Prime Time - Jane Fonda [14]
I knew I was not the sort of person who could have done this life review and this family research much earlier. I needed the challenge of my Third Act to compel me to take the time and be brave enough to face it, to declare a memory open house, to seek the truth about myself and my family. Now I had an added incentive, too: I wanted to get my life right going forward.
Me, around age three.
Thus, I learned that there had likely been a long history of undiagnosed depression in the Fonda men, as well as what my cousins described as an almost pathological abhorrence for heavy women, especially those with thick legs. Ahh. My dad!
I learned that my father had always avoided any situation that would cause him to be emotional. He’d even refused to attend his mother’s funeral, choosing instead to stay in New York, where he was performing in a play. Work always came first for him, perhaps as a way to avoid real-life emotion. He didn’t even miss a performance of Mister Roberts to be with Peter and me the night our mother killed herself. (I learned that she had not died of a heart attack only when, a year later, I read in a gossip column that it had been suicide.)
My grandfather William Brace, Aunt Harriet, Dad, Aunt Jayne, and Herberta, my grandmother.
Members of the Fonda family, including Sue Fonda, David’s wife; Aunt Harriet; Becky Fonda, Peter’s wife; Peter Fonda; Tina Fonda; David Fonda; me; Cyndi Fonda Dabney; and children, gathered on the porch of Dad’s birth home at the Stuhr Museum in Nebraska.
Family picnic in Omaha, July 1907. Front row, left to right: My father in the lap of my grandmother Herberta, Ethelyn Hinners Fonda holding my aunt Jayne, my grandfather William Brace holding my aunt Harriet. Back row: my great-grandmother “Grammie” Hattie, unknown (could be Hattie’s sister), and my great-grandfather, Ten Eyck Hilton Fonda, Sr.
Dad’s father and mother in front of their home in Omaha.
ACT II
In my second act, the rap on me was that “there was no there there,” that I was only whatever my current husband wanted me to be. In fact, when I asked my daughter, who has made documentary films, to help me with the autobiographical video I was shooting for my sixtieth-birthday party, she said, “Why don’t you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the screen?” I knew that one important thing I needed to find out through my life review was whether this opinion of me was true. I secretly thought that maybe it was.
With Ted at my sixtieth-birthday party.
ERIC WITTMAYER PHOTOGRAPHY
But as I delved deeper, I could see evidence of a new, stronger me starting to emerge. I felt as though I was owning myself for the first time. There is a there there!
PHYSICAL ABUSE
The most profound event for me during the writing of my memoirs was when I was able to obtain my mother’s medical records from the mental institution where she killed herself. In them, the doctors noted that my grandfather had had the symptoms of a paranoid schizophrenic. He’d boarded up windows and kept the front door bolted because he feared that some man would come and steal his beautiful, much younger wife. The records included a fifteen-page autobiography written by my mother, I assume upon admittance, at the request of the doctors.
In her own words, she revealed that she had been sexually molested at age eight by the piano tuner, the only man my grandfather would unbolt the front door for! All my adult life I had wondered about my mother’s childhood. The older I got and the more I understood about the long-term effects of early trauma, the more I intuited that something bad must have happened to her. Maybe that’s why I had been drawn to studying childhood sexual abuse over the previous five years. My research enabled me to understand what my mother meant when, in recounting