; the other returns brittle and empty, unable to let go of the militaristic myths of what a man should be. I didn’t know where to fit in a role for me, but I didn’t really care. It was about the two men and the transformation and salvation of one of them.

I mentioned the idea to my friend Bruce Gilbert, an IPC staffer who was a film buff and dreamed of becoming a producer. We had often talked about the kind of movie we’d like to see made about the Vietnam War. We decided Bruce would try to develop a story draft based on Ron Kovic’s sentence, and I insisted that screenwriter Nancy Dowd work on it as well, to ensure a woman’s perspective.

Nancy and Bruce went to work for hardly any money, since we had no studio to put up development funding. With the help of my lawyer and my agent, Mike Medavoy, we got Bruce a job as a script reader with an independent movie production company so he could start learning about scripts. He was there for a year, and because he was able to get copies of early drafts of masterpieces like
Chinatown,
he had opportunities to learn the ways in which scripts evolve, as directors and actors become attached. Bruce came to me one day and said that he’d rather be a partner than an employee of mine, and instead of seeing this as a brash move by an inexperienced young man, I made a leap of faith. I figured someone who could organize rallies the way he could, with meticulous attention to detail, could probably be just the partner I needed. So we formed a production company and called it IPC Films, in honor of the Indochina Peace Campaign, the organization that had brought us together (we didn’t tell outsiders what the initials stood for).

Nearly six years later,
Coming Home
won Academy Awards for Jon Voight, me, and screenwriters Nancy Dowd, Waldo Salt, and Robert Jones. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

While I was still bedridden, Tom convinced me that we needed to relocate our home closer to the IPC office in Ocean Park, where he had lived before moving in with me. Sell my house? That I’d had only one year? I loved my house. But more than anything I wanted to do what Tom thought was right. Though he never said so outright, I believe Tom felt that how you lived reflected whether you were pure in your politics (read: “one of the people”) or just an armchair liberal (read: “bourgeois”). Given my Rocky Mountain epiphany three years earlier, I held this perspective myself, so I was ready to be challenged by whatever Tom offered up. Several days later he came back and told me he’d found a place, one block from the beach, for $45,000. We bought it without my even seeing it.

The Ocean Park of today is gentrified with swank restaurants and clothing stores. Later, I heard that in 2003 our $45,000 house was sold for $2 million. But back in the seventies Ocean Park consisted primarily of seedy bars and thrift shops, and it was redlined, meaning that banks considered it a poor investment and refused to make any loans for community development.

When the danger of my miscarrying had passed and I was able to get up again, Tom took me to see the new house he had chosen for us. It sat on the south side of a narrow, one-way, one-block-long street called Wadsworth Avenue, which ran almost to the beach. All the little streets were lined with wooden houses built side by side in the 1920s as summer homes for wealthier folks, who would take the famous red trolley from Los Angeles down San Vicente Boulevard to the beach. In their time the houses must have been charming, but now most, including ours, had been converted into duplexes and were run-down, with thin, uninsulated walls and floors vaguely slanted from sinking into the sand over the years.

The residents of Ocean Park were an interesting mix of blue-collar, radical, and counterculture. In a one-story house next to us lived a conservative Catholic family: a burly night watchman, his wife, and their many children, one of whom was Vanessa’s age. Next to them was a two-story building; on the ground floor lived a Maoist writer and his bright, redheaded son, also Vanessa’s age. Across the street lived a group of women activists Tom knew. With few exceptions there were no driveways or garages, so we all had to park on the street.

I recall the first time I walked into the house. It was dark and dampish. I had to swallow hard, but I was determined to show I could make the move with no complaints, though it would mean saying good-bye to Ruby Ellen, who had been my faithful friend and assistant for almost three years. On top of that, Tom felt we didn’t need the entire house for ourselves, so to save money Jack Nichol and Carol Kurtz, both with IPC, moved in on the ground floor. This was a good thing, actually. During the times of increased controversy that were about to roll over me, Carol in particular was a pillar of support, stability, and tenderness. She was a lanky, handsome woman ten years my junior, with soft brown hair and a ready giggle. Both Carol and Jack had been part of the Red Family collective, had reconciled with Tom (Carol was the woman who cried on my doorstep that Tom had no emotions), were intelligent, committed activists, and were the parents of a ten-month-old boy named Corey—the only other couple we worked with who had started a family.