Prime Time - Jane Fonda [13]
Masked nurses held me and gave me a bottle while Dad took pictures.
I’m not so sure about the new arrival, my brother Peter, here in Mother’s lap with my half-sister, Frances, looking on.
My mother, around age 34.
I studied family photographs, honing in on nuances of expression that might provide clues, hoping to recover proof of love in our family, love that was so rarely expressed. Yet I could see it on my father’s face as he played with me, at one year old, in our pool. So he did love me when I was very little! But how glum I was in childhood photos with my mother, as though deliberately sending a signal for all who cared to pick up on it that hers was not the team I chose to be on. Compassion opened my heart when I noted the desperation in my mother’s eyes in the photo of our family posed to look as if we were on a picnic, one year before her suicide. Forgiveness began to creep into my heart, forgiveness of her and also of myself.
I remembered how frightened I was of the noise of a motorcycle. During the Second World War, in the newsreels that would be shown in movie theaters before the main feature, Nazis were often shown riding motorcycles, so every time I heard one I would shout, “Get out of the way! Here comes Hitler!”
Dad playing with me in our pool.
Me around age two, making it clear to the camera that Mother’s lap was not where I wanted to be.
Mother, Dad, me, Peter, and Frances, my half-sister. Dad had just come home on leave from the navy during World War II.
I remembered the exhilaration I felt galloping bareback through the avocado groves in Pacific Palisades, California, unafraid, the Lone Ranger!
I tracked down Diana Dunn, my best friend from middle school, whom I had not seen in more than fifty years. She told me stories I’d forgotten, like the one about the time several of us found a dead snake in the road as we walked back from the hockey field. We scooped it up and put it inside the desk of a teacher we didn’t like. When she opened her desk drawer and saw the snake, she went into shock. All of us were called into the principal’s office and asked who was responsible for the snake. My friend told me that I was the only one who admitted to the prank. She recounted a similar experience when, during a sleepover at a friend’s house, we’d knocked over an antique lamp while playing hide-and-seek. Our friend’s mother was very upset and wanted to know who was responsible. I fessed up, and because of my telling the truth, the mother didn’t punish us.
I recalled the girl at summer camp who beat me up and rubbed my face in the dirt as she shouted, “Don’t think you’re special just because Henry Fonda is your father!” I refused to cry, but it lodged in my memory as a terrifying experience.
Newly discovered anecdotes like these gave me confidence, made me feel I had some good qualities after all, that I wasn’t just the lazy, foolish girl my father seemed to see me as. The faint outlines of a brave, resilient, honest little girl began to emerge, and I realized that I liked her, even if her parents hadn’t seemed to be too interested!
PARENTS, GRANDPARENTS, AND FAMILY
Perhaps the most important part of my research on Act I was that which I did on my parents and grandparents. I needed to know who they were behind the parental masks. What did they really care about, and why did they do the things they did? I focused on how my parents were treated by my grandparents, what state of mind my parents might have been in when they married each other and when I was born. I called and met with second and third cousins who knew my parents or grandparents; an aging