SECTION ONE
PAGE FIVE

sm
COLUMN SIXTY-THREE, SEPTEMBER 1, 2001
(Copyright © 2001 Al Aronowitz)

AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT
THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

V.

They have the same last name, but they don't have the same memories.

"If you have glamorous parents," she once told Lillian Ross, "you just have to live a special way."

She has said as much in other interviews, a fact which has caused her father no small sadness in reading them.

"I was conscious," she told me, "in terms of my father and in terms of 'The Life' and in terms of the movies, that that's the way the good people lived---that's the way people lived who know the others were city slickers, and city slickers is the word I used.  The others were just silly people, but the real people lived close to the earth and they worked with animals."

She used to go to birthday parties for Joan Crawford's children, and when she saw the frilly dresses and the measured politeness of the other children she would begin to cry and her nurse would have to take her home early.

"The way I was affected by the movies," she said, "was that my father brought it home

A card game
with guns
on the table

with him---not the business talk, not the movie star bit, not the glamour, none of that, because he separated that very well. He never got us involved with the glamour part of Hollywood, but he did look the way he looked in the movies because we lived on a farm and the life was rather, you know, that kind of life.  And he brought home the people that he was in the pictures with.  John Wayne, John Ford, Ward Bond, Jimmy Stewart, they were company at the house.

“They would play a card game called ‘Pitch’ and we had a guest house and it was all early American. And they would sit around this big table, with a chandelier above the table that had great, big covered wagon wheels, with lights hanging on them. And they wore hats and holsters and they would take the guns out and put them on the table and they'd all sit around play cards, and it was right out of any one of the movies. We didn't need to see the movies.  It was the way they lived.  And this is the way I wanted to live and the way I felt if I were to be accepted in his eyes.  And instead of leaving it behind me, it came pretty much up to the middle of my adolescence."

For Henry Fonda, tall, lithe, handsome and with still no hint that he is already fifty-seven, the images that his daughter takes for reality have become part of his sadness.

"I'm between planes somewhere," he told me, "and somebody recognizes me and before long there's a reporter to interview me, and he has a clipping that says Jane Fonda thinks her parents led a 'phony' life.  Or that she thinks her father should have been psychoanalyzed thirty-five years ago.  Now it's all right for her to think it, if that's what she thinks, but I don't think it's all right for her to say so in interviews.  After all, I'm her father.  I mean that's disrespectful.  And we didn't lead any phony life. That's the thing I tried most to avoid.  I felt we were having a wonderful, normal growing up with Jane and Peter.

“I think---and I’m hesitating because I think some of these questions they have to answer for themselves, because as far I'm concerned it was a very happy life when they were growing up.  It seemed be a good life for the kids and they seemed to be happy about it.  And that thing about the card game, that’s in Jane's mind, because only once did I have Ward Bond and John Wayne and John Ford over.  It was a benefit party and someone took photographs and I still have a picture. And there were no guns on the table.  It was just, I think, Ward Bond---he took one of Peter's cap pistols and put it on the table as a joke.”  ##

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE ONE OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE TWO OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE THREE OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE FOUR OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE SIX OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE SEVEN OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE EIGHT OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE NINE OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE TEN OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE ELEVEN OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE TWELVE OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE THIRTEEN OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE FOURTEEN OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PAGE FIFTEEN OF SECTION ONE---AMERICA'S ANSWER TO BARDOT: THE YOUNG JANE FONDA

CLICK HERE TO GET TO INDEX OF COLUMN SIXTY-THREE

CLICK HERE TO GET TO INDEX OF COLUMNS

The Blacklisted Journalist can be contacted at P.O.Box 964, Elizabeth, NJ 07208-0964
The Blacklisted Journalist's E-Mail Address:
info@blacklistedjournalist.com
  

THE BLACKLISTED JOURNALIST IS A SERVICE MARK OF AL ARONOWITZ